MAPS
The Caribbean
Cuba
Matanzas
Matanzas centre
Habana Vieja

PREFACES
Karen Mulhallen Campo Santo
Cornelia Hoogland By Way of a Preface

ANNALS OF TRAVEL
Rafael Campo El viejo y la mar
/ Night has fallen
Rosemary Clewes Calle Obispo
Michelle Barker Showing Up
/ Cuban for One Night
Kate Braid Cueva del Indio. Viñales, Cuba
Stan Douglas Cuba [Portfolio]
Julia Steinecke from What is Cuba?
Stan Douglas Cuba [Portfolio]
Cornelia Hoogland Girls Taught to Fall on Concrete
/ Voyeur
Stephen Henighan La Santiaguera [Fiction]
Vincenzo Pietropaolo Homenaje, Homage [Portfolio]

CUBA’S WRITERS SPEAK
José Martí From shape to shape, and from star to star I come
/ Two Fatherlands
Margarita Lozano Parilla Awaken
/ Without mirrors
Manuel de Jésus Velásquez León Luxury

THE POETS OF MATANZAS
Mabel Cuesta Matanzas: A city of poetic imaginings and literary traditions: admitting it, a century later [prologue]
Digdora Alonso Staring at a flock of doves in the afternoon sky
/ Butterfly’s eyes
/ Flood
Carilda Oliver Labra A woman writes this poem
/ When papá
/ Save time for me
José Manuel Espino City without a public writer
Teresita Burgos Rituals
Isolina Bellas Before Arístedes
/ Royal palm
Israel Domínguez I’m forced to carry a badge
/ Not all the grains of rice
Nayris Fernández Hernández Before the page
/ My own supplicatory
/ Lone soul
Juan Luis Hernández Milián Body of the other
/ Sketches of the shore
/ Heretics
Jacqueline Font The new ruins
/ Mirage
Yanira Marimón When fear is the pretext of dreams
/ The poet who judges me
/ The incapacity of the lens
Marilín Roque Stones of the sea
/ I had a city and a lunatic
/ At my back, the city
Guadencio Rodriguez Santana Poems that speak of cities
/ The photographs of the sister
/ The island of childhood
Laura Ruiz Montes San Vicente (as San Cristóbal)
/ you too be my guide by sea, earth and air
/ To come back before the seventh day (an excerpt)
/ Fatigue
Alfredo Zaldívar Speaking Mediaevally
/ In the middle of August

EDICIONES VIGÍA
Laura Ruiz Montes Ediciones Vigía [Portfolio]

EXILE
Rachel Kushner Green Island Trinity [Fiction]
Virgil Suárez What We Choose of Exile
Ali Aixalá Price Recorded History [Memoir]
Ana Hebra Flaster Mercy [Fiction]
Mark Medley The Varadero All-Stars [Fiction]

LITERACY AND THE SPORTING LIFE
Keith Ellis Two Cuban Vignettes
JC Elvy Forty Women on Forty Years: The 1961 Cuban Literacy Campaign [Portfolio]
Marjorie M.Doyle Bridging Troubled Waters [Memoir]

THE CRITICS
Ian J. MacRae El asalto: A Grotesque Allegory in a Dictatorial Age
Sophie Lavoie Fidel’s Cuba: a.k.a.The Prolific Purgatory of Leonardo Padura Fuentes’s Star Detective

BACK OF THE BOOK

CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES

NEWS AND NOTES

Two fatherlands I have: Cuba and the night.
Or are they only one? As soon as the Sun
withdraws its majesty, with long veils
and a carnation in her hand, silently
Cuba like a sad widow appears to me.
I know that bloody carnation
that shivers in her hand! My chest
is empty, it is wasted and empty
where the heart was. It is now time
to begin to die. The night is good
to say good-bye. Light interferes
and human word. Universe
speaks better than man.
Like a flag
that invites to fight, the red flame
of the candle blazes. I open
the windows, already tight in me. Mute, breaking
the leaf of the carnation, like a cloud
that blurs the sky, Cuba, a widow, passes…

Translated by Manuel de Jesús Velásquez León

Journalist, lawyer and poet José Martí is revered by all Cubans as the apostle of Cuban independence. Founder of the Cuban Revolutionary Party, he died on the battlefield in the first skirmish of the War of Independence (1895-1898)

A woman writes this poem
anywhere she can
at any time of any unimportant day
in the century of vitamin deficiency
and cosmic sadness
desire for she doesn’t know what
awaiting the bayonet or the shell
a woman writes this poem
shamelessly and with bite marks
fiery unalterable repenting rotting
we fall under the stars
we all have to die
there’s nothing more illustrious than blood
a woman writes this poem
how stupid the line that separates sun from shadow
the sunset accumulates at the end of the roof-tops
we learn about somebody’s coronary thrombosis
you, solitude, exist
a bomb sounded
did it break your contact lenses
a woman writes this poem
she sets aside fifteen pesos for rent
my old friend
detaches from his life at noon
it’s his prostate
we dance
the preparations for combat continue
they will not pass
a woman writes this poem
like someone for whom time no longer matters
I believe in the heart of Denise Darval
We’ve won because we’ve died so many times
it seems I have synovitis
there is no time for poetry
Man the beans are taking a long time to boil
I swear I’ll file for divorce tomorrow
a woman writes this poem
the ghosts in my chest at seven
I grafted a branch of the sad palm tree
mama you don’t know how much I need you
when the air-raid sirens sound
gather the sleeping children from their cribs
I’ll save Che’s portrait
the canary went silent so I brought home a tenor
a woman writes this poem
loaded with ultimatums
with gunpowder
with mascara
I am a green contemporary dumbfounded
among uranium
and cobalt
clover of hope
recovering from love
cheating all the way to ecstasy
silly as a ballad
neurotic
stashing dreams into a piggy-bank
a daughter of trauma
bride of knives
playing not to lose the light in the last card game
a woman writes this poem.

Translated by Mario Boido

(NOTE: excerpt of full text)

I don’t care that the Earth’s shadow eclipses the moon, said the Admiral. I have seen terrific irregularity with mine own eyes, and have been forced to the sensible conclusion that this Earth is not round, like some wrongly insist, but the shape of a pear, or violin.

A THOUSAND YEARS BEFORE the Admiral made his daring proclamation and charted his course on this violin-shaped Earth, people thought it was flat like a discus. Until the Greek Cartographer spoke out, claiming it was round like an orange. He’d drawn standard aesthetic divisions on his planisphere, a flattened version of his round Earth. The first set of lines he called “latitude.” And the second set, trickier than the first, “longitude.” But his finest moment, his greatest act of self control, had been to leave parts of his map blank.

The Cartographer was later forgotten, his maps like dreams that are lost upon waking, lingering only as faint unglimpsable residues. Seafarers, with no reliable guide by which to brave the open Ocean, paddled and were wind-scooted along in landlocked, salted waters. For navigation, they dead reckoned and used wind roses — radiating lines of sixteen focal points, ornate foliations that indicated air currents but varied according to the size and dimensions of the map, so that no two maps, even of one place, were ever alike.

The Cartographer was eventually remembered, but by then the forgetting had been sustained so long that no one could read Greek. The epic after the Cartographer’s planisphere reigned and before it reigned again — forgotten and then discovered but unreadable — was known as the Great Interruption. It lasted one thousand years.