jueves, 25 de mayo de 2017

Lemebel y la dictadura ausente

Pedro Lemebel and the
Absent Cuban Dictatorship
By Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

         In most of Latin America one can hear the terrible tragedy of desaparecidos: missing people killed by dictatorships (and by dictatorships disguised as democracies). Thousands of extrajudicial killings committed with atrocious and absolute impunity. The desaparecidos are human bodies that have lost even their right to become cadavers. They do not belong to any homeland anymore. They are at most unfinished biographies: lives condemned to emptiness, with their deaths forever in the dark. But there is an outstanding exception in the Americas hemisphere: Cuba, the country where I come from and where I cannot return to (another way of being desaparecido, without the macabre prestige of death).

         In fact, in Cuba we are never desaparecidos. In Cuba what seems to be missing is the dictatorship as such. Beyond the large number of fatal victims and displaced individuals since 1959 until today, Cubans are forced to be present and behave, under the permanent spotlight of a paternalistic system that knows what’s best for each and every one of its children-citizens. A God-like Father State has been deciding everything for us, all the time, for nearly six decades now. For Cubans, totalitarianism is tiresome to the point of exhausting. 

         In return, the Cuban people have learned the convenience of remaining silent, as well as the adaptive advantages of simulation, which includes the art of smiling as we wait for the day in which we will just “commit exile.” The price of happiness, when it is obligatory, is not only hypocrisy, but the impossibility of subtracting ourselves from reality: the impossibility of becoming others according to our own wishes.

         Of course, the disappearance of the Cuban dictatorship is a concomitant process with the appearance of the Cuban revolution. To begin with, this Revolution is the literal and literary outcome of the narrative of Fidel Castro, commander-in-chief as much as the omniscient author of the social system imposed in Cuba after his guerrilla takeover in January 1st, 1959. But the real absence of the Cuban dictatorship in the context of the Americas, the prevailing impracticality of calling it a “dictatorship” and then survive with a dose of legitimacy, is a direct effect of international intellectuals, including most academics from the First World, especially those writing from countries once considered colonialist or imperialistic (namely: Spain, France, England and, above all, the United States).

         If we believe in Utopia on Earth, and if the last of such utopias is being built just in front of our eyes, in a tropical Island located in the heart of the Caribbean Sea, then it follows that, in a kind of leftist brotherhood, as Muslims of historical materialism on our way to a Marxist Mecca, the travel to bear witness of that utopia is unavoidable. Cuba is waiting for us, eager to welcome us all: intellectourists of the world, unite!

         Therefore, there is a whole literary corpus of texts extracted out of that existential experience: the intellectual hegira from the free-world to Cuba, to feel first-hand the idyll of ideology in our own histology, to fall in love with the savage enchantment of an alternative model of society, where democracy is a superfluous fashion, and where the surplus value of Das Kapital has been overthrown, so that man is no longer wolf to man.

         From French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre to American poet Allen Ginsberg, from the noble Mohammad Ali to the Nobel Nelson Mandela, from José Saramago to Gabriel García Márquez, from soccer’s super star Diego Armando Maradona to American film directors Michael Moore and Oliver Stone, from Chilean communist leader Gladys Marín to Chilean chronicler Pedro Lemebel. The list is endless.

         They all come to Cuba. They all bow to the illusion of a “revolution” where they wouldn’t formulate a single uncomfortable question that, even by chance, could uncover a trace of “dictatorship”. In practice, they all mask the dictatorship with their simple presence in proletarian’s paradise, because they bring their anti-systemic impulse in their suitcases but, once in Cuba, they just decide to take it back with them when they leave. Cuba deserves better. Their criticism (and cynicism) must be focused and concentrated against capitalism out there. Cuba plays the role of the victim and every victim deserves solidarity. Besides, Cuba is for them a bubble of poetic exceptionality in a planet prosaically permeated by global marketization.

         The history of Chilean and Cuban communists is a peculiar one. During the government of Salvador Allende in Chile (1970-1973), Fidel Castro infiltrated the Chilean society and its institutions at all levels, including the military. The influence of Castro violently radicalized what could have been the first successful democratic experience of the left in Latin America. In more than a way, with the toppling of Allende by the coup d’état of General Augusto Pinochet in September 11th 1973, Castro emerged as the winning apocalyptic visionary who has warned the whole continent that the only way to power (and to stick to power indefinitely) was making use of bullets instead of ballots.

