World history is not the soil in which happiness grows.
Periods of happiness are empty pages in it.
—Hegel
This text is not a review. The practice of reviewing, especially when aimed at inducing others to read, has been overvalued. The review ends up being a didactic exercise that reduces the literary experience to explanations and interpretive structures that might distract from what should be essential: the resonances the text awakens in the reader. Jorge Luis Borges, who challenged the conventions of reading and interpretation through a body of work riddled with labyrinths, mirrors, and fictions folding back upon themselves, demands of the reader an almost detective-like participation. Lezama Lima, in his exploration of what he called the Delphic Course, was not so much interested in its explicit content as in the resonances it generated—how the echoes of reading contribute to the shaping of an identity. That is why reading—at least for me—is above all an ontological experience.
What is the price of an ideal? Since Cuban independence was imposed as an “ideology” over autonomism and annexationism, the struggle for ideals has been a battlefield littered with blood, ink, cries, stones, eggs, and returns overflowing with tears. What is the price of an ideal? Surely José María Heredia asked himself this in his first exile, when melancholy was the cursor of a poetry haunted by remorse. More than two hundred years after Heredia relocated and became a naturalized Mexican thanks to President Guadalupe Victoria, we Cubans continue to ask ourselves about The Price of an Ideal (1) with the only difference being that this question has now taken the form of a book in the hands of Kevin Legrá.
Rivero, Matilde, Father Meurice, Monsignor Enrique, Monina, and Ramiro are not mere characters in a fiction; they are symbolic figures embodying a historical tragedy that takes shape on the physical, the symbolic, and the psychic planes. The body never forgets. (2) For Kevin Legrá, a single idea suffices to explain how this anomaly has operated in the national psyche. And so it is, because even those of us who were not direct victims of the UMAP feel the echo of its violence, as if an entire country had been pierced by a pedagogy of punishment.
When Aldo—a Seventh-day Adventist pastor in Veguita de Galo—took the risk, he understood that his act of disobedience would bring dire consequences. This ethical and political dimension of the victim turns risk into a symbol of resistance against a repressive apparatus that could not tolerate difference.
Kevin Legrá weaves his book as one who stitches an open wound into the fabric of time. Tyranny is not an idea suspended in a void, nor the whim of a single man: it is a shadow that drags itself along, that seeps into the bodies of others, that inhabits them. It is a poison that does not kill immediately, but transforms, corrupts, domesticates. Tyranny is a fire that needs no flames: it is enough for one person’s will to turn others into obedient ash.
But it is not only fire: it is also a thick fog that clouds the gaze, that erases the outlines of judgment, that turns conscience into a wasteland. Tyranny shouts, but it also whispers. It strikes, but also persuades through terror. It disguises itself as order, as duty, as destiny. And when it finally reveals itself, it has already taken root in men’s marrow, has turned willpower into a foreign echo, has made fear into a habit. In the universe Legrá unfolds, tyranny is not a visible monster but a disease transmitted by contact, by silence, by resignation. It is the face of power reflected in the eyes of those who have forgotten how to look for themselves. That is why the figure of Sergeant Del Toro embodies the brutality of the system:
emerging with ruthless ferocity and, like a hunter pouncing on its prey, he seized Aldo’s shirt with force and hurled him violently to the ground. (3)
In Sergeant Del Toro’s violent gesture lies all the contempt of power for the Other. The Price of an Ideal directs its attention to the ethical and political dimension of faith, exploring the tensions that arise when spiritual conviction comes into conflict with a state regime that seeks to standardize subjectivity. The figure of Rivero, far from representing a superficial or merely ritual religiosity, embodies a profound faith, lived with coherence and risk, which becomes the axis of a silent resistance against a power that not only represses, but also seeks to reconfigure the individual in his entirety.
Although the repression of sexual dissidence has occupied a central place in the memory of the Military Units to Aid Production (UMAP), Legrá broadens the field of analysis by including other forms of alterity persecuted by the regime: religious faith, race, non-normative masculinity, and dissenting political attitudes. The author does not limit himself to narrating a story of exclusion but rather proposes a critical reading of the totalitarian project as an enterprise of social engineering. Correcting and disciplining everything that deviated from the hegemonic revolutionary ideal has been the modus operandi embodied in the formation of the “new man.”
