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Cuba
has been in the news
headlines ever since
the Trump
administration swooped
into Caracas,
Venezuela, to kidnap
its president Nicholas
Maduro and his wife.
During that U.S.
operation, 32 members
of Cuba’s armed
forces and intelligence
services were killed
(in addition to 800
Venezuelans). This
group of Cubans had
been involved in
protecting Venezuelan
presidential officials.
It’s estimated
that Cuba has been
getting half of its oil
from Venezuela. Now the
Trump administration
has promised to cut off
that oil supply and
take control of Cuba.
In December 2024, the
Steiny Road Poet
visited two cities in
Cuba— Havana and
Cienfuegos—meeting
artists of various
disciplines—writers,
musicians, singers,
dancers, painters,
sculptors. Steiny
experienced rolling
black outs—for
example, the
electricity shut off
during a dance
performance, silencing
the recorded music and
plunging the staging
area into darkness. She
witnessed people
scavenging through
trash for food or
saleable items. She saw
people waving dollar
bills trying to hitch
rides with private
individuals. This was
because public
transportation is
extremely unreliable
and motorists must wait
hours to get a limited
amount of gasoline. She
wrote about it in her February
2025 column.
To recapture the experience of that visit to the fascinating island
nation, Steiny read Marcial Gala’s The Black Cathedral (La
catedral de los negros—2012) as translated into English by Anna
Kushner in 2020. It’s a gritty novel in three sections told by a
chorus of two dozen voices. The main story, set in a poor
neighborhood of Cienfuegos, revolves around a Black family of
five: the father Arturo Stuart, a Sacramentalist pastor, who
obsessively builds a cathedral in his new community, his wife
Carmen who seems to fade into the woodwork, and their three
teenage children—daughter Johannes (the artist), first son David
King (a.k.a. Cricket who loves to sing and gets beaten by his father
for doing it), and second son Samuel Prince (the effeminate poet
nicknamed Jelly who is constantly described as being as hot as his
sister, and who we first meet when he literally cracks open the
head of a taunting neighbor with a book of poetry).
The secondary story concerns a man calling himself Gringo who
evolves as a serial robber and killer. Gringo butchers his prey to
dispose of the body and has his sidekick Piggy sell the human
flesh as meat. Meanwhile, Gringo falls for Johannes and pretends
to embrace her father’s brand of Christianity. When Gringo fails
to woo Johannes, he flees to the United States where he
occasionally kills the women he marries. But he gives up on
butchering his victims because he knows he can’t get away with
cannibalism in the U.S. Eventually, he gets caught in Texas and is
put to death by lethal injection.
The novel includes ghosts and thugs who tell their side of things
as well as an architect and a Santeria padrino (high priest) who
authenticate what others are saying about building Arturo Stuart’s
never-to-be-completed cathedral and opine about the influence
of African spiritual beliefs versus Catholicism.
The novel is richly peppered with elements of high and low
culture that include historic figures (e.g., José Martí, Barack
Obama, Hitler); worldwide literary authors, such as Rimbaud,
William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Dante; and
touchstones of hip status like motorcycles, racing cars, race
horses, pizza. Exaggerated expressions of racism, misogyny,
antisemitism, and anti-LGBTQ sentiment are prominent among
Gala’s characters without there being any evidence of love or at
least tolerance.
Neither religion (as represented by the unfinished cathedral) nor
magic realism (represented by the talking ghosts of Gringo’s
victims) offer any hope for a good life on earth. Berta, the last
character of the narration says that Cuba will succumb to global
warming and be submerged under water. Then after everyone
perishes, “extraterrestrial voyagers” will find the unfinished
cathedral, but they will think it was “the main temple of a city of
happy beings and that the parishioners’ children ran down its
aisles…will it matter that it wasn’t like that?” Existential angst
makes sense for this island subject to horrific hurricanes and
political forces like those of the United States under the Trump
administration.
Translator Anna Kushner, born in Philadelphia to Cuban exiles,
does an outstanding job of showcasing Cubano Spanish, using
expressions like Babalawo, a high priest known as the keeper of
secrets, influenced by Yoruban culture that arrived in Cuba with
slaves taken from Nigeria; acere, meaning dude as in “¿acere, qué
bolá?” (Dude, what’s up?); guajiro, a man who lives in the west of
Cuba and is considered a country bumpkin (these are Gringo’s
victims). These words are not translated, leaving readers to look
them up on their own, since no glossary has been prepared for
this edition.
Gala’s novel resonates with much of what Steiny learned about
Cuba from the Cubans she met during her visit there. But in the
tradition of sophisticated Postmodern literature, neither Gala nor
his translator Kushner made The Black Cathedral an easy read. A
reader who puts the work in to understand The Black Cathedral
will be rewarded by a rich appreciation of this complex Caribbean
culture.
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Writings
