Havana Babylonia or Prostitutes in Cuba
Or
An Accidental Way of Attaining Fame
© 2006 by Amir Valle

I will never forget my first years in a literary workshop. It was one of those literary workshops, fortunately, with special advisors and a special status, which did not abound on the island, as I realized years later, when I began a war without quarter against the system of literary workshops and the many writers who defended that way of perfecting the creative talent of the young people we had, pitting them against each other so that, in order to belong, they had to suffer what was considered an indispensable step on the island for anyone aspiring to be a writer.

Our workshop was special because it reunited special people. I would never have enough time to thank my friend, the writer Aida Bahr, for that strength of a titan she showed every week in confronting a fierce bureaucracy that imposed hundreds of barriers, so that other, still very young writers (Alberto Garrido, Marcos González, José Mariano Torralbas, Ricardo Hodelín) would know that writing required a seriousness and an intellectual compromise that would happen only if we were implacable with our first texts. I will never forget the affection of old José Soler Puig in our meetings; nor the advice and hard criticism of that unforgettable friend, Jorge Luis Hernández, to whom I would like to return the favor of all the affection that I could never give him here on earth; nor the dedication transformed into sisterhood of my first literary advisor, Maritza Ramírez; nor the wisdom taught by Luis Carlos Suárez and Daysi Cué; and even less could I erase that insanity that made us found the literary group, SIX OF THE EIGHTY, formed by Torralbas, Garrido, Marcos, José Manuel Poveda, Radhis Curí, precisely because the brotherhood that united us then continued growing, far from the jealousies, envies and internal wars that characterized other literary groups of those times.

My happiness doubled, years later, exactly in 1999, when Alberto Garrido and I decided to compete for the House of the Americas Literary Prize, he with a book of short stories and I with my already well-known testimony Havana Babylonia or Prostitutes in Cuba. All the unofficial news had us both winning the prize: together we had begun and together we would achieve the highest literary award given in the country to a Latin American writer.

I want to take the opportunity to talk about this now.

And although it is an episode I prefer to forget, a matter that I always avoid, I believe that now, with the coming publication of Havana Babylonia or Prostitutes in Cuba by Planeta Publishing, and before the questions arrive from readers (“What is the story of that book”? many ask, each in his own way), I must put on the table some of the cards that, for ethical reasons, I have been holding in silence.

In 1999, after five years of work (including journalistic investigations, interviews, research of official and unofficial information at different levels of the country, consultation of historical, health and political sources) I finished the book, bringing together interviews, testimonials, documents and essays about the world of prostitution in Cuba, basically about the strength this phenomenon acquired beginning in 1990 up to the present, specifically in step with the Cuban economy of basic survival (Cuba has never left a survival economy, at least not since 1959), by means of the so-called “industry without chimneys,” tourism.

Throughout the book, and during seven chapters, four structural blocks alternate: a long testimony about one of the greatest Cuban prostitutes, very well-known and respected in the ‘90s; a second block of essays that develops the history of prostitution in Cuba up to the present, beginning with the first “women of the life” who arrived on the island in one of the ships of Christopher Columbus (a fact that is certainly curious and that has never been exploited by historians); a third block of testimonies from the different prostitutes who gave me interviews; and a fourth block reproducing a series of interviews of other people linked to the world of prostitution in Cuba: pimps, clandestine sellers (of rum, cigars, Cuban music and drugs), owners of private restaurants, owners of houses of prostitution and transvestite shows, lawyers, tourism workers, etc. The book consists of more than 300 pages.

Our Sade Who Art in Heaven or Prostitutes in Cuba (that was the title of the book then) was presented in the genre of Testimony for the House of the Americas Literary Prize that same year, 1999.

At this point I must clarify something: I tell this story having proof that there was manipulation on the part of the jury at the moment my work was evaluated for the prize that, although it was small, was left unawarded, but for obvious reasons–-the safety of the people who showed me the proof-–I don’t have the right to mention them at this time, since I don’t want to put the responsible parties in harm’s way without justice (at least literary justice) remembering their sad role. The moment will soon arrive.

