Maielis González delves into Cuban actuality via science fiction: “My generation grew up with the corpse of a utopia” | Culture | EUROtoday

The author Maielis González was born in Havana the identical yr that the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet empire started to falter. It was 1989. At that time, seven years had already handed for the reason that plan to construct a nuclear energy plant in Cuba was inaugurated, promoted by Moscow in order that Fidel Castro’s regime would have a sure power autonomy and fewer dependence on oil; and there have been nonetheless three extra to go earlier than that nice work in Juraguá was suspended in 1992. “There was a half-built nuclear power plant and an unfinished city,” recollects Benicio, one of many two protagonists of the novel. Nuclear (Trojan Mare) written by Maelis González. This thirty-year-old feels more and more alone in Cuba, confronted with the mass exodus of his compatriots and fellow generations, however, regardless of the whole lot, he resists and needs to dedicate himself to cinema, which is why he travels to the ruins of the outdated and unfinished energy plant, as a result of he plans to movie there.

Benicio’s encounter with mysterious characters within the deserted metropolis and energy plant of Juraguá and the parallel journey of his ex-partner to Argentina, to an inventive residence within the Tigre delta, drives the novel. Nuclear in direction of science fiction. “Speculative literature is a very fertile terrain that Cuban authors such as Erick J. Mota have worked on in Havana Underguater. And I have not visited those ruins of the power plant, because in Cuba it is difficult to travel, but they are a myth, and I know the entire epic of that plan, which inspired the film The great work of the century“explains González in Madrid, the city where he lives, and emphasizes that, despite Cuba’s isolation, its writers have participated in the new currents of genre literature. In his novel he makes an explicit nod to the classic The place by Mario Levrero, to the film Stalker from Tarkovsky already Picnic extraterrestre of the Strugatskys. Sitting in a cafe near the Plaza Mayor in Madrid, she mentions Fernanda Trías, Liliana Colanzi and Luis Carlos Barragán as authors who follow that path that interests her. And he emphasizes: “I have wanted in Nuclear talk about the present of Cuba.”

This is not González’s first foray into science fiction, this has been the dominant current in his work. Nuclear It is the ninth book he has published, although most of his previous titles appeared on small imprints. Together with Sofía Baker she launched the podcast The Writers of Urra on contemporary fantasy genre authors. And last November he published a long novel, Palenque (Cuatro lunas) in which, through the fantasy genre, he returned to Cuba’s slave past. Nuclear It is, however, the first work that, he says, he has dedicated to his “disbelieving and cynical” generation. With them, unlike their parents, “nostalgia for the revolution does not work,” he says.

Those born in the last decades of the 20th century in Cuba, González affirms, have lived with the ruins of a dream: “My era grew up with the corpse of a utopia. We are marked by the diaspora.” The two voices in his novel, Claudia and Benicio, symbolize these two sides of that story, those that depart and people who keep, “exile and jump“, which, as the writer points out, have been studied in detail in Cuban literary theory. “Claudia’s character does not feel that she fits into that writers’ residence in Argentina. Benicio suffers isolation when the rest of his generation leaves. “They are both trying to narrate each other.”

In Argentina, Claudia’s character expresses the anger that comes from facing the stereotypes that exist about Cuba outside the island, and is sarcastic about current debates such as cultural appropriation. “They checked out me with a ‘Friend, understand’ face. I lacked deconstruction. Read extra Judith Butler,” the narrator ironically says in Nuclear. Like that character, Maielis González also left Cuba. He hasn’t returned. In 2017, after a few months in Argentina, he ended up in Spain. She says she spent nearly five years undocumented. Today she works at the Women’s Bookstore in the center of Madrid and teaches classes at the Writers School. “In this e book I embody views and processes that I went via myself in my diaspora, and what’s taking place in up to date Cuba. Because these of us who march by no means end leaving, we’re at all times alert to what’s taking place within the nation.”

Regarding the current situation, the radical asphyxiation of the regime due to lack of oil, he states: “Cuba is suspended with synthetic respiration and we’re ready to see what occurs to it.” He regrets that after the attack on Venezuela by the United States and the arrest of Nicolás Maduro, “there is still no talk from the left of a dictatorship in Cuba.” That fault that separates the reality of Cubans from the perception that progressive sectors have of the regime from outside is one of the themes that lie beneath the story of his novel. “I needed to guide the reader via a actuality that’s overseas to the stereotype that we’re both communists or tremendous right-wing. There are many nuances and, though in Cuba now we have not been in a position to operate as a democracy, we’re studying to construct our voice and likewise construct ourselves as residents.”

Nuclear delves into the reality of the island and its inhabitants: from social classes (which its narrators affirm do exist in Castro’s Cuba) to feminism (an ideal that is also highlighted in the novel is far from having been achieved on the island), passing through the departmentthat variant of regatón with Afro-Cuban overtones that emerged in marginalized neighborhoods and contradicts the official discourse that these suburbs do not exist. The remittances that arrive from abroad or the difficulties faced by those who want to dedicate themselves to “artistry” also appear in this story. “It is very complicated to be an artist in Cuba, and filmmakers like Benicio are among the most persecuted. Cinema is very precarious and you need permits to film and this leads you to a certain guilt, to ask yourself what I am doing dedicating myself to art in a world that is falling apart,” explains the author.

González says she enjoys her role as a mediator of readings and not just that of an author who describes an isolated reality. His character Benicio, upon visiting the ruins of Juraguá, wonders if his mysterious guide is “stalker” or “coyote”, if he rescues and sells objects from one other world to make them seen or helps to cross borders. González says that these are the 2 attitudes he maintains in direction of writing: taking items of one other universe and making them seen and serving to to cross borders via fiction. Because as he writes in his novel “between each of those worlds there is a space, a tiny interstice of indeterminacy.”