Prelude.
Morejon, Nancy
My country is sweet on the outside, but very bitter on the inside,
wrote Nicolas Guillen, in Argentina, at the end of the 1940s.
That's how our history happened: in the midst of canefields that
were bitter and belonged to others, along endless plantations of tobacco
that were fragrant and belonged to others, among coral shoals and reefs
that belonged to others, under the air we breathed that belonged to
others. Cuba was a palm grove that was sold. And the only thing we fully
owned was hunger at early rising, at the height of day, in wind and
weather; the lash and rude pain; the boundless ignorance of the world
and of ourselves; a few dim gods with no horizon; and loads of hopes,
which one day, from the heights of the Sierra, assaulted the Island in
the very heart of the Caribbean. Havana burned like the eyes of a cock.
Night's shadows fled above the coconut palms. A green wind settled
in the morning.
Editorial note: From With Eyes and Soul: Images of Cuba, ed. Dennis
Maloney, photographs by Milton Rogovin. Copyright [c] 2004 by White Pine
Press, Buffalo, New York (www.whitepine.org). Reprinted by arrangement
with the publisher.
* Editorial note: Bodoni is a typeface; a reglet is a flat piece of
wood used to separate lines of type.
NANCY MOREJON (b. 1944) is director of the Center for Caribbean
Studies at the Casa de las Americas in Havana, a member of the Academia
Cubana de la Lengua, and an advisor for the Teatro Nacional de Cuba. One
of the foremost Cuban writers and intellectuals of her generation, her
publications include several books of poetry and theater as well as
critical studies of Cuban history and literature. In 2001 she won
Cuba's Premio de la Critica for her verse collection La quinta de
los molinos, and in 2002 she helped honor Roberto Fernandez Retamar as
the fellow of the Puterbaugh Conference on World Literature at the
University of Oklahoma (see WLT, Summer-Autumn 2002, 27, 52-53).
