Amir Valle Ojeda

Beginning with the appearance of two cadavers in a miserable hovel in a poor Havana neighborhood, Lieutenant Alain Bec's investigation takes him once again to an unknown world, something also hidden from view for the majority of Cubans: homosexual and transvestite prostitution directed at foreign tourists, as a form of survival in the face of the economic and social debacle that exists in the country at the time of the plot. Searching for the reason of a supposed suicide in which no one believes, again the two men, Alex Varga and Alain Bec, reveal to the reader a world that is corrupt and rotten, where money, fear and violence dominate everything.

Six stories in which Cuba finds itself in some of its most controversial difficulties: a writer who travels to Paris and shares the drama of exile with other colleagues; a family that lives in an undefined place of the universe where masks observe; a black woman who waits facing the sea for a sea that departs, like a modern Penelope; a writer who discovers that long-awated posterity is too tortuous a path; a baseball fanatic who invites the mythical pitcher Duque Hernández in defense of nostaliga; and a writer who searches in Madrid for an old love, lost by his stubborness and (once more) exile.

The Words and the Dead is a rare historical novel. Rare, because it is not (according to the definition of historical authenticity) a true historical novel; and yet, there has been no Cuban novel written in the last 50 years that has been so faithful to the country's history. Beginning with the death of Fidel Castro, the man who has been closest to him, his favorite bodyguard, reminisces about the past 40 years, from the time that, as a child, he joined the rebels in the mountains and gained Fidel's trust, becoming almost his shadow. Below Fidel's gaze he becomes an accomplice, blinded by admiration and burdened by fidelity. The novel relates, with a sadistic innocence (born from the bodyguard's childlike viewpoint), the most notable moments of the Revolution, not by recreating the official story, but by telling the story that people have formed privately, tying up the loose ends left dangling by the official history, allowing the construction of another view of that history and those momentous events. We are left with a vision that is curiously closer to the possible truth than the one offered by the official viewpoint. This is a book where the great names become real human beings, those names that have been in the news when the subject "Cuba" was the fashion: Fidel, Ché, and many others are again in the public eye in Amir Valle's novel, which reclaims, with a seductive narrative mastery, one of the most important themes that the best Latin American novels have offered: the story of the dictator.

A reflection that approaches the variety of intentions, the comparison of points of view and the themes found in the writers of the southern province of Cienfuegos, considered by critical research as the first approach in essay form to Cienfuegan narrative throughout its whole history, up to the beginning of the decade of the Nineties.

The only finalist in Latin America for the Distel Verlag Internacional Prize 1998, with this work the author inaugurates a series of detective novels that has converted him in a short time into one of the most distinguished voices of what is known internationally as the Latin American Neo-Detective genre. In order to rummage around on the outer edges of Cuban society, Alex Varga, a black man (a kind of unofficial mayor for the marginal neighborhoods of Havana), and Police Lieutenant Alain Bec form an enriching relationship that allows them disquieting plunges into crime as a means of survival in present-day Cuban society, even for the non-delinquent population. In this first novel, these two characters solve a horrifying case of child prostitution.

The short stories brought together here, after the substantial prologue of the anthologist, are from young writers who have made themselves known since 1984. The convincing list and the quality prove the creative possibilities of the authors who, with curious and disimilar texts, penetrate very cleverly into the world of the every day as well as that of fantasy and linguistic transgression, in a moment of their incipient literary careers that succeeded in calling the critical attention of the nation, before converting themseves into important names in present-day Cuban fiction written by women.

The book that launched its author to the recognition of the large Cuban reading public, converted into one of the most-read books by the Cuban population in the first years of the '90s, and which became the subject for works of thesis, diplomas and other higher studies in various universities in the country, beginning with the novel incursion of this author into the lives of the direct protagonists of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.