Let’s look at the facts: It is certain that someone knew that the work had been selected for the award; it is certain that a widespread rumor put in doubt the jury’s performance, alluding to manipulations of a political type, among them that the book was not convenient because of the difficult times the country was going through; it is certain that the news of the award spread throughout Havana, and in the award ceremony, when the president of the jury read the act and declared the prize would not be awarded, there was a booing that everyone noticed, including the foreign press. It is certain that the following day and for several days, the foreign media (the Miami Herald, Radio and Television Martí, about ten digital newspapers, etc.) wrote that “a Cuban had been deprived of the House of the Americas award for political reasons.” It is certain that in just a couple of months, I received juicy offers from the Exterior for publication of the book, on the condition that the publishers could manipulate the text against Cuba, politically. I turned down all those offers.

THE REAL NAME

I have said earlier that the book was initially called Our Sade Who Art in Heaven or Prostitutes of Cuba. And I must add that someone stole one of the three copies that I presented to the House of the Americas award office (the organizers returned only one to me when I went to retrieve them and told me that, inconceivably, the other two had disappeared), that someone photocopied the book and posted it on the Internet, even the last page with my personal information, including my telephone number and address. That made me sad and happy at the same time. Sad, because someone committed an act of piracy without precedent in the history of the country, which was done without my consent and which obliged me to bring an international lawsuit for an act of piracy and legal proceedings to find the pirate. Happy, because the book began to circulate, attracted readers, and in a few years I had received thousands of messages from all over the world in my mail. I had to buy an answering machine, and every month the mailman brought to my house anywhere from ten to twenty letters. While the Cuban cultural authorities permitted me to keep my email through Cubarte (the network of the Ministry of Culture), and until they took it away from me in an act that I consider pure cultural fascism, I received daily, for several years, between two and five messages that I decided to save in a special archive, and to which I turned (and turn) from time to time, especially when some news reaches me that I consider lamentable (people dismissed from their jobs for reading a book considered clandestine, workers reprimanded, people labeled as unpatriotic for defending the thesis that I defend in the book, to mention just a few).

Today, if that person who stole my book from the House of the Americas award office appeared, I would do him the honor of an acknowledgment for a simple reason: I was known as a writer in my country; although it seems immodest, I must say that I was one of the most known and mentioned writers by the literary critics, but that knowledge was widespread only among those of us who were in the milieu and those who read, since in Cuba writers do not have the same success as musicians and athletes, who are public figures. Although it hurts us to say it, if you ask the average Cuban for a name of a well-known writer, you surely will get a shrugging of shoulders and, in the best case, you will hear: “I read a book by someone whose name I don’t remember.”

Beginning with the clandestine dissemination of Havana Babylonia or Prostitutes in Cuba, I became (and I quote the words of the writer Guillermo Vidal) “one of the most widely-read writers, the one most sought after in the libraries of the island”; at the presentations of my books, in whatever part of the country, hundreds and hundreds of people would attend and fight to get one of the few copies for sale; and the worst, or perhaps the most shameful, is that the censoring of this book, its condition of being a “banned book,” and the spread by word of mouth of the measures taken against people who have read it, converted me into a myth.

I quote some of the most beautiful messages received:

MANUEL VÁSQUEZ MONTALBÁN, SPANISH WRITER:

Again your stories move me; in Havana Babylonia the verb is aggrandized in your hands. I have read few studies about a moral scab––prostitution in this case––that have such a narrative skill. It is a book written from the heart, because you note that it was deeply distressing to write. For that reason it is distressing to anyone, even when it is a question of some of those empty souls who are so abundant on our no-longer-blue planet. Congratulations for this fascinating study. It is a pity for your country that it now cradles an evil from which no one has ever managed to escape.

JESÚS DÍAZ, CUBAN WRITER
DIRECTOR, JOURNAL OF ENCOUNTER WITH CUBAN CULTURE

Sadness and impotence are the only words I had left when I finished reading your book. Sadness for the blame we have for not having stopped such a disgusting evil; and impotence for knowing that this reality is growing and becoming more complex every day. Your book is an excellent piece of journalism and testimony, which will certainly become a Cuban classic in this genre. You show us what we already know: your grasp as a journalist and your skill as a narrator. I hope that those who read it will discover the existence of this other Cuba that you set forth, and realize that it is one of the Cubas we should cure like you cure gangrene: by tearing it out at its roots.

