Néstor E.

Rodríguez
University of Toronto

An Art of Making Ruins: Antonio Jose Ponte’s Countercurrent Aesthetics

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent decline of the Soviet

influence on the island, changes in Cuban nationalist narrative have paved the way for a

new diction in Cuban literature. Although extremely diverse in its aesthetic proposals,

this diction has become a critical space that questions, either directely or obliquely,

Cuba’s political culture. Since the mid-60s, and particularly throughout the 70s, that

official culture started to show the signs of political orthodoxy. For instance, there is the

fate of Virgilio Piñera, Antón Arrufat and Herberto Padilla in the “Revolutionary city”,

and, even closer to the present time, those of María Elena Cruz Varela, Raúl Rivero and

Antonio José Ponte. In the case of the latter, his public support of the journal Encuentro

de la Cultura Cubana and his denouncement of the governement’s reluctance to

distribute it in the island resulted in his exclusion from the UNEAC (the Cuban Writers

and Artists Union). In a country like Cuba, where the most simple aspects of everyday

life are institutionalized, being a writer not affiliated to the UNEAC is the equivalent of

social death.

The union of political power and culture in contemporary Cuba seems to suggest

that, for decades, there has been a tendency to shape a kind of cultural dolmen - dolmen

in its dual sense of monument and memorial. However, the cultural cartography exercised

by the most important writers from the island and from exile today is very distinct from

the logic of exclusions and inclusions of the official map of Cuban culture. Rather than

literary loyalty to uniform systems, what prevails in the poetics of the early 90s and the

new millenium is more of a radical distrust towards the fixed nature of configurations.
 In an article published in 2005, Francisco Moran makes some convincing remarks

about the poetry published in the island during the Special Period that could be applied to

contemporary Cuban literature in general:

Instead of a map marked by bolts, coastguard vessels and unyielding

militants, we have a more contaminated and porous one. Cuban poetry of

the last decades has questioned all cartographies, it has transformed them

into escapes, not into places of permanence. These unfixed maps that

disappear and turn up again out of irony and anger are the ones that are

alive, gnawed and eroded by the poets of the 80s.

In Cuban Palimpsests Jose Quiroga links that new cartography of Cuban culture

in the context of the Special Period to an aesthetics less committed to an ideological

rupture with the political project of the Revolution than stemming from a situation of

deep disenchantment. Quiroga refers to the tension between power and subjectivity in

contemporary Cuba, the tension between what the Revolutionary City asks from its

subjects (sacrifice, stoicism) and what these subjects give back with a certain touch of

bitterness:

…bitterness involves a melancholic way of understanding struggle from

the point of view of [the subject’s] future loss. In these terms, it is related

to nihilism, defined as more than merely lack of belief, or absence of

illusion, but as a distancing effect, one that views events from the point of

view of something that has already occurred. However, it seemed to me

that, unlike nihilism, there was no real redemptive power to bitterness. It

remained within the temporal framework of a relationship with the state

Bitterness creates a subject “out of joint”. (19)

Another recent book on Cuban intellectual history: Tumbas sin sosiego:

revolución, disidencia y exilio del intelectual cubano by Rafael Rojas, analyzes the

interplay of diverse modes of thinking Cuban culture at the time when the “Revolutionary

city” was institutionalized, and he examines how theorizations about that culture have

evolved until the present day. According to Rojas, in today’s Cuba it is possible to

identify a clear distintion between ideology and culture for the first time in 40 years of

revolutionary ruling:

In today’s post-communist phase of Cuban socialism, ideology and culture

establish a new discursive tension. Such tension is the outcome of the

clash between a cultural politics based on the “defense of the national

identity” and a cultural practice that tends to the opening up of the

ideological canon of nationalism and to the inscription of new social

actors who, from diverse alterities, query the homogeneity of the socialist

subject. (447)

Taking this observation as a starting point, my paper will examine some of the

intricacies of this alternate polis sketched by Rojas, understood as the epistemological

nemesis of the ‘Revolutionary city’. Cuban cultural production of the last 15 years, and

literature in particular, depicts the complex relation of historical memory and post-

