Abel Prieto’s Travels

Abel Prieto's Travels / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo
Posted on July 16, 2013

"The day that rabble gets into the UNEAC*, we're lost."
– Abel Prieto, from his Viajes de Miguel Luna

What does a Minister of Culture think about when he turns into an
author? What does he aesthetically cling to and what does he judge as
too politically incorrect to include in his work? Does he play? Does he
confess? How does he balance the influences and disguise the secrets of
the State? Does he compare his stories with the classics of the Cuban
canon or only with his contemporary competition? Does he censor himself?
Is he sucking up to or betraying his superiors (His Superior)?

Viajes de Miguel Luna is an invaluable document for dissecting the mind
of citizen Abel Prieto, public official in the upper echelons of power
during the last two decades of the Revolution. Literally, the last. And
the most profitable from the point of view of fiction: those of the
decline and fall of just about everyone, here on the Island as well as
in Exile.

The official presentation, in February 2012, at the Book Fair of the
Cuba Pavilion, required (perhaps due to the bulk of the novel, 540
pages) three veterans in turn: Graziella Pogolotti, Eduardo Heras León
and Rinaldo Acosta. To this was added the presence of Ambrosio Fornet,
Roberto Fernández Retamar, Eusebio Leal, Miguel Barnet, Frank Fernández,
Fernando Martínez Heredia, Reynaldo González and, of course, his
predecessor in the post, transformed that evening into an involuntary
vision of a generational wake.

A devotee of Lezama among the earliest after the death and burial of
Lezama (between the ambulance sent by Alfredo Guevara and the bugs
planted by the secret police), at last Abel Prieto achieves the miracle
of a book as arduous to read as Paradiso, although for diametrically
opposed reasons: Lezama's magnum opus is an untranslatable labyrinth
that forges its very reader (the rest get burnt out); while Viajes de
Miguel Luna is the spasm of the legibility of Cuban dialect loud and
clear (quasi-military jargon), an anecdotal hyper-transparency that ends
up overstuffed (the accursed circumstance of the drivel-ography of
Miguel Luna, or "Mick or Mike or Miki or Mickey Moon or simply Mikimún"
from all sides).

In a Stakhanovite effort of "popular dissemination", written like
volunteer work from behind his political desk at the Ministry of Culture
or the Central Committee of the Communist Party, this is the sympathetic
saga that the New Man had been expecting to read since 1989 (the
perestroika on paper); it is the coming-of-age story that our middle
class cried out for, demanding a relief from the vacuum of this
Imaginary Era of transition toward State capitalism; it is the best
seller that we intellectuals can give as a gift on a Sunday in May to
our mothers (without awaiting the death of a Rosa Lima, such an
affectionate repressor); and it is, also, more than a travel epic, the
last of the "scholarship novels" of 20th century Cuba, that genre that
was born senile, yet has yielded so many functionaries during peace time.

There is a lot of kitsch in this type of tropical gaiety in the gulag:
from Marcos Behmaras to Enrique Núñez Rodríguez, from José Ángel Cardi
to F. Mond, among other ourselves-and-others, the text wants to laugh
but what comes out isn't a smirk, but something worse: a grimace (rigor
mortis of the State). Falsehood as poetic license used by a bully in
search of authenticity. Because here we won't find even traces of the
stigmatizer of young Cuban artists, nor of the audiovisual censor, nor
of the manipulator of pro-Cuba solidarity movements, nor of the hijacker
of Cuban exit permits, nor of the bandit-hunter setting his sights on
the Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana magazine, including the coercion of
this island's hostages who collaborated with it (a publication that,
after observing a minute of silence at UNEAC when its editor/founder
died, they finally managed to sabotage). But it is precisely these
omissions that open up a bridge, a great bridge to our residual freedom
in so many perverse readers. Thus, the archeological eloquence of these
Travels of Miguel Luna will face the researchers that will descend from,
let's say, North American academia to celebrate the Great Centennial of
2059 — mulg-kästrismo beaming as one of the fine arts.

The proof of success, guarantor of an imminent Critics Prize and perhaps
a National Literary Prize, is that this book by Abel Prieto is nowhere
to be found inside the country: it sold out before its introduction into
the market! This will not impede Abel Prieto's trips now to collect
praise and euros from a parliamentary Europe suffering from nostalgia in
its terminal stages, plus the corresponding thousand and one
translations of this work, including into Mulgavo: a dead post-socialist
language (part Basque, part North Korean, part Iranian?) in which an
unbearable percentage of monologues of our "Kübb-hím-póet-Míkel-Lún" are
written (the ex-minister uses Mac or gets by with the accent marks in
Microsoft).

