The dozen stories that made up that unusual book set standards in the fantastic literature that was produced in Cuba at that time.
HAVANA, Cuba – It has just been 60 years since the publication, in 1965, in the Dragón series by Ediciones R, of the book “The Old Woman and the Sea”, by the writer and journalist Évora Tamayo.
The dozen stories that made up that unusual book, where humor and horror were mixed with absurdity and dreamlike logic, due to their originality, set guidelines in literature fantasy that was made in Cuba at that time, in which authors such as José Lorenzo Fuentes, María Elena Llana, Oscar Hurtado and Esther Díaz Llanillo stood out.
As the narrator and essayist Alberto Garrandés states in his article “The Dark Smile: 60 Years of The Old Woman and the Sea,” published in Hypermedia Magazine: “Évora Tamayo made Gothic horror a space strongly contaminated by black humor and lyricism.”
Those stories by the then very young (she was 25 years old) Bayamese writer and the other authors of fantastic literature, considering them “too strange”, were not well received. by the commissioners who governed cultureinterested in Cuban writers reflecting in their works the themes of “the revolution and the construction of a socialist society.”
In the case of Évora Tamayo, the situation was aggravated because her first book, “Stories for sick grandmothers,” had been published in Ediciones El Puente in 1964, less than a year before the editorial scrutiny was closed by express orders from Fidel Castro.
A few days ago, when asked by me about the impact that “The Old Woman and the Sea” had at the time, Évora Tamayo, who has lived in the United States for decades, explained to me in an e-mail: “When the book was published, I already suspected or intuited the trouble I was getting into. I was not absolutely innocent. The fact is that I knew that the revolution was not for stories just for the sake of fantastic literature. I knew that the literature that the first paunches were waiting for was praises and banners. And at that point I was not going to give up even one of my stories, which is why I did not write stories again and dedicated myself to humorous journalism. In short, I did not sell my soul to the devil.
Évora Tamayo during the 1960s and 1970s dedicated herself to humor in the weekly Palante and wrote texts on the history of humor in Cuba. It was not until 1983 that he decided to publish the book of stories “Pipe Smoking and Other Customs” and the novel “Suspicion of Murder.”
Recently, thanks to a friend who lent me a copy very battered by time, I have re-read the stories of “The Old Woman and the Sea”: “Silvia”, “Little Red Riding Hood’s Grandmother”, “The Princess’s Secret”, “Album Sheet for Elisa”, “The Mysteries of Teresa”, “Milo”, “The Frog’s Adolescence”, “The Garden” and the one that gives the book its title.
My favorites are “Silvia”, the story of the woman who was simultaneously an old woman and a beautiful blonde with green eyes, and “Album sheet for Elisa”, the story of the woman who fed the beasts of her father’s circus with the corpses of their husbands. But I can assure you that all the stories impressed me as much or more than when I first read them many years ago.
Allow me again to quote Alberto Garrandés when he states, regarding “The Old Woman and the Sea”: “Évora Tamayo’s book is as unusual yesterday as it is today, and its cinematographic quality, verifiable in some texts, sheds a light that reaches the present and highlights an imaginary that does not cease.”
