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Finding a Way in AlamarKristin DykstraPublished online: 19 Apr 2011.

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Finding a Way in Alamar

Kristin Dykstra

Kristin Dykstra’s translations and criticism feature work by Reina Marıa

Rodrıguez, Omar Perez, and others. Her bilingual editions include Time’s

Arrest (2001) and Violet Island and Other Poems (2004), both by

Rodrıguez, as well as Something of the Sacred (2007) and Did You Hear

about the Fighting Cat (2010), both by Perez. She co-edits Mandorla: New

Writing from the Americas with Gabriel Bernal Granados and Roberto

Tejada, and is Associate Professor of English at Illinois State University.

A short walk from the home of poet Juan Carlos Flores is the home of

his late contemporary, Angel Escobar (1957�1997), where a tile honoring

Escobar’s life and writing marks his front door. Both poets have drawn

from the energies of Havana’s cosmopolitan scene and developed a

following in the city’s literary centers. They have also propelled cultural

activity in recent decades in their neighborhood of Alamar.

Alamar is a housing community in eastern Havana, designed in the

1970s to decentralize the city’s population and accommodate new arrivals

to the region. Microbrigades erected the buildings, following a general

plan designed by the Ministry of Construction. Because there were not

enough skilled workers to respond to pressing needs, the Microbrigades

incorporated volunteers, temporarily released from their usual work-

places, into the construction teams. The result: hundreds of new buildings

rapidly built between the highway and the sea.

Today, Alamar represents the triumphs and failings of its moment. ‘‘On

balance the Microbrigade efforts were positive conceptually and socially,’’

write Mario Coyula, Joseph Scarpaci, and Roberto Segre, favorably

comparing housing unit sizes, degrees of light and air, and green areas

in Alamar to other ‘‘self-help’’ housing initiatives in Latin America and

Eastern Europe (219). Criticisms of the strategies used for housing

production in eastern Havana highlight the non-integration of workplaces

and other community support structures into the new residential zones,

Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, Issue 82, Vol. 44, No. 1, 2011, 29�38

Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas ISSN 0890-5762 print/ISSN 1743-0666 online # 2011 Americas Society, Inc.http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/08905762.2011.564856

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as well as lack of attention to regional architectural visions. Two trends

from the early 1970s are resoundingly symbolized in Alamar’s hundreds of

identical five-floor walkups: the planners’ adherence to an ideal of

standardization, and a working climate that squelched departures from

norms and dictates of centralized authority. A simple statement from

Coyula and his fellow experts in architecture and urban planning echoes

observations made by many a non-specialist: ‘‘Urban spaces in Alamar can

best be described as depressing’’ (219).

As a result, residents of Alamar have consciously sought to improve life

in their community with activism in the arts, countering the intense

uniformity of their built environment. Rappers have earned international

attention for these efforts in the past two decades. The documentary East

of Havana, which follows the lives of three young musicians, pans across

the landscape in which they live. These shots, some taken from the tops of

Alamar apartment buildings, are both lyrical and sobering. The camera’s

slow motions evoke beauty and dynamism. At the same time, the film

avoids romanticizing the musicians’ lives or focusing on nostalgia for a

pre-Revolutionary city; it depicts residents of Alamar mapping and

debating their desires in relation to contemporary challenges, particularly

a troubled economy.

The latest collection of poetry from Flores (b. 1962), who has lived in

Alamar since 1971, is El contragolpe (y otros poemas horizontales) (The

Counterpunch (and Other Horizontal Poems)). It offers reflections on the

human condition and snapshots from the broader Havana literary scene,

alongside an exploration of life and dreams in Alamar. Although

he doesn’t analyze his own work in these terms, Flores’s way of writing

prose poems suggests a certain influence from his architectural environ-

ment. He frequently deploys two or three repetitive statements (clauses,

sentences, even entire sequences), sometimes dropping the use of

conventional linking words, like articles, for a cropped effect. Insofar as

the poetry does flow, it is forced to move through and around the

structures of repetition and curtailment that frame his compact

paragraphs. On the page, individual poems live or die in relation to the

power and range of emotions he can maneuver within these forms.1 In

performance, Flores’s repetition enables a mesmerizing use of dramatic

gesture for overall impact.