It is curious that Cuban literature (the same as with the more recent
Dictionaries of Cuban Literature) does not dare over-mention that
dystrophic year of 1989. In style and theme, we are nailed to a remote,
ludicrous past: Cuba's trauma is that no holocaust will be tragic. Our
day-to-day amnesia can't withstand it, and we lack the capacity to
narrate the horrifying void of a nation forced into fidelity, at the
whim of a personalistic power that made us live un-chronologically
outside of global history, anachronistically in that stop-motion time of
absolute totalitarianism.

Abel Prieto, upon writing (or dictating to his deputy ministers) the
screenplay of this Goodbye Lenin awash in semen, need not be the
exception: the action transpires in hops between the September 29 of
1948 and the September 29 of 1989, while the author's alter-ego
masturbates from the start (over the fields and cities goes the
onanist…), while Congolese hutias as demonic as they are endemic (pardon
the redundancy) masturbate, while the masses and sub-Soviet leaders of
the putative proletarian utopia masturbate, while the mobs rush out to
shoot themselves to death, no sooner does mulg-demökratia arrive in the
Pastoral Agricultural Democratic Popular Socialist Workers Republic of
Mulgavia. It's obvious that Abel Prieto can see the processes of change
like a blitzkrieg of mafias (Mulgavo-American?) and fluorescent
McDonald's icons, where today's communist hierarchs will without doubt
be masters of war and capital (let us trust that it will have been for
health reasons, not this kind of imagination, which will have cost him
his ministerial purse). Of that hypothetical country that yesterday was
associated with Cuba, we know nothing after page 540 (Wikipedia isn't
God either). For the author, it probably wasn't worth wearing oneself
out on an anti-climax of economic growth, the opening of borders,
respect for human rights and, if it's not too much to ask, the training
of Mulgavan Boy Scouts by People in Need to fratricidally undermine a
still surviving little revolution in the Caribbean Sea. I don't recall
even one single mention of the word "revolution" in the novel, as if
this situation were out of context, of zero influence on the thesis
(even though "counter-revolution" is mentioned and even provokes a
fainting spell in a supporting character: someone taken out of the novel
who writes the character who in turn is written by Abel Prieto).
Ecstatic with retrospectives that cover up any association with local
historical horror, the jovial jargon of the sexagenarian Abel Prieto
achieves a novel for all and for the good of all. It doesn't matter
that he himself could have gone to jail for daring to write it in real
time. It doesn't matter that he would have been shot by firing squad
without trial for having published it then in the "Red Island in the
Black Sea". What is transcendent here is that all future time must be
better (an idyll of the Left), and that this text in Cuba now proves it
against our Eternal Enemies. Thus, due to its ecumenism or maybe its
communist Catholicism, from the theorist of global anti-imperialism, to
our provincial dissidents with "Made in Miami" digital copyrights, all
should find something to praise in this mammoth opus by Raúl Castro
Ruz's current salaried subordinate. Congratulations! I suppose the
consensus-building had to start somewhere.

What does an advisor think about when he turns into an author? What
does he politically cling to and what does he judge as aesthetically
correct to include in his work? Is he free or does he run every concept
by State Security? Does extensive writing distract his parliamentary
concentration, is it a diversion of resources from the Council of State,
or is it simply an extracurricular hobby edited in record time by Letras
Cubanas publishing house? Is this an exemplifying work meant to monitor
the literary market (for good reason, the novel imparts a Delphic
mini-course on adolescent-adventurer readings)? Will Abel Prieto retire
with this dramatic effect or is he already plotting a new hilarious
project for his next two decades in power?

In an interview, the author implores us to not abandon reading his work
until the KONIEC** ("not because it's so good, but because I'd like it
if someone reached it"). As with Paradiso, in effect, I recommend
resisting until the bitter end the half-a-millennium of pages in Viajes
de Miguel Luna. Maybe this is the novel that, since the "Revoluzoic
Era", Armando Hart should have written for us? This is a book that can
be put to use as a Rosetta Stone of 21st century socialism, Cuban style,
and it includes, as a bonus track, a histrionic colophon that parodies,
or maybe pays homage to, the telenovela writer Mayté Vera, not to
mention half of a century's worth of excellent vignettes signed by the
author (the untapped potential of a Marjane Satrapi emanates from Abel
Prieto, self-portrait included).

Mikimún has died, long live the Ministrún. Quod scripsi, is crisis.

Translator's notes:
* National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba
** This is the Polish term for "finish" or "end".

From Diario de Cuba

Translated by: Yoyi el Monaguillo

Source: "Abel Prieto's Travels / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo | Translating
Cuba" -
http://translatingcuba.com/abel-prietos-travels-orlando-luis-pardo-lazo/