Citario. Derived from the Latin “citāre” (to quote) plus the suffix “-ārium” (repository), similar to “bestiary.” A 21st-century neologism, it emerged among Spanish-speaking scholars at Bookish & Co., with roots in ancient anthologies and florilegia. “Citario” is related to medieval books of commonplaces (such as Erasmus’s) and proto-examples from the 19th century, such as “Familiar Quotations.” This “Citario Arenas” celebrates the 82nd birthday of that cursed and provocative novelist, who exposed the horror of totalitarian power with rage and beauty.
For me, Cuba is far from being a colorful, monumental, and baroque description, like Alejo Carpentier’s. For me, Cuba is the outdoors, the faint, the light, the weightless, the helpless, the torn, the desolate, and the changing. The bush, not the tree; the grove, not the forest; the hill, not the jungle. The savannah that fades and retreats into its own tremors. Cuban culture is a murmur or a cry, not a chorus or a torrent. Cuban culture is a yagua rotting in the sun, a stone in the open air, a nuance, a fluttering at dusk. It is never an immense baroque cathedral, which we have never had. Cuban culture is what undulates.
More than a style, Cuban is a rhythm. Our constant is the breeze. Stronger at dusk, almost still at midday, yearning and moaning at dawn. Hence, Cuban novels are not written in chapters, but in bursts; they are not something that extends, but rather undulates, returns, retreats, beats, sometimes with more fury, sometimes more slowly, circular, rhythmic, repetitive, on a single point. Thus, if we can speak of any “telluric nature,” it is a marine and aerial “telluric nature”… Our jungle is the sea.
“El mar es nuestra selva y nuestra esperanza” (Necesidad de libertad, 2001)
♣♣♣
At dusk, exhausted, we just arch our backs. A helicopter appears on the horizon; it descends. It takes a few photos of us and leaves. The old man “who pretended to be a criminal” faints. All of us, clinging to whatever objects we can find, retreat a little into our own misfortunes. Only the man who does not know where he is going raises his arms—in his own world—and holds back his unintelligible moans. At midnight, a huge ship with the inspiring name Vigorosus II approaches us, guided by the helicopter. It is a US coast guard vessel. It throws its lifeboats into the water, which reach us, transport us, and, using ropes, deposit us on the deck. The sick and injured are transported by the helicopter that lands and takes off from the coast guard vessel. Its crew, mostly Puerto Rican, welcomes us with joy.
We can dry off, have something hot to drink, eat… We spend the early morning hours like this, and the next day (the third of our journey) we are already off the coast of Key West.
“Un largo viaje de Mariel a Nueva York” (Necesidad de libertad, 2001)
♣♣♣
Thus, the Cuban intellectual in exile is condemned to disappear twice: first, the Cuban state erases him from the literary map of his country; then, the rampant and preponderant left, naturally installed in capitalist countries, condemns him to silence. For these gentlemen of the Western left, tourists from socialist countries, being anti-communist is in bad taste; but it is not in bad taste to collect capitalist money, live in the comfort and security of capitalist democracies, and, splendidly attired, watch (as fascist agents watched through the peepholes of crematoria) how millions of human beings, kicked and beaten, are reduced to the terminology of “masses,” to an anonymous and planned one-dimensional block, hungry and gagged, always compelled to scratch the earth and applaud or simply perish. None of these “gentlemen” ever bothered to find out what was really happening to Cuban intellectuals.
“La represión (intelectual) en Cuba” (Conferencia dictada en agosto de 1980 en la Universidad de Columbia, Nueva York)
♣♣♣
Love in the Time of Cholera is not a love story (every love story is something beautiful, terrible, and unrepeatable); it is rather the story of a failure and a boredom. The obvious failure is that of García Márquez, who has been fawned over and mythologized to the unjust extreme of being awarded the Nobel Prize, when there are writers such as Borges and Paz who have not received it; the boredom, which falls like an empty circus tent over the reader, is produced by the reading of these 450 pages, which are so monotonous and sterile that they seem to be the product of a bureaucrat. outdated—and I apologize to the bureaucrats. “Music is good for your health,” García Márquez writes here in one of his incessant platitudes. True, but bad prose can kill even the healthiest reader. Beware!
“García Márquez: fin de un mito” (El Nuevo Herald, February 8, 1986)
♣♣♣
One of the characteristics of Castro is that he psychologically castrates men. The Cuban caudillo system only admits two types of men: the macho-macho, naturally embodied by Fidel Castro himself, who is the only one who speaks, kicks the podium, thunders, gives orders, and hands out prizes or prison sentences; the other type is the macho-female, that is, the man who obeys and unconditionally admires the macho-macho.
“Fidel Castro en Desnoes: transverberación” (Necesidad de libertad, 2001)
♣♣♣
I don’t believe that a true writer ceases to be one because he becomes president of his country. Talented writers have faced worse calamities and emerged unscathed… The artistic condition is not a profession but a gift that visits sporadically. That gift feeds on adventure, and since the presidency of Peru is fortunately not a lifetime position, once his term is over, the writer could emerge with an experience that could well be part of one of his future novels. I would even dare to say that from the point of view of artistic creation, it would be more useful for Mario Vargas Llosa to live this political adventure and then transform it into literature than to make writing a daily profession and, therefore, a chore. Even for the most fertile talents, it is impossible to publish a good book every year.