Numerous texts in El contragolpe register cycles of hope and

disappointment involved in working toward some greater purpose. One

of these, ‘‘El pensionado’’ (The Pensioner), begins with the following

portrait of a gardener fed up with building construction but still

committed to small-scale interventions on behalf of beauty:

In Alamar, city or semi-rural small town, where there’s still no cemetery, obscure is

the man whose book of prayer is the botanical guide, from the rising of the sun,

until the setting of the sun, occupied in garden, whoever has seen one building has

seen them all, better to cultivate ornamental plants than raise buildings . . .

1. Readers can see the

structures of complete

poems from this

collection online in

Spanish and English at

La Habana Elegante,

Segunda epoca 48

(Otono-Invierno 2010)

and The Brooklyn Rail

(InTranslation, August

2010). All translations

are mine (my work on

the book is now in

progress) and are carried

out with permission

from Flores.

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Another poem, ‘‘El buzo’’ (The Diver), ruminates on a landscape

populated by dumpsters, apartments, and various generations of citizens.2

It offers a humble, yet hopeful prospect for the future:

Whether the dumpster diver be occupation one exercises or horizontal real estate

or foolish son of the homeland or child feeding from bottle (areas thick with grass,

there are unused wastelands, where pedestrians from the neighborhood throw

debris from their daily lives and among weeds, the first mushroom rises for a new

civility, not yet included on maps of the counterculture [ . . .]

Nature and art conspire against centralization to generate something new,

a force still largely invisible in its peripheral existence in the ‘‘wastelands.’’

In keeping with this vision*and with his own status as an outsider poet,

who does not hold a university degree or job in the culture industry*Flores depicts Alamar, more generally, as a community of the margin-

alized.

His world is also a site of encounter amongst diverse local and

international populations, offering a window into Havana’s multicultural

history and culture. Sujatha Fernandes observes, ‘‘While people of all

social levels were relocated to Alamar, the majority were people of

marginalized black communities, from slum areas’’ (87). While Flores

does not attempt a demographic analysis in his poetry, his Alamar reflects

this presence of Afro-Latino peoples. In ‘‘Griot’’ (Griot), for example,

Flores presents the question of how a resident following a venerable

African storytelling tradition can shape the culture of the region:

‘‘Hispanic this civilian, though of Afro origin; attempts to introduce

artifact into capital city, or into nation of immigrants, or country in need

of large and small load-bearing beams.’’ He sketches the griot through a

list of clothing and belongings, which shows that the character has already

contributed to the structures of everyday life in Alamar: the first item is a

helmet used by members of the Microbrigades. The question of the griot’s

future success as a cultural worker remains not only unanswered at the

end of the poem, but reiterated.

Flores evokes more direct African origins in ‘‘Hay que ver’’ (You Have

to See), which takes an overtly humorous approach and draws on Flores’s

real-life enjoyment of athletics:

[ . . .] I know, from having inquired, that students of kung fu like to have a teacher

who comes from the Chinese dynasty, but my kung fu master is a man who comes

from the African continent.

Because we’re not in China, or even in one of the many Chinatowns of the

Americas, but in Alamar, site of intermixture, where these things happen. [ . . .]

Flores hints in passing at another source for Alamar’s mingled population:

just as its building design derives from Eastern European sources, Soviets

numbered among its early residents. He includes a brief poem of apology,

2. While we were discussing

this poem, Flores

clarified that his phrase

‘‘horizontal real estate’’

refers directly to the

standard shape of

apartments in Alamar’s

buildings.

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‘‘Mea culpa por Tomas’’ (Mea culpa for Tomas), for ‘‘Tomas, kid from the

Soviet Union, whom we called ‘bowling-ball head’’’ (a common nickname

for Russians). A vintage object makes an appearance in another poem: an

aged Selena radio imported from the Soviet Union, through which a

resident keeps hoping to hear broadcasts with news from abroad.

Other poems expand on this portrayal of a multicultural community

and its international linkages*however, ‘‘Sifa’’ (Wastepipe), one of the

rare poems that departs from Flores’s usual repetition, suggests exhaus-

tion with related discourses about identity. It explicitly rejects a famous

food metaphor used by Fernando Ortiz to describe the meeting of

multiple cultures on the island: ‘‘This whole business they call Cuban

culture, an ajiaco, the stew and all its symbolic foodstuffs, I’m fed up with

it, better that I shut up or get out of here.’’

