Jorge Ferrer presents ‘Between Russia and Cuba’ in Barcelona. Against memory and oblivion.
14ymedio, Yaiza Santos, Barcelona, 17 May 2024 — The history of the link between Cuba and the Soviet Union, and what this meant for the world in the years of the Cold War, is well known. However, until now no one had related the intimate implications it had for several generations of Cubans. Especially those young people who, sent to study in Moscow, witnessed glasnost and Perestroika, waited for the change to be echoed in their country and ended up exiled.
The task of explaining this “very strange link,” between a Caribbean island and the icy lands of the USSR, in the words of Ricardo Cayuela, director of the Ladera Norte publishing house, was far surpassed by Jorge Ferrer in Between Russia and Cuba, Against Memory and Oblivion, which he presented this Thursday at the La Central bookstore in Barcelona.
The essayist and art critic Iván de la Nuez, resident in Spain for more than 30 years and presenter of the event, described the book as “huge, tremendous, extraordinary,” going beyond narrating the “life that every Cuban could have had.” The three lives – related in the three parts that make up the volume, are that of the grandfather Federico, a police officer under Batista exiled in the United States in 1968, when Jorge Ferrer was a baby; that of the father Jorge, a preeminent apparatchik at the National Bank of Cuba; and that of himself. In reality, says De la Nuez, the three lives are “at