From the Balseros to the present day: The unceasing crisis of the Cuban people

A few months ago, I read Cuban writer Leonardo Padura’s [*] long and intricate novel The Man Who Loved Dogs [**], which examines the final years of Leon Trotsky and of the Stalinist agent Ramón Mercader, who assassinated him in Mexico in 1940.

The cover of the English translation of the book and Leonardo Padura

The novel is set in the 1990s, a decade in which Cuba was plunged into a profound crisis following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe. As a result, Padura’s book contains numerous bleak scenes that vividly portray the severe hardships endured by the Cuban people during those years. These passages not only enable us to visualise events that took place merely thirty years ago, but also help us to better understand the devastating impact of the deep crisis now gripping Cuban society -an issue I sought to outline in my article, The collapse of the Cuban economy.

In one part of the novel, during the summer of 1994, the narrator -novelist Iván Cárdenas- goes with a friend [Daniel] to Cojímar, the historic fishing town just east of Havana that still bears traces of Hemingway. At that time, Cojímar and other fishing villages in the surrounding area were witnessing some of the most dramatic scenes in Cuba’s mass exodus. This episode has gone down in history as the “Balseros Crisis”.

The novel’s “writer within the novel”, Cárdenas, describes what he saw there as follows:

A group of Cubans launching their makeshift boats during the 1994 wave of migration. (A still from Luis J. Perea’s documentary La Esperanza de un Pueblo 1994.)

The spectacle we found turned out to be devastating. While groups of men and women, with tables, metal tanks, tires, nails, and ropes devoted themselves along the coast to giving shape to those artifacts on which they would throw themselves into the sea, other groups arrived in trucks loaded with their already-built boats. Each time one of them arrived, the masses ran to the truck and, after applauding for the recently arrived as if they were the heroes of some athletic feat, some threw themselves at helping them unload their precious boats, while others, with wads of dollars in their hands, tried to buy a space for the crossing.

Another still from La Esperanza de un Pueblo 1994.

In the middle of the chaos, wallets and oars were stolen. Businesses had been set up and were selling barrels of drinking water, compasses, food, hats, sunglasses, cigarettes, matches, lights, and plaster images of the protecting Virgins of La Caridad del Cobre, the patroness of Cuba, and of Regla, Queen of the Sea, and there were even rooms to be rented for amorous goodbyes and bathrooms for greater needs, since the lesser ones were taken care of on the rocks, shamelessly. The police who had to guarantee order watched with their eyes fogged over by confusion, and only intervened reluctantly to calm people down when violence broke out. Meanwhile, a group of people were singing alongside some boys who had arrived with a pair of guitars, as if they were at a camping ground; others argued over the number of passengers that could be taken on a balsa raft so many feet long and talked about the first thing they would eat upon arriving in Miami or about the million-dollar businesses they would start there; and the rest, close to the reefs, were helping the ones launching their craft into the sea and bidding them goodbye with applause, cheers, promises to see each other soon, over there, even farther: way over there. I think I will never forget the big, voluminous black man with his baritone voice who, from his floating balsa raft, yelled at the coast: “Caballero, last one out has to turn off the light in the Morro,” and immediately began to sing, in Paul Robeson’s voice: “Siento un bombo, mamita, m’están llamando…”

“I never imagined I would see something like this,” I said to Daniel, overcome by a deep sadness. “It’s come to this?”

"Hunger rules,” he commented.

“It’s more complicated than hunger, Dany. They lost their faith and they’re escaping. It’s biblical, a biblical exodus…”

“This one is too Cuban. Forget about the exodus, this is called escaping, going on the lam, getting the hell out ’cause no one can stand it anymore…” [***]

In Cuba today, the working class and other layers of the working population are experiencing similar hardships, albeit on a far greater scale and with far more severe consequences. Yesterday’s “balseros” have become today’s mass migrants. Although it has its shortcomings, The Man Who Loved Dogs remains an important source for understanding the human dimension of Cuba’s economic collapse. Indeed, at times a few pages of a novel can offer a reality far more powerful and profound than an entire volume of economic statistics and analysis.

[*] Leonardo Padura (b. 1955) is one of the most internationally renowned contemporary Cuban writers. His crime novels -set in Havana’s impoverished neighbourhoods and centred on the “would-be-writer/cop” Mario Conde -Havana Black, Havana Blue, Havana Gold and Havana Red- have been translated into numerous languages. Unlike many Cuban authors, Padura continues to live in his homeland and has, to a large extent, succeeded in avoiding the censorship and ostracism imposed by the regime. His best-known work, The Man Who Loved Dogs, opens in Cuba in 2004 and tells the intertwined stories of Trotsky, Ramón Mercader and the fictional writer Iván Cárdenas, set against an international historical canvas shifting between Havana, Barcelona, Moscow and Mexico City.

[**] The novel was first published in Spanish in 2009; its English translation appeared in 2014. The Turkish translation, by Volkan Ersoy, was published in 2021 by Bilgi Yayınevi.

[***] Leonardo Padura, The Man Who Loved Dogs, trans.: Anna Kushner, Bitter Lemon Press, 2014, London, pp. 403-404.