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| Cuban dissident writer Raúl Rivero speaks to reporters from his home in Havana on Tues., Nov. 30, 2004, moments after being released from prison. (AP Photo/José Goitia) |
This extract from my forthcoming book about independent Cuban journalism is being published here on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the forced exile of Raúl Rivero from Cuba in April 2005.
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Master and Teacher
In Spanish, the word maestro has two meanings: master and teacher. Raúl Rivero was both.
He was a proven poetic master, widely considered among the best and most prolific poets of the revolutionary period.[1] He helped launch the pioneering Cuban literary magazine El Caimán Barbudo in 1966, subsequently won Cuba’s top two poetry prizes while still a young man, and then went on to publish more than ten volumes of poetry both in Cuba and abroad.[2] He also taught journalism at the University of Havana after graduating in 1969 as a member of the first generation of journalists trained in the profession following the triumph of the Revolution.
Rivero was also a master journalist. As wryly noted by Pablo Díaz Espí, Rivero’s editor at CubaEncuentro and Diario de Cuba, his nimble, simultaneous practice of poetry and journalism, “made him bilingual” as a writer. Of course, Rivero’s skill as a journalist was quite muted during the 1970s and 1980s given the ideological muzzle he was forced to wear working as a propagandist for the official press both at home and abroad.
However, his journalistic talent at composing brief, vivid, and aesthetically original chronicles of daily life in contemporary Cuba became apparent between 1995 and 2003, during which time he published hundreds of such day-in-the-life crónicas abroad via Cuba Press thanks to his various international editors and collaborators. Indeed, one of Rivero’s most emblematic crónicas from these years was his five-part series, “La vida cotidiana” (Daily Life), which was written in December 1998 to inject some sober reality into celebrations of the Revolution’s 40th anniversary that month.[3]
Finally, Rivero is almost universally praised among his colleagues in the independent journalism movement on the island
(García, Quintero, Escobar, Cino, Domínguez, and Olivera) for the sage reportorial instruction and compositional advice he constantly dispensed to his fellows at Cuba Press and in other independent press agencies, always while burning through an endless stream of cigarettes and small cups of café cubano.
La Crónica
The reportorial genre known in Spanish as la crónica is a style of literary non-fiction – long and widely used in Latin America – that chronicles the details of everyday life in brief, vivid vignettes often with an underlying message of progressive socio-political critique. Well-known and influential practitioners of the form include the 19th century writers Rubén Darío (Nicaragua) and José Martí (Cuba/New York) and, in the contemporary era, the Argentine journalists Tomás Eloy Martínez and Rodolfo Walsh.
As opposed to straight journalism that aims to report “just the facts” of who, when, where, and why, the crónica is a distinctly literary narrative style that mixes journalistic reporting with the aesthetic, creative flair usually associated with fiction or poetry. For this reason, the crónica often overlaps with costumbrismo, a Spanish and Latin American literary tradition that reflects everyday life, customs, and mannerisms characteristic of particular eras, locales, regions, or countries. Thus, the crónica inhabits the liminal space between literature, journalism, and memoir since it often also includes first-hand testimony.
The fiction of Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez earned the name “magical realism” based on the style of novels like One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera given their description of the magical elements embedded in everyday life. Likewise, la crónica as practiced by Raúl Rivero in Cuba between 1995 and 2003 can be considered “quotidian surrealism” based on Rivero’s ability to humorously evoke the surreal in his provocative and decidedly politically incorrect reflections on everyday life as lived in Cuba during this very “special” period.
The late Cuban poet Manuel Díaz Martínez perfectly captures the unique character of Rivero’s prose in the following description extracted from his prologue to Recuerdos olvidados (2003, Hiperión), a collection of el maestro’s work published when the writer was imprisoned in Cuba between 2003 and 2004:
“Lo mejor de Rivero prosista son sus crónicas de la actualidad nacional. Revitalizan en clave moderna la gracia y la agudeza del mejor costumbrismo cubano. En ellas, con su humor tan criollo, con esa ironía suya que en ocasiones estalla en un sarcasmo espectacular, con el mismo asordinado sentimentalismo que atraviesa sus versos, Rivero nos ha dado una visión facetada y al mismo tiempo integradora, a base de viñetas que son como fotogramas de un filme interminable, de la realidad cubana. Estas crónicas nos llevan a la calle, nos acercan a la gente. Y dan testimonio del surrealismo cotidiano que se vive en la isla.”