“Vargas Llosa, presidente” (Libro de Arenas, Prosa dispersa, 2013 and 2022)
♣♣♣
New York, August 5, 1983
Ms. Alexandra Reccio:
You may be surprised by this letter. I know of you through Enrico M. Santi, who told me how disappointed—even outraged—you feel because I, finally out of Cuba, that is, out of prison, can really tell what is happening there. You came to my hovel at 401 Monserrate Street in Old Havana in 1980 with plans for a brand-new anthology of official Cuban literature, as well as a book of “positive” interviews… You, very well dressed, a member of the Italian Communist Party, officially led by Edmundo Pérez Desnoes (was there also a little romance? I say “little” and you know, of course, what I mean…), very well accommodated and treated in Havana, you fulfilled your mission perfectly: to give an idyllic and radiant image of Castroism, an image to be exported. Like mules when they are loaded (with the only difference being that the other mules are forced to do so), you also wore enormous blinders that prevented you from looking anywhere but toward a “straight” and surely well-paid goal. Old Havana in successive ruins, with its shored-up balconies, collapsed houses, closed markets, and thousands of families living in cramped quarters like mine, seemed to you “one of the most beautiful cities in the world”; the lack of transportation was a reason for you to praise “the wonderful silence of the city”; the food shortages were even a health measure and a “way to stay in shape.”
I remember—how could I forget—that while in the company of Vicente Echerri, I was eating a hard-boiled egg that you ‘generously’ refused to share, you told me that Virginia Woolf was nothing more than “a bourgeois lady”… I understood at that moment the degree of baseness and misery to which a person can sink when they are the instrument (for whatever reason) of a perverse ideology.
That instrument is you. A typical example of resentful and dissatisfied mediocrity, for whom the freedom you enjoy (and fight against) has served only to reflect your inability and failure…
♣♣♣
In 1985, two of my great friends died: Emir Rodríguez Monegal, the person who had best interpreted all my books, and Jorge Ronet, with whom I had embarked on enormous nocturnal adventures. Emir died of a fulminating cancer; Jorge died of AIDS; the plague that, until then, had only remote connotations for me due to a kind of unavoidable rumor, now became something real, palpable, evident; my friend’s corpse was proof that very soon I too could be in the same situation.
(…)
The witches have haunted my life. Those witches never let go of their brooms — not because they could fly, but because all their longings, all their frustrations and desires, were redeemed by sweeping and sweeping the hallway of my house, the patios, the living rooms, as if trying to sweep away their own lives. And among all these witches stands out the image of the eldest witch — the noble witch, the suffering witch, the witch full of nostalgia and sorrow, the most beloved witch in the world: my mother; she too with her broom, always sweeping, as if the symbolic meaning of that act were what truly mattered.
(…)
Oh Moon! You were always by my side, lighting my way in the most terrible moments; since childhood, you were the mystery that watched over my fears, the comfort in my most desperate nights, you were my very own mother, bathing me in a warmth she perhaps never knew how to give me; in the forest, in the darkest places, at sea — there you were, accompanying me; you were my solace; always the one to guide me through the hardest times. My great goddess, my true goddess, who has protected me from so many calamities; toward you, in the middle of the sea; toward you, by the shore; toward you, among the rocks of my desolate island, I would lift my eyes and gaze at you — always the same; in your face I saw an expression of pain, of bitterness, of compassion for me, your son. And now, suddenly, Moon, you shatter into pieces before my bed. I am alone now. It is night.
♣♣♣
Alejo, old man, why are you drifting further and further away? We only see you as a reflection. Son, give up those pretensions, renounce luxury, stop sanding yourself down and don’t chip away at Old Havana with your spyglass. Come and eat lentils and guataquear parejo, working hard without complaining. [For Alejo Sholejov]
(…)
When the Gloomy Skunk entered the reading room of the National Library, everything changed — including herself. There, surrounded by books, a magical aura enveloped Reinaldo. Gabriel, almost completely alone in the library, gazed toward the shelves. From each book emanated a unique glow. To walk up to those shelves, to pull out a book at random… What world would it reveal to us? To what distant place would it transport us? With what rhythm would it carry us to landscapes, beauties, and ideas never dreamed of — and yet somehow anticipated?
But the most extraordinary moment was that instant when, hand already on the book, it had not yet been opened. In that moment, the Gloomy Skunk, Gabriel, Reinaldo, held not a single book, but all the books in the world — and therefore, all possible and impossible mysteries. Then, a feeling of total fulfillment enveloped the Gloomy Skunk, Gabriel, and Reinaldo, fusing them into a single being. And so, radiant, that being took the book and, returning to the table, began to read.
(El color del verano, 1999)
♣♣♣
The sufferings of exile, the pains of banishment, the loneliness and the illnesses I may have contracted in exile would surely not have been suffered had I lived free in my country.
I urge the Cuban people, both in exile and on the island, to continue fighting for freedom. My message is not one of defeat, but of struggle and hope.
Cuba will be free. I already am.
