Young Poets in Cuba

by Rosa Alcala

What I found really astounding about my trip to Havana with a UB group for the cultural festival, "Encounter," in 2001: how young many of the poets are who are being published there, that they're getting support for their literary efforts.

I think that because we live in such a rich country, with such huge middle and upper middle classes, with access to so much, we forget that a great majority of the people who live in the U.S. don't have access to many of those same resources, and a part of that group are artists and students. Not only don't we have access to certain resources, but we're not given the opportunity to work on our art in the way that Cuban artists are -- the time and the space to talk about things. The time to write their poems.

They get support from publishing houses that we don't get. These 24- and 25-year olds have already had two books published and are being guided by older poets, are being taken seriously by older poets. It's not that a similar tradition doesn't exist right now in the U.S. academy, but I often find that a certain amount of seriousness or validation is attributed to publications, either in magazines, or entire publication of manuscripts by publishing houses. Until that happens, one is considered an apprentice.

These young poets in Cuba were taken very seriously. They were spoken about as the generation that is going to forge a new aesthetic and new possibilities, not as mere followers of an older generation. In fact, the older generations, even though there was reverence for them, were considered people that had to make way for something that had to be different, that had to represent what's happening in Cuba now. I'm amazed at the amount of openness that there is in the work.