Revolution cultural ethos from a variety of different aesthetic postures. For instance,
urban displacement, ruins, and melancholy are among the more salient tropes and

metaphors in current Cuban literary production. While critizicing openly or obliquely the

social order of the Revolution, writers such as Antonio Jose Ponte also engage in the

articulation of a distinct political morality in their literary poetics. My presentation will

examine the work of Ponte as one of the most suggestive examples of this divergent

diction in today’s Cuban literature. More specifically, I will analyze a short-story titled

‘Un arte de hacer ruinas’, included in the collection Cuentos de todas partes del Imperio,

a text that the author himself describes as “una interrogacion sobre el destino

arquitectonico de La Habana” [an interrogation regarding the architectural destiny of

Havana]. My aim is to complicate that “interrogation” by considering the story’s

portrayal of Havana in the aftermath of the Soviet decline as a move towards the quest of

the city as “arche-texture”, that is, a literary quest for a lost potential, an urban utopia,

corrupted over the course of post-revolutionary history. In my view, Ponte’s ultimate

intention in “An Art of Making Ruins” is to give the reader a glimpse of a social utopia

that is to be found not in the future, as advocated by the Revolution since the beginning,

but in the dilapidated archive of a city where, as the protagonist puts it, “todo se conserva

como en la memoria” [everything is kept, like in our memory].

The protagonist of story “An Art of Making Ruins” is a student of architecture,

who is interested in researching the practice of constructing “barbacoas”- improvised

floors in the buildings of Havana. The student’s hypothesis is that Havana is expanding

“from the inside, in barbacoas” (“hacia adentro, en barbacoas”). He convinces an old

friend of his grandfather, who is former professor, to supervise his dissertation, and

together they start sketching the new project. The mentor enjoys talking about the
contradictory nature of time and explains to his student that “el tiempo es un espacio

mas” [Time is just another space]. The plot complicates with the subsequent visits of the

student to his mentor’s apartment in Centro Habana, where a mysterious guest melts

coins in the back of the apartment. Later on, these coins turn out to be the means by

which the protagonist is able to gain access to the underground city of “Tuguria”, a copy

of Havana built out of the ruins of the city above. I will suggest that this passage from

Havana to Tuguria – the underground city - functions in the story as the marker of a

utopian quest through which the epistemic power of the normalized “Revolutionary city”

is put into question through irony.

But before descending into the underground city, the protagonist is introduced to

“Professor D” by his mentor. Professor D a former urbanist who has written an

unpublished study entitled Tratado breve de estatica milagrosa [Brief Treatise on

Miraculous Weight-bearing Capacity]. In this manuscript, Professor D. develops a

controversial theory about Havana. He believes that with an ever increasing population

density and no urban planning, the city can only remain standing by way of a miracle:

“Una ciudad con tan pocos cimientos y que carga mas de lo soportable, solo puede

explicarse por flotacion” [A city with so few foundations, bearing up more than it could

possibly sustain, can only be explained by flotation].

Professor D. lives in a building declared as ‘inhabitable’ and spends his days

gathering objects from urban debris. With lampposts, park benches and street signs as

decoration, the professor’s apartment looks like a museum of a vanishing city. The

Havana Professor D. wants to capture is a city besieged by its unpredictable historicity,

tribulations of the subject to inscribe his/her signs on the intricate domain of the political.

From the professor, the protagonist of the story learns about the “tugures”,

enigmatic figures that maraud the city looking for old buildings to occupy and then to

demolish. The narrator explains the actions of the “tugures” as a desperate quest for

living space: “People could fill a building until it collapsed. They could find space where

there appeared to be no more; they pushed until they could fit in their lives. And all that

effort usually ended up doing the opposite.” [La gente podia copar un edificio hasta

hacerlo caer. Se hacian un espacio donde no parecia haber mas, empujaban hasta meter

sus vidas. Y tanto intento de vivir terminaba casi siempre en lo contrario.”]

In the story it is difficult to understand whether Professor D. is demonizing the

“tugures” or, on the contrary, praising a somewhat anomic living practice he himself is

incapable of following. As Professor D. describes “[the Tugures] are people with a light

shadow and nomadic blood… and that is hard on a small island”. For Caren Kaplan, a

nomad is someone “who can track a path without succumbing to nation-state and/or

bourgeois organization and mastery”. If one is to believe Kaplan’s interpretation of the

trope of displacement in postmodern theoretical ruminations, and to apply it to a society

such as that of Cuba, which is immersed in a precarious balance between nationalism and

State-capitalism, the nomadic practices of the Tugures could be interpreted as the

ultimate gesture of resistance. Indeed, the nomadism of the Tugures could be seen as

some sort of defiance of the Revolutionary city’s interpellation, the same Revolution that

in the 90s abandoned the ‘internationalist’ and Marxist-Leninist character of its rhetoric
for a more localist discourse, and, in economical terms, adopted an interventionism that

was the norm both under Machado and Batista.

