FALSE WAR, Cuban author's polyphony mirrors diaspora

FALSE WAR
CARLOS MANUEL ÁLVAREZ (tr. Natasha Wimmer)
Graywolf Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An ambitious, panoptic novel about exile as both condition and state of being by a major young Cuban writer

The characters in False War are ambivalent castaways living lives of deep estrangement from their home country, stranded in an existential no-man’s land. Some of them want to leave and can’t, others do leave but never quite get anywhere.

In this multivoiced novel, employing a dazzling range of narrative styles from noir to autofiction, Carlos Manuel Álvarez brings together the stories of many people from all walks of life through a series of interconnected daisy chains. From Havana to Mexico City to Miami, from New York to Paris to Berlin, whether toiling in a barber shop, roaring in Yankee Stadium, lost in the Louvre, intensely competing in a chess hall in Cuba, plotting a theft, or on a junket for émigré dissidents in Berlin, these characters learn that while they may seem to be on the move, in reality they are paralyzed, immersed in a fake war waged with little real passion.

The fractured narrative, filled with extraordinary portraits of ordinary people, reflects the disintegration that comes from being uprooted. At the same time it is full of tenderness, moments of joy and profound release. False War confirms Carlos Manuel Álvarez as one of the indispensable voices of his generation in Latin American letters.

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My Review: Complex narrative told in multiple styles...it requires paying attention...but like the most exciting stories, it repays you with an interlocking puzzle of identities giving a full-color image of exile.

Few times do you get a challenge set you in a long reading life that feels both longer, for its richness, and shorter, for its fascinating concise storytelling across styles, than its page count. Yes, there are a lot of people talking to you; yes, they act as though you're in medias res with them. You will be.

What a bunch these people are! Petty crime, grand theft (there are tech workers everywhere), music makers...all united by the fact of leaving Cuba, their home, for all sorts of reasons. All twine around the central narrative of the writer creating the novel from the stories he's been, is being, told, then telling us: "And right now, reader, neither you nor I can know what it is I’m thinking about this book you’re holding (your right now is not the same as my right now; the right now is always tragically different from the right now of writing)."

Shades of the time slices so beloved of physicists explaining why there is no now due to relativity! Part of that disorienting purpose is also served by the polyphony's voices being labeled, like the time slices needing labels (Observer A, Observer B), and others being job titles, others still (most disorientingly, are they real or invented?) receiving normal names.

The Cuban diasporas having left over the course of sixty years, they are often strangers to each other as much as the places they're staying. A man who learned his dance moves in the 1970s has little chance of making a good showing in a crowd who learned theirs thirty years later;but they're all united by the one main identity: Cuban Exile.

In braiding the many voices telling the different stories of why, of how, of that moment when, exile was the solution, Author Álvarez via Translator Wimmer has handed us the kaleidoscope with no instructions on how to use it. Twisting it a bit to that side, into shade, away from blinding searchlights, Author Álvarez takes your eyeline with him, letting you hold the device but showing you *his* pretty colors.

Made of the numerous rays in the story, he's found beauty in hard and endless toil...to fit in? to stand out? to find, lose, escape, respond? to the endlessness of crafting an identity.

THE HIDDEN ISLAND, essay collections by exiled Cuban journalist

THE HIDDEN ISLAND
ABRAHAM JIMÉNEZ ENOA (introduction by Jon Lee Anderson; tr. Lily Meyer)
Ig Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$19.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The work of one of the most powerful new voices in independent Cuban journalism, The Hidden Island is a searing portrait of life in contemporary Cuba, where the struggles of ordinary citizens collide with the brutal repression of the government.

In this powerful collection of essays, we encounter a memorable and diverse cast of regular Cubans who are trying to survive with few resources and little hope—including a female boxer in a country that has long outlawed women's boxing, a boy who collects money for the country's underground lottery, a male gigolo, and the residents of a neighborhood that is so poor that the government doesn't officially recognize its existence. We also meet the homeless, and vendors who eke out a meager living by selling fruit and vegetables, scraping by in a former socialist paradise.

Jiménez Enoa juxtaposes these ordinary lives against the repressive tactics of the government, or "regime." He describes his “walks” around Villa Marista, the headquarters of the secret police, and the spies, confidantes, informers and regime sympathizers who crush anyone who questions the official narrative, which forces many independent journalists into exile. In a final self-portrait in the book about his own exile, Jiménez Enoa writes that, “to escape from Cuba is to fall into the world, to realize that Cuba is an island that has been hijacked by a political system which ensures that the country remains locked inside the twentieth century.”

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My Review: Essays by journalists, especially ones that don't get a gentle massaging to flow into each other, can make for somewhat choppy, repetitive reading. Founder of online Cuban resistance magazine, El Estornudo, Author Jiménez Enoa highlights "...fresh perspectives on challenges for independent journalists and reporting on issues rarely covered by {Cuban} state media, including racism in Cuba. In 2020, state security officers strip-searched and handcuffed Jiménez Enoa, interrogated him for five hours, and threatened him and his family over his writings about life in Cuba in his {now-defunct} Washington Post column. The persistent harassment and censorship forced Jiménez to flee to Spain in 2021, where he is currently living in exile."

All that potted biographical information (from Ig Publishing's website) should tell you that this is a book by a man who's living by his principles, is in fact doing the very thing authoritarians hate the most: Talking about them factually, therefore in unflattering terms. As expected, the terms change little; the essays, taken in large doses, thus become repetitive. Space them out, intersperse them with jolly Wodehouse stories or something in that vein.

Make no mistake that Cuba is an authoritarian state; it always was. Its slide into poverty came when the Soviet Union crashed out and Russia, as the successor state, opted not to resume propping up the Cuban economy. Things do not go well for former client states that suddenly lose the support of their masters. There was no plan for a way to transition into a new economic model, so misery resulted, as always when one system collapses and no new ideas are allowed to arise.

Author Jiménez Enoa dared to point this out publicly. The regime did not like having its failures openly discussed and used bullying and intimidation to silence him. That website I've linked to above is his riposte. Not silenced, but rather energized, motivated to say his piece on the biggest stage he could find.

I wonder how many more times this game of repression and rebellion will need to be played out before the real message gets through to the powerful: What you're doing is wrong, and we all know it and see it. You are not going to fool anyone by acting the bully.

All the essays Jiménez Enoa has written about the Cubans he's met...especially the sex-worker guy, who reminds me of John Kilo...show how resilient people are, how many ways they find to keep their lives moving and thriving.

Good people are so often cursed by bad governments, aren't they.