Although Flores evokes a desire to break (or dribble) away from that

vocabulary, performance and collaboration offer communal modes and

discourses that he finds more useful. In the late 1990s, noting the energy

generated by alternative writers’ groups in central Havana, Flores and

others decided to create an organization based in Alamar. They began

performing poetry as a collective, dubbed Zona Franca. This eventually

merged with OMNI, a group comprised of painters and sculptors. Flores

initially led the group, then passed the role on to others (Amaury Pacheco

presently acts as something of a ‘‘silent director,’’ while participants such

as Luis Eligio are also very visible); the precise membership of OMNI�Zona Franca has shifted over time to include many people. Their

performances have taken place in spaces ranging from city buses to the

local rap festivals. For more than a decade the group has organized an

annual event in Alamar called ‘‘Poesıa sin fin’’ (Poetry Without End).3

Flores’s subtitle for his 2009 book, proposing ‘‘horizontal poems,’’

echoes the egalitarian attitudes of OMNI�Zona Franca by foregrounding a

leveling gaze: how much more level can writing get than to name itself

horizontal? The poems express resistance to hierarchy while also refusing

to romanticize the current living conditions of everyday Cubans.

This is not to say that contemporary poetry from Alamar avoids

mythologizing the place and its people: the process of debunking and

regenerating mythologies of Cuban life is very much underway. In the

wake of Angel Escobar’s death, the poet himself has begun to be

mythologized. The topic of death in his poetry is merging in the Cuban

imagination with Escobar’s actual suicide, much as Jose Martı’s famous

poetry and famous death perpetually intertwine in modern commentary.

Escobar’s poetry deals with different issues in form and content than

that of Flores, although the two share a strong sense of writing from the

margin. Escobar is recognized and respected in Alamar, but the housing

community and its construction are not obvious subjects in most of his

work. Currently, critical resources emerging around his poems tend to

focus on anguish and trauma, as well as Escobar’s illness and death. These

3. In emails to the author,

Juan Carlos Flores and

his partner Mayra Lopez

confirmed the details

mentioned here. They

also noted that two days

before the 2009 ‘‘Poesıa

sin fin’’ events,

organizers were denied

permission to use their

usual venue, so readings

took place inside homes.

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topics are hard to avoid, not least because he wrote about them, and

commentators who knew him understandably battle with their grief. As

Flores and others recalled in conversations during my visit in June 2010,

Escobar’s advancing schizophrenia transformed everyday life in his final

decade. It made him unable to sustain the regular engagement with the

literary community so important for the earlier development of his

poetry. Yet his fellow writers speak of him with deep affection and respect,

while his poems addressing illness have resonance for readers fighting

their own battles. Escobar’s rich literary productivity, the determination

to survive that shines through his dark humor, and his widow’s emphasis

on his love for art and music all argue that suicide cannot serve as a

sufficient metaphor for his entire corpus (Lynd).

At the present time there are still many people in Alamar who knew

Escobar and his widow, Ana Marıa Jimenez. Residents organize tributes to

his work on his birthday, symbolizing their conscious refusal to emphasize

his death over his life. Gatherings nearby in the heart of the city have also

served to move the conversation forward about Escobar’s legacy, including

one that led to the publication of testimonies about his writing, Angel

Escobar: El escogido (2001; Angel Escobar: The Chosen One). Mythologiz-

ing is thus still tempered by personal memories of Escobar, but it has

become clear that his representations will only multiply in future accounts

of Cuban poetry. For example, the renowned writer Reina Marıa

Rodrıguez speculated in our conversations in Havana that Escobar will

emerge as the single most important poet of his era. (To be fair: others

have made the same statement to me about her.)

The eventual importance of the greater Havana area in his career

notwithstanding, Escobar‘s first home was in Oriente, the eastern side of

the island. Like many other Afro-Cubans of his generation, he relocated to

the western capital area, pursuing education and work. He would find a

home in that Alamar apartment, where the door is marked with the

decorative tile, after meeting Jimenez. She had arrived as a political exile,

receiving asylum from the Cuban government, after imprisonment and

torture at Chile’s infamous clandestine center at Villa Grimaldi in the

mid-1970s. Jimenez was assigned a living space in Alamar, which she

eventually shared with Escobar. His wife is a reminder of further diversity

in the east Havana housing communities: exiles fleeing political violence

in the Southern Cone in the 1970s and 1980s brought different Latin

American perspectives into this zone.

Romance propels one of Escobar’s poems that explicitly names Alamar.

In the following poem, ‘‘Acotacion’’ (Annotation), the actual meeting of

lovers is less visible than the landscape in which it occurs:

On 28 September 1983 I came to know a woman.

