The foundation of the Cuban nation is essentially linked to the creation of a Cuban imaginary by the part of the narrative literature that, around the famous gatherings organized by the writer and promoter Domingo del Monte, was written in the Island in the final years of the 30s of the 19th century.
An element of greatest importance in the creation of this imaginary space, prior to the creation of the national space, was the narrative fixation of the image of the city, in this case, Havana.
Since the seventeenth century, Havana had become part of Cuban literature, and even universal, but not precisely through traditional literary genres, but through a utilitarian, scientific and commercial literature that was agreed upon in a manner precise to the needs of a very specific society, the one generated by a production-service colony, as defined by the historian Manuel Moreno Fraginals, who would be in charge of systematizing and revealing the importance of that literature focused on topics such as navigation and art of shipbuilding, of such importance for the busiest port in the western hemisphere during that colonial stage. The Havana of that literature was then, more than a social or spiritual space, a marine enclave, of shipyards and fortresses, of maritime and military culture, according to the commercial and strategic importance of the city that was already, by the way, the third, the most populous in America, even when a part of its population had a floating character, it was made up of sailors, soldiers in transit to the mainland and merchants without a specific place.
The first to propose, consciously and even more, preconceived, the creation of a physically-spiritual space, definitely historical of the city, would then be the writers José Antonio Echeverría, with his historical account Antonelli and, above all, Cirilo Villaverde , through the original story Cecilia Valdés and, above all, with the novel The Young Girl with the Golden Arrow (1841). Before doing so in these works, certainly, Havana had appeared as the scene of some - few, indeed - stories, among which one could mention The Cave of Taganana and The Dead Bird, by Cirilo Villaverde himself and El cholera in Havana, by Ramón de Palma, all published between 1837 and 1838 but characterized by the intention of recreating more or less real episodes. However, when reading these texts by Palma and the first Villaverde against those who succeeded them, it becomes clear that none of them had proposed the conscious exploration of the urban landscape as an essential component of the "national space" and its unique characteristics.While Antonelli refers to a foundational period of the city - at the end of the 16th century - Villaverde writes of his "actuality" and manages to assemble the social, architectural and psychological fabric of the city, bequeathing the first versatile image of Havana and its inhabitants —Social and economic, national, ethnic groups.
From that moment on, the city becomes the most complex and representative scenario of the nation in Cuban literature, the most precise mirror of its distinctive qualities.
An important step in this appropriation occurs thanks to Villaverde himself when he publishes in 1882 the final version of Cecilia Valdés, now also entitled The Hill of the Angel, in an attempt - already specified in the book - to put the characters at the same level of transcendence and its vital space, that is, the city. In this transit, of course, the same evolution of the author plays a decisive role from his years as a young romantic writer to those of a veteran author already permeated by the realist manners.
With great leaps - or from milestone to milestone, as it is only possible to move in such a short space - the next significant moment in the literary appropriation of the city by the Cuban narrative occurs in the first decades of the twentieth century in the realistic-naturalistic novels of authors such as Miguel de Carrión and Carlos Loveira, who use the city environment as a precise setting for their stories and characters, without needing to explain and define it, but simply assuming it as a space already created by their predecessors, among which we should always remember Ramón Mesa, who in the late nineteenth century and from the realist realism, left works of critical Havana belonging as My uncle the employee.
Perhaps the culmination of this process of appropriation of an urban space conceived as a space of the national takes place with the moment of great splendor of the Cuban narrative set around the 40s. And, among all the many works published then that are developed in Havana, two in particular achieve total appropriation of their space based on the same argument in the story.The first of these works is the story by Lino Novás Calvo "The Night of Ramón Yendía" - perhaps the most impressive and perfect of the stories written in Cuba - and the novel The Harassment, by Alejo Carpentier. If in the first the city appears as an enemy scenario, which constantly repels the protagonist, closing all its doors, in the second it is conceived as a labyrinth and enveloping space, protective and challenging at the same time. But perhaps the most important thing in these two masterpieces is that in them their respective authors do not feel the need to "explain" the city, even to see it as a whole, but simply assume it in their chaotic human and physical, architectural presence And social.
The narrative of the 60s, however, achieves the true and definitive culmination of this process of appropriation of a physical and human space, but it no longer does, so only through the creation of physical scopes, architectural singularities, contrasting descriptions, but through language. The publication of Three Sad Tigers, the novel by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, finally materializes one of the oldest wishes of Cuban novelists and storytellers to "create" their own language, a distinguishable language for the city. Undoubtedly, the finding of this "literary Havana" language deepens and completes the appropriation of the urban space as an expression of the national space, by endowing it with its own words to express its own realities.
From this work and up to the present, the findings regarding a literary definition of the city environment have only taken advantage of the teachings of these founders and their work for more than a century of writing.Perhaps most notable, in the last decades - the 90's and the current one - has been the treatment of the city's space as a reality in disintegration, contrary to what was sought by the previous authors, who were precisely proposing integration and , with it, fixation and definition.
The social and economic realities of recent years and a certain exhaustion of the historicist look that prevailed in the narrative of the 70s and much of the 80s, have led, as a reaction, a reflection on the visible disintegration of the spaces of the city, which was assumed as literary material by several authors, among which Pedro Juan Gutiérrez and his dirty narrative about Havana could be cited, or a novel of chaos and despair as The distant palaces, by Abilio Estevez, where his own author faces the closed image of his first novel, Yours is the kingdom, to enter a plural, mobile, almost indefinable universe of a Havana in Frank demolition.
Within this process, we cannot forget the participation of a genre that, starting in the 90s, begins to participate in a more realistic and literary way of the Cuban artistic process and, within it, of the new vision of the city as a chaotic space and in disintegration. The new Cuban police narrative, a typically urban and corrosive genre, has fundamentally chosen the city space as the setting for its arguments and, with them, has created a murky, problematic and, above all, chaotic image of the national space through the image of the city.
The new characters, realities and contradictions that roam the streets of Havana have once again served - as in the remote 1840 or the increasingly distant 1950 - to recreate the spiritual space of the nation and give voice and image to through narrative literature, the best able to propose this type of global constructions. Perhaps that is why Havana today, more than space and stage, has become a character, stalked by the same uncertainties and regrets of the individuals who inhabit it and make it throb.
Taken from the book Between Two Centuries, published by IPS in 2006