         Pedro Lemebel (1952-2016), the Chilean writer of whom novelist Roberto Bolaño said that “he didn’t need to write poetry to be the best poet of my generation,” was one of those intellectual travellers to Cuba in search for the lost left. His prose is brilliantly extreme, full of colorful incorrectness and filtering history through the human heart. All writers like him in Castro’s Cuba have ended up incarcerated or in exile. Or first incarcerated and then in exile, like Reynaldo Arenas, for example. 

         Lemebel is an intimate witness of the intimidating horrors of both dictatorship and post-dictatorship in Chile. Maybe he chose to keep a ray of hope incarnated somewhere else, in a “revolution” that by no means could be narrated as another Latin American “dictatorship.” Because the Cuban “revolution” cannot be allowed to become (or even be compared to) such a terrible reality. Because the Cuban “dictatorship” cannot be allowed to appear and thus destroy all of the intellectual illusions in a better future (the present time can wait on perpetuity). Moreover, even the absence of dictatorship must disappear in the case of Cuba, where a revolutionary narrative occupies and fills up the empty spaces of utopia, those radiant black holes that still today illuminate the communist cosmovision.

         I met Pedro Lemebel in La Habana, in November 2006, exactly a decade ago. It was his birthday number 54. He was invited by the governmental Casa de las Américas, a sort of cultural embassy that since the sixties has promoted those authors who are not critical to the social system enthroned on the Island. Early in 2007, the homonymous literary magazine published by Casa de las Américas[1] included a dossier with texts from and about Pedro Lemebel, and his presentations and panels there.

         One of the two chronicles published by Pedro Lemebel is “One more time the search, once again the disappointment.”[2] It’s a powerful piece, precisely about the “disappeared detainees” and how in Chile those “stories” are considered something from “old ladies,” who will do better if they just “forget” or else “get bored” after the countless bureaucratic hours of claiming in ministries, in courts, etc., for there will be “no news” at all for their grief: the missing ones probably “are abroad the country, they must have fled together with other terrorists.” 

         But Lemebel is the one who do remember what by nature (and by the Chilean nation) must be now forgotten: the “kickings,” the “violence of police irruptions” and, still worse, the “smiles” of the guilty ones “playing the fool today”, “pretending they know nothing about the exact place where they made them disappear,” because during the dictatorship the criminals “swore to the dirty honor of the homeland not to ever reveal the secret” of where they dispersed the “pale bones” of the victims. Lemebel is the one who writes in order of “not leaving them behind so dead, so deleted,” and be able to “recover night after night their faces,” and “dream of them persistently” as when “drawing a beloved face in the air of an invisible landscape.” Moreover, these desaparecidos are able to accompany the living day after day and “they point to all of the accomplices and the guilty ones, when they appear in the screen talking about amnesty and reconciliation.”

         In his introductory note to Lemebel’s dossier, the Cuban essayist Jorge Fornet[3] cautiously mentions that in “few cases as in Lemebel’s it has been so patent the conviction that what’s personal is also political,” for he is “a writer that exposes himself,” both in the sense of “exhibiting” and “risking.” But Fornet forgets to connect the Chilean author with any corner of the Cuban literary tradition. In principle, it looks as if in Cuba there were no differences between personal and political, and no need at all of revealing and risking anything. Cubans must assume that our most intimate opinions sooner or later will become public, so it is better to calculate very well about what we think (for only ignorance is guarantee of innocence on the Island). Consequently, Cuban intellectuals can be considered free to express their personal views, because beforehand it is known that they will completely agree with the political propaganda of Castroism. This explains their smiles while playing the fool and pretending they know nothing about the exact moment when the Cuban dictatorship disappeared, as if they had sworn to the dirty honor of the homeland not to ever reveal this revolutionary secret.

