César González-Calero: "The 'damned circumstance' of its insularity has influenced Cuba's fate on a number of occasions"

"Foreign correspondents in Cuba are subjected to blanket censorship of specific issues which they cannot discuss, at the risk of being expelled from the island"
Interviews
(07/12/2010)

The Madrid-born journalist César González-Calerohas won the sixth Eurostars Hotels Prize for travel writing, organized by the UB, the Hotusa Group and the publisher RBA Libros, for his book Cuba a cámara lenta. César González-Calero has spent his entire career working as a journalist in a range of publications in Spain and Latin America, including Diario 16, El Mundo, El País, Expansión, The Washington Post, El Universal, Cambio and Milenio. He now lives in Buenos Aires, where he covers international stories for the daily newspaper La Nación. As a correspondent in the United Kingdon, Mexico, Central America and Cuba, he has covered International forums, political crises, social revolt and natural disasters. In 2009 he published the novel Humano (Inéditor). In his prize-winning book, González-Calero takes readers on an original and entertaining journey across Cuba, where he spent five years working as a correspondent for various publications.

"Foreign correspondents in Cuba are subjected to blanket censorship of specific issues which they cannot discuss, at the risk of being expelled from the island"
Interviews
07/12/2010

The Madrid-born journalist César González-Calerohas won the sixth Eurostars Hotels Prize for travel writing, organized by the UB, the Hotusa Group and the publisher RBA Libros, for his book Cuba a cámara lenta. César González-Calero has spent his entire career working as a journalist in a range of publications in Spain and Latin America, including Diario 16, El Mundo, El País, Expansión, The Washington Post, El Universal, Cambio and Milenio. He now lives in Buenos Aires, where he covers international stories for the daily newspaper La Nación. As a correspondent in the United Kingdon, Mexico, Central America and Cuba, he has covered International forums, political crises, social revolt and natural disasters. In 2009 he published the novel Humano (Inéditor). In his prize-winning book, González-Calero takes readers on an original and entertaining journey across Cuba, where he spent five years working as a correspondent for various publications.

 

You have said that you wish to maintain a neutral stance on the Cuban regime. Nevertheless, how do you think your book will be received by the Cuban authorities?
 
Cuba a cámara lenta is not a book on Cuban politics. It is a window on daily life on the island, containing character studies and narratives of journeys I undertook during the five years I spent there (2003-2008). However, there are a lot of references to the Cuban revolution and the islandʼs past and present. The profiles of the people appearing in the book necessarily include personal views in favour of and against the revolution. The awards panel stressed the “balance” displayed by the book. Balance, however, is not a highly valued commodity in a regime that tolerates only adulation and submission to its ideologies.
 
You have worked as a journalist in various countries in South America. How did your time in Cuba differ from other experiences?
 
Cuba is different in a number of ways. Working as a foreign correspondent is not easy in a country where, as Goytisolo said about Russia under Putin, the “absence of information” is a key mechanism of power. Foreign correspondents in Cuba are subjected to suffocating control by the authorities (phones and e-mail addresses are monitored constantly) and blanket censorship of specific contemporary issues which they cannot discuss, at the risk of being expelled from the island.
 
Your book is full of the contrasts and paradoxes you have encountered in Cuban society. What, in your view, most faithfully reflects the essence of Cuba?
 
The book Cuba a cámara lenta opens with a quote from the Cuban writer Virgilio Piñera, taken from La Isla en Peso. Piñera speaks of “the damned circumstance of water on all sides”. I think that this verse transmits some key ideas about the island. It is the “damned circumstance” of its insularity that has so often influenced Cubaʼs fate. This circumstance obviously has to be considered alongside the natural character of the Caribbeans, whose outlook on the world is different to that of Europeans. In the Caribbean there is another idea of time, of existence...
 
Will this prize mark a change in your career? Or does it motivate you to continue in the way you have worked until now?
 
The prize is, above all, a motivation to continue exploring closely neighbouring literary genres like narrative fiction and travel writing. The book Cuba a cámara lenta, which is about to be released by RBA, falls somewhere between the two genres. Initiatives like the Eurostars Prize for travel writing, organized by RBA, the Hotusa Group and the University of Barcelona, help these genres to reclaim the position they deserve in the literary world.
 
What was behind your decision to write the book? What possibilities did the format offer that your work as a journalist did not?
 

The urgency of modern journalism and the growing prevalence of new technologies often leave little scope for reflection. Some stories cannot be told in 100 lines of print. Daily reporting places excessive constraints on the amount that can be written, and this increases the risk of producing superficial coverage. Narrative fiction, on the other hand, requires greater space and a different timeframe. A book offers writers this possibility, which the media - with very few exceptions - no longer affords. The trend is moving in the opposite direction, towards a flood of brief snippets of information that are updated every minute. But Twitter and its 140 characters cannot describe reality in the way that narrative journalism has always done. The book Cuba a cámara lenta is a tribute to that style of narrative journalism, a genre that, in Spain, emerged from the work of writers such as Manuel Chaves Nogales in the 1930s and has produced celebrated exponents in the English-speaking world, such as Gay Talese and Joseph Mitchell, among others.