EXITO
Magazine, Nov. 1997
By Santiago Aroca
Eliseo Alberto is in no man's land. He's a Cuban citizen living in Mexico, but he can no longer return to his native land, he said. Now it turns out he can't come to the United States either. Alberto had been invited to take part in the Miami Book Fair, but a U.S. consular official in Mexico rejected his visa application. ''Every one is responsible for his own face and that guy's was horrible,'' said Alberto. ''I was waiting in another line but they sent me to him at the last minute, and I struck out. This guy didn't want to listen to anything. I told him I was a writer going to Miami to present my book... that I had been there before, that I had a daughter in Mexico... He said no, that I was going to the U.S. to stay.'' The book Alberto would have come here to present is Informe contra mi mismo (Informing on myself), recently published to great acclaim in Spain.
''They first asked me to inform on my family in 1978,'' is the first line of the book. According to Alberto, Cuban State Security police directed him to spy on his father, the poet Eliseo Diego, considered by some among the foremost Cuban intellectuals of the 20th. Century. ''I would ask my father what I should write in my report and he would even correct my spelling,'' said Alberto. ''My father said he wasn't concerned about me accusing him of crimes against the Revolution... but he thought it would be unforgivable for the report to contain grammatical errors.''
Alberto started writing his reports about his family at the time he went into the military, which is compulsory in Cuba. ''They told us it was necessary to report all contacts with the enemy. The problem was defining who was the enemy. Anyone in Cuba can be the enemy, especially if your father is a poet and receives visits from famous writers from all over.'' Alberto got the idea for Informe when his friend, essayist Rafael Rojas, suggested he write a book about emotions in Cuba.
''It was like opening a valve... more than an exorcism... The book was already written. It was very painful, but very easy.'' In Informe, Alberto tells the story of how his family nearly left Cuba in the early sixties. Everything was ready, even the plane tickets, but at the last moment, his father changed his mind and decided to stay and live out his life in a kind of ''internal exile,'' said Alberto.
''I'm not sorry we decided to stay,'' said Alberto, who is 46 and the single father of a young daughter who lives with him in Mexico. ''I enjoyed my youth. I know it was hell for others. But I made friends and discovered a very curious world. I come from a family of poets, musicians and dancers. We've even had circus people in the family.'' Notwithstanding his stated lack of regret at not having left Cuba, Alberto includes at the end of his book an enormous list of the friends who did leave.
''It's a devastating list and it had to be shortened,'' said Alberto. ''I kept getting faxes from friends saying you forgot so and so, but I had to leave them out. In truth, it's not so much a list as a inventory of the absence of hope. The foreigners who read the book find the list boring. But Cubans, that's one of the things they notice the most.'' Alberto left Cuba in 1990 to work with Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez at a TV company. He currently runs the Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica, a film school. Until a few months ago, he had a passport which identified him as an official of the Cuban government.
''After the book was published, they took my passport away and they gave me another one that looks horrible, with rusted staples, very thin. It makes the holder seem like a suspicious character,'' said Alberto.
''Now, with an American stamp that says ''rejected,'' it looks so disreputable that when I went to the Cuban consulate to ask for a visa to go to my own country as a tourist, the official looked at it suspiciously and said it wasn't prudent at this time for me to return to the place I was born.''
For García Márquez, despised in exile circles for his friendship with Fidel Castro, Alberto had nothing but kind words and an apologia. ''I think Gabo is fascinated by the subject of power,'' said Alberto. ''He's friends with almost all the presidents. It's something I don't understand very well. He likes to study power. I'd like to think it's a writer's peculiarity.'' As for Cuba, Alberto said he can't help feeling ashamed of his own country. ''It's a strange sensation. Of course, you always love your country, Cubans most of all, who are so nationalistic, but I can't help feeling a certain shame,'' said the writer.
''Sometimes I feel ashamed of my country because I see it deny a place to my friends, because so many people have to leave. It pains me deeply that so many brilliant people have to leave. Havana is small, and it kept getting reduced to very few pleasant places. Those are islands inside the island. A friend said it was like living in a zoo, where your meals and medical care are guaranteed.'' Alberto said he misses Cuba, but he receives a lot of information about what is going on there. One story he thought was interesting was that of a Miami exile who went back to his home town in Pinar del Rio.
''They were very nice to him and showed his everything the Revolution had done for the people, including the municipal pig sty, where an armed guard keeps the residents' pigs from being stolen at night. Apparently, the only complaint came from people who keep chickens instead of pigs and who said they had to sleep in the chicken coop.'' It's difficult to write fiction in a place like Cuba where reality is so rich, said Alberto. And he underlined the point by describing the plot of a play by Alberto Pedro.
''It's a wonderful story about a family who raises a pig in their apartment and then find themselves unable to kill it because they've grown so fond of it. Finally, hunger helps them to find a solution. They trade their pig for another one exactly like it so they can kill a pig they don't know.'' Why do Cubans stay in the zoo their island has become? ''For me, the great problem of communism is that it taught us to dissemble extremely well,'' said Alberto. ''We have become great experts at pretending. We know how to take a step forward in order to remain behind. We are volunteers for doing nothing. As the revolutionary leaders say, what's important is your attitude... and because attitudes are easy to fake, we're O.K.''
But Alberto finds hope in something his father used to say to him. ''The old man used to say that in this world of crooks, to see an honest man was really something. Of course, there are honest men in Cuba and they are heroes, even though they may spend more time in jail than on the street.''
Copyright 1997, Exito Online, South Florida Interactive, Inc. and Sun-Sentinel Co.