Malaga (Spain)/There are books that are neither written nor read: they are confessed. Report against myselfby Eliseo Alberto, belongs to that rare category. It is the story of a man who writes a police report – not against the enemy, but against his own family – and discovers that the real informer is not the one who signs the paper, but the system that managed to make it possible.
The novel, written from the Mexican exile and silenced in official Cuba, could be read as the Cuban version of The lives of others. In the German film, a Stasi agent spies on a playwright and ends up redeeming himself out of compassion. In Report against myselfon the other hand, the narrator does not redeem himself: he strips himself naked. It doesn’t save anyone. He’s just trying to save his conscience. Surveillance does not come from above, but from within. The informer becomes his own victim.
Both works share the same moral axis: the annulment of the individual by the totalitarian State. But Eliseo Alberto adds something that the film cannot offer: the heat of betrayed affection. There is no cold basement or interrogation room. There is a Havana house, a poet father, a mother who puts out a cigarette in her sleep, a family that sings while the son – a soldier in the reserve – receives the order to spy on them. It is horror with the smell of rum and sad lamp light.
Eliseo Alberto was the son of Eliseo Diego and nephew of Fina García Marruz, heirs of a poetic tradition that believed in the dignity of language. For this reason, his testimony hurts more: because it shows how a regime that proclaimed itself redeemer ended up destroying even faith in the word.
The lives of others ends with a redemption; Report against myself No. In the Cuba of the report, guilt is not expiated: it is archived. The author says it with bitter irony: “I am imprisoned in a file”. In that bureaucratic file is the true Cuban prison: the one that does not need bars, only a people educated to distrust themselves. And he adds on another page: “No one is entirely guilty of their fear.”
Eliseo Alberto was not a counterrevolutionary, in any case he went from “red” to “pink.” He loved the Revolution as one loves a youth, and that makes it more painful. Because he understood that the great success of the process was not literacy or reform, but rather perfecting the art of depersonalization. The Revolution turned obedience into a moral virtue, loyalty into a test of faith, and fear into a form of belonging. He taught how to renounce the self without feeling that one was renouncing oneself.
The Cuban speaks in the winery as a militant, at home as a skeptic, and with the foreigner or in exile, as a victim.
From that moral experiment arose a phenomenon that still defines Cuba: the I polyhedral. This is not a psychological split, but rather a pragmatic identity that rotates depending on the context without dissociating: a strategy of moral and linguistic adaptation in an environment where personal coherence could be dangerous. The ability – or the need – to change face and language depending on the context. The Cuban speaks in the winery as a militant, at home as a skeptic, and with the foreigner or in exile, as a victim. Each environment activates a code, a lexicon, a “way of believing.” This verbal and moral plasticity, born of fear, ended up becoming – like jokes and humor – another survival strategy: learning to say the “right” thing, where it corresponds.
This is not about hypocrisy, but about adaptation. In a country where sincerity could cost at least a fine, if not a job or freedom, the discourse became fragmented. Thus a culture of commutable opinions was created, where words serve to protect, not to reveal. The result: a town that, by dint of pretending, ended up not fully knowing who it is.
Report against myself It is the autopsy of that loss. Eliseo Alberto does not accuse, he does not pontificate; shows how the system managed to install a censor within each citizen. And although the author wrote from exile, his book continues to take place within the Island. Every time someone remains silent out of caution or fear, who disguises their thoughts to survive, who changes their vocabulary so as not to clash, that report is written again.
“The Revolution has aged, but its most lasting work is still alive: the Cuban divided between what he says, what he remains silent – but thinks – and what he appears to say.” In that, depersonalization triumphed where the five-year plans and the ten million harvest failed.
‘Report against myself’ is not a political plea, but an internal atonement
Perhaps the only thing left to do, on behalf of all those who signed unknowingly, is to write the reverse: a report in one’s favor. A report in favor of freedom. Even so, lucidity and candor do not absolve. Eliseo Alberto was a victim and participant at the same time, like a large part of the intellectuals of his generation. The problem – and that is what is uncomfortable – is that many, out of aesthetic, family or ideological fidelity, remained silent for too long. Some did it out of fear; others, for believing that they could still save the project from within. But when cultural and moral repression was already evident, staying was also a form of complicity, even if it was passive or sentimental.
This moral ambiguity should be recognized: not to judge it harshly, but to remember that the sensitivity and intelligence with which a pain of conscience is expressed in writing is not enough when a long silence in the past perpetuates the damage. Eliseo Alberto faced the monster, yes, but he did it late. And he paid for it with chronic remorse, not with the personal and committed political action that would have been more redemptive. Report against myself It is not a political plea, but an internal atonement.
His friend Héctor Abad Faciolince, from Colombia, expressed it with the clarity of someone who did not share that servitude: he admired his talent, but he could not forgive him for having taken so long to break the “spell.” That observation, more fraternal than cruel, summarizes the moral dilemma of a generation that believed that the word – poetry, essay, criticism from within – could redeem a Revolution that had already lost its soul, given over to the “devil”… that it itself had created.
