MIAMI, United States
Maria Mercedes Mesa presents her first novel in Miami. Since leaving Cuba in 1965, Maria de las Mercedes Mesa has dreamed of writing a novel “to share the wealth of experience that I bring with me." Finally, she has succeeded. On May 2 she presented a novel of 482 pages entitled: “Un ingenio cubano: historias amores y sueño” (A Cuban sugar mill: loves, and dreams).
The presentation took place at Poveda Center in Miami where, surrounded by about 60 people, she spoke about what had motivated her during the years of development of her book.
"I think this novel is about presenting a reality and conveying what I think and feel about it," she said, referring to her homeland, Cuba. She said that for years she has been thinking about several questions. Why did I have to leave Cuba? Why the revolution? How can there be two Cubas?"
These questions, "besides being my motivation, form the root and the gist of this novel that develops around a sugar mill and wanders through the years of the Republic in the hands of a group of friends, settlers and employees of the mill," she said on the day of the book presentation.
To write this book, she leaned on history and her own experience. She notes that in Cuba textbooks end in 1902, the beginning of the Republic that followed the war of independence from Spain and the US occupation. "Nothing about the years leading up to 1959 is taught,” she explains. Reading and researching about those years has helped her understanding. She has her own theory and explains that when we speak of revolution there is a need to distinguish between the revolution of 1933 and the revolution of 1959.
She explains that both are similar: Machado was the first dictator who, forced by circumstances, left Cuba in December 1933. "But then there was no Fidel Castro who could take advantage of the political vacuum in those years, as happened in 1959 when Fulgencio Batista left the country."
In presenting the book, novelist and literary critic José Prats Sariol, who also has written the preface, describes the book as “anthropological fresh air that appears and hides between autobiography and memory, between nostalgia and existential challenges." He states that the author, although born in Havana in 1945, grew up in a sugar mill. The main merit, he said, is "to focus on actions on the sugar mill, which she called Caribbean to conceal its identity; it was built in Trocha, just 19 km north of Ciego de Avila and 10 km from Moron". Suriol Prats also stressed "the genuine Christianity of the author by humanizing the story."
At 19, Maria Mesa she left Cuba alone to go to Mexico. There she requested her parents and soon she traveled to St. Louis, Missouri, in the United States, where her brother Julio was already living. Their parents joined later. The father was a sugar chemist who worked for a time in a sugar mill in Ecuador and later in another one in Florida.
At 24, she combined her studies in Sociology with work. Then she studied anthropology and later obtained a master's degree in social work.
She met the Teresian Association at the beginning of the 70s and was captivated by the figure of Saint Pedro Poveda and the spirituality of incarnation he proposed to the laity. And,while studying, working, and caring for her sick mother, she continued her dream of writing a novel. She had already published a book on poetry.
The novel that comes out now, published by Alexandria Library Publishing House, covers the 47 years preceding the Cuban revolution of 1959. It begins in 1912 when the Moron Sugar Company built the sugar mill, during the government of Jose Miguel Gomez. It was managed by different owners until its nationalization in 1960, coinciding with "the exiles, banishments, and cruel distancing because of ideological criteria" as Sariol Prats said in his presentation.
The author notes that the novel is the story of Cuba of those years intertwined with the history of the sugar mill and its founder Felipe Carbonell, a man who believed in the revolution because it was the dream of brotherhood he dreamed all his life. "Carbonell represents Cuba at that time," says Mesa.
The author wants her work to encourage the hope of every Cuban who dreams of genuine brotherhood for a united Cuba.
Araceli Cantero Guibert