Literary programme

“My father was killed one very sunny afternoon, though we didn’t know it at the time. He was on the other side of the world, in the dark jungle of Angola.”

Ernesto’s childhood ends with that news, at the age of twelve, one day as he returns from playing in the Havana woods. In the eyes of others, he has become the son of a hero sent, like so many other Cubans, to the war in Angola. Under the weight of that responsibility, Ernesto begins to perceive the contradictory reality of the Revolution and to obsessively investigate the long period of the Cuban presence in Africa. Thus begins a life-changing journey that will take him from Cuba to various European cities, always haunted by the ghost of his father, whose death he tries to piece together. But reality is never exactly as one imagines. And the tentacles of war are long and complex, impossible to sever once entangled in them. Present and past intertwine, as do feelings, in a novel that Karla Suárez has constructed with a prodigious rhythm to give voice to a generation marked by a unique discourse and by the struggle for individual freedom.

Moderation: Michi Strausfeld