Writer Jorge Ferrer narrates the traces of totalitarianism in three generations of his family
14ymedio, Madrid, 3 June 2024 — “There are many ways to have encountered the Russian and Cuban revolutions, and end up hurt by them. A lot,” says Jorge Ferrer (b. Havana, 1967). The writer and translator wanted to investigate the stories he knows best: those of a family, his own, shaken by totalitarianism. His book De Rusia a Cuba. Contra la memoria y el olvido [From Russia to Cuba. Against Memory and Oblivion] (Ladera Norte publishing house), which has just been presented in Madrid, narrates the vicissitudes of three generations that dealt differently with the destinies set for them by Castroism.
Its protagonists are three Ferrers. Federico, the grandfather, born in Spain, the adventurer who ended up as Batista’s police officer, a novelistic character, with excessive love affairs, who preferred to serve drinks in New York rather than languish as an outcast, a misfit, what in the USSR they called byvshi and in Cuba worm, lumpen or scum.
His son, Jorge, repudiates him and chooses to embrace the new times as a meticulous apparatchik, “a perfect creature to grow up in the Cuban and Soviet worlds,” where he was assigned as a senior official. And the grandson, Jorge, the schoolkid, who is none other than the author himself, studies in Cuba and Russia, where perestroika lives, and r