2023-05-08 20:30:02
What do we inherit? Why are we the way we are? How to judge the right to voice? Who and how has told our story? They are questions that Zaida Capote Cruz try to answer in your book Tribulations of Spain in America. Three episodes of history and fictionEditorial Letras Cubanas, 2021, and Alejo Carpentier Essay Award of the same year, presented this Saturday, May 6, on Calle de Madera, in Old Havana, in front of the former Palace of the General Captains and current Museum of the City.
The usual Saturday of the book had in its opening with the words of the poet and editor Norberto Codinawho to begin with quoted the essayist, historian and professor Félix Julio Alfonso López, regarding the volume of Capote during the last International Fair.
“Behind this intellectual inquiry, lies a hermeneutic anguish: ‘the dispute over the hegemony of the narrative voice, or in other words, the position of power acquired by whoever holds the privilege of discourses about the past. Telling the story, we have known this for many centuries, has been the prerogative of the victors and the powerful”. One could paraphrase Stefan Zweig’s well-known sentence: ‘the defeated are never right’”.
He also recalled a fragment of the minutes of the jury that awarded the Alejo Carpentier Award to Tribulations of Spain in America… (of which he was a part, together with Félix Julio and Jorge G. Bermúdez): “…it is a provocative varied reading about ‘the historical novel and the books of the conquistador, painting and costumbrista prose and the multiple narrative of that’ deep wound’ that Weyler’s Reconcentration represented for Cubans’, readings that make up ‘the narrative forests and symbolic spaces through which the author of this book walks with ingenuity, elegance and investigative solvency […] his text will contribute even more to reveal the questions that he places on his portico”.
For Zaida Capote Cruz, the presentation of Tribulations of Spain in America. Three episodes of history and fiction in Calle de Madera is significant, as “this is a space for memory, for the rescue of heritage”. And he says: “Here we have seen the statue of Fernando VII come out to the Plaza de Armas for many years, exposed, little less than as a historical curiosity, in the City Museum. Its new pedestal is almost ridiculous and passers-by in Havana live with this symbolic restoration almost without noticing it”.
Cubans —he adds— we assume other spaces for discussion or lack of discussion about the Spanish cultural heritage, perhaps because we have almost family contact with Spain (more than other countries), because the colony lasted another century.
When referring to Memories of a wound, the third part of her book, Zaida took up a comment by Codina, when minutes before she cited a note published in the Spanish newspaper The country where Weyler is said to have been a liberal general, “when in reality he was a sadist.
“I get emotional when I talk about concentration. She cried like a cupcake while she read the documents and testimonies of the time. It hurt a lot because one of the hardest hit areas was the center and west of the island. The one that surrounds Havana, specifically Alquízar and Güira de Melena, is my family from the beginning of the 20th century, and I thought of her. The great Spanish emigration to Cuba at this stage was due to the fact that the fields remained barren, because the reconcentration dictated taking everyone to the cities and people died of hunger and disease.
In her words, Zaida also recalled the translations by Miguel León Portilla, and that verse that she has never forgotten in which the indigenous people say: a network of holes was our inheritance.
“Part of the objective of this book is that our heritage is not a network of holes, to avoid those silences about our history that must be reviewed. It is necessary to make a museum of reconcentration. The number of works that have been written about this event is impressive, and yet we do not have a place of remembrance, review, or contact with that period.
“There are young people who have read my book and have told me that they had no idea how serious Weyler’s concentration in Cuba was. That tremendous historical trauma is part of our identity and what explains the way we react as a people to current issues. We are survivors as a people of that great trauma. That and other traces are engraved in our identity.
Regarding the first chapter, The Navigating Continent, the author said that it deals with how the continent has navigated in the metropolitan imagination and that she worked on novels referring to the episodes of the conquest of America.
“It is impressive, because since in 1979 Carpentier published The harp and the shadowmade school with humor, the permanent mockery of the hierarchies of the Spanish colony, the questioning of the civilizing work of the arrival of the Spaniards to the so-called new world that was not so new, and almost all the novels that deal with the subject imitate Carpentier’s tone.
“And it is very good to laugh at our own story, but knowing what is in dispute: how and who tells it. That is why the duel between chroniclers of the Indies —who, even though they were marginal and not envoys from the crown, wrote from a position of dominance over the invaded— and Latin American novelists who have created very powerful novels that are very pleasant to read.”
Regarding the central chapter, Politics of a cultural practice, Zaida Capote refers that she made a political reading of the literary texts. “That cross between politics and literature is very evident in books of costumbrista chronicles or articles of customs as they were called at the time. The English, the French, the Spanish did it and I think that Cuba is the first place in Latin America where something like this was done. Its titled Cubans painted by themselvesbut as always when you live or write in conditions of oppression, things turn out the other way around.
“Many of its authors were Spaniards settled in Cuba, many were not consecrated costumbristas or who were successful in the Cuban press. And there is a dilemma, and it has to do with the fact that the printing press in Cuba at that time was completely dominated by Spaniards and Cubans did not have the right to print their own newspapers and when they did, as happened with El plantel, by Palma and Echeverría, they ended up taking it off.
“In reference to The Cubans painted by themselves, Cuban writers said that to write literature in Cuba it was essential to talk about how blacks and whites had mixed, how Cuban society lived on the backs of slaves, how the economy of slavery was essential for social development and that those themes are practically dodged in the book.”
Tribulations of Spain in America. Three episodes of history and fiction, Capote Cruz concluded, is like a trip to the past that tries to explain it from those dissensions and what traces of that past we can recognize in our environment to better recognize ourselves as a nation.
Taken from Cuba in Summary
Cover photo: Octavio Fraga
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