Maybe this won’t interest other people*I’m no outcome of a dream, no descendant of El Cid*but I want to write down this date and keep the paper.

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It was in a neighborhood, marginal, on the island’s west side,

a neighborhood

with almond trees, buildings ugly as decrees,

a dustfilled light, and joys and torments

that no longer correspond to Kierkegaard.

The name of the place is Alamar, and the sea

lends it moderation, if that can be achieved in the Caribbean;

the sun reappears on every stone*and conversing is a sun, a stone, a delineation.

There the patient moon pronounces no one guilty.

I don’t lie to the woman. That would deflate the memory

of the first time I saw her; I don’t know*on the garbage heap of this world

happiness can be lethal.

I don’t want to die yet. I just make a note:

Alamar, 28 September, in 1983.4

The reappearance and multiplication of the sun in Alamar, along with the

emphasis on dialogue, highlight a natural landscape characterized by

forgiveness. The buildings may be ugly, and history tempers beauty with

legacies of marginalization, but even the speaker’s consciousness of the

weighty Occident and the ‘‘garbage’’ of world history cannot ruin the

scene. Closing by circling back to its start, the poem embraces memory,

guarding its peaceful exchange.

‘‘Acotacion’’ recalls another location in the line about claiming descent

from El Cid, a nod to Chilean poets Nicanor Parra and Vicente Huidobro.

It is one of many poems in which Escobar acknowledges the Southern

Cone, illustrating the cultural impact of his life with Jimenez. They first

traveled to Chile together in 1991 after Patricio Aylwin assumed the

presidency and Jimenez was able to reenter her country; Escobar received

an invitation from a Chilean literary organization for his visit (Guajardo).

In 1994 they would return to Chile for a longer stay. Escobar’s poems

reflect interest in a variety of poets from the region, among them

Huidobro, Parra, and Gonzalo Rojas.

In his late work, Escobar melds ‘‘expressions of Cuban identity with a

broader social consciousness that extends to Latin America and to a

profound critique of modernity and the human condition’’ (Lynd 130).

He blends his dialogues with writers and places beyond the island with

assertions of his island origin, symbolized in compact form by the tiny

village of Sitiocampo. There, in the mountainous countryside of eastern

Cuba, Escobar was born to a large, impoverished family who recognized

slaves among their ancestors. Despite the importance of the Havana area

in his adult life, the village of origin surges up in his writing, bearing

ambiguous meaning, but meaning nonetheless.

While these turns toward the east and the south might appear to

detract from Escobar’s connection to the island’s urban west side, Alamar

is a community forged by relocated peoples. Escobar’s multicentered work

4. ‘‘Acotacion’’ was

published in El examen

no ha terminado (1997;

The Examination Is Not

Over). Translations are

based on the Spanish

texts in the Poesıa

completa. Rights are held

by Ana Marıa Jimenez,

who has graciously given

me permission to

translate and publish the

work. Along with

Jimenez herself, Flores,

Lopez, and Efraın

Rodrıguez kindly

responded to my

questions about Escobar

and Alamar.

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captures something just as significant to its identity as the construction of

housing units: the power of cultural convergence in moments of crisis.

Abuso de confianza (Breach of Trust), thought by many to be his most

significant book, was first published in 1992 in Chile’s capital city. Its

vivid poems, which he began to compose in the 1980s while discussing

trauma with Jimenez, present some of the bleakest visions in his entire

career. The conflation of forces around its composition and publication

suggest sources for its darkness and range. The first Chilean trip by

Escobar and Jimenez that led to its publication represented a big step: they

were leaving their home in Alamar to test the waters in her native land.

The risks of a return to the place where she had suffered so much

overlapped with a newly difficult moment in Cuba, the Special Period.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, islanders faced a sea change at

home, one that pushed them to search for new opportunities abroad:

A sort of anachronistic self-awareness*as socialist survivors in a sea of global

capitalism*together with the national gloom over Soviet abandonment [ . . .]

colored the experience as a radical break from the past. In the Special Period, there

was a ‘‘before,’’ which was stable, perhaps purer in its altruism and high ideals, a

‘‘now,’’ which was confusing and unsettling, and a future that was, for many,

another country. (Hernandez-Reguant 2)

Cubans faced progressive degradation of many kinds in the Special Period:

the collapse of buildings, shrinking access to opportunities, a fractured

sense of place in the international sphere, and everyday deprivations of

goods and even food. If the economics of daily life had to be

reconstructed, so did the utopian language of national identity.

