(EFE).- The Cuban writer and playwright Grethel Delgado says she has “taken it off her chest” Don’t talk to me about Cubahis first novel, which he presents next Saturday in Miami and narrates a return trip to the Island after years of exile that was to be “conciliatory” and ended “in boredom.”
“The theme was born when I was out of Cuba. Sometimes it happens that when you move away from that place that hurts so much and at the same time the one you love so much, you can’t find another way to express it,” says Delgado (Havana, 1987). in an interview with EFE.
Published in 2022 by Suburbano Ediciones, a South Florida Spanish-language imprint, Don’t talk to me about Cubawhich will be presented this Saturday at the American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora, is the journey of a woman, Gertrudis, who after six years in Miami decides to return to Havana due to the death of her uncle.
The first pages of this novel, rewritten from another perspective after ten years, focus on the first meeting with the authorities at the Havana airport, on the procedures for entering the country, and on a taxi that deposits the protagonist directly and before to visit anyone on the wall of the Malecón.
Sometimes written by an omniscient narrator and other times in the first person, Don’t talk to me about Cuba it links characters like Gertrudis, the traveler, her ex-partner Enrique, now a transvestite, and Arturo, a street sweeper who was a former literature professor who was “kicked out” from the university for talking about Vargas Llosa.
The novel winks at the Cuban poet Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (1814-1873) and is also inspired by a friend of Delgado’s with the same name
The novel winks at the Cuban poet Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (1814-1873) and is also inspired by a friend of Delgado’s with the same name.
“When we were at the university, at the Higher Institute of Art (ISA), she (the friend) had a private meeting to let us know that she was leaving and that farewell was what inspired me, in Spain, to write this character,” he details. .
Delgado wrote a draft at the request of the renowned Spanish writer Antonio Gala during an artistic creation scholarship about ten years ago. The author recounts that she proposed to write a play and that Gala, “that old curmudgeon and ingenious man without mincing words,” asked her to write a novel.
“The novel was born because I was thinking of staying in Spain. I wanted to leave Cuba. On a previous trip to Germany, an official warned me that we should not approach a ‘counterrevolutionary element’ in reference to the journalist Yoani Sánchez. Then I knew that I was being watched,” Delgado explains.
“It is a story of a cursed return, because Gertrudis returns without any patriotic concept, but to see those she left behind, but she regrets having done it so much that it left her with a very bitter taste, and hence the title Don’t talk to me about Cuba“, says Delgado, currently a journalist for Journal of the Americasof Miami.
“It is a story of a cursed return, because Gertrudis returns without any patriotic concept, but to see those she left behind, but she regrets having done it so much that it left her with a very bitter taste”
However, in the draft that he wrote at the behest of Gala, the title was different: someone will save us. The novel was “shelfed” until the author traveled to visit her parents in Havana and experienced in a certain way what Gertrudis experienced.
“The novel is more than ten years old. I filed it away, let it sleep, returned to Cuba and a year later I came to live in Miami, as the central character basically did, who stayed in the United States. Somehow I lived what that he had written in fiction”, recalls Delgado.
“When rewriting it comes the current title because I am already another, because definitely that return that I made to see my parents was so painful… Everything looked dirty and so alien that I aborted that island,” she explains.
When asked if someone who doesn’t know Cuba could go after reading this novel, Delgado replies: “if he’s very morbid and masochistic, he’ll want to go check it out.”
The writer announced that she already has the collection of poems Melancolìa South Beach ready, where she combines images of Miami Beach with others of Santa María del Mar, the busiest beach in Havana.
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