ÓRGANO COMPETENTE PARA CONOCER LA DENUNCIA

One space uniquely reserved for writers and fiction writing is the Centro de Formación Literaria Onelio Jorge Cardoso. El Onelio not only houses the weekly, year-long courses on narrative fiction, but also provides space for both workshops I worked with, space for annual conventions on literary topics organized by graduates and workshop members and finally a place for graduates to meet and socialize. It is an old nineteenth-century mansion in Miramar, a part of Havana that is both less densely populated and considered fancier than most neighbourhoods in the city due to it housing most of the embassies. It is an ornate, Mediterranean style building made of grey marble, dark woods, a clay tile roof, and blue, Iberian floor tiling throughout. The ground around the outside is overrun by trees and bushes, with some grassy areas outside of the once-landscaped beds. I walked past the building twice when I tried to find it the first time, even asking a policeman and passers-by if they knew of it, while standing in front of it, without anyone being able to point me in the right direction.

It had been updated and retrofitted to meet the needs of the writing school. There is a modern extension built to house the main classroom. Unlike the original aspects of the building, this extension was built with metal siding and the blue, vinyl flooring typical of schools in the

United States and United Kingdom and the government-run empresas [companies] in Havana. They

also built an extension on the roof, which housed the school’s library. They have a small computer workroom with two computers, which students could use, and offices on the second floor for teachers and administrators, of which there were five. There was a kitchen, which was very basic, with a working sink and stove. There was a toilet on both floors, but the second-floor one never seemed to work and the toilet on the first floor only seemed to have an outlet for plumbing. On Saturdays and Sundays, someone in one of the groups would fill up a bucket with water, leaving it by the side of the toilet to be added when needed to flush. The walls were crumbling. The original colonial windows oftentimes balanced on one hinge and stayed permanently either opened or closed. In some places the ceiling beams were exposed as plaster had fallen away over time. The building, though, still seemed to function perfectly, creating a network of graduates and of

acquaintances of graduates or teachers who could then use the space both formally and informally as a place entirely dedicated to writing.

Toward the end of April, I arrived at the usual time to partake in Grupo Ariete’s taller but did not find anyone in the normal meeting room. I heard movement upstairs and followed the noise. Approaching the landing, I saw two group members leaving Raúl’s office and asked them what they were doing. They told me that there had been a leak during the recent storms in some of the back offices and upon further investigation, Ivonne, the Director of Education for the Centre, discovered a large hole in the roof of the building. It had affected the library and they were helping to organize and move the books away from the problem.

I followed the group to the back of the building and around the corner to see a bucket brigade, or a book brigade in this case, as stacks of books were passed down an old, iron spiral staircase from the rooftop library to the second floor. An amazing amount of dust fell from the opening in the floor above as books were handed down. I took my first stack and was shocked by the amount of destruction. The books were rotten, moth-eaten, and deteriorating in my hand as I carried them to Ivonne’s office. The destruction was almost beautiful as layers of papers had melded together or rotten away creating a landscape of peaks and valleys decorated by the words. In her office, Ivonne was on the floor, on her knees, going through each stack, book by book, sorting out those that could be salvaged from those that they would be thrown away. There was a giant cardboard box—so large it required two people to carry it to the garbage bin outside when full— next to the desk, which, over the next hour or so of moving, would be filled up and emptied about 4 or 5 times.

Slowly my shirt, hands and face were covered with the detritus of disintegrating books. I was covered not only with dust, small scraps of paper, spiders and moths, but yellow and red ink, which had turned crayon-like as the paper it was printed on almost liquefied. The books that I carried were not only Cuban classics, but very old editions of world classics. I saw books by the Bronte sisters, Hemingway, Cortázar, Kafka, Garcia Marquez, Joyce, some in English, Portuguese,

and French, but most were in Spanish. There were a number of Cuban first editions. After the books, we started moving magazines and journals and finally sets of cassette tapes. As I carried a small plastic container of protected cassette tapes to Ivonne, she looked at them and started to cry. ‘These are the recordings of the first classes we held here, the first years at el Onelio’. The sadness she felt was not because the tapes were destroyed; they were in fact fine, protected in their plastic case. It was not because the course’s future was in jeopardy; it is a highly lauded and an important part of the Ministry of Culture. She was upset about the destruction of the building, which had fostered groups of writers for years and provided a focal point for the networks created through the course.

Raúl invited me to follow everyone upstairs to see the source of the destruction. The iron frame of the spiral staircase wobbled dramatically as we all packed up it in a line. The roof was a beautiful, red-tiled patio. There was a set of rooms enclosed in glass in front of the stairs, which had been the library. They were now, due to our afternoon efforts, just empty rooms filled with cheap, metal stacks with dust and rot covering the floor. Following the path between the eaves, we turned a corner and I saw the giant hole, about 4 meters in diameter. ‘Ño…’21 _{yelled one of the men who}

was also seeing the hole for the first time. Through the opening, I saw rotting eaves and timbers and the colonial tiles were dropping like dominos ensuring the hole would continue to grow. Unlike Ivonne’s sadness, the students seemed both shocked (at the size of the hole) and unsurprised (about its existence). I asked Lena when it was going to be fixed. She shrugged. She told me they had been talking to the Ministry of Culture about it but said that they could not do anything about it right now as they do not have the time nor the money to fix the building at the moment. But I could not get over how important it felt to me that this hole existed and that no one was going to fix it, at least in the immediate future. My confusion was not reflected in the expressions of any of the people on the roof. Ivonne was sad, but the group members were resigned.

The sadness and the resignation reaffirm another aspect of la cotinianidad: that of a lived reality among daily ruins. Navaro-Yashin (2012) writes about the materialities of the quotidian in

relationship to her field site and specifically ‘affective ruins’22 _{(157). She noted that ‘The affect}

generated by these ruins, which appeared like a shocking war zone to my eyes and senses, had been repressed and abjected over the years’ (ibid: 155). My shock over seeing the hole and the new acute awareness I had of the dangers of returning to the building, were not reflected in the reactions of my interlocutors. El Onelio existed as a place for the writers to engage with literary networks, which would have ideally been established through print media, literary magazines or books; it was a place to present their work to an audience through a mechanism of oral publication and feedback. My experience of the space was that it was the only, regular space of writing and literature my interlocutors had. Yet for those writers, it too was another space of writing in negotiation, succumbing to la lucha cotidiana [the daily fight], like the dining room table, the office, and the waking household.