A decade after she won the Isabel de Polanco prize with her essay the invisible fist, Carlos Granés once again dazzles us with an ambitious account of the Latin American artistic avant-gardes and their interaction with the revolutions and politics of those countries. The book begins narrating the early death of Martí, liberator of Cuba, riddled with bullets in a battle; and closes it with a bland epilogue about the predictable end of Fidel Castro. “That was the strangest thing of all: Castro died and nothing happened.” While the epic of the poet meant the premature inauguration of the 20th century in Hispanic America, the discreet agony of the commander, indisputable icon of all the revolutions of the subcontinent, left behind a Cuba that continued in the past, “and kept the entire continent anchored to the ideological disputes and broken promises of that century that refused to end for us”.
Between both deaths, so many things have happened that inevitably we find ourselves before a voluminous work, which encourages Granés to suggest reading it in parts according to the particular interests of each one. The proposal, to a certain extent mimics the options for dealing with Hopscotch, must be rejected. Cortázar’s invention, to whom Granés certainly does not devote much attention in his work, was another nod to the fabulous cronopio that signed the novel, but it did not diminish its content, which in the case at hand also deserves the reader’s full attention. .
We are facing a serious work, so much so that whoever signs it frequently resorts to humor and sarcasm, in case someone gets bored, which is impossible in my opinion. The story is structured in three well-defined times of the permanent delirium in which, according to the author, that land of utopias has lived: the delirium of the avant-garde and the search for modernity, with the early dream of the Motherland, the search for a common destiny and the exaltation of anti-Yankee and anti-imperialist sentiments; the delirium of identity, the explosion of nationalism, the consolidation of states and the dangerous drift of many of them towards fascism; and the delirium of pride, the rebirth of the revolution and the invention of Guevarism, which even takes us to Maduro. All this in a permanent conjunction between art and politics, poetry and power. That incestuous relationship gives the story an insurmountable appeal and helps to understand the mistakes and even the crimes of a society in which literary genius and ambition for command have gone together too often.
I recognize my predilection for the first shipment. It has reconciled me again and like never before with Rubén Darío, whose dense manipulation by the Francoist educators made many post-war children end up exhausted by his esdrújulas. The attention paid to the futurism of the Italian Marinetti, a movement not so well known among us, and the cheerful description that the author makes of the modernist poets should also be noted. Militant cosmopolitans, in love with the European avant-gardes, they presumed to know more about Paris than the Parisians themselves. Equally interesting is the deep friendship and subsequent disagreement between the political power and the Mexican muralists who continue to amaze the world (Rivera, Orozco, Siqueiros). Perhaps there has never been a similar phenomenon when it comes to putting art at the service of the revolution, although this would end in the dictatorial drift that the PRI embodied. Granés assimilates in a certain way the PRI to the APRA of the Peruvian Haya de Latorre and to the Argentine Peronism. Their coincidences are evident, as well as the different paths they ended up traveling. On the other hand, he himself recognizes that there are very few countries that can compete with the special relationship that the governments of Mexico established for years with artists and writers, the attention that power paid to culture, and the repeated complicity of creators. with the regime, although many ended up deserting.
The delirium of arrogance, the third part of the essay, considers it embodied by the Cuban revolution, of which not only the opprobrious regimes of Venezuela and Nicaragua are sequels, but also the winning currents in the last elections in Bolivia, Peru and Chile. This part of the book is the most predictable, perhaps because we have had the opportunity to follow the events at least through the radio, the press and television. I am not sure, however, that the author, who was born in 1975, has fully understood the fascination that the Cuban revolution aroused among European youth, especially university students, who were immediately agitated by May 1968. In any case, he could not experience it or experience it himself, but many of the protagonists of the Spanish political transition did. The same thing that happened with Allende’s suicide and Pinochet’s coup. In those years, aside from political convictions and militancy, the will to strengthen ties between democratic Spain and the peoples of Latin America responded to the unfortunate ignorance of Latin American reality and history in which my generation was miseducated. So today we know of the atrocities and murders committed by Che, but for a long time his image headed the beds of tens of thousands of young Spaniards, fed up with Franco’s mediocrity. It was the minimum protest, without any risk, of those who felt imprisoned in a cultural and political ghetto of enormous proportions.
In any case, we are faced with an admirable work that combines scholarship and entertainment. But also, and above all, it encourages debate and reflection on who the hell we are, the components of this family of Hispanics and Latinos, willing so often to risk their lives in order to try to live it. It is part of the very current lament for the deterioration of liberal democracies. But also in the traditional Hispanic nightmare of the stories of leadership and domination. Those bad dreams are responsible for the so-called delirium.
