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The Cuban writer Gerardo Fernández Fe published this week in the magazine Letras Libres an essay on Max Aub and Cuba in which he uses the figure of the exiled Spanish intellectual as a mirror to reflect on the current situation of the island, concluding that in Havana of 2026 “there is not even the hope that existed in Spain before the death of that dictator who slept near the incorrupt hand of Saint Teresa of Jesus.”
The essay begins with an exchange on social media between the exiled Cuban journalist Ileana Medina —who has been residing in Santa Cruz de Tenerife for about 30 years— and a Spanish friend who compared the situation in Cuba to that of Francoist Spain. Medina responded bluntly: "I tell you, life in Franco's Spain was a garden compared to what Cuba is today."
Fernández Fe takes that phrase as a starting point to draw a literary and historical parallel between two dictatorships, referencing the two major travel diaries by Max Aub: Enero en Cuba (1969) and La gallina ciega (1971).
Aub —a writer, playwright, and leftist liberal with no sympathy for the Soviet Union— arrived in Havana on December 23, 1967, and participated in the Havana Cultural Congress, held from January 4 to 11, 1968, which brought together more than 500 intellectuals and which he described as "nonsense." His initial enthusiasm was notable: on the first day, he wrote, "If all the anarchists in the world agreed, what a monument they would raise to Fidel Castro!" and he ventured to say, "It is impossible for Fidel to understand the Soviets," eight months before the tanks from Moscow entered Prague.
But reality was eroding that illusion. In January in Cuba, Aub criticized the "classic disarray of socialist countries" in services and the regime's complicity with Francoism for commercial reasons: "Cuba maintains excellent commercial relations with Spain, its revolution lives thanks to the USSR. It's sad, it's true, and in that case, there's nothing more to say," he wrote on January 6, 1968.
A year and a half later, Aub returned to Francoist Spain between August and November 1969, an experience captured in La gallina ciega. What he found frustrated him for opposing reasons: a society that had stopped speaking ill of Franco and was only looking to the future. "I spent as much time as possible with young people; none of them ever asked me anything about the Civil War. Journalists conducted more than 50 interviews with me, and in none did they ask anything about the conflict," he lamented. A friend pointed out the difference between the two dictatorships: "Perhaps you would care more if they critiqued Fidel Castro," he said, referring to Franco.
Disenchantment with Cuba deepened when the Padilla Case occurred in 1971: poet Heberto Padilla was arrested and forced to give a public self-criticism. Aub stated, "If it weren't ridiculous, it would be disgusting." On December 21 of that year, he wrote a personal letter to Fidel Castro: "Hurry up, comrade; justice is all well and good, but for living beings. It is of no use to the dead; it is also of no use to a hungry, diminished, sickly people." The letter, partly prompted by the fact that his 15-year-old grandson was going hungry in Havana, concluded with a devastating question: "Homeland or death, they shouted, and that is the problem. You choose. We will overcome! Who? To whom?"
Fernández Fe anchors his reflection in the data from Cuba in 2026, where the crisis is the most severe since the Special Period. A survey by El Toque with over 42,000 valid responses revealed that 96% of Cubans consider political change urgent, and 60.9% support a direct military intervention by the United States. The blackouts exceed 20 hours daily, with record electrical deficits of 2,153 MW, and 33.9% of households have at least one member going to bed hungry.
The essay envisions Aub landing today in Rancho Boyeros and understanding within 24 hours what took him weeks to grasp in 1967. Fernández Fe concludes with an image of the writer gazing from the balcony of the Habana Libre, alone, watching the sea as Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings plays: “Music of tragedy. The one that touches us. Before returning to illusion.”
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