Pedro Lemebel and the
Absent Cuban Dictatorship
By Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo
In most of Latin America one can hear the
terrible tragedy of desaparecidos:
missing people killed by dictatorships (and by dictatorships disguised as
democracies). Thousands of extrajudicial killings committed with atrocious and
absolute impunity. The desaparecidos
are human bodies that have lost even their right to become cadavers. They do
not belong to any homeland anymore. They are at most unfinished biographies:
lives condemned to emptiness, with their deaths forever in the dark. But there
is an outstanding exception in the Americas hemisphere: Cuba, the country where
I come from and where I cannot return to (another way of being desaparecido, without the macabre
prestige of death).
In fact, in Cuba we are never desaparecidos. In Cuba what seems to be missing
is the dictatorship as such. Beyond the large number of fatal victims and
displaced individuals since 1959 until today, Cubans are forced to be present
and behave, under the permanent spotlight of a paternalistic system that knows
what’s best for each and every one of its children-citizens. A God-like Father
State has been deciding everything for us, all the time, for nearly six decades
now. For Cubans, totalitarianism is tiresome to the point of exhausting.
In return, the Cuban people have
learned the convenience of remaining silent, as well as the adaptive advantages
of simulation, which includes the art of smiling as we wait for the day in
which we will just “commit exile.” The price of happiness, when it is
obligatory, is not only hypocrisy, but the impossibility of subtracting
ourselves from reality: the impossibility of becoming others according to our
own wishes.
Of course, the disappearance of the
Cuban dictatorship is a concomitant process with the appearance of the Cuban
revolution. To begin with, this Revolution is the literal and literary outcome
of the narrative of Fidel Castro, commander-in-chief as much as the omniscient
author of the social system imposed in Cuba after his guerrilla takeover in January
1st, 1959. But the real absence of the Cuban dictatorship in the
context of the Americas, the prevailing impracticality of calling it a “dictatorship”
and then survive with a dose of legitimacy, is a direct effect of international
intellectuals, including most academics from the First World, especially those
writing from countries once considered colonialist or imperialistic (namely:
Spain, France, England and, above all, the United States).
If we believe in Utopia on Earth, and
if the last of such utopias is being built just in front of our eyes, in a tropical
Island located in the heart of the Caribbean Sea, then it follows that, in a
kind of leftist brotherhood, as Muslims of historical materialism on our way to
a Marxist Mecca, the travel to bear witness of that utopia is unavoidable. Cuba
is waiting for us, eager to welcome us all: intellectourists of the world,
unite!
Therefore, there is a whole literary
corpus of texts extracted out of that existential experience: the intellectual hegira
from the free-world to Cuba, to feel first-hand the idyll of ideology in our
own histology, to fall in love with the savage enchantment of an alternative
model of society, where democracy is a superfluous fashion, and where the
surplus value of Das Kapital has been
overthrown, so that man is no longer wolf to man.
From French philosopher Jean Paul
Sartre to American poet Allen Ginsberg, from the noble Mohammad Ali to the Nobel
Nelson Mandela, from José Saramago to Gabriel García Márquez, from soccer’s
super star Diego Armando Maradona to American film directors Michael Moore and Oliver
Stone, from Chilean communist leader Gladys Marín to Chilean chronicler Pedro
Lemebel. The list is endless.
They all come to Cuba. They all bow to
the illusion of a “revolution” where they wouldn’t formulate a single uncomfortable
question that, even by chance, could uncover a trace of “dictatorship”. In practice,
they all mask the dictatorship with their simple presence in proletarian’s
paradise, because they bring their anti-systemic impulse in their suitcases
but, once in Cuba, they just decide to take it back with them when they leave.
Cuba deserves better. Their criticism (and cynicism) must be focused and
concentrated against capitalism out there. Cuba plays the role of the victim
and every victim deserves solidarity. Besides, Cuba is for them a bubble of poetic
exceptionality in a planet prosaically permeated by global marketization.
The history of Chilean and Cuban
communists is a peculiar one. During the government of Salvador Allende in
Chile (1970-1973), Fidel Castro infiltrated the Chilean society and its institutions
at all levels, including the military. The influence of Castro violently
radicalized what could have been the first successful democratic experience of
the left in Latin America. In more than a way, with the toppling of Allende by the
coup d’état of General Augusto
Pinochet in September 11th 1973, Castro emerged as the winning apocalyptic
visionary who has warned the whole continent that the only way to power (and to
stick to power indefinitely) was making use of bullets instead of ballots.