PÍO SERRANO, DIRECTOR, VERBUM PUBLISHING, SPAIN

It is a magnificent book, heart-rending, well written, with a sure and strong prose, which reminds us of things that should not be happening in our country.

ANDRÉS JORGE, CUBAN WRITER, MÉXICO, (AUTHOR OF ALFAGUARA)

Brilliant and moving, stunning, thoughtful. One more prodigious piece added to your already-respected work as a writer. Thank you for having made me think about our reality with these stories of beings who have been crushed by History. It is a book that presents much to talk about, because it is one of the great books that we have been lacking.

CARLOS CABRERA, CUBAN JOURNALIST, SPAIN

I just finished reading your magnificent work about prostitution in Cuba, which seems to me the best inventory of the victims of the present Cuban reality. (…) Your rigorous investigation has now given me two sleepless nights (…) It moved me with the intra-violence that each line of your excellent field work collects, since even the language of that collection of losers you describe is a terrible violence to assimilate in the hours that it takes to devour the pages.

PAQUITO D’RIVERA, WRITER AND CUBAN MUSICIAN, NEW YORK, UNITED STATES

I could not go to sleep last night until I finished reading the whole book. The same as Chaplin, Cantinflas and the death of Celia Cruz, it made me laugh and cry at the same time. It is the most heart-rending and complete history of one of the great traumas that today makes the reality of our dear island more convulsive.

SIFREDO ARIEL, CUBAN WRITER

A friend just sent me (as a gift) Havana Babylonia in an email version. I read it with amazement, gratefully. Thanks and congratulations.

GUILLERMO VIDAL, CUBAN WRITER

Since the publication of the biography of a run-away slave, by Miguel Barnett, in the ‘70s, there has not been written in Cuba, within this genre, a book of such social impact (…), which, besides its quality, converts it, effectively, into a classic of our literature.

ANTONIO JOSÉ PONTE, CUBAN WRITER

I congratulate you for this classic that you have written.

JORGE C. OLIVA, CUBAN WRITER

Yesterday I got together with other clandestine readers of your work in Fontanar. Five of us are over 60. All are professionals, three are still active and two are already retired. Their professions are: a sociology professor at UH (the University of Havana), a lawyer, two engineering professors at the CUJAE (University Center José Antonio Echevarría), an athlete and a “clandestine struggler” of the March 13 Board of Directors, already in his ‘80s (The Baby).
Opinions:

The lawyer says that you cut it short, that there is much more rot hidden in that underworld. The sociologist thinks your imagination contributed something, quite a lot, and that you exaggerated some people almost into making them caricatures. The two engineers were impressed with how troubling the underworld that you describe is, and they recriminated against the sociologist. The lawyer and the sociologist, in turn, started arguing.

We are all of the opinion that you are very gutsy and that you must have invited not just a few problems writing about this subject.

DAGOBERTO VALDÉS, ESSAYIST AND DIRECTOR OF MAGAZINE, VITRAL

This is an indispensable book in the history of Cuban testimony; a required reference in our sociology studies, an essential book, already a classic.

I am filled with pride reading what so many people whom I love and respect have said about my book, while I pray to God for the humility necessary to not be conceited. Also, trying to be faithful to that humility, I confess that I owe the actual title of the book to one of those secret readers. I will tell the story:

In 2001, while I attended a presentation in the Province of Las Tunas of one of my books published by a Cuban publisher, Blue Girl Under the Rain, a man of about 50 years stood up in public and asked if I would read “something from Havana Babylonia.”

I thought: “Shit, he has me confused with another writer,” and I don’t remember the exact words I said, but I let him know.

“But you are Amir Valle,” the man insisted. I said yes.
“You yourself are the author of that book,” he answered, “It’s the book about the prostitutes,” and he went on to tell me the fragment that had most impressed him.

The title he mentioned seemed so perfect that when I returned to Havana, I decided to change the name of the book. From then on, and thanks to that anonymous reader, the book is called Havana Babylonia or Prostitutes in Cuba. And what I have just told is its story.