Out of the original group, only Ángel Arango took up SF again in the 1980s, though his most talented and productive years were by then already past.
And Miguel Collazo? Though his prose grew more and more sophisticated, as shown by surprising poetic books such as Onoloria (1971) and Estancias (1985), which could even be classified as fantasy broadly defined, he never wrote SF again. Disillusioned, the dreamer of the 1960s, who had set out to learn Chinese when the Asian power under Mao seemed like a viable alternative to Soviet bureaucratic rule, quickly succumbed to alcoholism, dying at the age of fifty-eight in 1991, at the outset of the Special Period, the hard years of shortages following the collapse of the USSR and the Socialist bloc. Shortly before he died he published his swan song, a chapbook with his magnificent short story “La gorrita del Papa,” an ultra-realistic description of the semi-marginal world of regulars at the neighborhood bars that he knew so well in the flesh.
Years later I had the privilege of meeting his son Abel, to whom he dedicated The Journey, through Abel’s wife, who at the time was working at the Agencia Literaria Latinoamericana; later they both left for Miami. And—small world!—while Restless Books was working on getting the novel translated into English and published in the United States, I discovered that Collazo’s widow was none other than Xiomara Palacios, who had been my mother’s good friend since the days when they were both young and active in amateur theater, one as a puppeteer, the other as an actress.
Sadly, Xiomara, a lovely person, died a year or so before she could see her husband’s great novel published abroad for the first time.
Much could be written about The Journey from a literary theory point of view. A fundamentally symbolic and polysemous work, its characters undertake an inner journey that has sometimes been compared to the construction of a new society, communism. Even though it remains clear throughout that Collazo’s characters are attempting to return to a glorious past, can you ever really return to something? Bathe in the same river twice? And isn’t all progress, to some degree, a return to what we used to have, but on a higher level?
Others have seen it as a metaphor for travel itself, the great impossible dream for Cubans after 1959. A period when we were unable to travel whenever and wherever we felt like and had to get used to going on journeys only when we were given permission. Inhabitants of an island surrounded by the natural barrier of the sea, those of us who tried or managed to visit other countries, other latitudes—especially those not counted as members of the socialist bloc—were often considered, in Cuba as in many other socialist countries, potential deserters, “impure” for having come into contact with the “capitalist contagion,” and at a minimum looked upon with suspicion. Ideological and geographic prisoners, like the inhabitants of Ambar on their arid world, almost all of us dreamed about crossing the sea that surrounds our island. The same aspiration remains topmost for many of my fellow citizens. Of course, now that the government no longer requires its surrealistic and arbitrary Exit Permit in addition to a passport in order for us to travel, we Cubans are discovering that only a very few countries are willing to extend entry visas to people they see as likely immigrants.
But for me, despite its stylistic timelessness, The Journey is above all a novel of its time, the New Wave of the 1960s—whose echoes, curiously, barely reached Cuba, even at its peak. A book that explores inner space, the doubts and contradictions of its characters, more than the unearthly planet Ambar, so exotic yet so familiar. Like an onion peeled layer by layer, there is much to be discovered in successive readings of Collazo’s novel: an analogy about social processes, about the changing mental paradigms in a civilization, about prophets and reluctant masses. About preachers and their flocks. About the skeptical and the indifferent. In sum, about humans in all their immense complexity and variety: the object of analysis for all art.
Now, thanks to Restless Books and their dedicated translators, Anglo SF fandom will have the opportunity to judge for themselves why Collazo is considered as important an author in Cuban science fiction as Agustín de Rojas or Daína Chaviano—and to enjoy this, his finest creation, a work that has held up better to the passage of time than most stories by contemporaries such as Ángel Arango or even the talented Oscar Hurtado.
Nunca es tarde si la dicha es buena, a Cuban proverb goes: good things are worth the wait. So we may hope that, though it arrives long after its own time has passed, reading this novel now may convince curious readers that Cuban SF, this genre that remains all but unknown beyond our watery borders, is good for more than vernacular humor and parodies; that it has also produced reflective and philosophical works of rare depth, such as this one: a novel that, even half a century after it first appeared, continues to amaze, intrigue, raise questions, and inexorably capture the imagination of everyone who enters its pages.
YOSS
September 19, 2018
I
Jalno
1. Beres and Bímer
Jalno walked among the ruins, remembering that once upon a time this place had looked completely different. His son Beres picked up a petrified twig and began tracing designs absentmindedly in the sand. Jalno stopped and stared: why always so unenthusiastic, so apathetic? Hadn’t he brought them here for something incredibly important? Hadn’t he yelled at them about it a hundred times? Actually, he’d been sick. Too sick. In recent years his clouded mind, his mind alone, had created this disorder. When he thought about it, nobody nowadays had any direction, any way forward.…
Jalno wiped the dust from his face and looked around to see how the men were clearing the rocks. What a stupid way to work! Why were some of them shifting rocks from here to there, only for others to move them right back to where they’d been? Why did men suddenly plop down and lie in the rubble, as if they’d forgotten everything they needed to do? Why were they playing, why dancing, why sleeping slumped across each other? Anyway. Who could you blame. Jalno shook his head and finally said it was okay: himself, he couldn’t lift another rock. After all, others were going to benefit from it, enjoy it. Not him. This was where they were; they were gambling on this place. Then again, the machines must still be under these ruins, waiting.… At least that’s what his father, Nur B, had said. Yes, they ought to still be here, Jalno thought, shiny, slick, and beautiful. Yes, absolutely. They had to be here, under his feet, same as they’d been when he was a kid.
He closed his eyes. What good would the machines do them?
Well, no point worrying about it. The machines must know what they’re good for. The machines knew everything; why else be a machine. They probably even knew the men were up here looking for them. Damn it! They should only have to clear a little rubble and the machines should appear.
Beres stood atop the ruins, his arms spread wide: his body was reflected in glints of scattered shards, metal and plastic. Bímer, Jalno’s other son, clambered cautiously up to another spot; when he reached the summit he cried out in fear, thinking he was dangling in midair.
Jalno told him it was a dome, as if that explained everything. Bímer slid across the transparent plastic, screaming, trying to dig his nails into the polished, seemingly nonexistent material; suddenly he dropped down along a gutter.
Now Jalno was pointing, rather tentatively, at the place where he thought they should dig. Here, or there, or maybe a bit farther over there? Everything had changed!
Little Borles lugged a rock and let it fall, sending plumes of dust into the air. Everyone stared at the dust cloud as if it were the most entertaining sight in the world.
Daylight was fading fast.
Jalno went back to giving orders. He was tired. He hadn’t realized just how tired till now. Something was pounding furiously inside his chest, and his right arm was