Pedro Lemebel (1952-2016), the Chilean
writer of whom novelist Roberto Bolaño said that “he didn’t need to write
poetry to be the best poet of my generation,” was one of those intellectual travellers
to Cuba in search for the lost left. His prose is brilliantly extreme, full of
colorful incorrectness and filtering history through the human heart. All
writers like him in Castro’s Cuba have ended up incarcerated or in exile. Or first
incarcerated and then in exile, like Reynaldo Arenas, for example.
Lemebel is an intimate witness of the
intimidating horrors of both dictatorship and post-dictatorship in Chile. Maybe
he chose to keep a ray of hope incarnated somewhere else, in a “revolution”
that by no means could be narrated as another Latin American “dictatorship.”
Because the Cuban “revolution” cannot be allowed to become (or even be compared
to) such a terrible reality. Because the Cuban “dictatorship” cannot be allowed
to appear and thus destroy all of the intellectual illusions in a better future
(the present time can wait on perpetuity). Moreover, even the absence of
dictatorship must disappear in the case of Cuba, where a revolutionary
narrative occupies and fills up the empty spaces of utopia, those radiant black
holes that still today illuminate the communist cosmovision.
I met Pedro Lemebel in La Habana, in
November 2006, exactly a decade ago. It was his birthday number 54. He was
invited by the governmental Casa de las Américas, a sort of cultural embassy
that since the sixties has promoted those authors who are not critical to the
social system enthroned on the Island. Early in 2007, the homonymous literary
magazine published by Casa de las Américas
included a dossier with texts from and about Pedro Lemebel, and his
presentations and panels there.
One of the two chronicles published by
Pedro Lemebel is “One more time the search, once again the disappointment.”
It’s a powerful piece, precisely about the “disappeared detainees” and how in
Chile those “stories” are considered something from “old ladies,” who will do
better if they just “forget” or else “get bored” after the countless
bureaucratic hours of claiming in ministries, in courts, etc., for there will
be “no news” at all for their grief: the missing ones probably “are abroad the
country, they must have fled together with other terrorists.”
But Lemebel is the one who do remember what
by nature (and by the Chilean nation) must be now forgotten: the “kickings,”
the “violence of police irruptions” and, still worse, the “smiles” of the
guilty ones “playing the fool today”, “pretending they know nothing about the
exact place where they made them disappear,” because during the dictatorship
the criminals “swore to the dirty honor of the homeland not to ever reveal the
secret” of where they dispersed the “pale bones” of the victims. Lemebel is the
one who writes in order of “not leaving them behind so dead, so deleted,” and
be able to “recover night after night their faces,” and “dream of them
persistently” as when “drawing a beloved face in the air of an invisible
landscape.” Moreover, these desaparecidos
are able to accompany the living day after day and “they point to all of the
accomplices and the guilty ones, when they appear in the screen talking about
amnesty and reconciliation.”
In his introductory note to Lemebel’s
dossier, the Cuban essayist Jorge Fornet
cautiously mentions that in “few cases as in Lemebel’s it has been so patent the
conviction that what’s personal is also political,” for he is “a writer that
exposes himself,” both in the sense of “exhibiting” and “risking.” But Fornet
forgets to connect the Chilean author with any corner of the Cuban literary
tradition. In principle, it looks as if in Cuba there were no differences
between personal and political, and no need at all of revealing and risking
anything. Cubans must assume that our most intimate opinions sooner or later
will become public, so it is better to calculate very well about what we think
(for only ignorance is guarantee of innocence on the Island). Consequently, Cuban
intellectuals can be considered free to express their personal views, because beforehand
it is known that they will completely agree with the political propaganda of
Castroism. This explains their smiles while playing the fool and pretending
they know nothing about the exact moment when the Cuban dictatorship disappeared,
as if they had sworn to the dirty honor of the homeland not to ever reveal this
revolutionary secret.