         In the late XX century, Lemebel traveled several times to Cuba, displaying his provocative performances in international art festivals on the Island, loaded with political connotations that were almost illegible in a country devoid of political culture and political spectrum, as the Communist Party of Cuba is the only one legal, according to the Constitution of the socialist republic. In 2004, Lemebel included in his book Adiós mariquita linda[4] four chronicles that he wrote back then about his adventures in La Habana.

         Lemebel was perfectly aware of the repression to homosexuals in Cuba, that in the sixties reached the point of interning them in forced labor camps called Military Units for the Support of Production (U.M.A.P., in Spanish),[5] which used the slogan “work will make you men,”[6] analogous to the Arbeit macht frei that the German national socialists hung at the entrance of concentration camps.[7] No homosexuals were allowed in the communist organizations during decades, and they couldn’t hold any public position of social influence, so that hundreds were dismissed from their jobs. In a 1971 foundational congress of education and culture held in La Habana, the “homosexual deviations were defined in their character of social pathology,” so that it was necessary “to cure all the focuses and even the control and relocation of isolated cases, always with an educative and preventive purpose.”[8] In many aspects, since the plagiarism of the final remarks of Hitler’s Mein Kampf by Fidel Castro,[9] during his self-defense when he was trialed in 1953 after attacking a military garrison, the language of Castroism or Fidelism has always been philofascist. Yet, Lemebel in Cuba suddenly mutates from his demonic tongue into an angelic tone, unbelievably becoming he who do forget what by nature (and by the Cuban nation) must be forgotten forever.

         In one of those texts,[10] Lemebel limits his accustomed criticism to depict how Cuban young men asked him for dollars in exchange of sex during his promenades by Old Havana. He calls them “jineteros” (horse riders), which is the common word in Cuba to soften the fact of how widespread prostitution can be within an egalitarian society (in all its variants: heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, transsexual, anysexual). Lemebel praises the way the handsome mulattos praised him in the streets, throughout the “evening erotic sugarcane field:” Hi, princess, where are you going? Hi, queen, where would you like to go?
         It’s a festive environment, a hunting zone, a reserve area of the Revolutionzoic Era. And, of course, Lemebel meets a guy and immediately he falls in love. In lust, in loss. For his sudden lover turns out to be a painter infected with HIV, and he is also a fugitive from the Cuban hospital where HIV-positive persons were forced to remain interned for life (socialism is about controlling not only the movement of the mind, but the location of bodies as well). And then the reader remains intrigued by the enigmatic self-introduction of the painter: Everything is a lie. But Lemebel won’t allow us to know more, maybe to protect his source, maybe to protect us, maybe to protect himself: Cuba as the colloquial condom that they both are about to share in this chronicle. But protect him/us/himself from whom, why? Is this literary suspense or literal silence? Solidarity or complicity?

         Lemebel is fascinated with Cuba from the minute he gets on the plane.[11] In a second chronicle he documents the climate of informality of the whole crew of Cubana Airlines, in a plane that looks old and overused all around, from the plastic and metal parts to the cover of the seats and the broken seatbelts, including the worn-out uniforms of the flight personnel and their damaged dentitions. There’s no TV, no furniture music, and “no First Class, no VIPs, no special attention.” But no one seems to worry about this dear debacle, because such a state of professional irresponsibility is happily contagious, and who knows if it’s also a first step towards our individual emancipation, because chaos implies a “classless” society which is so different from the stiff and tough capitalism nowadays: “for even in the air, chica, the revolution goes on” and in Cubana there will be no “disguised loathing towards the poor” as it happens in Lufthansa or British Airways, according to Lemebel.

         Therefore, Cubana de Aviación is a company full of “emotional charm,” and this has nothing to do with the salaries they pay to their workers, because Lemebel acknowledges that it’s the “same earning that all Cubans earn,” certainly a communitarian virtue, regardless of the detail that with such a salary (Cuba’s average wage is around 25 U.S. dollars a month) in Chile, for example, the workers wouldn’t survive a single day, and they would be on permanent strike against the private owner who exploits them as a social class. Lemebel enthusiastically certifies with his writing that in Cuba there are no social classes, no private owners (everything belongs to the State), no strikes and, much less, no right to go on strike. For many like him, it’s like a preview of Paradise. And this may explain why the rest of the travelling Chileans are so thrilled to see how their “political, sexual and sentimental biographies are diluted,” as if “at 3,000 meters of height, the hypocritical mood of life in Chile, so far away, no longer mattered.” We are being introduced to the discrete enchantment of the proletariat, and Pedro Lemebel is its pamphlet-prophet with the sharpest possible prose.

