Ediciones El Puente (The Bridge Publications) was a literary project for young writers in Cuba just after the 1959 revolution. Between 1961 and 1965, they published each other's work, introduced dozens of new voices – among them poet and translator Nancy Morejón, playwright Gerardo Fulleda León, playwright-activist Ana Maria Simo and folklorist Miguel Barnet – and held readings and performances.
Nevertheless, El Puente is remembered primarily as one of the casualties of the wave of social repression in Cuba in the 1960s and 1970s. Accused, among other things, of fostering homosexuality, Black Power, publishing exiles, and consorting with foreigners, some members were detained, and/or sent to the UMAP concentration camps. A few left the country.
Cuban literary critics are beginning to address the group, and in 2005, the Gaceta de Cuba published a series of pieces on El Puente.La Gaceta de Cuba. 2005, no. 4. UNEAC, La Habana. Much of the group's work was republished and analyzed in the 2011 book Ediciones El Puente en la Habana de los años 60: Lecturas críticas y libros de poesía, edited and introduced by Jesús J. Barquet.Ediciones El Puente en La Habana de los años 60: lecturas críticas y libros de poesía, ed. Jesús J. Barquet, Ediciones del Azar, Mexico, 2011.
Origins El Puente was begun by José Mario Rodríguez (b. 1940, Güira de Melena – d. 2002, Madrid), a young poet who perceived the post-revolution literary world in Havana as closed to new writers. "[Lunes de Revolución] only covered people connected to the director Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and they never reviewed books by young writers." He wanted to create a publishing project that would be open to everyone, "Especially young people, new people. We wanted to find new talents with quality works inside Cuban culture. That's the thing that interested us most."
Gerardo Fulleda León remembered meeting José Mario in 1961 at a theater workshop that was also attended by playwright Eugenio Hernández Espinosa.
"The next day, in the José Martí National Library, he and Eugenio introduced me to Ana Justina Cabrera and after that to Ana María Simo. We immediately began to exchange opinions, argue about certain points, and on others agree. From that day forward, we scheduled appointments or met up in the afternoons in the gardens of the Writer's Union, in the park, at the entrance to a series of Soviet films at the Cinemateca de Cuba, at a theater function in Mella, in the hallways of an exhibit of Portocarrero, at a concert of Bola or Burke; the afternoon would turn into night and we would go to listen to a concert of filin at El Gato Tuerto, or jazz at the Atelier. We went up and down La Rampa and ended up at dawn at the Malecón reading poems, singing boleros, and telling each other our hopes and dreams."Fulleda León, Gerardo. (2002). "Aquella luz de La Habana". La isla en peso (no. 10). Retrieved 2007-12-16.
The books they shared included authors such as Borges, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Cuban poet Emilio Ballagas, Nerval, Rilke, Tagore, Mayakovsky, Salvatore Quasimodo, Essenin, poet Vicente Huidobro, Proust, Seferis, Dylan Thomas, and Holderlin.
Within a short time they began publishing as a group. Ana María Simo became co-director of the project,Rodríguez, José Mario. (2002) "La verídica historía de Ediciones El Puente, La Habana, 1961–1965 ", Revista Hispano Cubana, Madrid, number 6, winter 2002. largely focusing on the production end and editing fiction. Other core members included Gerardo Fulleda León, Nancy Morejón, Ana Justina, and Reinaldo García Ramos (Reinaldo Felipe), who later made up the board of directors.
Impact In practical terms, the impact of the group can be seen in what and who they published. Self-subsidized (funds came largely from José Mario's father ("La verídica historia") and Ana María Simo, who was working as a journalist) and publishing with editorial independence, even after they were persuaded to ally themselves with the Writers Union (Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba – UNEAC), El Puente introduced dozens of new voices to the literary scene, eventually publishing more than twenty writers and offering more than three dozen books of poetry, theater, fiction, and folklore.
Writers who got their start with El Puente include prize-winning poet and translator Nancy Morejón, playwright Gerardo Fulleda León, now director of the Rita Montaner theater company in Havana, folklorist Miguel Barnet, and playwright and lesbian activist Ana María Simo.
El Puente's long-term impact as a movement is more difficult to gauge. Emerging from the euphoria of the revolution, they were seen by some, including themselves, as embodying the post-revolution generation. Cuban-Chilean poet Alberto Baeza Flores in particular hailed them as a kind of unifying movement, gathering together "a generation of young writers, which was the first surge in tandem with the Cuban revolution, and which is a brilliant and critical generation."Baeza Flores, Alberto (1980-12-11), Miami Herald, in "La verídica historía".
They deliberately worked in opposition to the previous generations that they saw as excluding and elitist. They were especially determined to assert their intellectual freedom and claim all writing that reflected the gamut of Cuban society, even from writers that left the island. Anthologies, such as La Novísima Poesía Cubana (1962) edited by Reinaldo Garcia Ramos and Ana María Simo, in part expressed this literary ethos that had less to do with rigorous craft or a common style, than fresh points of view.
