TRAVELS

For a long time I had wanted to go to Europe and meet with Jorge and Margarita in Spain, but since I had no passport yet or any other official document that would allow me to travel, I could not leave the United States. I had received several invitations since 1980, but it was not until 1983 that I was able to travel with a document to prove my refugee status, a strange and not very reliable piece of paper that almost no foreign consulate or immigration department, nor even desk clerks at hotels, wanted to accept. A refugee is always a problem, because he might want to stay anywhere and generally does not have a penny. That document, issued by the UN, enrages even porters, who do not expect tips from refugees.

Anyway, after a lot of hassles, I was able to go to Madrid in 1983; it was my first trip to Europe. I started my tour in Sweden and, with Humberto López, traveled throughout the country; in freezing trains, we almost made it to the North Pole. I also carried with me a number of documents, including a verdict in which a poet in Cuba had been sentenced to jail because he had written a book about a special variety of insects, which someone had later identified as Raúl and Fidel Castro. With those documents, with that verdict, we traveled through the countryside in winter. I remember that once we stayed in a very desolate place, at the home of a Swedish farmer deeply depressed because his wife had left him. I do not know why the committee that invited us decided on that farm as the place for us to spend the night; perhaps there were no other accommodations available. With the help of those documents I tried to convince the man of the loneliness and desperation the people of Cuba were suffering; his only concern at the moment was the wife who had abandoned him. When I looked at his dilapidated house in the snow, I was surprised that she had not left him much sooner.

At the University of Stockholm I gave a lecture in which all I wanted to do was read excerpts from the Cuban newspaper Granma; it was an irrefutable way of demonstrating what was happening in Cuba. Most of the audience was made up of Chileans exiled by the Pinochet dictatorship; they heckled me constantly and almost did not let me speak. They were on their feet insulting me, telling me that everything I was saying was absolutely false. At some point I read several of the laws that the Cuban government itself had published in Cuba. I also read reports from other Cuban newspapers, but there was no way to convince them. They were living very well in Sweden, taking their vacation trips to Chile every year, and then returning to their comfortable apartments in Sweden, where they even had social security benefits. I was wrapped in a big, ill-fitting coat purchased in New York for eighty dollars. But I enjoyed seeing Stockholm, and especially the Swedish king’s Royal Guard, a great-looking group of adolescents.

Carlos Franqui and Margot, his wife, had preceded me at that university, and they also had a very hard time there. Some people had even placed something on the floor that could cause Margot to fall, which she did.

I must admit that many Swedish intellectuals received me in a different manner; their views concerning Fidel Castro’s dictatorship were more perceptive. They knew about Armando Valladares and many other intellectuals who were in prison; with them I could talk. They even published several of my interviews and I was able to make contact with some publishers, although the fact is I never heard from them again.

To arrive in Spain was, for me, an immensely sentimental event; Jorge and Margarita Camacho were there, waiting for me after so many years. It was now 1983 and we had not seen each other since 1967. During all those years they had never stopped writing, not for a single week, nor had they given up on their efforts to get me out of the country, in any way possible. Now, suddenly, we were together, strolling on Paseo del Prado in Madrid; it was like a dream. We then took the train to Paris. With them I spent some of the most memorable moments of my life, discovering one of the most beautiful cities in the world. To discover a city is in itself a unique event, but when we have the privilege of sharing it with friends most dear to us, it becomes a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

I always thought that with writers it is best to read them without getting to know them personally; we risk terrible disappointments. My friendships with Lezama, Virgilio Piñera, and Lydia Cabrera, who were in fact extraordinary human beings, were marked, because of the Cuban situation, by a sense of doom and despair, ostracism and separation. I later met many other well-known writers, some superfamous whom I would rather not mention; I felt much closer to them when reading their books. Luckily I think I have forgotten their personal conceits. I also do not want these memoirs to become a treatise on literature or a log of my public relations with supposedly important people, because, in the final analysis, what is important really?

Through a prank of destiny, I was visiting with the rector of a prestigious U.S. university. One evening a number of internationally famous writers were present. There was one whose image most daunted me: Carlos Fuentes. He did not behave like a writer but like a computer; he had a precise and apparently lucid answer to any problem or question put to him; all you had to do was press a button. There were a great many American college professors in attendance, and all of them were wearing, like nurses in a hospital, large badges indicating their names and titles.

Carlos Fuentes lectured in perfect English, and seemed to be a man without any doubts whatsoever, not even of a metaphysical nature; he was the extreme opposite of what I would consider to be a real writer. That man, so fashionably attired, was an encyclopedia, perhaps even a little thicker. There are many writers who receive important literary prizes, including the Cervantes and the Nobel, for delivering such impeccable lectures.

I left that meeting terrified. Luckily I was able to catch a local train and return to New York. But among the fauna at that gathering was one outstanding person: Emir Rodríguez Monegal, a lover of great literature, with an intuition far beyond his academic merits, which were countless. This man was not a professor in the conventional sense of the word; he was a great reader, and possessed the magical ability to instill the love of beauty in his students. He was the only Spanish-American professor in the United States who inspired a school of critical thought.

In the three years I had been out of Cuba I had taken part in three international films: In His Own Words [1980] by Jorge Ulla; The Other Cuba [for Italian television, 1983] by Carlos Franqui and Valerio Rivas; and Improper Conduct [1983] by Néstor Almendros and Orlando Jiménez Leal.* I had also traveled through much of Europe, written or rewritten six of my books, founded a literary magazine, and managed, after considerable paperwork, to get my mother all the way from Holguín to New York so that she could spend three months with me in this city, and take home a huge load of clothes for almost everyone in Vista Alegre, the neighborhood in Holguín where her family and friends live. And by then I had been invited to more than forty universities and had enjoyed memorable adventures with the most fabulous black men in Harlem, in Central Park, and on populous Forty-second Street. And I had heard Jorge Luis Borges himself reading his own poems.

In the evenings I would go to the most unbelievable places in Manhattan, with René Cifuentes, Jorge Ronet, or Miguel Contreras. As if my time were unlimited, I had also signed up at a gym and spent part of the day jogging. On weekends I would go to the New York beaches.

Some of those beaches were surrounded by areas of tall grasses, somewhat similar to the Cuban guinea grass, and they were full of queers in the nude, aroused and always ready for a good time. It was as if the good old days were back, the days when I would roam from beach to beach in Havana. I was now making up for lost time, almost recovering the past, the wonderful days of my underwater adventures and the euphoria of my literary creativeness. But now I had absolute freedom to do and write whatever I wanted, to disappear for a whole month without having to explain to anyone; to take a car and travel anywhere. One of my great adventures, shared with my friend Roberto Valero and his wife, María Badías, and Lázaro, was to drive all over the United States, where for the first time we were able to enjoy the sense of freedom and the thrill of adventure without feeling persecuted; in short, the pleasure of being alive.