         Once landed, Lemebel describes the decaying splendor of Old Havana in another chronicle,[12] so that by no means he can be considered as blind to the barbaric mixture of Castro’s Cuba. He mentions the “rationing” system, and the “humiliation” of Cubans “who are not admitted in the luxurious hotels and new resorts.” The occasional reader might wonder why the capitalist investors discriminate against local guests, although the untold truth is that it was an apartheid policy subscribed by the Revolution, approved by Fidel Castro in person in the early nineties. And somehow justified by Pedro Lemebel, as for him the cause of such an “economic injustice” (economic and not political) is the need to keep afloat in Cuba the project of a country that wanted to be “independent,” “a nation that wanted to alter the trend of its colonial history with the rough awakening of a courageous transgression”, and “that wanted to have a fairer social system” (social and not political). The poignant politicophilia of Pedro Lemebel in Chile, by a touch of magic materialism becomes in Cuba a case of chronic politicophobia. 

         Lemebel goes a little beyond this point: he declares that his perspective is somehow similar to the touristic traveller and, thus, this implicitly implies that he has no right to be so critical on the Island. On the other hand, as Cuban citizens will pay with jail being critical to the government, the textual impunity of the Cuban Revolution is guaranteed for life. In practice, only Fidel Castro allowed himself to be constructively critical of his own regime and, twice or thrice every decade, he launched massive campaigns and counter-campaigns to rectify the policies imposed precisely by him. In more than a sense, Fidel Castro was the only free citizen of Cuba: if not a Faustian character, at least a kind of “Der unabhängigste Mann” in the Americas, as Peter Sloterdijk[13] called Friedrich Nietzsche in reference to Europe.

         It is precisely in the distant omnipresence of Fidel Castro, during the massive parade of the International Workers’ Day in La Habana, on May 1st 1996, that Lemebel describes “the vast Revolution Square trembling with the vigor of the crowds arriving in columns by several entryways” and, as for him this was “doubtlessly beautiful, immensely emotional, some of his tears of weak mare were then mixed with his sweat”.[14]
         It doesn’t matter for Lemebel that all those workers and students (including me on that very May Wednesday, back then a biochemistry working in the Center of Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology that belonged, of course, to the Cuban State) didn’t attend but were taken to attend the parade in buses and trucks strictly paid by their working and study institutions. Lemebel had the exclusive opportunity of detecting the symptoms of simulation in the time of socialism, surrounded by such a sea of citizen-lemmings. Instead, he is touched by the spectacle of tropical totalitarianism and he just gently cries (as it is his right to do so), and later he documents it with fascination upon this fascistoid kitsch, quite similar to those military marches he deplores so much both in dictatorial and democratic Chile (as it is his right to do so). Cubans, as a sort of Socialist Subalterns S.A., are just moving marionettes for whom rights (and any other term from the political right) are less urgent than for the progressive proletarians of Chile, Latin America, and the Third World.

         In another Cuban text,[15] Lemebel travels in a taxi and reads (and sometimes misquotes) the posters of the political propaganda that are displayed in La Habana. The scarcity never diminished the demagogical impulse of the official narrative. The Cuban government likes to talk to the people from block to block, in printed characters of huge font and striking colors that make the reading unavoidable. Lemebel informs us that the Cuban taxi driver has “cutting answers” for him, “assessing suspicions and the double intentions of the foreign interrogatory” that Lemebel is asking to him. 

         How a conversation has turned into an interrogatory? Is this a scene in a rented taxi or in a police patrol? Why would a common taxi driver be so cautious in front of a common tourist? This whole exchange seems more proper of a clandestine encounter in a climate of, yes, dictatorship. Only that, again, it is an absent dictatorship the one that emerges (or rather remains submerged) in the anachronistic Cuban chronicles of Pedro Lemebel. It seems that the desire for an idyll always include despotic disappearances like this.

