The Fallen by Carlos Manuel Álvarez
I read the books Armando gave me, the book of stories about Che Guevara that tells how Che refused the gift of a bicycle for his daughter, because bicycles belong to the State, to the People, not to any particular individual.
I asked Armando why, if bicycles were for everyone and not for individuals, they made bicycles for individuals to ride? Why didn’t they make a gigantic bicycle that we could all get on and pedal together, millions of pedals moving at the same time, all riding in the same direction?
—Carlos Manuel Álvarez, The Fallen
I started reading The Fallen by Carlos Manuel Álvarez one morning during my day off and I didn't stop reading until I finished it, the same afternoon. It is an insightful portrait of a family in Cuba, during the 1990s, an era of hardship and deprivation, known as the “special period” that followed the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Shortly after the revolution and the embargo imposed by the United States, Fidel Castro turned to the Soviet Union for help. The Soviets ended up buying all the sugar Cuba could produce, usually at inflated prices and selling it cheap at subsided prices. Almost 80 percent of Cuba’s international trade depended on the Soviet Union.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, Cuba’s foreign trade also collapsed. The economy contracted by a third, and Castro announced his country had entered a ‘Special Period in a Time of Peace’. The impact on the Cubans was brutal. The country run out of fuel. Without fuel and fertilizers, there were food shortages. Many people went hungry and lost weight.
Thousands fled to the United States in a bid to find a better life. In the meantime, the United States, in an effort to push Cuba to the brink of collapse and bring about regime change, tightened further the trade embargo.
But the system survived. Castro initiated economic reforms, temporary measures to save socialism. Cubans were allowed to set up small businesses. The government legalised the possession and use of the dollar and sought foreign investment, especially in the tourist industry. Again, as it was under Batista, before the revolution, hotels became a venue for sex tourism, as young Cuban women were forced to sell their bodies to escape the hardship and earn money for their families.
The story revolves around a family in breakdown, a metaphor for the country’s harsh reality during that period, and with their relationships to each other. Carlos Manuel Álvarez writing is intelligent, symmetrical and precise. The story is told in five sections, each divided into four monologues, one for each person of the family. The father is a dedicated communist, a “Fidelista” who still believes in the dream of the revolution. The mother, a chronically ill former teacher, whose seizures caused her to suddenly collapse, has relinquished control over the home to her daughter, who has abandoned her studies to work as a waitress in the hotel her father manages. And finally, the son who is finishing his military service, enduring a pointless and mind-numbing sentry duty.
A family in disintegration in a poignant reflection of a country in a free fall.
The obscurity of life is its uneven distribution, I think, the manifest internal imbalance of episodes, the uneven distribution of major events. Before the age of twenty a transcendental maelstrom is continually building, a stew that never ceases to reverberate, and we cannot digest everything that life serves us to us. There are constantly new signs to interpret, signals and feigns flashing pas, third and fourth dimensions. At twenty, at precisely twenty, everything is in place.
After that, I think, comes a stretch of barren years; the thirties, the forties, the fifties, the sixties. Then, supposedly, man acquires wisdom. I can’t comment, since what purpose wisdom serves a man if all that he can do with it is look back on the things he didn’t do before he had that wisdom, and torment himself with all the things he might have done if he’d had it.
Carlos Manuel Álvarez, The Fallen
The Fallen is Álvarez’s third book and his first to be translated by Frank Wynne. In 2016, Álvarez was named to the prestigious Bogotá39 list, as one of the thirty-nine Latin American writers under forty to watch. The Fallen has been published in the U.K. by the wonderful Fitzcarraldo Editions.