In the same vein, the long-exiled Cuban novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante echoes this assessment in his own prologue to Rivero's book, Orden de registro (2003, Editorial Hispano Cubana), arguing that Rivero exhibited a “remarkable originality” in the journalistic prose he produced during these years. He also notes that Rivero’s crónicas were widely read and admired on both sides of the Atlantic because they revealed a gritty and long-repressed “undiscovered country” to readers accustomed to tales of revolutionary sacrifice and achievement and because Rivero – the master journalist – practically “invented a form of narration that split the difference between fiction and the vignette of denunciation."
Search Order
On Thursday, March 20, 2003, State Security agents raided the apartment on Peñalver that Raúl Rivero shared with his wife Blanca Reyes in Centro Habana, confiscating all his work materials and taking the famed poet and director of Cuba Press into custody. Though Reyes was used to the theatrics of Cuba’s State Security agents, while they carefully collected the all the detritus accumulated during her husband’s life as a poet and journalist as if they were forensic investigators prosecuting a murder, she thought to herself, “If they show this stuff to the world, people will just end up laughing. All journalists, whether they have degrees or not, use such things to work” (Beaulieu 2013: 343).
Rivero himself must have laughed internally as well, thinking at least briefly about his ironically prophetic poem “Search Order” (Orden de registro), which he had published just the year before in Mexico in his latest poetry collection Puente de guitarra (Guitar Bridge). The poem describes with poetic economy the absurdity of just such a raid on the home of a poet and journalist.
“Eight policemen
are examining the texts and drawings of my daughters,
and are infiltrating themselves into my emotional networks/
[…]
with a search order
a clean operation,
a full victory
for the vanguard of the proletariat.”
While the agents completed their inventory of the apartment, Rivero made a quick call to Jorge Rouillon, the foreign correspondent for the Argentine paper La Nación. Reyes quietly took the phone from Rivero and described to the reporter what was going on in a whisper. “They are raiding the house! Please tell the world!” Then she added, “They are in our living room, come quick…,” before the line was cut (Beaulieu 2013: 344).
Given that this was the third day of the roundup and that Rivero’s home was a well-known gathering spot for dissident writers and independent journalists, the street outside was crowded with neighbors and other curious onlookers. When the agents placed a handcuffed Rivero into the patrol car as if he were some kind of terrorist, a handful of angry neighbors began to shout. However, the loud denunciations that echoed in the street were aimed not at Rivero as they had been during his 1997 “acto de repudio” but at the officials themselves. “¡Abusadores!” they clamored. “¡Libertad!” (García 2013).
For their part, Rivero’s colleagues at Cuba Press, Tania Quintero and her son Iván García remained in a tense and tenuous holding pattern for the next few months of “terror-charged days” (García 2010), awaiting a second roundup that – thankfully for them – never came. In ordering this massive crackdown during the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Fidel Castro had anticipated a muted international response to Cuba’s “Black Spring.” Instead, the international condemnation was immediate, broad-based, and nearly unanimous. It even included progressive luminaries and longtime intellectual fellow-travelers of the Cuban Revolution such as José Saramago and Eduardo Galeano.
Indeed, the European Union reacted by quickly agreeing to impose a “common position” of economic sanctions on the island.
This energetic response helped keep Tania and Iván out of prison and led her to conclude, as she puts it in her memoir, that the Cuban government “had made a bad bet” in throwing the book at so many, so quickly, for so long. This, despite the fact that many of their former colleagues who had spearheaded the founding of the Cuban independent press with them during the second half of the 1990s would end up languishing in prisons far from their homes for nearly a decade.