         Back in Chile, Cuba is also present in a number of columns by Pedro Lemebel. Once Lemebel joined “seventy thousand young people present” in the “great act of homage to Ché in the National Stadium.”[16] This arena is tragically loaded with painful significance, for during the 1973 coup d’état it became a detention center, where thousands of Chileans were arbitrarily detained, before being interrogated, tortured, and a lot of them “disappeared” (namely, assassinated by the State). 

         In this chronicle, Lemebel recalls how this “event had very emotional moments that transported the masses to the tough dictatorial history,” and he recognizes that “it is and it will always be necessary to repeat a thousand times the ritual of naming the victims and pointing to their executioners.” But certainly not all of the victims, and not all of the executioners. Because Ernesto Ché Guevara was in charge of the firing squads at La Cabaña Castle in La Habana, where he gave the order and also personally shot many people during the first years of the Cuban Revolution (in most cases without much worrying about the formalities of a trial). 

         Lemebel only poses some minor criticism upon the gross homophobia of Ché Guevara, and he ironizes about the “operatic representation” of “resurrecting his memory for a few hours, and then turn the page of his dangerous memory.” Yet, an aura of invisibility floats over the souls of the silenced, the Cuban citizens that were arbitrarily shot to death but not desaparecidos, and therefore for him they do not deserve the same compassion as their Latin American counterparts. Those Cubans are in fact like apparitions, absent presences that I cannot help but remembering, like accusing visions over the selective forgetfulness with which Lemebel humiliates them, much more than the fact that the surviving Cubans are not being admitted in the luxurious hotels and new resorts on the Island. 

         In another Chilean anecdote involving Cuba,[17] Lemebel recalls the shouts of a wild crowd of Pinochet followers, when they harass a young woman wearing a T-shirt of Ché in a rich neighborhood: “go to Cuba,” they scream to her, spitting on her, and finally slapping her face. Every human being with a sense of dignity is insulted with these “fascist-like fanatics” that could have “lynched her for using that symbol.” But Lemebel cannot associate this sad spectacle with the analogue acts of repudiation in Cuba, where the image of Ché is routinely used by the mobs to harass, shout, spit, and beat the peaceful activists of Cuban civil society and the illegalized dissidence and opposition: “go to Miami,” is the scream on the Island. I have heard it in person. And it hurts so much as the “go to Cuba” he heard in Santiago de Chile. And it hurts even more when I realize that the screams narrated by Lemebel erases the echo of those screams unnarrated in Santiago de Cuba, Pinar del Río, Camagüey, Santa Clara, Matanzas, La Habana and many other cities and towns of Cuba today.

         Pedro Lemebel is a courageous writer. His literary style is as radical as his rage. In September 1986, under the dictatorship of Pinochet, he read in public his poem Manifesto (I Speak For My Difference),[18] where he utters: “I do not need a disguise / Here is my face / I speak for my difference / I defend what I am / And I’m not so strange / I deplore injustice / And I’m suspicious of this democratic dance / But don’t talk to me about the proletariat / Because to be poor and faggot is worse / One must be acid to endure it / (..) / Like the dictatorship / Worse than the dictatorship / Because the dictatorship will go / And democracy will come / And thereafter socialism / And then? / What will you do with us, comrades? / Will you tie our ponytails in packs / destined towards a Cuban AIDS sanatorium?

         But precisely because of his courage is that I have now the courage to question him. It’s called civism. Did Lemebel, for instance, asked the Cuban singer Omara Portuondo why in 2003 she signed a letter supporting the death sentence of three Afro-Cubans who attempted to kidnap a boat and escape to the U.S. (with no fatal or injured victims)? Lemebel and Portuondo smile together in the first frame of a picture taken by Víctor Parra in 2008,[19] a minute after or before chanting together “¡Long live the Revolution!”[20] Their black-and-white smile in turn silences the missing smiles of not only three Cuban Black families, but of thousands of families whose younger ones are still sunken, unidentified, in the Strait of Florida (in practice, devoured by sharks, in a perverse parody of a Caribbean Condor Operation[21] that seems to be not dramatic enough as to be chronicled by Pedro Lemebel).

