Anchored in no man’s land

Original language: Español

Year of publication: 1998

Valuation: Highly recommended

Havana (Cuba). Year 1994, fourth year of the Special Period, scarcity, misery, a model that seems to collapse (and continues to collapse 30 years later), etc. Those are the spatiotemporal coordinates in which the texts of Anchored in no man’s land. I say texts, in general, because the category of “stories”, in which a priori they could best fit, does not quite convince me. The absence of the traditional approach, middle and end and the lack of a moral or a more or less moralizing intention means that, at least, we are not dealing with standard stories. They would be, rather, pictures, photograms or more or less autobiographical chronicles of misery and squalor, of the B side of that Cuba idealized in tourist brochures and in certain intellectual circles (who the hell can understand this idealization of misery?) .

Starring Pedro Juan, a kind of Chinaski of the tropics, these are texts that I would dare to describe as “grotesque realism” (perhaps this is true realism and laugh here at socialist realism), which smell of sex, alcohol and shit, both This is how Pedro Juan himself goes so far as to say I’m a shitty wallower in one of his texts. Riders, freeloaders, abusers, cheap and poor quality rum, houses that are falling apart, violence, sex, different forms of pleasure to escape frustration… because Art is only useful if it is irreverent, tormented, full of nightmares and despair. Only irritated, indecent, violent, rude art can show us the other side of the world.

In this sense, Pedro Juan is not openly critical of the regime, in the sense of directly showing his character. It is through cynicism and crudeness that the daily reality of the country is shown. And whoever wants to understand, let him understand.

There are two aspects that draw my attention the most. Anchored in no man’s land: registers and rhythm. As for those, Pedro Juan also goes down to the street and uses popular speech that is both a means of expression and a philosophy of life, and he goes up to the roof and is capable of extracting poetry, dirty and visceral if you want. , of abjection; As for this, the short phrase, the sharp dialogue and the sharp observation are key to making the internal rhythm of the narrative dizzying.

So a very good impression of this first part of the Dirty Havana Trilogy, pthat to its stench and its decrepitude. Or perhaps precisely because of how he shows it to us.

Also from Pedro Juan Gutiérrez in ULAD: Popular mechanics