I met Luis Felipe Rojas one day when he wanted to settle a dispute with another student with his fists. He had just returned from military service and bore certain scars from skirmishes that were best forgotten. I know that wasn’t the first time we met, but my memory insists on recalling those events. It was the 1990s in a university residence in Santiago de Cuba, which meant that we all suffered from a severe shortage of everything, but we were united by books, poetry, and a belief in the power of friendship that remains intact.
We began to meet in the evenings with other friends in rooms where, among other things, we talked about what we were reading. We read a lot, and I wish we still read as much as we did back then, not with the same eyes, which were too young, but with the same ambition and the same evil, the evil of impetuousness. We drank tea made from leaves and mixed it with some concoction that was thankfully called rum. Sometimes we were left in the dark due to power cuts. Sometimes there was something to eat, rice with nothing and a piece of three-day-old bread. We would stay up late, filled with wonder and a brutal desire to be writers when we were nothing more than wannabes waiting for devastation to find us awake and with at least one book published. But all that stuff about books and getting serious came much later.
Felipe was the one who arrived at the university residence with a fairly decent notebook of poems. That’s what everyone started calling him, not Luis or Güicho, but Felipe, giving his almost always ignored middle name the importance of the Christian names of old, the first names. But since none of us were going to let him get away with his poems, we told him to keep working on them. How silly of us. They were sonorous texts, meant to be read aloud and written with a pen in a well-thumbed notebook. Some of them later appeared in his first book, which I edited in Holguín.
I had never met anyone who combined street life and reading so well. He had been a prison guard, he said. He came from a military prep school, and I’m sure he had read more than all of us put together. But Felipe also had another quality: he knew a lot about loyalty, but he was also somewhat unsociable, so loyalty had to be earned. He didn’t mix with everyone. There was an opaque area of family absences, rebelliousness, a single mother, a younger brother, where we couldn’t easily penetrate, but time would bring us closer until we were able to get to know that beyond. He went to Havana to finish his degree in literature. He returned to Oriente. He did theater and worked as a municipal instructor. We tried to put together a magazine and they almost burned down the booth with us inside. He started a blog, took photos, and edited videos.
He joined the opposition to Castro because there was, and still is, no greater moral imperative, and for this he suffered persecution and beatings until he finally managed to leave Cuba with his family. Felipe talks a lot about all this in the pages of El ruido de los libros (Media Mix 305, 2025), but above all he talks about how he started reading.
He talks about a sugar cane hut, the dusty streets of a sugar town, a Cuba that, apart from the dust and the heat, no longer exists. I knew that place. It wasn’t a Brodsky-esque one-and-a-half room, but barely half a room. And then there was the other one, when his mother was able to move into one of those so-called “low-cost” houses, not far from the hut. His mother read him stories with that voice that no man forgets, a voice that remains planted, waiting for the next moment that connects with the beginning of time and restarts the long and endless saga of a reader who persists and resists.
From that barracks, he had written some arduous and polished poems, read a lot, and shown admiration for poets such as Ángel Escobar, and now he tells us about the origins of that long journey to everywhere that is books and writing. One writes because memory settles, and that spares us the question of what is worth narrating. That is why so many people write diaries, and it is not unreasonable to read this book as such, as a diary peppered with intimate meditation—“I read more, I write less. There is a game of attrition that is marked from the beginning”—with entries dedicated to books and friends who have accompanied him on his journey.
He writes about a poet who lives on the streets of a city we once frequented; about a teacher responsible for re-teaching him to read Dante, Bocaccio, and Cervantes; about the magazine Bifronte; about the death of Ramón Legón and Armando de Armas, and about books such as La otra guerra by Leila Guerriero, Nuestra hambre en La Habana by Enrique del Risco, the anthology Desde el redil bramo, a collection of Cuban poetry on the theme of prison, and La gloria de Cuba by Roberto González Echevarría, among many others. The final pages are dense and rigorous because they are the foundation of a future memoir by the recruit who began writing poems and whom I met in Santiago de Cuba in 1993. So much for looking back. The past is the textbook of tyrants, as Melville said.
“I am one of the recruits who listens to him and does not know that he may be one of the few—or the only one—who will write about this more than thirty years later…” he says in one of the pages where he recounts his years in the military. I have spoken of Felipe the poet, but he is also an alert intellect and a man who observes wherever he has been. The final pages belong entirely to a Galdosian eagerness, to what Andrés Trapiello likes to repeat so much: wherever man goes, he carries his novel with him, because sometimes there is one that is written, but there is always one to live. Although he also subscribes to Stendhal’s saying: desire much, expect little, ask for nothing.
“I write from an image,” says Felipe, by way of poetics. “I write out of necessity… Writing is being afraid of wasting time… I write because I always have doubts about the next line.” Many of us feel the same way, but without the audacity to admit it. What is certain is that this book is born of multiple scars, patched details of a life. If memory and literature have anything in common, it is a taste for detail. This book has managed to honor all three.
