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Hernández Diaz, Alejandro. The Cuban Mile. Trans. Dick Cluster. Pittsburgh: Latin American Literary Review P, 1998. 120 pp. ISBN 0-935480-94-3
This is a work of fiction by a young Cuban writer born in 1970 who, according to the back cover of this edition, in the first twenty six years of his life managed to complete his military service as a journalist in Angola and to return to Cuba to study English language and literature, graduating in 1996. In my opinion this young writer, while still inside Cuba, writes under the wing and watch of the regime that has ruled the island country for the last forty-two years. Even if he thought of carrying out a sharp criticism of the system of government in Cuba, no such possibility is feasible under the present conditions.
The novel tells the story of two Cuban rafters (a term for those escaping from Cuba by sea during the last three decades). In some way, nobody knows how, they managed to steal a Cuban Air Force raft, a firearm and camouflage clothes, collect water as well as a sizable amount of food not available to the general public, and start their ninety-mile trek to the United States. The novel reads easily and rapidly and is in many aspects similar to Relata de un naufrage by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; perhaps it was even inspired by it. The novel seems to have been very well translated into English and as a native of Spanish, I enjoyed its reading as if it were in the original.
The general structure of the book consists of seven chapters-from the first to the seventh day-with subchapters broken down in miles, from mile 5 to mile 90, the latter just a blank page to suggest the idea that the surviving rafter has finally perished. Another interesting formal aspect of this edition is the fact that, out of 120 numbered pages, 25 are totally blank and another 14 are barely half a page, at times only two or three lines.
As to the novel's content, there are two main themes developed. First is a harsh criticism and ridiculing of those Cubans who embark on such a perilous adventure as to cross the Florida Strait in weak makeshift rafts of...