In the late XX century, Lemebel
traveled several times to Cuba, displaying his provocative performances in
international art festivals on the Island, loaded with political connotations
that were almost illegible in a country devoid of political culture and
political spectrum, as the Communist Party of Cuba is the only one legal,
according to the Constitution of the socialist republic. In 2004, Lemebel
included in his book Adiós mariquita
linda
four chronicles that he wrote back then about his adventures in La Habana.
Lemebel was perfectly aware of the
repression to homosexuals in Cuba, that in the sixties reached the point of
interning them in forced labor camps called Military Units for the Support of
Production (U.M.A.P., in Spanish),
which used the slogan “work will make you men,”
analogous to the Arbeit macht frei
that the German national socialists hung at the entrance of concentration camps.
No homosexuals were allowed in the communist organizations during decades, and
they couldn’t hold any public position of social influence, so that hundreds were
dismissed from their jobs. In a 1971 foundational congress of education and
culture held in La Habana, the “homosexual deviations were defined in their
character of social pathology,” so that it was necessary “to cure all the
focuses and even the control and relocation of isolated cases, always with an
educative and preventive purpose.”
In many aspects, since the plagiarism of the final remarks of Hitler’s Mein Kampf by Fidel Castro,
during his self-defense when he was trialed in 1953 after attacking a military
garrison, the language of Castroism or Fidelism has always been philofascist. Yet,
Lemebel in Cuba suddenly mutates from his demonic tongue into an angelic tone,
unbelievably becoming he who do forget what by nature (and by the Cuban nation)
must be forgotten forever.
In one of those texts,
Lemebel limits his accustomed criticism to depict how Cuban young men asked him
for dollars in exchange of sex during his promenades by Old Havana. He calls
them “jineteros” (horse riders), which is the common word in Cuba to soften the
fact of how widespread prostitution can be within an egalitarian society (in
all its variants: heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, transsexual, anysexual). Lemebel
praises the way the handsome mulattos praised him in the streets, throughout the
“evening erotic sugarcane field:” Hi,
princess, where are you going? Hi, queen, where would you like to go?
It’s a festive environment, a hunting
zone, a reserve area of the Revolutionzoic Era. And, of course, Lemebel meets a
guy and immediately he falls in love. In lust, in loss. For his sudden lover turns
out to be a painter infected with HIV, and he is also a fugitive from the Cuban
hospital where HIV-positive persons were forced to remain interned for life
(socialism is about controlling not only the movement of the mind, but the
location of bodies as well). And then the reader remains intrigued by the
enigmatic self-introduction of the painter: Everything
is a lie. But Lemebel won’t allow us to know more, maybe to protect his
source, maybe to protect us, maybe to protect himself: Cuba as the colloquial
condom that they both are about to share in this chronicle. But protect
him/us/himself from whom, why? Is this literary suspense or literal silence?
Solidarity or complicity?
Lemebel is fascinated with Cuba from
the minute he gets on the plane.
In a second chronicle he documents the climate of informality of the whole crew
of Cubana Airlines, in a plane that looks old and overused all around, from the
plastic and metal parts to the cover of the seats and the broken seatbelts,
including the worn-out uniforms of the flight personnel and their damaged
dentitions. There’s no TV, no furniture music, and “no First Class, no VIPs, no
special attention.” But no one seems to worry about this dear debacle, because
such a state of professional irresponsibility is happily contagious, and who
knows if it’s also a first step towards our individual emancipation, because chaos
implies a “classless” society which is so different from the stiff and tough capitalism
nowadays: “for even in the air, chica, the revolution goes on” and in Cubana there
will be no “disguised loathing towards the poor” as it happens in Lufthansa or
British Airways, according to Lemebel.
Therefore, Cubana de Aviación is a
company full of “emotional charm,” and this has nothing to do with the salaries
they pay to their workers, because Lemebel acknowledges that it’s the “same
earning that all Cubans earn,” certainly a communitarian virtue, regardless of
the detail that with such a salary (Cuba’s average wage is around 25 U.S.
dollars a month) in Chile, for example, the workers wouldn’t survive a single
day, and they would be on permanent strike against the private owner who
exploits them as a social class. Lemebel enthusiastically certifies with his
writing that in Cuba there are no social classes, no private owners (everything
belongs to the State), no strikes and, much less, no right to go on strike. For
many like him, it’s like a preview of Paradise. And this may explain why the rest
of the travelling Chileans are so thrilled to see how their “political, sexual
and sentimental biographies are diluted,” as if “at 3,000 meters of height, the
hypocritical mood of life in Chile, so far away, no longer mattered.” We are
being introduced to the discrete enchantment of the proletariat, and Pedro
Lemebel is its pamphlet-prophet with the sharpest possible prose.
