Havana Cuba. – The life of Ena Lucía Portela, one of the most important Cuban writers of the last three decades, is in danger if in the next few days she does not manage to have trihexyphenidyl (Artane), the medicine with which she fights advanced Parkinson’s disease, sent to Cuba suffering.
In a desperate call for help made on social media and that has been shared by several of her fellow writers and friends, Ena Lucía cries out for trihexyphenidyl, the medicine that she must consume daily and that is not being produced in Cuba, since the only laboratory that manufactures it has been closed for some time. more than two months due to technical failures and it is not known when they will be able to start it up again.
The writer explains in her message: “I cannot replace trihexyphenidyl with another drug just like that, that is, without prior neurological check-up, something also impractical at this time due to the same lack of resources.”
And he warns: “If I don’t consume 8 milligrams a day, I will no longer be able to walk, use my hands for anything, or articulate words. Worse than death. I don’t think I can bear it. I still have a few blister packs left. But they are not enough. If 23 days from now I don’t receive help… Anyway, better not even imagine it”.
The 51-year-old writer, with serious mobility problems, lives alone, in a high-rise apartment, in a building with Havana Center. Since it is impossible for him to go down the stairs of the building without help, he spends months and sometimes even years without going out into the street. He totally depends on the help of several friends and neighbors to get food and do other things.
Despite her fragile health, “the most hermit of Cuban writers” ―that’s what she called herself―, she does not stop writing and works from her home as an editor in the narrative writing of Ediciones Unión.
Narrator and essayist, Ena Lucía Portela is the most prominent writer of the so-called Novísimos generation, made up of authors born in the 1970s. She is the author, among other works, of the novels the shadow of the walker, The bird: brush and Chinese ink, One hundred bottles on a wall and Djuna and Daniel; and the story books A stranger among the stones and some serious illness. All of his books have been translated into several languages. He has published in magazines in Cuba and abroad.
Honest, direct, bold, Ena Lucía has scandalized the quiet official culture by addressing in most of her novels and short stories the world of marginality, the gay scene in Havana and the existential problems of today’s Cuban. She does it with an impeccable command of language, a very original style, somewhat baroque, making use of various cultural references, appealing to the resources of postmodernism but without abusing them.
In May 2007, at the Bogotá Book Fair, she was chosen among the best writers under 39 years of age in Latin America.
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