No Longer A Battered Foe: Balmaseda on Cruz Varela (SHE IS DISSIDENT POETRY WRITER)

[posei...@sympatico.ca]

 

From: malanga <mal...@nyame.yu.ca>
Subject: No Longer A Battered Foe: Balmaseda on Cruz Varela
Date: Monday, March 26, 2001 12:34 PM

No longer a battered foe
She spoke in a little-girl voice, her lyrical verse falling upon a hushed
and packed salon Friday night on Southwest Eighth Street.
But the voice of exiled poet María Elena Cruz Varela carries the strength of
an army.

It's a voice so fearless and powerful that it earned Cruz Varela confinement
in Cuba's political prisons for nearly two years. And, in 1992, as her
brave, condemned words echoed miles outside Cuba, hers was a voice that
earned a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.

The nomination, submitted by the former Costa Rican president and Nobel
winner Oscar Arias, came in a swell of recognition for the horrors that Cruz
Varela endured for her writings and democratic convictions.

Nearly a decade later, she watches in amazement as her chief torturer, Fidel
Castro, is nominated for the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize by some fool in Norway's
parliament.

The reasons that Castro should get tossed out of the running are told by the
numbers of dissidents executed, persecuted, jailed and forced into exile.
Cruz Varela is one of those reasons.
She watches in amazement as her chief torturer is nominated for the Nobel
Peace Prize.

One fall day in 1991, a mob of state security agents stormed her home and
dragged her into the street. They beat her and attempted to force her
crumpled writings down her throat.

She still recalls the government-sponsored thugs. ``Make her mouth bleed!''
they taunted.

For as much as they tried, they couldn't force Cruz Varela to swallow her
words. Later, her jailers tortured her in ways she still cannot fully
describe. But they could not silence her; her 1992 book of poems, The
Exhausted Angel, was translated into 27 languages.

The poet born on a farm prophetically named Laberinto -- Labyrinth -- had
clamored for democratic reforms. Given the violence of her captors, an
outsider might have concluded that she had possessed large quantities of
explosives instead of poems.

Even now, seven years since leaving Cuba, Cruz Varela's flashbacks verify
the violent core of Castro's government.

As I listened to the visiting writer recite her poems before a warm Miami
audience last week, stressing her art over her politics, I could tell Cruz
Varela had evolved in leaps of grace. Her recent years living in Madrid have
not only invigorated her work, they have helped to heal her emotional
wounds.

She had feared she would never regain her inspiration.

``All of my words -- all of them -- had stayed behind in Cuba,'' she
recalled.

But the embrace and fortunate long memory of human rights advocates brought
back all her words and multiplied them.

Now it's not a battered foe that stands in contrast to Castro.

``I'm not a victim of Fidel Castro,'' she said, ``I'm simply a person who
tried to exercise freedom.''

But clearly there are those, like this Norwegian politician, who wouldn't
understand such a concept.

Cruz Varela calls Castro's nomination ``a joke, the product of his own
circuitous lobbying efforts.''

It is, she believes, a desperate attempt to steal the thunder generated by
Julian Schnabel's film Before Night Falls, the story of the late writer
Reinaldo Arenas' struggles against brutality and homophobia in Castro's
Cuba.

``The film is opening the world's eyes to Castro's true nature. And, being
the rabid, celebrity whore that he is, he decided he needed to make a
splashy move, crazy as it may be,'' she concludes in a thin voice that
drifts and lingers at once.