The Whole Island: Sixty Years of Cuban Poetry is the first volume of its kind in terms of size (602 pages) and has been published as a bilingual reader, with Spanish and English pages facing each other for easy cross-referencing. These poems begin in the 1940s, at the end of President Batista’s first term, and trace the line of Cuban history moving forward to the 1959 revolution through the present day. The fruits of Cuba’s 400-year-old literary history dazzle and shine here, needless to say.The island’s poetic legacy is filled with colorful and queer characters—many of whom were/are often very “out”—despite the harsh repercussions this invited and can still invite. Openly gay poets José Lezama Lima, Virgilio Piñera, and the still-living Antón Arrufat, wrote in a flamboyantly dense style known as neobarroco (neo-Baroque), weaving queerness and political themes into “coded” works—where secret dialogues were apparent to certain people. And sometimes they didn’t mask gay camp at all—such as with Piñera’s “At the One-Eyed Cat.”
At the One-Eyed Cat
there’s a night within night,
with a moon that emerges for some,
with a moon that emerges for some,
a sun that shines for others
and a cock that crows for all.
