Spanish literary awards, a lifeline for Cuban writers

Salamanca/In his diaries, Ricardo Piglia recounts the “crazy work” involved, in the 1960s, in sending seven copies of a manuscript to the Casa de las Américas prize. Arriving in Havana was the rumour. You have to imagine young Piglias with his fingers painted in “carbon”, typing Cage on a portable machine. The ending was disappointing: they rewarded the forgotten – and excellent – ​​Antonio Benítez Rojo. It didn’t matter. They called him anyway. “There is already a ticket in my name,” he notes in surprise to the newspapers. He was 27 years old.

Jorge Ibargüengoitia did not have a good impression of the trip – his invitation was in 1964 – and even the praise failed: the moment he told an official that Havana was a very beautiful city, they were fatally passing through an empty land. He won the prize with his first novel. In Cuba they gave him 100 pesos for his stay, a bottle of Bacardi, a vinyl record and a box of cigars.

The then young prose writers of Latin America wanted this award at all costs. Now they pay $3,000, a paltry figure compared to other international prizes, but juicy for a Cuban. The Italo Calvino Prize, sponsored by the Italian Embassy and for Cubans only, offers 4,000 euros. That’s it for the story.

The thousands of provincial prizes awarded by the Book Institute and not a few of the national ones continue to use the common Cuban peso for their rewards. The Alejo Carpentier Award – perhaps the most prestigious nationally – pays 70,000 pesos. The same amount, Nicolás Guillén. Those of Uneac, 35,000. Creation grants, like Fronesis, do not exceed 3,000 pesos, the approximate amount of provincial awards.

As much as the Ministry of Culture continues to celebrate itself for subsidizing art and literature, none of these awards will help a writer survive until the end of the month. It will not bring trips, like in Piglia or Ibargüengoitia, nor dollars. It will hardly bring with it the edition of the competing manuscript. The only sure thing is the diploma, because at the end of the day – or so the leaders think – this is a world of paper.

The escape route – in many cases literally – for Cuban writers is the European awards. From municipal councils or foundations, public or private, creation grants (these come with an apartment, money and travel), prizes in Spain are in the sights of every new writer. Spain is the real Home of the Americas.

This year, several Cubans won prizes in the European country, including Dayana Contreras, a resident of Madrid, who won the Kutxa Fundazioa Donostia prize for her novel The empty house. The poet Sergio García Zamora, who lives in Palencia, was also awarded for his collection of poems Bread and reason. In addition, an almost suspicious number of poets from Santa Clara and some old dogs of the island’s literature have deserved recognition in Spain.

For Cubans, winning a prize means – like in video games – winning a new life. Those who stay, because they have enough to live on in the first months. Those who return to Cuba, because they finally have some money, although money means little on the side there. The literary debt the country pays is expensive: it has lost almost all its young writers.

Making a living from writing, difficult almost anywhere in the world, is impossible in Cuba. Others will say that Cuba is precisely the only country where you can make a living from writing, following the old adage: poor but happy. Poor and blind and at the expense of bureaucracy, but happy.

The literary event of September is, without a doubt, its arrival The Cambridge History of Cuban Literaturean authoritative account of what has been written on the island since then Mirror of Patience in the production of diaspora, towards which everything that matters in Cuban literature in the last 40 years tends.

Edited by academics Vicky Unruh and Jacqueline Loss, among the authors of the chapter are famous critics such as Rafael Rojas, Norge Espinoza, Ángel Esteban, Anke Birkenmaier, Dean Luis Reyes or Pedro Pablo Rodríguez. The book claims to be the first in English to make a comprehensive assessment of Cuban literature, from the colonial era to the 21st century, without ignoring or relegating – like the official literary history of the island – the output of the exile.

This month Verbum published a novel by Uva de Aragón, Of loves and wars. Cuba and Spain. It is a historical story about the adversities of two 19th century Creoles married to Spaniards. The characters – which include José Martí and Arsenio Martínez Campos – move between Camaguey, Santiago de Cuba, Galicia and Salamanca.

The same publishing house publishes Music in the religious context of colonial Havana (1853-1898)by Margarita Pearce, a study of colonial sacred music and its sociocultural context. In addition, the study deals with the artistic daily life of the Havana Cathedral and other important churches in the capital and provides the names of the most important composers, arrangers, copyists and performers of the moment.

Edited by the Isaac Campantón Center, the book The Jews in Cuba (1492-1902)by Jesús Jambrina, brings to light a fact: in the “Cuban ajiaco” described by Fernando Ortiz, the Jewish element is more important than is usually admitted.

From Luis de Torres to the twice-exiled Jews of the 20th century – many fled Castro in 1959 – Cuban culture has plenty of Jewishness. In fact, Jambrina argues, even the Cuban ajiaco itself has its predecessor in the Sephardic adafina, which came on the ships of the conquistadors.