Once landed, Lemebel describes the
decaying splendor of Old Havana in another chronicle,
so that by no means he can be considered as blind to the barbaric mixture of
Castro’s Cuba. He mentions the “rationing” system, and the “humiliation” of
Cubans “who are not admitted in the luxurious hotels and new resorts.” The
occasional reader might wonder why the capitalist investors discriminate
against local guests, although the untold truth is that it was an apartheid policy
subscribed by the Revolution, approved by Fidel Castro in person in the early
nineties. And somehow justified by Pedro Lemebel, as for him the cause of such
an “economic injustice” (economic and not political) is the need to keep afloat
in Cuba the project of a country that wanted to be “independent,” “a nation
that wanted to alter the trend of its colonial history with the rough awakening
of a courageous transgression”, and “that wanted to have a fairer social
system” (social and not political). The poignant politicophilia of Pedro
Lemebel in Chile, by a touch of magic materialism becomes in Cuba a case of
chronic politicophobia.
Lemebel goes a little beyond this
point: he declares that his perspective is somehow similar to the touristic
traveller and, thus, this implicitly implies that he has no right to be so critical
on the Island. On the other hand, as Cuban citizens will pay with jail being
critical to the government, the textual impunity of the Cuban Revolution is
guaranteed for life. In practice, only Fidel Castro allowed himself to be
constructively critical of his own regime and, twice or thrice every decade, he
launched massive campaigns and counter-campaigns to rectify the policies
imposed precisely by him. In more than a sense, Fidel Castro was the only free
citizen of Cuba: if not a Faustian character, at least a kind of “Der
unabhängigste Mann” in the Americas, as Peter Sloterdijk
called Friedrich Nietzsche in reference to Europe.
It is precisely in the distant
omnipresence of Fidel Castro, during the massive parade of the International
Workers’ Day in La Habana, on May 1st 1996, that Lemebel describes
“the vast Revolution Square trembling with the vigor of the crowds arriving in
columns by several entryways” and, as for him this was “doubtlessly beautiful,
immensely emotional, some of his tears of weak mare were then mixed with his
sweat”.
It doesn’t matter for Lemebel that all
those workers and students (including me on that very May Wednesday, back then
a biochemistry working in the Center of Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology
that belonged, of course, to the Cuban State) didn’t attend but were taken to
attend the parade in buses and trucks strictly paid by their working and study
institutions. Lemebel had the exclusive opportunity of detecting the symptoms
of simulation in the time of socialism, surrounded by such a sea of
citizen-lemmings. Instead, he is touched by the spectacle of tropical
totalitarianism and he just gently cries (as it is his right to do so), and
later he documents it with fascination upon this fascistoid kitsch, quite
similar to those military marches he deplores so much both in dictatorial and
democratic Chile (as it is his right to do so). Cubans, as a sort of Socialist
Subalterns S.A., are just moving marionettes for whom rights (and any other
term from the political right) are less urgent than for the progressive
proletarians of Chile, Latin America, and the Third World.
In another Cuban text,
Lemebel travels in a taxi and reads (and sometimes misquotes) the posters of
the political propaganda that are displayed in La Habana. The scarcity never
diminished the demagogical impulse of the official narrative. The Cuban government
likes to talk to the people from block to block, in printed characters of huge
font and striking colors that make the reading unavoidable. Lemebel informs us that
the Cuban taxi driver has “cutting answers” for him, “assessing suspicions and
the double intentions of the foreign interrogatory” that Lemebel is asking to
him.
How a conversation has turned into an
interrogatory? Is this a scene in a rented taxi or in a police patrol? Why would
a common taxi driver be so cautious in front of a common tourist? This whole exchange
seems more proper of a clandestine encounter in a climate of, yes, dictatorship.
