Asentamiento en la civilidad (Casa Vacía, 2023) presents itself as an urban guerrilla manual disguised as a poetry collection. Through verses that seem to address themes of architecture and everyday life, the text executes a coordinated attack on three pillars of official discourse: the myths of socialist progress, the rhetoric of the “collective work,” and the artificial dichotomy between civitas and periphery.
Youre Merino constructs a linguistic map of the contemporary city, where the poetic and the political merge in a single gesture: tracing coordinates over lived, inhabited, and, above all, contested space. His writing does not seek traditional conversationalism but rather a kind of critical realism that draws on both anti-poetry and the aesthetics of hip-hop and urban culture. The result is a poetry collection that functions as a travel log through the margins of civilization, where each verse is a note on resistance.
The city is not approached as a backdrop but as a living, wounded, and contradictory organism. The 7 km tunnel separating the coast from the suburbs becomes a metaphor for a perpetual transit between the official and the marginal, between the planned and the spontaneous. The pink camel dismantles utopia; it is the subject: a beast of burden within a system that glorifies autarky while denying any real movement.
The anatomy of Alamar—that emblem of Cuban socialist architecture—is no coincidence: it is the backdrop for a broader meditation on how narratives of belonging are built—and dismantled. Poetry here is not ornament but a measuring tool, like the sound of a chisel marking concrete before breaking it:
Afronivel, mundalamar ruido:
el punto le sirve de alarma
el chanchullero, el mangrullo…
Throughout the book, the jargon of bureaucrats is used as a resource to expose the implicit violence in state planning. Many verses parody slogans, while the image of the Christ of Alamar walking unrecognized by the people reveals a proletarian messiah, a kind of ghost of the New Man wandering through post-communist suburbs.
The linguistic weaponry of the texts operates through appropriation and distortion of official terms: bidding sessions are primary ammunition, the obsessive repetition of niches are armor-piercing bullets against institutional language; and syntactic glitches, like rajando la legna están, function as sabotage.
The zones of conflict extend to everyday spaces turned into theaters of the absurd: the urinals where a Hamlet queues for bread, the counter where the clerk wipes the formica clean of poems, and the buildings placed in the landscape sit at the intersection of aesthetics and territory, showing how art and power burn their own images.
The book is neither a manifesto nor an elegy. It is not a refuge but a record of a project reduced to a sample of worn-out metaphors. Yet, there is no nihilism in this gaze, but rather a stubborn will to take notes on what remains standing or resurges as monsters—beautiful or terrible—amid the rubble. Merino demystifies language. If Parra dismantled literary solemnity with acid humor, Youre does so with phrases that mimic bureaucratic rhythm:
jornadas de licitación
vendrán
con el despliegue de la soberanía
But his gaze is not merely ironic; it is also permeated with conceptualism, material art, and objet trouvé. The poems are filled with everyday objects that cease to be inert and become uncomfortable witnesses. The most trivial act is charged with political tension: the ordinary citizen performing a common task as if it were the Odyssey is the perfect image of the individual trapped between personal drama and collective absurdity.
Hip-hop emerges as a key element, not only in explicit references to Cuban underground groups but also in the very structure of the poems. Short verses, repetitions mimicking sampling, and a rhythm oscillating between denunciation and skepticism. In the section Movimiento de máquinas (poetas del este), Merino adopts the pose of the MC to build a voice that rejects institutional praise. There is no sentimentalism, only the gesture of picking at the scabs of official discourse.
In conclusion, Asentamiento en la civilidad is a poetic virus that infects the language of institutionalism using its own words, replicates in gray zones—Alamar, microbrigades, hip-hop—and detonates upon reaching readers with weakened immune systems. The verses of the final poem,
Hacer un camino recto para nosotros.
Mal que les pese a quienes trazan nuevas
que se saben viejas implicaciones
reveal the core of the artifact: poetry as a shortcut on a censored map.
Ultimately, it is an exercise in poetic cartography. Merino does not offer something new but traces with precision the cracks through which real life seeps. His poetry is less a song than a blueprint of architecture in ruins, where each verse is a mark on the wall, a sign that someone was here, measuring the disaster.