Likewise, the work transcends the limits of literary fiction to situate itself in a hybrid terrain where testimonial narrative, political essay, and documentary research converge. Legrá articulates his story with a critical apparatus supported by bibliographic sources, historical documents, and cross-references, which turns the text into a valuable tool both for literary analysis and sociopolitical reflection. Thus, The Price of an Ideal can be read simultaneously as a work of aesthetic creation and as a critical intervention on one of the darkest episodes of recent Cuban history.
Fear and hopelessness are key pieces in the narrative configuration of this novel. The representation and symptomatology of fear—the dread of physical violence, symbolic and linguistic aggression, as well as the fear of social stigmatization and of having the marks of contempt imposed upon individual identity—are fundamental structures for understanding the scope of this nightmare that reaches into our own day. The novel precisely portrays the pain anticipated in the gesture that precedes the blow, the suffering that emanates from the existential void in an environment marked by cloistered silence. And yet it is hopelessness—manifested as weariness and emotional paralysis—that rises as the dominant force, seizing bodies and nullifying their capacity for action. This sensation of stagnation, of emotional sparseness, reveals a profound critique of the conditions that perpetuate immobility and suffering in contexts of oppression.
What do you think will happen next? What will the little fish do to fulfill its dream?” asked Monina. But one of the children gave an answer she never could have imagined. The child raised his hand, with a confused expression, and said that if the fish were Cuban, it would be impossible for it to fly. […] The little one replied that his father had told him that in that country they clipped the wings of those who dreamed big. (4)
Reading Legrá, I almost inevitably recalled the philosophical reflection contained in The Apocalypse of Our Time by Vasily Rozanov (1856–1919) (5). Rozanov articulates a profound critique of the spiritual consequences of the October Revolution of 1917. The ontological rupture between the human being and transcendence—a split that disintegrates the sacred bond between body and God—is the immediate consequence of a revolution in which virtually nothing remains untouched. If, for Rozanov, existence severed from its metaphysical foundation results in a subject possessed by contempt, in Legrá’s narrative the figure of Rivero experiences the collapse of his horizon of meaning and, with it, the abandonment of faith. The “Muscovite shadows” of the past, the loss of the sacred, are not merely a cultural phenomenon; rather, they are the radical experience of ontological uprootedness that directly confronts the human condition in its deepest dimension within a left-wing totalitarian system.
At the same time, in the novel, the sense of justice presents itself as a structural absence, a lack that is not accidental but rather a constitutive element of the narrative universe dominated by a totalitarian power operating from an anthropophagic logic. Power is not limited to exercising political control or physical coercion; its violence manifests itself on an ontological plane. The experience of terror, as lived by Vasily Rozanov or by the countless victims of the Red Terror of 1937—even the terror lived and endured by the old revolutionary Nikolai Rubashov (6) during the Stalinist purges—finds a disturbing echo in the figure of Rivero. To somatize the trauma of a violence that exceeds the physical presupposes a profound damage to the psychic structure of consciousness. (7) That is why all the characters in the novel—without exception—are reduced to the condition of victims of an absolute power that imposes its hegemony through the annihilation of bodies and the dissolution of souls. The totalitarian state not only physically eliminates the individual but also strips him of all juridical identity and existential value, configuring him as an “Other” radically excluded from the symbolic order. What is at stake here is not a violence seeking to consume the flesh, but a deeper operation: the destruction of the ontological foundations that make possible the constitution of identity. This form of metaphysical violence reveals the sacrificial character of totalitarian power, whose logic rests on the radical negation of the Other as subject.
Lieutenant Rodríguez was waving his hands frantically, hurling insults at Rivero and threatening him. Then, with a dull thud, the door crashed down. Rodríguez turned quickly and saw Ramiro, who had entered to defend his friend.
—Let him go, damn it!
—Stand back, corporal, this snitching bastard is about to find out what’s what! (8)
Where was God at that moment?, Rivero asked himself. It is the same question that Ángel Santiesteban posed in The Summer When God Slept. (9) Yet where was God? points to an even more radical interrogation: that of God’s silence in the face of evil. The question “Where was God?” is not merely an expression of despair, but a metaphysical interpellation that traverses modern consciousness. For Levinas, this question acquires a particular ethical density. The face of the other—the suffering other—summons us to an infinite responsibility that precedes any theological or metaphysical understanding; it is the anguish of Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov who sees in Sonia’s face that of Lizaveta Ivanovna. God’s silence is not simply absolute abandonment, but an ethical demand that shifts toward the human subject: it is man who must answer for the other, even (and above all) when God remains silent. Divine absence does not exempt from responsibility; on the contrary, it intensifies it.