Only that, again, it is an absent dictatorship the one that emerges (or rather remains
submerged) in the anachronistic Cuban chronicles of Pedro Lemebel. It seems
that the desire for an idyll always include despotic disappearances like this.
Back in Chile, Cuba is also present in
a number of columns by Pedro Lemebel. Once Lemebel joined “seventy thousand
young people present” in the “great act of homage to Ché in the National Stadium.”
This arena is tragically loaded with painful significance, for during the 1973 coup d’état it became a detention
center, where thousands of Chileans were arbitrarily detained, before being
interrogated, tortured, and a lot of them “disappeared” (namely, assassinated
by the State).
In this chronicle, Lemebel recalls how this
“event had very emotional
moments that transported the masses to the tough dictatorial history,” and he recognizes that “it is and it will always be necessary to repeat a thousand
times the ritual of naming the victims and pointing to their executioners.” But certainly not all of the victims, and not all of
the executioners. Because Ernesto Ché Guevara was in charge of the firing
squads at La Cabaña Castle in La Habana, where he gave the order and also
personally shot many people during the first years of the Cuban Revolution (in most
cases without much worrying about the formalities of a trial).
Lemebel only poses some minor criticism
upon the gross homophobia of Ché Guevara, and he ironizes about the “operatic
representation” of “resurrecting
his memory for a few hours, and then turn the page of his dangerous memory.”
Yet, an aura of invisibility floats over the souls of the silenced, the Cuban
citizens that were arbitrarily shot to death but not desaparecidos, and therefore for him they do not deserve the same
compassion as their Latin American counterparts. Those Cubans are in fact like
apparitions, absent presences that I cannot help but remembering, like accusing
visions over the selective forgetfulness with which Lemebel humiliates them,
much more than the fact that the surviving Cubans are not being admitted in the luxurious hotels and new resorts on
the Island.
In another Chilean anecdote involving
Cuba,
Lemebel recalls the shouts of a wild crowd of Pinochet followers, when they
harass a young woman wearing a T-shirt of Ché in a rich neighborhood: “go to
Cuba,” they scream to her, spitting on her, and finally slapping her face. Every
human being with a sense of dignity is insulted with these “fascist-like
fanatics” that could have “lynched her for using that symbol.” But Lemebel
cannot associate this sad spectacle with the analogue acts of repudiation in
Cuba, where the image of Ché is routinely used by the mobs to harass, shout,
spit, and beat the peaceful activists of Cuban civil society and the illegalized
dissidence and opposition: “go to Miami,” is the scream on the Island. I have
heard it in person. And it hurts so much as the “go to Cuba” he heard in
Santiago de Chile. And it hurts even more when I realize that the screams
narrated by Lemebel erases the echo of those screams unnarrated in Santiago de
Cuba, Pinar del Río, Camagüey, Santa Clara, Matanzas, La Habana and many other
cities and towns of Cuba today.
Pedro Lemebel is a courageous writer. His
literary style is as radical as his rage. In September 1986, under the
dictatorship of Pinochet, he read in public his poem Manifesto (I Speak For My Difference),
where he utters: “I do not need a disguise / Here is my face / I speak for my
difference / I defend what I am / And I’m not so strange / I deplore injustice
/ And I’m suspicious of this democratic dance / But don’t talk to me about the
proletariat / Because to be poor and faggot is worse / One must be acid to
endure it / (..) / Like the dictatorship / Worse than the dictatorship /
Because the dictatorship will go / And democracy will come / And thereafter
socialism / And then? / What will you do with us, comrades? / Will you tie our ponytails
in packs / destined towards a Cuban AIDS sanatorium?
But precisely because of his courage is
that I have now the courage to question him. It’s called civism. Did Lemebel,
for instance, asked the Cuban singer Omara Portuondo why in 2003 she signed a
letter supporting the death sentence of three Afro-Cubans who attempted to
kidnap a boat and escape to the U.S. (with no fatal or injured victims)?
Lemebel and Portuondo smile together in the first frame of a picture taken by
Víctor Parra in 2008,
a minute after or before chanting together “¡Long live the Revolution!”
Their black-and-white smile in turn silences the missing smiles of not only
three Cuban Black families, but of thousands of families whose younger ones are
still sunken, unidentified, in the Strait of Florida (in practice, devoured by
sharks, in a perverse parody of a Caribbean Condor Operation
that seems to be not dramatic enough as to be chronicled by Pedro Lemebel).