Rivero himself spent the remainder of 2003 and nearly all of 2004 in La Canaleta Prison in Cuba’s Ciego de Ávila province – not far from where he was born but roughly 250 miles from his wife and home in Centro Habana. However, thanks to an outpouring of international pressure and under the pretext of letting him go out of mercy due to his failing health (which was indeed severely deteriorating), he was released (but not exonerated) on November 30, 2004.
He returned home a changed man. As attested to by both Reinaldo Escobar and Iván García – who visited him separately at his Centro Habana apartment before he went into exile in Spain on April 1, 2005 –, the man they once affectionately referred to as “Gordo Rivero” had become noticeably thin in prison, losing perhaps 45 pounds during the previous year-and-a-half (García 2021).
But weight loss was the least of his problems. In fact, when Escobar asked him about the difficulties he experienced in prison, Rivero preferred not to mention the harsh living conditions, meager food, physical threats from other prisoners, or his months in solitary confinement (Machover 2009: 44-63). Instead, he responded simply, “they treated me like shit, not even a single blow,” which Escobar took to mean that the bruises he suffered were internal and would mark him for the rest of his life (Escobar 2021; 2025).
Upon García’s visit, Rivero apologetically explained to his journalistic protégé, “We are leaving for Spain. It is a banishment, the regime is leaving me no other option,” adding with his usual acerbic wit mixed with an anticipatory nostalgia, “They parked the plane right outside La Canaleta so that I leave the country. I do hope it’s not a trip with only a one-way ticket” (García 2021).
Some months after his arrival in Spain, Rivero was interviewed by the Cuban-French researcher Jacobo Machover about his prison experiences and how it felt now to be free. Rivero could not deny the joy he felt at being individually free. At the same time, he continued to carry inside a deep sense of bitterness at having been forced to abandon his beloved patria (homeland) together with a heavy sense of obligation to those comrades-in-arms – like Ricardo González Alfonso – he left behind.
“I do not feel culpable,” he clarified to Machover.
“What I feel is a debt with those people. But I cannot feel guilty for my own freedom."
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[1] Even Manuel David Orrio, the man who passed as an independent journalist for eleven years and then testified against Rivero during his April 2003 trial as agent “Miguel,” refers to him as “a distinguished journalist and poet - said to be the best of his generation […] the emblematic figure of the independent Cuban journalism movement,” in a chapter of his unpublished memoir which he shared with me in December 2024.
[2] These are Papel del hombre (David Prize, 1969), Poesía sobre la tierra (Julián del Casal Prize, 1972), Corazón que ofrecer (1980), Cierta poesía (MINFAR Prize, 1981), Poesía pública (1983), Escribo de memoria (1987), Firmado en La Habana (1996), Estudios de la naturaleza (1997), Puente de guitarra (2002), Recuerdos olvidados (2003), Corazón sin furia (2005), Vidas y oficios (2006), and Contraseñas para la última estación (2015). Two anthologies of Rivero’s poetry have also been published. They are Herejías elegidas (1998, republished 2003) and Orden de registro (2003).
[3] First published in Le Monde on January 2, 1999, and republished many times since, this series of quotidian vignettes describes the “other world” most Cubans experience far beyond the one inhabited by government officials, Havana-based foreign diplomats, and the tourists visiting Cuba’s growing number of hotels and beach resorts. It is a Cuban version of Jacob Riis’ photojournalistic sensation, How the Other Half Lives (1890), sans photography. Cubans’ everyday struggles and illicit “hacks” to obtain food and transportation (“Invent, resolve, escape” and “Camels in the Caribbean”), the sad reality of Cuba’s much vaunted systems education and health care (“Spirit and Material”), and their ongoing search for something to believe in (“The Return of God”) are all richly described, as is the pervasive sense of failure and hopelessness as Cubans face an uncertain future after 40 years of Revolution (“Where Are We Going?”). This series and many of Rivero’s other pieces can be found reprinted in the three volumes of crónicas that collected his work from Cuba Press originally written between 1995 and 2003. They are Pruebas de contacto (Proof of Contact, 2003), Sin pan y sin palabras (Without Bread and Without Words, 2003), and Lesiones de historia (Lesions of History, 2005).