Escobar shares common ground with other writers and artists from his

area: much Cuban culture from the period presents self-questioning and

an underlying awareness that no matter what one’s convictions might be,

master narratives of history and futurity would have to be revised to adapt

to previously unforeseen circumstances. Island writers and artists sought

to reach an embittered population, one increasingly alienated from

familiar political slogans yet not always willing to give up on equally

familiar ideals of local and international solidarity.5 Poetry emerged as

a favored genre in the Havana area for literary responses to crisis, in part

because paper shortages made production of longer forms difficult

(Quiroga 129). In Alamar, music*particularly rap and hip-hop, forms

intersecting with poetry*served related functions.

Despite his explicit personal appreciation for the historic interventions

of revolutionary leaders after 1959, which changed the course of his life

through access to education and publishing, Escobar depicts a traumatic

process of doing away with utopian rhetoric in Abuso de confianza (Fowler

123). The social and political implications of that process are clearly

critical in a local context. And yet, they are not simply reducible to

criticisms of island government. In their mix of disillusionment and

5. Hernandez-Reguant

offers useful examples of

official language.

Fernandes gives a

substantive exploration

of the complexities of

recuperating and

revising cultural

discourses, with special

attention to music; for

example, she documents

concerns not only about

co-optation by the state

but through

commodification in the

international market.

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determination, the poems reach far beyond Cuba. For example, the book

includes a portrait of the torture suffered by female prisoners at Villa

Grimaldi during the Pinochet regime, based on Escobar’s conversations

with his wife. In his prologue, ‘‘Mente rota’’ (Broken Mind), he portrays a

deeper and wider century of violence through reference to phenomena

such as the ugly ‘‘creativity’’ that produced the atom bomb. Abuso de

confianza targets modern states and the abuse of ‘‘reason’’ as such.

Escobar’s struggle with illness presents another facet of the anguish that

colors his depiction of place. Hospitalized and released many times, he

wove patients, doctors, and medical institutions into the late poems.

‘‘Hospitales,’’ a much-anthologized piece, opens with the subjugation of a

raging poet amid an explosion of emblems:

I saw Rimbaud roped to a bed

and the Paterprotagonist roping him down hard,

and his pajamas, letting him go, they roared and

his smallest innocent bones came loose with doctors

blowing on that broken bassoon,

the glasses shattered, and the blinds, and the symbols

then to each according to his symptom

they gave his dose, his eyes, his Lenten discipline.

The speaker closes with repeated reassurances that he himself is calm,

suggesting the contrary. Indeed, many voices in the book evoke people

who feel endangered. They roam through disorienting, often dehumaniz-

ing landscapes.

An appearance of temporary calm is no guarantee of safety for the two

patients of ‘‘Ası en la paz’’ (In Peace), where

[ . . .] far away, hissing, the right minds disappear

between the smoke and the sun, blinding now

sun strikes the stones

rebounds to our hands

telling us yes, yes, there’s no alternative,

we’ve got to do it.

If ‘‘it’’ might be suicide here, Escobar wrote in other late work of strategies

for resisting its call. In ‘‘Haberes’’ (Holdings), the figure of Solangel

(Sunangel or Hummingbird) helps the speaker conjure a world of joy.

Leaving cities behind, the ‘‘I’’ dreams quietly of sharing fruit with her,

strolling through natural landscapes. Lurking in the sky above them is her

constant equal and opposite: ‘‘The kestrel is the deadly presence*up

there, flying / above prescribed ideas / that shelter the suicidal.’’ 6

Released from a psychiatric hospital several days before his wife’s return

from a visit to Chile in early 1997, Escobar took his life by jumping off a

building in Havana’s Vedado district (to which the couple had moved

upon return from their longest stay in Chile). Without attempting to

6. From El examen no ha

terminado. Complete

translations of

‘‘Hospitales’’ and

‘‘Haberes’’ appear in

Jacket 38 (Late 2009)

with originals.

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explain Escobar’s eventual suicide away, commentators have begun to

trace gestures animating his poems. The twentieth century’s betrayal of

hope and justice holds a strong place in this discussion. Pedro Marques

offers the following summary: ‘‘His poetry, rough and painful, though not

free of irony, translates the personal drama of someone who confirms that

a promised justice does not exist and that history has become [ . . .] theater

and falsification.’’ Francisco Moran situates Escobar as one of Latin

America’s great poets of the ‘‘No,’’ placing him in company with Vallejo.