When the transition to democracy came to
his country after the plebiscite of 1987, he remained a critical actor and
opinion-maker of the Chilean society, attacking the mediocrity, hypocrisy and
impunity of the old violators of human rights, now dressed as civilian
politicians (there are no old violations of human rights: crimes against
humanity are always contemporary). As Fornet said of him in a Cuban official magazine,
Lemebel did risk at lot all through his life, and he risked it beautifully,
sincerely, movingly. His tender tears amid the terrifying tear gas. His
whipping adjectives and the sweet sentences of his broken grammar, making
visible the invisible: unfinished biographies, pale bones dispersed,
disappeared but still not absent. His heart being bigger than Chilean History
itself. His lucid loquacity of a local loco, or loca. How do I love thee, Pedro? Let me count the only way: I love
you politically, I envy you.
For over half a century, we Cubans have missed you in every single text out
of our cultural field, including your 2007 aseptic dossier in Casa de las
Américas: the cradle of cultural censorship on the Island (the equivalent of
our pathetic Pinochetism, mi amor). In
Cuba we still need myriads of Lemebels to expose the disappeared Cuban
dictatorship that Lemebel dully refused to see and speak about, as it should
have been his moral duty, instead of coming just for collecting the only
lemebeless chronicles that he ever wrote.
When I talked to Pedro Lemebel privately
for a few minutes in La Habana, I asked him to please mention in his talk some
of the injustices in Cuba that he knew so well, as he was the privileged
invited guest of the Author’s Week in Casa de las Américas, and nothing could
happen to him as a foreign for bringing up this absent topic in the insipid
intellectuality of the Island. Lemebel looked at me, his expression suddenly so
somber: “Mi niño,” he told me, “this
car will take us longer to push it forward slowly.”
Ten years of birthdays later I’m still
wondering what Lemebel really meant on that November Tuesday in which he turned
54 in La Habana. Which car? Longer than what, slower than when, forward to
where?
A couple of weeks later Augusto
Pinochet was to die on the International Day of Human Rights, on December 10th
2006: also my birthday number 35. Lemebel published ipso facto an obituary
as obscene as his political obfuscation permitted, identifying himself and all
the Chileans who “toasted” and “danced” in the streets with a single spittle
that a young man spat at Pinochet’s coffin. It’s called existential emancipation.
Then, a long and winding decade in Cuba expanded its silence upon my own
writing, which was banned from every publication along the Island: the crime
was my free-lance posting in a personal blog,
a provocative platform from where I launched hundreds of chronicles that
hopefully Lemebel would have loved (and believed in) if he were a uncomfortable
Cuban instead of an uncomfortable Chilean. That experience of inxile, including
three detentions by Castro’s G-2 (a mimesis of Pinochet’s DINA and CNI),
finally forced me into exile, wandering from Miami to Alaska, from Reykjavík to
the Mid-West in the heart of the heart of the United States of America.
Then, Pedro Lemebel passed away early in
2016. And Fidel Castro followed him, late in 2016. But we Cubans were not
supposed to behave in an obfuscated or obscene way of writing (or spitting)
upon Castro’s life and legacy, because this will only show how dehumanized are
those Cuban pro-democracy activists (we, the absent unable to disappear). Much
less we should publicly toast and dance in the streets, as the ashes of our disappeared
dictator traversed Cuba in a pagane procession, more present than ever. The
Left is always right. The Right is left to ridicule.
In any case, the protagonists of this epoch already with no epic are one
by one going extinct. Yet, I’m afraid that the Cuban car will take forever to
push it slowly to nowhere at all, mi niño.
Revista Casa de las Américas, No. 246,
January-March, La Habana, Cuba, 2007, pp. 67-107.
Documentary
Film Conducta Impropia. Written and
directed by Néstor Almendros and Orlando Jiménez Leal. Produced by Les Films du
Losange.
Lemebel, P. Adiós
al Ché (o las mil maneras de despedir un mito). In: Zanjón de la Aguada, Seix Barral (Biblioteca Breve), Ed. Planeta, Chile, 2003, pp. 75-78.
