74: The empty shelf

The Empty Shelf is not just a title of the Cuban essayist Rafael Rojas’; it is also a metaphor for the national intellectual space—one that behaves not like a field but like a literary campsite (literarid). I’ve suffered it in text and in my own experience. When my book of stories, Boring Home, was censored by the publisher Letras Cubanas that same year, 2009, I could count on the fingers of one hand (with fingers left over) the authors who publicly supported me in Cuba. Cuban artists do not want to take on the risky role “by vocation and by mission,” as the Mexican Octavio Paz said, of expressing “the critical conscience of a society.” Thus, our participation in civil life today is almost nil. We are islands within the Island.

Artists justify this inaction with the argument that they should focus on making transcendent art and not waste time getting mixed up in political contingencies. None of them care to realize that “politics is a question too serious to be left in the hands of the politicians,” as Charles De Gaulle thought. And so I am increasingly convinced that Cuban literature is too serious a question to be left in the hands of Cuban writers. We need to plan, and soon, a textual coup d’etat.