“Life in Cuba is such that, if you have money, you virtually have no problems. But if you don’t have money, you’re screwed,” says the author.
EFE (via 14ymedio), Juan Palop, Havana, July 13, 2024 — Cuban author Pedro Juan Gutiérrez explains in an interview that his anger is gone and he has entered a new, happier, more poetic stage as is evident in his new book, Mecánica Popular [Popular Mechanic]. Now 74-years-old, the author of Trilogía sucia de La Habana [Dirty Havana Trilogy] and Animal Tropical [Tropical Animal] claims he has given up cynicism, anger, alcohol and rage. He now embraces Buddhism, stoicism and — in literature — poetic language and character development.
His latest book, recently published in Spain, is a collection of seventeen short stories set in Cuba in the 1950s and 1960s. Short, seemingly superficial works with deeper meanings, snapshots whose moral message the reader must fill in. And all with a clearly autobiographical component.
Gutiérrez happened to come across some old issues of the magazine Mecánica popular [Popular Mechanic], which he says taught him how to read and draw. Finding them, he says, was like “opening a door to memory.” That discovery led to this intimate, sometimes even mysterious book, which contrasts with the crude existentialism of the work that made him famous in the 1990s.
“I now have a more poetic view of life. I am happier. I have learned how to better control my personal life
“I now have a more poetic view of life. I am happier. I have learned how to better control my personal life and that is reflected in what you write, in everything you do,” he says. He says that life is about stages and that, since turning sixty, he has adopted “a philosophy of poetry, contemplation, and meditation.”
