It was late at night the first
time I arrived in Cuba. It was January, 2003, and my wife had signed up for an
educational tour. I decided to tag along. The flight out of Montreal had been
delayed and it was 1 a.m. when we deplaned. But the hotel bus was still waiting for us. We
loaded our luggage and drove off into a night full of potholes. Sugarcane fires
burned in the fields, but there was little lighting on the roads.
And then, a lot of light. A police barricade, with flashing lights,
police cars, and in the shadows, a military vehicle. Not a jeep, but more like
a troop carrier. And in the ditches, some young men running. I remember one of them had a red bandana on
his head. Someone was yelling. We waited, but after a short conversation with
the driver, we were waved on through. Tourists.
We were there for ten days. My wife had a salutary schedule of schools,
medical facilities, cooperative farms and a residence for children rescued from
Chernobyl. I poked along the long
beaches east of Havana, avoiding dead
jellyfish and resting at the many little open-air mojito bars. Both of us loved
it, albeit for different reasons, and we returned several times.
Well, that relationship failed,
and so did my enchantment with Cuba.
Although I returned on my own and, later on, with my new family, it was
never quite the same. The seeds of disillusion are there, in the poems of cuba
A book: the spalling concrete, the dengue fever, the classic cars held
together with wire, and mostly, the young soldiers with machine-pistols on many
of the corners. I had befriended a couple of young musicians, and knew some
people at the natural history museum, but it began to feel that my presence
brought police attention in its wake. I
haven’t gone back now for almost a decade.
But Cuba did get me writing again,
after an extended quiet period. The
poems in cuba A book got revised and expanded in Disappointment Island (Chaudiere Books, 2006) and also led me to the work in El Big Zoo,
a hybrid project with artist Suzanne Hill.
A mistranslation of Nicolas Guillen’s, El gran Zoo, one of my
favorite books of Cuban poetry, it remains unpublished in book form, but has
shown up in several galleries and various literary magazines and still gets
regularly updated. So this little chapbook, which rob coaxed out of me 20 years
ago (really??) was important for me. The
only thing I didn’t like about it was the star on the cover. It was supposed to
be like the star on Che’s famous beret; we fixed it this time.
As I write this, deep in a
Canadian winter, Cuba has lost power.
The grid has failed and even Havana, usually the last to go, has gone
black. The Soviet-built electrical infrastructure
is aging and difficult to maintain. It
runs on oil, but the main suppliers, Venezuela and Russia, are otherwise
occupied, and have reduced shipments.
There have been periodic blackouts in the countryside for many years but
when Havana, the capital, goes black, you know there’s a serious problem. I
hope it’s not beyond fixing.
Monty Reid
2025
Monty Reid was born in Saskatchewan, and currently lives in
Ottawa. He is
the author of the full-length collections Karst Means Stone (NeWest
Press, 1979), The Life of Ryley (Thistledown Press, 1981), The Dream
of Snowy Owls (Longspoon Press, 1983), The Alternate Guide (Red Deer
College Press, 1985), These Lawns (Red Deer College Press, 1990), Dog
Sleeps: Irritated Texts (NeWest Press, 1993), Crawlspace: New and
Selected Poems (House of Anansi Press, 1993), Flat Side (Red Deer
College Press, 1998), Disappointment Island (Chaudiere Books, 2006), Luskville
Reductions (Brick Books, 2008), Garden (Chaudiere Books, 2014) and Meditatio
Placentae (Brick Books, 2016). The
former Managing Editor of Arc Poetry Magazine, he was the Artistic
Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival for more than a
decade.
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