If he had answered «oui» to the lieutenant-colonel, he would have remained quietly in Cienfuegos, exempt from military service. But to the question “Are you gay?” Raúl, 17, blond with light eyes, answered firmly «non». Satisfied, the recruiter said: “Raúl Iriarte, you may be a bit short, a bit skinny, but we are going to make you a soldier of the socialist fatherland.”
Raúl is indeed not homosexual. Effeminate yes, he has been criticized enough for that, but he has no desire for men. What he likes is to put on dresses. Those of his aunt Nancy first: dead of cancer, it was his inconsolable mother who made him wear them. To escape the brutally virile world embodied by his father and his brother, the child takes refuge in the world of women: his mother, his aunt Nancy, who will soon die, or the Russian, his father’s mistress, who offers the books that fuel his imagination. L’Iliade above all, that he learns by heart.
Nicknamed Marilyn Monroe
For the myths of the socialist revolution, Fidel and Che, which he is fed in class, he will substitute Greek mythology: Zeus, Apollo. Until reincarnating as Cassandra, daughter of Priam, king of Troy. Like Cassandre, Raúl reads the future, he knows when and how the people he meets are going to die. He also knows that he will die in Africa. It is for this reason that he answered no to the recruiter: the war in Angola will be his Trojan war. Where, at the beginning of the 1980s, the Cuban army lends a hand to the pro-Soviet regime resulting from decolonization.
Another dress awaits him in Africa: the one imposed on him by the captain, while he rapes him by calling him a “shit fagot”, to ease the pain of being separated from his wife. Raúl, whom the whole barracks calls Marilyn Monroe, suffers and is silent. He stays away because he resides on Olympus. He avoids baseball games, doesn’t go to brothels. But he carries the assault rifle and uses it when a skirmish against the enemy, the anti-communist guerrillas, requires it.
Steeped in Cuban history
The second novel by Cuban Marcial Gala is set both in the Caribbean and in Africa, on earth and in the sky, mixing different spaces with virtuosity. It is also precisely rooted in Cuban history. The “internationalist mission” which exports the Castroist revolution to all continents. The schoolchildren who are moved in front of the house of a little comrade, to insult this family which is about to leave the country. And the propaganda songs of Silvio Rodríguez or Sara González, sometimes very beautiful in their lyricism.
The trauma of Angola, where 400,000 Cuban soldiers were sent between 1975 and 1990, marked the island as much as Vietnam left an indelible mark on the United States. Marcial Gala draws from it an abundant picture, both fatalistic and magical, where a lush language unfolds.