Paul Ricoeur has addressed this absence through the problem of evil and from a hermeneutical perspective. In Evil: A Challenge to Philosophy and Theology, (10) Ricoeur argues that radical evil—that which can neither be explained nor justified—defies traditional narrative frameworks and forces a rethinking of the relationship between suffering, meaning, and language. The question “Where was God?” does not seek a doctrinal answer, but expresses a rupture in the horizon of meaning, a wound that can only be embraced through an ethics of memory and recognition.
The silence of the perpetrators has always been—as Legrá says—a soothing balm. But does silence conceal an ideological justification or a narrative of redemption? This silence aspires—with the complicity of others, especially leftist intellectuals inside and outside a not-so-Young Cuba—to reconciliation, to forgetfulness, to oblivion, to a cynical dialogue, but above all, to forgiveness. I, like Andrés Reynaldo, “do not believe in reconciliation or forgiveness. I believe in memory and in justice. Without memory and justice, Germany would not have overcome Nazism nor Japan its genocidal imperial vocation. Can anyone cite better examples of democratic transition? Reconciliation and forgiveness are cultural constructions. But memory and justice have a concrete and universal institutional implementation. Let it be clear: Cubans are not asked for reconciliation and forgiveness to bury the dictatorship but to perpetuate it.” (11)
Silence—whether human or divine, soothing or not—hardens the nature of evil and evades the ethical demand to confront the fragility of any response to the extreme suffering of the other.
What has been the price of an ideal? Or was it perhaps a rushed idea, an illusion clothed in promise? Beyond the arbitrariness of the Moirai—those weavers of destiny—the cost has been a historical paralysis, a collective lethargy that has suspended the very possibility of happiness. We have inhabited a stagnant temporality, marked by a passion that became pathology, by a nostalgia that turned compulsive. A people that “suffers, lives and waits here; and also suffers, lives and waits out there,” (12) trapped in a cycle of waiting without horizon. That visceral hatred that emanates from fear, from oppression, but above all from the incapacity to name: from not pointing to those responsible, from not calling things by their name. “Will it be possible that one day all this will end?” Rivero wonders. The tragic thing is not only the persistence of pain, but the blindness to the change already consummated. Because “the world goes on and Cuba is left behind.”
Don Valerio León, though illiterate yet bearer of infinite wisdom, used to say: he who does not look ahead will find himself behind. A country that clings to the past through an ideological and selective reading, that turns history into fiction, is incapable of imagining the future. The destiny of the nation is not in the emotional embrace between Rivero and Ramiro; it is not in poetry either, for poetry does not save as many believe. The destiny of the nation may lie in the rupture with myth, that is, in the demystification of that false messiah. Nietzsche was right when, in Twilight of the Idols, he recognized that overcoming nihilism and decadence necessarily entails the destruction of fundamental values and beliefs.
The price of that ideal has been the veneration of a false messiah, whose will became—and has become—a battlefield. The price of that ideal has been blood spilled, censored ink, silenced cries, hurled stones, shattered eggs, and returns filled with tears and reproaches. It is not only the failure of a utopia, the failure of an ideal—though it is that too—but the human, ethical, and cultural cost of having turned an idea into a religion, and a promise into a prison surrounded by water.
NOTES
1- Legra, Kevin. (2024). El precio de un ideal, Galaxia Gutenberg.
2- Sierra Madero, A. (2022). El cuerpo nunca olvida: Trabajo forzado, hombre nuevo y memoria en Cuba (1959-1980), Rialta Ediciones.
3- Legra, Kevin. (2024), p. 96.
4- Legra, Kevin. (2024), p. 122.
5- Rózanov, V. (2017). El apocalipsis de nuestro tiempo, Acantilado.
6- Koestler, A. (2011). El cero y el infinito, Debolsillo.
7- Oeste, M. Á. (2022). Vengo de ese miedo. Tusquets Editores.
8- Legra, Kevin. (2024), p. 141.
9- Santiesteban, Ángel. (2014). El verano en que Dios dormía, Neo Club Ediciones.
10- Ricoeur, P. (2007). El mal. Un desafío a la filosofía y a la teología, Amorrortu.
11- Reynaldo, Andrés. Cuba, memoria y justicia https://www.elnuevoherald.com/opinion-es/opin-col-blogs/opinion-sobre-cuba/article41870814.html#storylink=cpy
12- Legra, Kevin. (2024), p. 296.
