The Eye of the Cyclops
Victoriano Masdéu keeps valuable objects belonging to exiled friends in a secret room, sharing it with the poet Luna until his death, a prisoner of nostalgia.
Loose Pages
Exile
Inquisitions
‘Exile is Autism.’ Conversation with Carlos A. Aguilera
A reflection on Cuban exile as autism, literary resistance through the dismantling and fragmentation of a diasporic literature without a centre or possible union.
Bouquiphiles
Moves
About traveling with books, especially when they are like fragments of a writer’s life, chapters of a biography whose meaning matters only to oneself.
Book Reviews
Death with Bells or Myths in Recent Cuban Imagination
An analysis of the formation of myths in the post-revolutionary Cuban imagination, through an examination of stereotypes in Kelly Martínez-Grandal’s stories about sensitivity, communism, and exile among Cubans and Russians
Book Reviews
‘La costurera de Chanel’ or the Sinuous Disintegration
Wendy Guerra’s latest novel marks a departure from the ontological depth and political urgency of her earlier work, embracing a cinematic surface where memory, exile, and identity risk dissolving into aesthetic gesture.
Book Reviews
‘El ruido de los libros’: Writing and Scars
A book by Luis Felipe Rojas that intertwines memory, resistance, and literature, from his youth in Cuba to his exile, marked by scars and a passion for books.
Bookspel
Chronicle of Absurdity with Limited Plan
A half-hearted update on Cuba’s tragicomedy: sky-high internet tariffs, rogue dollars, and reggaeton artists jailed for existing, narrated from exile with coffee and guilt.
Bouquiphiles
Fragmented Libraries
The personal library as a portable and sentimental homeland, especially for the displaced writer who carries his books and objects like fragments of identity.
Loose Pages
The Fish out of Water
A reflection on the trauma of compulsory military service and the challenges of exile.
Essays
José Martí: Our Man in Manhattan
José Martí, the immigrant and poet whose equestrian statue in New York symbolizes his pivotal position between the two Americas and his deep connection to the city from which he observed and wrote about American life.