         When the transition to democracy came to his country after the plebiscite of 1987, he remained a critical actor and opinion-maker of the Chilean society, attacking the mediocrity, hypocrisy and impunity of the old violators of human rights, now dressed as civilian politicians (there are no old violations of human rights: crimes against humanity are always contemporary). As Fornet said of him in a Cuban official magazine, Lemebel did risk at lot all through his life, and he risked it beautifully, sincerely, movingly. His tender tears amid the terrifying tear gas. His whipping adjectives and the sweet sentences of his broken grammar, making visible the invisible: unfinished biographies, pale bones dispersed, disappeared but still not absent. His heart being bigger than Chilean History itself. His lucid loquacity of a local loco, or loca. How do I love thee, Pedro? Let me count the only way: I love you politically, I envy you. 

For over half a century, we Cubans have missed you in every single text out of our cultural field, including your 2007 aseptic dossier in Casa de las Américas: the cradle of cultural censorship on the Island (the equivalent of our pathetic Pinochetism, mi amor). In Cuba we still need myriads of Lemebels to expose the disappeared Cuban dictatorship that Lemebel dully refused to see and speak about, as it should have been his moral duty, instead of coming just for collecting the only lemebeless chronicles that he ever wrote. 

         When I talked to Pedro Lemebel privately for a few minutes in La Habana, I asked him to please mention in his talk some of the injustices in Cuba that he knew so well, as he was the privileged invited guest of the Author’s Week in Casa de las Américas, and nothing could happen to him as a foreign for bringing up this absent topic in the insipid intellectuality of the Island. Lemebel looked at me, his expression suddenly so somber: “Mi niño,” he told me, “this car will take us longer to push it forward slowly.”

         Ten years of birthdays later I’m still wondering what Lemebel really meant on that November Tuesday in which he turned 54 in La Habana. Which car? Longer than what, slower than when, forward to where? 

         A couple of weeks later Augusto Pinochet was to die on the International Day of Human Rights, on December 10th 2006: also my birthday number 35. Lemebel published ipso facto an obituary[22] as obscene as his political obfuscation permitted, identifying himself and all the Chileans who “toasted” and “danced” in the streets with a single spittle that a young man spat at Pinochet’s coffin. It’s called existential emancipation.

Then, a long and winding decade in Cuba expanded its silence upon my own writing, which was banned from every publication along the Island: the crime was my free-lance posting in a personal blog[23], a provocative platform from where I launched hundreds of chronicles that hopefully Lemebel would have loved (and believed in) if he were a uncomfortable Cuban instead of an uncomfortable Chilean. That experience of inxile, including three detentions by Castro’s G-2 (a mimesis of Pinochet’s DINA and CNI[24]), finally forced me into exile, wandering from Miami to Alaska, from Reykjavík to the Mid-West in the heart of the heart of the United States of America. 

         Then, Pedro Lemebel passed away early in 2016. And Fidel Castro followed him, late in 2016. But we Cubans were not supposed to behave in an obfuscated or obscene way of writing (or spitting) upon Castro’s life and legacy, because this will only show how dehumanized are those Cuban pro-democracy activists (we, the absent unable to disappear). Much less we should publicly toast and dance in the streets, as the ashes of our disappeared dictator traversed Cuba in a pagane procession, more present than ever. The Left is always right. The Right is left to ridicule. 

In any case, the protagonists of this epoch already with no epic are one by one going extinct. Yet, I’m afraid that the Cuban car will take forever to push it slowly to nowhere at all, mi niño.