This negation, he emphasizes, would have appeared with or without the

Revolution and will echo long after new futures come to exist: the ‘‘No’’

encompasses solitude, orphanhood, hunger for love, and a complex

testimony to ‘‘the marks left by history on indigenous and black skin’’

(385).7

These statements raise questions about how Escobar’s poetry will

function for readers in the new century. As it circles back in Spanish and

spirals outward through translation, how will residents of Alamar, who

already celebrate Escobar’s life and work, continue their artistic dialogues

with him?

Flores*who says that all of his books to date include references to

Escobar*has already responded to that question in El contragolpe. There,

he takes Escobar’s ‘‘Desde el suelo’’ (From the Floor), a poem from Abuso

de confianza, as a point of departure for his own ‘‘Visto desde el suelo’’

(Seen from the Floor). Dark, hallucinatory, Escobar’s poem states:

‘‘There’s no furthermore, / no beforehand, / no someday.’’ It dwells

with horror on the arrival of soldiers and tanks, closing with an emphasis

on the speaker’s state of oblivion. Flores responds to its climate of

entrapment and loss. In his poem, he envisions ‘‘ex-responsible citizens’’

outside the bounds of Escobar’s fraught metropolis: ‘‘Sun rises and there

they are on the mountain, inhaling a different breeze and they’re on the

mountain.’’8 There, his imagined citizens move through a brighter

landscape where they refuse to be contained, ‘‘climbing across the law’’

on the mountainside.

Bibliography

Coyula, Mario, Joseph L. Scarpaci, and Roberto Segre. Havana: Two Faces of the

Antillean Metropolis (1997). 2nd ed. Chapel Hill: U of NC P, 2002.

East of Havana. Dir. Jauretsi Saizarbitoria, with Emilia Menocal. Video on demand.

NY: Denver and Delilah Productions, 2006.

Escobar, Angel. Abuso de confianza. Santiago de Chile: Kipus 21 Editora, 1992.

****. Angel Escobar: Poesıa completa. Havana: Ediciones UNION, 2006.

Fernandes, Sujatha. Cuba Represent!: Cuban Arts, State Power, and the Making of New

Revolutionary Cultures. Durham: Duke UP, 2006.

Flores, Juan Carlos. El contragolpe (y otros poemas horizontales). Havana: Editorial

Letras Cubanas, 2009.

****. Personal conversation with the author. Alamar, Cuba, 10 June 2010.

7. Remarks from Marques

and Moran appear in my

translation.

8. Complete translation

forthcoming in Sentence:

A Journal of Prose Poetics.

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****, and Mayra Lopez. Emails to the author. 14 and 26 July 2010, 16 Aug 2010,

6 and 27 Nov 2010.

Fowler, Vıctor. ‘‘El muro anterior a toda perdida.’’ In Rodrıguez Santana 2001, 109�131.

Guajardo, Ernesto. ‘‘El poeta como un espejo: Angel Escobar en Chile.’’ Letras s5.com:

Pagina chilena al servicio de la cultura, Proyecto Patrimonio (2007). Digital: http://

www.letras.s5.com/eg241207.html

Hernandez-Reguant, Ariana. ‘‘Writing the Special Period: An Introduction.’’ In Cuba

in the Special Period: Culture and Ideology in the 1990s, ed. Ariana Hernandez-

Reguant, 1�18. NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009.

Jimenez, Ana Marıa. Emails to the author. 11 and 13 Mar 2009, 20 Nov 2010.

Lynd, Juliet. ‘‘Reflections on a Conversation with Ana Marıa Jimenez, Wife of Angel

Escobar.’’ Sirena: Poesıa, Arte y Crıtica / Poetry, Art, and Criticism (2010.2): 126�136.

Marques de Armas, Pedro. ‘‘Prologo al lector portugues.’’ La Habana Elegante:

Segunda epoca 48 (Otono-Invierno 2010): n.p. http://www.habanaelegante.com/

Spring_Summer_2010/Pedro_Prologo_Marques.html

Moran, Francisco. ‘‘Angel Escobar: La luz sobre el asfalto.’’ Mandorla: New Writing

from the Americas / Nueva escritura de las Americas 11 (2008): 382�398.

Quiroga, Jose. Cuban Palimpsests. Minneapolis: U of MN P, 2005.

Rodrıguez Santana, Efraın (compilacion). Angel Escobar: El escogido. Havana:

Ediciones UNION, 2001.

****. Email to the author, 27 Nov 2010.

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