Havana Cuba. – Book censorship is a big thing, and also old, but even so I think it is great to insist on its existence, to make it known while you can. And although censorship is old, there are always new ways to create such damage. And the old and very great censorship that continues to wreak havoc, although it is not called that way, although today it is only “a bundle of books with moths that no one reads.”
And we would have to remember those scrutiny to understand those contempt. It should be mentioned, and above all not forgotten, that “Index of Banned Books” that was published years ago, hundreds…
Those lists included those books that, according to the Church’s considerations, were heretical and immoral. In the “Index” the titles that could not be published in any way appeared. The list was fixed by a bishop, but first came under the supervision of Henry VIII as far back as 1529.
And so much importance was given to the aforementioned index that “The Sacred Constitution of the Index” was even founded, which would not be rejected until 1966. And those pyres, those inquisitions have continued to brew in many parts of the world. And at the forefront of such indices were the Russians and other European communists; and there are not a few who, without qualms, follow in the footsteps of those communist censors.
Cuba, which would come to “communism” a little later, also recognized the importance of such reprimands to achieve the survival of socialism on the Island. In Cuba, after that fateful 1959, what Fidel Castro’s party wanted was read. , which Savonarola in chief thought was better.
And one of the most faithful standard bearers of Cuban communist censorship would be the Argentine Ernesto Guevara, and others too, but that asthmatic who came to us from the south, exercised it in a big way, becoming another kind of Savonarola, a second-in-command to the champion in chief. . The sick man from Rosario loved censorship and all kinds of punishments. The Argentine did not hide his disapproval of him and censured him, even when he was traveling.
And proof of this occurred in Tunisia and in the Cuban embassy in that country. In Tunisia, on the bureau of ambassador Walterio Carbonell, Guevara found a volume of Virgilio Piñera, and this detail provoked his anger, one of the biggest pranks of that Argentine who was always said to hate deep cleanliness.
With the book in his hand and knocking on the ambassador’s desk, the Argentine asked who was reading that “faggot” there. Walterio Carbonell would later tell, repeatedly, the Argentinean’s prank when he discovered a book by Virgilio. “Who reads that faggot here?” Thus, the asthmatic from Rosario would scream in disbelief and then throw the little tome into the air and through a window.
And I remembered all that today after looking at the image that a friend sent me, and in which a very well closed garbage container appears and, next to the base of the container, some short stacks of books. The container, they told me, was full of books, but very soon a “bookseller” was notified and took as much as he could.”
I managed to take a small volume of Petronio’s complete works, some stories by Felisberto Hernández that I already had, the Treaty of the reform of understandingby Spinoza, Praise of madness, by Erasmus of Rotterdam. I took those books that were marginalized, I took those that the bookseller did not take.
I carried those copies that were relegated. And it is very sad to look at a book in its abandonment. It is sad to look at a book, wise and old, lying on the street and a victim of bad readings. And perhaps it is the poor reading that prevails on this Island that is to blame for these abandonments, but the fate of those books went from abandonment to the worst contempt, until I made some of them my own.
Nobody who was passing through there leaned forward a little to investigate their titles, only the bookseller who arrived before me began to rummage and loaded up with what he thought was salable, profitable. The bookseller did not take pity on the books, the bookseller thought about the little money, undoubtedly brief, that he could get from those discarded.
And the reason for these abandonments, the lack of interest, could be the fault of the poor reading that exists among so many Cubans whom Castro assumed were very cultured. The reason for such abandonments could be explained in that famous Map of bad reading, by Harold Bloom, who explains, as much as he can, the literary canon and the reading of that reader whom he calls the individual reader.
And I don’t know where those “discards” came from. I have not known, at least until today, who gave the order to put them, throw them, in the trash. Maybe from a public library? Perhaps from the very close Ciudad Deportiva? I do not know the reasons for such a disaster, I do not know the reasons for such vandalism in the country that Castro considered the most cultured of all.
Who dared to do that kind of scrutiny? Was it perhaps the fault of the “scrutiny of some bookstore” in the manner of Cervantes, in the manner of Don Quixote? What other books were at the mercy of rains and cyclones? What criteria led to so much contempt in such a “cultured country”?
Perhaps a new Che Guevara? A Fidel vibrating on the rot of a crowd of books? Who decided to abandon it? Which public official got rid of those little things that he later brought with me? I found one Abandoned Galatea and I brought her with me.
Who can decide the ending of a book? It is so contradictory that a country that boasts of having a “fabulous” publishing industry ends up putting a bunch of books in a trash container for safekeeping. It is counterproductive for a country that dedicates great fanfare to its fairs to decide that the place for some volumes is a garbage container and not the bookshelf.
Which eyes, which hands took those books to the pyre? Is it the fault of Fidel Castro’s philippics? Is it man’s fault that he decided, long ago, what things we could read and what we couldn’t? Which books passed the scrutiny this time without problems? Which ones fell by the wayside? In the trash, among the books that I couldn’t look at, there could have been The Quijotethe one with which Fidel Castro inaugurated the national printing press.
What criterion, what authority, leads us to protect or discard a book? Why do we preserve a book? What criteria make us save a previously discarded book, abandoned in the middle of the rot of a garbage tank? Is recognizing a “great author” enough? What topics are good and what are bad? Who can decide the death of a book? Who can decide the life of a book?
What criteria could lead Cervantes to live in a garbage tank? Who can banish Shakespeare to the rot of a container? Who makes Virgilio Piñera, Lezama Lima or the red Carpentier rot in a huge plastic box that was built in some corner of this “so cultured” island?
OPINION ARTICLE
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2024-04-18 19:59:14
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