And while Simo's book of short stories, Las Fábulas, was one of the few ever reviewed, the books regularly found an audience, and some of the other arts communities were also enthusiastic about El Puente. Book covers were designed by young architecture students and visual artists, including Gilberto Seguí, David Bigelman and José Lorenzo. A collaborative performance with "feeling" composers including , Cesar Portillo de la Luz, , Ela O'Farril, and others at the El Gato Tuerto had fans lined up down the block. They had exchanges of ideas with playwrights like Eugenio Hernández Espinosa, even though they weren't necessarily published by El Puente.Grant, María (2002). "Nancy Morejón: Sobre el Puente ". La Jiribilla. Fragment of "En Los Sitios de Nancy Morejón", Opus Habana, La Habana, vol. VI, no. 1, 2002, pp. 18–19. Retrieved 2006-11-25. A young philosophy professor, Josefina Suárez, also became central to the group, introducing some of her students, like the poet Liliam Moro.
Not everyone agreed that El Puente represented the post-revolution generation, or that they served any useful purpose at all. At the time, critics such as Jesús Díaz, for instance, said they did not represent anything except a very small "dissolute" fringe, and charged not only that some of the writing was uneven, but that El Puente was "a politically and aesthetically erroneous phenomenon." A criticism easier to divorce from politics was that José Mario used the group, perhaps too frequently, to publish his own poems.
In more recent times, several contemporary researchers in Cuba seem to see its diversity as one of El Puente's greatest contributions.
Diversity The core group had as many women as men, and women are central in the list of published works (see Publications). Most of the writers were poor or working-class. Many were black or mixed-race at a time when people of color were underrepresented in the literary world.
The group published the first two books of poems by Nancy Morejón. "El Puente was vital for us, for me, on a personal level. One fine day José Mario Rodríguez, its director, came, and asked me for some poems. It was the first disinterested publishing project that didn't have second or third motives."
José Mario downplayed his role in recruiting the participation of black writers, though he was a friend of Walterio Carbonell,Pedro de la Hoz, (2005-04-22). "Walterio Carbonell: Vivito, coleando y con las pilas puestas". Jiribilla, Havana an embattled proponent of a French-style "Negritude," one of the first Cuban writers to address the role of race on the evolution of Cuban culture in his 1961 essay, "How the National Culture Developed" (Cómo surge la cultura nacional).
"It's true that El Puente had a lot of black writers, like Nancy Morejón, Ana Justina Cabrera, Gerardo Fulleda León, Eugenio Hernández, Georgina Herrera, Rogelio Martínez Furé, Pedro Pérez Sarduy and others. I think this happened a little by chance. We met in the National Library and outside of this building if you remember, there were some of [Havana's] poorest neighborhoods; a lot of people that went to these meetings came from these "mansions." They had few economic resources. They were neighborhoods that were largely black. Ana Justina and Eugenio lived nearby, just behind the Library."
Many members of the group were also lesbian or gay.
Climate of homophobia While Che Guevara once reportedly threw a book across the room in disgust because it was written by gay author Virgilio Piñera,Cisco, Michael (2004-08-27). Jungle Mind, Virgilio Piñera Swam on Dry Land ". The Modern Word. Retrieved 2007-12-26. Cuba didn't need the Argentine revolutionary to introduce homophobia. Already a part of Hispanic and Western cultures,See Lavender scare and LGBTQ rights by Marxist-Leninist states it was underlying in such works as José Martí's 1894 "Our America", in which the poet and revolutionary not only offered an early analysis of the growing U.S. role in the region, but dismissed loyalists to Spain as delicate ones "that are men and don't want to do the work of men!" and men that think they're Parisians or Madrileños, "talking walks on the Prado, leaning against lampposts, or eating sorbets at Tortonis."Martí, José. "Nuestra América ". La Revista Ilustrada, New York (January 10, 1891). El Partido Liberal, Mexico (January 30, 1891).
After the revolution, one of the first occasions homophobia went from a private attitude to public policy was during the National Meeting of Poets (Encuentro Nacional de Poetas) held in Camagüey in 1960 shortly before El Puente was begun. Colonel Alberto Bayo, a representative of the government, used the opportunity to launch an invective against homosexuals, calling them "bad seed," and warning they were going to "pervert the revolution." That night large placards appeared that said, "Fags, dykes, out!"(Rein Conversation)
In 1965, the government set up concentration camps, euphemistically called Military Units to Aid Production (UMAP), where "social scum" From 1965 to 1967, the Government forced many priests, pastors, and others "who made religion a way of life" into forced-labor camps called Military Units to Aid Production (UMAPS), alongside homosexuals, vagrants, and others considered by the regime to be "social scum."Cuba: International Religious Freedom Report 2005, U.S. Dept. of State, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (mostly gay men, but also Jehovah's Witnesses, and those perceived as disaffected) were interned behind barbed wire and used as forced labor until the UMAPs ended in 1967. Echoing the slogan on the gates of Auschwitz (and ironically, José Martí), the camps were emblazoned with the words: "Work will make you men."Wise, Michael Z. (1995-01-22) "In Totalitarian Cuba, Ice Cream and Understanding". New York Times.
Ginsberg and gay scapegoating As social pressures intensified, and El Puente become increasingly well known, members of the group began to draw more and more attention from state security. In 1964, Ana María Simo was jailed for several weeks and interrogated.
The openly gay men in the group, such as José Mario, started being regularly detained, targeted for their homosexuality, but also because they read the wrong books (Gide), listened to the wrong music (The Beatles) and once or twice had drunken scenes in the middle of the night. A couple of members were caught stealing library books.