(This talk was delivered at the Lectorum Bookstore, New York, on April 22, 2005, in introducing the novels El general Sombra by Arnoldo Tauler and Posesas de La Habana by Teresa Dovalpage.)

You might be wondering: What do rain and dirt have in common? Why should the novels El general Sombra by Arnoldo Tauler, and Posesas de La Habana by Teresa Dovalpage—books that are apparently dissimilar—be presented in one stroke?

This is a sensible and logical question. As readers will be quick to observe, the narrative registers of these books could hardly be more different.

In Sombra, Tauler has written a concerto for two solo voices; and these voices, by the way, are clearly masculine. On one hand, an omniscient narrator tells the particulars of a conspiracy to decapitate the Cuban regime and speculates about historic figures in this man-eating archipelago—General Ochoa, José Abrahantes, the De La Guardia twins—major movers in that controversial episode which became the renowned Case Number One of 1989. On the other hand, interwoven with details of the conspiracy, and in an unaccustomed searching of conscience, the other narrator—Fidel Castro’s very voice—confronts, in minute detail, his own conduct as Instigator-in-Chief through a recounting of his past and present actions.

Dovalpage, for her part, delivers the story of Posesas in four voices that are just as clearly feminine. The four—from a grandmother in her eighties down to an eleven-year-old girl—tell of their travails and recount a century of life on the island. These stories unfold against the backdrop of a hard day’s night—and a wave of hysteria provoked by an enforced blackout, combined with the hovering threat of a Caribbean Jack the Ripper, The Tongue-Slasher, who haunts Old Havana, sneaks into nearby houses, rapes all the women and girls and cuts out their tongues to keep them from talking.

Now, back to that question from the second row: What do rain and dirt have in common?

For one thing—and this might not be so informative—both books come from Pureplay Press, a publisher dedicated to the rescue of Cuba’s culture and history from these last five decades of hatred, manipulation, selective memory and perfect silliness—“rice with mango”. As we know, rice with mango is an idea more sensible to those who live outside Cuba; since, on the island, one can hardly find fruit or grain.

It’s precisely this lack of rice and mango, of light and privacy, of so many commodities notable for their absence in the homes of the capital city, to which the characters in Posesas de La Habana and El general Sombra testify. They also speak of other shortages, other fears. They tell of private wars in the intimate circles of the Sad Figure; they concoct rebellions that might win back their absent or scarcely present liberties.

As is common with this publisher, these are works by Cuban authors—exiles, not emigrants; people displaced from their homes of origin and deprived of their natural public, obliged to present their works in New York instead of Havana. And their texts recreate the misfortunes to which Cuba and its leaders have long accustomed us.

In truth, these novels have a very solid connection to each other. More than the socio-political context they describe—a backward country pretending to be a vanguard society—that benighted circumstance of water, water everywhere—they encompass the last twenty years and their controversies, down to the same critical viewpoint before the Big Buffoonery, the historic farce parading as a serious time, with its theories and theoreticians, its Nobel Laureates, its useful idiots with their ethical posturings or ethical poisonings, its gestures of solidarity with the fraternal Cuban people, its rantings at the United Nations, its unbelievably favorable world press.

What calls our attention to this remarkable duo of novels—false notions to the contrary—is that their characters have the same defenselessness. The high-ranking officers conspiring to get rid of the Bearded One are as helpless as the quartet of haunted ladies in their Havana neighborhood.

The connection is a simple one. All who inhabit the island, no matter who or where, depend on the will of a big, rusty index finger. The finger that deals out death sentences is the same as the one that switches lights off and on all over Cuba, making the island into a giant, shiny Christmas tree.

So in answer to our original question—What do rain and dirt have in common—my grandmother, who until the other day had lived in that Havana of generals, phantoms and haunted ladies, would have answered with republican simplicity: “If it doesn’t rain, my dear child, what will I use to rinse my earthenware?”