A silent witness of the city’s transformation into ruins by action of the Tugures,

Professor D. seems to justify such fate for Havana when he explains to the student:

“When you cannot find new land, when you are surrounded, there is still one last resort:

to take out what lies underneath the constructed. To dig, to walk vertically. To look for

the connection between the island and the continent, the horizon’s code”.

Professor D.’s remarks take us to another book by Ponte: Las comidas profundas,

a brief literary essay published in 1996. This book deals with the metaphor of food or,

more precisely, with the shortage of food in the Special Period, as leitmotif employed to

reinterpret Cuban cultural identity. One of the main points discussed in Las comidas

profundas is the need for Cuba to overcome its cultural and political isolation. Ponte

presents moving examples of the inventiveness of Cubans to make food out of anything

in the early days of the Special Period as a way of explaining Cubanness in terms of

interaction and contingency. As Ponte puts it:

Substitute meals not only claim to be more noble, but also try to go

further. They speak of the good times in the past and establish a relation

between yesterday and today. In a time when all identities are in danger, it

seems clear that we are the same as before, we persist thanks to old habits.

Suspiciously, that identity that we want to assume despite all

circumstances, escapes us and does not comply with yesterday and today.

Because metaphor is a relation, the arc goes from A to B, and is never A

or B alone.
The identity Ponte advocates, then, is not that of the socialist subject, but one based on

the daily practices of ordinary Cubans in the Special Period. The latter functions

according to the logic of relation and is less monolithic than the former. A similar

pointing towards a politics of relation and the instability of identity could be identified in

Professor D.’s description of the Tugures as victims of the circumstances:

Nothing is like experiencing the building were you used to live collapse…

When the building where you used to live collapses, you discover that

what you had until then was nothing more than air, nothing more than the

power to float unaware at a certain level from the ground. When that

privilege is lost, there is nothing left. And that is when the circumstances

make a Tugur out of you.

In other words, while in Las comidas, Ponte describes the food practices of the Cubans as

creating a new identity at odds with official dogma, in this short story, it is the Tugures

that are formulating a practical resistance at odds with the Revolutionary City: an identity

that is not stabilized as a cultural dolmen, but responding to the circumstances of

deprivation and shortage of living space.

At the end of the story, both Professor D. and the student’s dissertation adviser

have died. Trying to solve the puzzle of these sudden events, the student follows the

enigmatic character who appeared at the beginning of the story melting coins. He is led to

the entrance of an antiaircraft refuge. This marks the passage from Havana to its exact

replica underground: Tuguria, a space from which the protagonist will not be able to

escape.
 Jose Quiroga reads this tale of two cities as the “psychic tomb of the narrator

facing what Havana once was”. In a similar fashion, Jose Maristany states that Tuguria is

“a metaphor of the social psyche, where what is no longer there leaves its scar, and thus

its memory”. I prefer to read Ponte’s portrayal of a labyrinthine underground Havana in

terms of those cultural “counter-sites” identified by Foucault with the notion of

“heterotopia”: he defines this as “a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real

sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously

represented, contested, and inverted”. In other words, instead of seeing the passage from

Havana to its subterranean replica as a melancholic re-enactment of a time past, it could

also be interpreted as an “other” space that potentially escapes the normalization of the

“Revolutionary city”. However, it is important to note that in the eyes of the protagonist

Tuguria is as coercive as the real city above. The fact that he has to pay to enter Tuguria

transforms the city into a commodity, inscribing it into the logic of capitalism.

Furthermore, once inside, the student is unable to understand his environment or find an

exit to the system. Paraphrasing Foucault’s 5th principle of heterotopias, the student is,

by the very fact of entering the city, excluded. He thus embodies the modern alienated

individual. Ponte then is less optimistic about the potential utopian value of the counter-

site. His story does not offer a simple resolution to the contemporary problems that he

here seeks to explain in urban terms. There is no ideal utopian place of escape.