Cuba on the Verge
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PATRICIA ENGEL (born United States, 1977) is the author of three books. Her most recent novel, The Veins of the Ocean, was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice as well as a Best Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle, which called Engel “a unique and necessary voice for the Americas.” She is also the author of Vida, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, winner of the Premio Biblioteca de Narrativa Colombiana, and a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Fiction Award and Young Lions Fiction Award, and the novel It’s Not Love, It’s Just Paris, winner of the International Latino Book Award. Patricia’s books have been translated into several languages and her short fiction has been widely anthologized, appearing in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Mystery Stories, among others, and in publications including The Atlantic, A Public Space, Boston Review, Harvard Review, ZYZZYVA, and Chicago Quarterly Review. She has received awards such as the Boston Review Fiction Prize; fellowships and residencies from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Key West Literary Seminar, Hedgebrook, Ucross, and the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs; and a 2014 Fellowship in Literature from the National Endowment for the Arts. Born to Colombian parents and raised in New Jersey, Patricia currently lives in Miami and is the literary editor of The Miami Rail.
PATRICIO FERNÁNDEZ (born Chile, 1969) studied literature and philosophy in Chile and the history of Renaissance art in the Università degli Studi di Firenze, Italy. In 1998, he founded The Clinic, the celebrated satirical magazine dedicated to politics and culture, born on the occasion of the arrest of Pinochet in London, which has become the most read weekly magazine in Chile. He has published the novels Ferrantes (2001) and Los nenes (2008); Escritos plebeyos (2003), a book that collects the best of his editorial columns as director of The Clinic; and the collection of feature reports La calle me distrajo (Random House, 2012). Fernández currently edits The Clinic and theclinic.com; works in radio; and writes about literature, arts, and current affairs in diverse media. Since December 17, 2014, when Obama and Raúl Castro announced the normalization of diplomatic relations, he has traveled often to Cuba in order to report on the changes that started that day.
RUBÉN GALLO (born Mexico, 1969) is the Walter S. Carpenter, Jr., Professor in Language, Literature, and Civilization of Spain at Princeton University. He is the author, most recently, of Proust’s Latin Americans (2014), about Proust’s Latin American circle of friends in turn-of-the-century Paris. Gallo’s other books include Freud’s Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis (2010), a cultural history of psychoanalysis and its reception in Mexico; Mexican Modernity: The Avant-Garde and the Technological Revolution (2005), about the Mexican avant-garde’s fascination with machines; and two books about Mexico City’s visual culture: New Tendencies in Mexican Art (2004) and The Mexico City Reader (2004). He is the recipient of the Gradiva award for the best book on a psychoanalytic theme and of the Modern Language Association’s Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for the best book on a Latin American subject.
FRANCISCO GOLDMAN (born United States, 1954) has published four novels and two books of nonfiction. His most recent novel is Say Her Name, which won the 2011 Prix Femina Étranger. The Long Night of White Chickens (1992) was awarded the American Academy’s Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. His novels have been finalists for several prizes, including the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The Ordinary Seaman (1997) was a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. The Divine Husband (2004) was a finalist for the Believer Book Award. The Art of Political Murder (2008) won the Index on Censorship T. R. Fyvel Book Award and the WOLA/Duke Human Rights Book Award. His books have been translated into at least fourteen languages. His most recent book, published in 2014, is The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle. Goldman has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library, and a Berlin Fellow at the American Academy. He has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, The Believer, and many other publications. He directs the Aura Estrada Prize. Every year Goldman teaches one semester at Trinity College in Connecticut, and then hightails it back to Mexico City.
WENDY GUERRA (born Cuba, 1970) is a Cuban poet and novelist. Guerra has contributed to many magazines and newspapers, including the Spanish daily El Mundo (where she wrote the blog Habaname for five years), El País, and the Miami Herald, where she currently writes about arts and literature. Guerra’s first collection, Platea a oscuras, won her a prize from the University of Havana when she was only seventeen years old. She has a degree in filmmaking from Havana’s Instituto Superior de Arte, where Gabriel García Márquez was her teacher in a screenwriting workshop. Guerra’s first novel, Todos se van (2006), was largely based on her own diaries and followed the young protagonist’s childhood and adolescence in Cuba. The novel was adapted into a film by the Colombian director Sergio Cabrera in 2014. In 2006, upon her return to Cuba from Spain, where she had gone to receive the Bruguera Prize, Guerra was asked to step down from hosting her own television show, and although her novels have been translated into several languages, they have never been published in Cuba. Guerra has been a guest lecturer at Princeton University and Dartmouth College. In 2010, she was proclaimed Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France, and in 2016, she was promoted to the grade of Officier. She has always lived in Havana.