[1] Revista Casa de las Américas, No. 246, January-March, La Habana, Cuba, 2007, pp. 67-107.
[2] Lemebel, P. De nuevo la búsqueda, otra vez la decepción. In: Casa de las Américas, 246, January-March, La Habana, 2007, pp. 71-72.
[3] Fornet, J. Un escritor que se expone. Casa de las Américas, No. 246, January-March, La Habana, 2007, pp. 67-68.
[4] Lemebel, P. Adiós mariquita linda. Ed. Sudamericana, Col. Señales, Santiago de Chile, 2004.
[5] U.M.A.P.: Unidades Militares de Apoyo a la Producción. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Units_to_Aid_Production
[6] Documentary Film Conducta Impropia. Written and directed by Néstor Almendros and Orlando Jiménez Leal. Produced by Les Films du Losange.
[8] Declaración del Primer Congreso de Nacional de Educación y Cultura. In: Casa de las Américas, 65-66, 1971, pp. 4-19.
[9] “The judges of this State may tranquilly condemn us for our conduct at that time, but History, the goddess of a higher truth and a better legal code, will smile as she tears up this verdict and will absolve us from all of the crimes for which this verdict demands punishment.” Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 1923. “I come to the close of my defense plea but I will not end it as lawyers usually do, asking that the accused be freed. (…) Condemn me, it does not matter: History will absolve me.” Fidel Castro, La historia me absolverá, 1953.
[10] Lemebel, P. El fugado de La Habana. In: Adiós mariquita linda. Ed. Sudamericana, Col. Señales, Santiago de Chile, 2004, pp. 86-93.
[11] Lemebel, P. Cubana de Aviación. In: Adiós mariquita linda. Ed. Sudamericana, Col. Señales, Santiago de Chile, 2004, pp. 77-79.
[12] Lemebel, P. La Habana Vieja. In: Adiós mariquita linda. Ed. Sudamericana, Col. Señales, Santiago de Chile, 2004, pp. 80-82.
[13] Sloterdijk, P. Der unabhängigste Mann in Europa, In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, August 28, 2000.
[14] Lemebel, P. El Primero de Mayo. In: Háblame de amores, Seix Barral (Biblioteca Breve), Ed. Planeta, Chile, 2012, pp. 265-267.
[15] Lemebel, P. Llegando a La Habana. In: Adiós mariquita linda. Ed. Sudamericana, Col. Señales, Santiago de Chile, 2004, pp. 83-85.
[16] Lemebel, P. Adiós al Ché (o las mil maneras de despedir un mito). In: Zanjón de la Aguada, Seix Barral (Biblioteca Breve), Ed. Planeta, Chile, 2003, pp. 75-78.
[17] Lemebel, P. Una chica con polera del Ché entre los pinochetistas. In: Zanjón de la Aguada, Seix Barral (Biblioteca Breve), Ed. Planeta, Chile, 2003, pp. 108-112.
[18] Lemebel, P. Manifiesto (hablo por mi diferencia). In: Loco afán. Crónicas de Sidario. Col. Entre Mares, Eds. LOM, 1996, pp. 83-90.
[19] Lemebel, P. Serenata cafiola. Seix Barral (Biblioteca Breve), Ed. Planeta, Chile, 2003, p. 192.
[20] Lemebel, P. Infinito delirio llamado deseo. In: Serenata cafiola. Seix Barral (Biblioteca Breve), Ed. Planeta, Chile, 2003, p. 165-168.
[22] Lemebel, P. Las exequias del fiambre. In: Háblame de amores. Seix Barral (Biblioteca Breve), Ed. Planeta, Chile, 2012, p. 211-213.
[23] Blog Lunes de Post-Revolución (in Spanish) at http://orlandoluispardolazo.blogspot.com. A not completely updated English version (Post-Revolution Mondays) has been developed/translated by volunteer followers at http://orlandolunes.wordpress.com
[24] National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), National Information Center (CNI).

martes, 23 de mayo de 2017

Liszt de que pinga

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

En La Habana más hueca. En la ciudad de los años cero. Me habían expulsado de mi trabajo como Licenciado en Bioquímica, en el Centro de Ingeniería Genética y Biotecnología.

Fue en abril de 1999. Y yo andaba por esa Cuba del renacer de los Castros con la cabeza vacía, dando trastazos, buscando un triste empleo para no tener que exiliarme ni tampoco matarme, que a la postre ha sido más o menos lo mismo.

Gracias al escritor Eduardo Heras León, en el verano del año 2000 por fin conseguí un puestecito más o menos humillante, como promotor cultural en el Centro Provincial del Libro y la Literatura, un antro de desconsuelo en la calle Zanja entre Aramburu y Hospital. Un manicomio, lleno de mujeres-madres que almorzaban a toda hora, pero sin una sola ventana para respirar en aquel clima irrespirable.

En una de esas siniestras “actividades culturales” que tuve que coordinar, a cambio del equivalente de unos 15 dólares mensuales como salario estatal, fui al Gran Teatro de La Habana. Se le haría un homenaje a Jaime Sarusky, si no recuerdo mal. Y allí hablé con una mujer de la alta aristocracia cubana supongo que de los años cuarenta y cincuenta del siglo pasado. Una bruja en toda regla. Ampulosa, arrogante. Especialista en ballet y música clásica, a la vez que renegando de su origen de clase (sin quitarse sus joyas) y muy sumisa al chachán tan chusmo de la Revolución.

En su oficina tampoco me era posible respirar. Los cuadros del Ché y de Alicia Alonso me asfixiaban. También el olor a almuerzo proletario, ese tufo que recorre los mediodías candentes del comunismo cubano, y que son el primer síntoma irreversible de la locura. Estábamos armando el programa cultural de la velada y ella me iba diciendo la música que se emplearía en cada parte del show. En una de esas, la gran dama obrera mencionó una pieza archifamosa de Liszt. Pero yo ignoraba cómo escribir ese título original (no supe ni siquiera si era una frase en italiano o francés o alemán o… ¡acaso en húngaro!). Y, para colmo, tampoco supe cómo deletrear bien el nombre de Liszt (todavía me cuesta hacerlo, como me pasa también con Nietzsche).

La mujerona me echó una mirada de asco con todo el peso de sus arrugas y joyas. Yo era un insecto. Yo era un burócrata de mierda que no me merecía ni aquel puestecito de mierda que me pagaba el Estado revolucionario. Un ignorante de mierda que ocupa el puesto de alguien con seguramente mejor instrucción. ¡Y así quería organizarle un homenaje de élite, nada menos que en el Gran Teatro de La Habana, al más que renombrado escritor de élite Jaime Sarusky, recientemente Premio Nacional de Literatura (aunque ningún cubano nunca lo haya leído ni ya nunca lo leerá)!

Tenía razón la antigua belleza del ballet batistiano, devenida embajadora cultural del castrismo. Yo era un mierda. Me estaba muriendo. Me habían botado de mi trabajo. Se me dijo que nunca más podría ejercer como profesional en la Isla. Estaba aterrado. No me atreví a denunciar nada, a nadie. Era el año 2000. No pensé que pudiera sobrevivir tanto después. El pánico paraliza.

Aquella lección fue terrible. Nadie te ama. La misma mujerona incapaz de mover un dedo para defenderme, ahora me machacaba mi total estado de estupidez. Entendí que lo mejor es no haber sido nunca cubano. No tener contemporáneos, no habitar en ningún país. Y también entendí que la cultura es solo otro nombre del odio, de la represión, de la violencia desde el lenguaje contra los individuos.

Sentí que me iba a desmayar.

Mi resistencia contra la verdad fue la más simple y brutal. Le pedí permiso a la mayorala ilustrada y salí al pasillo, como si fuera a ir de urgencia a los bañitos hediondos del Gran Teatro de La Habana. De hecho, fui.

Toda vez allí dentro, me aferré a las cabillas carcelarias de la ventanucas. Pensé: qué feo es el socialismo, qué intolerablemente feo es todo aquí, empezando por mi propia vida, por mi  falta de información, por mi desidia, por mis ganas de poner bombas en lugar de homenajes o, mejor, de poner una bomba en el lugar de los homenajes.

Me había convertido ya en un terrorista profesional.

En el baño de los balletómanos había una peste a mierda intolerable. Tal vez era la mierda de otras damas y caballeros burgueses-proletarios como la que me denigró, culos cómplices todos con una cultura descomunal. Y entonces grité, con todas las fuerzas de mi insania hueca, grité: ¡Pá la pinga, Liszt! ¡Pá la repinga, Liszt!

Era el 2000 y mi alarido fue el inicio de todo.

Salí del baño para la pinga. Salí para la pinga del Gran Teatro de La Habana. Todos mis exilios y extremismos, todas mis tentaciones y tristezas, desde Miami hasta Reykjavík, no son más que la continuación de esa fuga, de ese todavía estarme yendo para la mismísima repinga de allí.

Liszt el recontracoñísimo de su madre.