LEILA GUERRIERO (born Argentina, 1967) began her journalistic career in 1991, with the magazine Página/30. Since then her work has appeared in Argentina’s La Nación and Rolling Stone; in Spain’s El País and Vanity Fair; in Colombia’s El Malpensante and SoHo; in Mexico’s Gatopardo and El Universal; in Peru’s Etiqueta Negra; in Chile’s Paula and El Mercurio; in the United Kingdom’s Granta; in Germany and Romania’s Lettre Internationale; and in Italy’s L’Internazionale, among many others. She is the Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay editor for the Mexican magazine Gatopardo. In 2005, she published the book Los suicidas del fin del mundo, which has been translated into Portuguese and Italian. In 2009, she published a collection of articles called Strange Fruit. In 2010, her text “The Signs in Our Bones,” published in El País Semanal and in Gatopardo, received the CEMEX-FNPI Prize. Her book Una historia seneilla (2011) was translated into Italian, French, and Portuguese and published in English by Pushkin Press in the United Kingdom and New Directions in the United States. In 2013, she published Plano americano, a collection of twenty-one profiles of Spanish and Latin American artists and intellectuals, and in 2015, a collection of her articles was collected in the book Zona de obras. She is also editor of a number of journalism anthologies, including Los malditos and Los malos, published by UDP in Chile.
ABRAHAM JIMÉNEZ ENOA (born Cuba, 1988) is a journalist. He has a degree in journalism from the University of Havana. In 2016, he cofounded the first Cuban online magazine for narrative journalism, El Estornudo, which he currently directs. He has collaborated with BBC World News, Al Jazeera, Courrier International, and Univision.
LEONARDO PADURA (born Cuba, 1955) is a Cuban novelist and journalist. He is one of Cuba’s best-known writers. He has written movie scripts, two books of short stories, and a series of detective novels that have been translated into more than ten languages. In 2012, Padura was awarded the National Prize for Literature, Cuba’s national literary award and the most important award of its kind. In 2015, he was awarded Spain’s Premio Princesa de Asturias de las Letras, the most important literary prize in the Spanish-speaking world, usually referred to as the Ibero-American Nobel Prize. Padura has a degree in Latin American literature from the University of Havana. He first came to prominence in 1980 as an investigative reporter for the literary magazine Caimán Barbudo. Padura is best known in the English-speaking world for The Four Seasons, a detective series featuring lieutenant Mario Conde, a cop who would rather be a writer, and admits to feelings of “solidarity with writers, crazy people, and drunkards.” The novels in the series are Havana Red (2005), Havana Black (2006), Havana Blue (2007), and Havana Gold (2008). Havana B
lack won the the Hammett Prize from the International Association of Crime Writers. His latest novel, The Man Who Loved Dogs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), deals with the murder of Leon Trotsky and the man who assassinated him, Ramón Mercader, and is the result of more than five years of meticulous historical research. He lives in Havana.
MAURICIO VICENT (born Spain, 1963) has a degree in psychology and has studied law. From 1991 to 2011 he was the Cuba correspondent for El País in Spain. He has also been the Cuba correspondent for SER and has contributed to Radio France International as well as other European media outlets. In 1998, he won the International Press Club of Spain’s award for the best work of journalism. He was a finalist for the Cirilio Rodríguez Journalism Prize in 1999. He is the author of a book of interviews titled Los compañeros del Che, with photography by Francis Giacobetti. He wrote the screenplay for the documentary Música para vivir, filmed in 2009 by Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón. In 2011, he directed Baracoa 500 años después and in 2014, he published, along with Norman Foster, the book Havana: Autos and Architecture (Ivorypress).
ABOUT THE EDITOR
LEILA GUERRIERO is an Argentine journalist and editor whose work has appeared in magazines and journals all over the world, including Argentina’s La Nación and Rolling Stone, and Spain’s El País and Vanity Fair. She is the Latin American editor for Gatopardo magazine and has published a number of books, including Los suicidas del fin del mundo (The Suicides at the End of the World) and A Simple Story: The Last Malambo.
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* Editor’s note: This essay was written on November 1, 2016, the Day of the Dead. Fidel Castro died on November 25, 2016.
* Editor’s note: UMAP is an initialism for the Unidades Militares de Apoyo a la Producción, or Military Units to Aid Production, a euphemistic name the Cuban government gave to work camps from 1965 to 1969, where homosexuals and all those who did not fit within the revolutionary parameters were detained.