Eladio Secades’ point of view

Water in a basket (blog under construction)

By Dalia Céspedes

HAVANA – Some months ago, on my way to a friend’s house, I found in a second-hand book stall a second edition (1958) of the Estampas de Secades [Secades’ Images]. As if he really didn’t want to sell it, or believing that I was a wealthy bibliophile visiting Havana incognito, the vendor offered to sell it to me for an outrageous 50 convertible pesos.

Not trying to prophecy, I told him that, at that price, his merchandise would repose for a long time on the plywood shelves on 23rd Avenue. In reply, he reaffirmed his confidence on the flow of Cubans “from Miami.”

Last week, I bought, at a state-owned bookstore, the 1941-58 edition of Eladio Secades’ Estampas,* edited by Laidi Fernández de Juan (Union Publishers, 2010). Its price? Fifteen of the so-called “Cuban pesos,” as if convertible pesos weren’t Cuban, in other words, a millionth of what the book vendor charged, envisioning a flood of Miami Cubans willing to pay anything for a slice of the past.

By itself, this anecdote provides material for an image of book vendors, in the style of Secades. Or an analysis about the physical and metaphysical reality of two currencies in a single space. One could write a guaracha or a treatise about it. The truth is that, like dust returning to dust, Eladio Secades has returned to the city.

As I read him, I realize how ignorant of his masterliness are those who knew him only as a sports writer and those who didn’t know him at all. Bear in mind, please, that I say masterliness, not masterfulness, two concepts that are usually mistaken for each other, like mayonnaise and béchamel sauce.

What was Secades a master of? Well, nothing. You can’t even say that he was a master of digression, even though he leaped from palo to rumba with the conviction of an acrobat of the mind. A thinker, then? I discard that word, since I’ve seen and known the type of intellectual it describes. Eladio Secades must be called something else.

Contemplating Secades’ elliptical style, his probing of reality as he tapped on typewriter keys that were apparently disconnected, an exquisite cadaver of vox populi and tropical psychology, I realize that in those vehement but deliberate associations, where the Chinaman of Charades distributes fate to the rhythm of danzón and conga and the trinket vendors, loan sharks and office workers look at us like characters from Murillo, “the style of the Revolution” is more alive than in the pompous pronouncements of Mañach.

No, Lezama was not alone if, in addition to these pages, or those of Miguel de Marcos or Roa, the conversation with the absurd native man, with the absurdity incarnated into ideology or folklore, and folklore and ideology transfigured into absurdity, overflow what a noun and an infrequent epithet can provoke in poetry. Or the contact of two remote things or beings. I will not expound here about the relationship between revolution and absurdity, or recall that revolution was not invented in 1959.

The weight and the path that the vanguard (“vanguards,” if you prefer) was taking in the first half of the 20th Century becomes obvious in Secades’ brazen phrases, in his methodical and sardonic disrespect toward some traditions that he simultaneously loved. In this case, “images” does not mean just pictures of families, with picturesque landscapes and characters; above all, it means portraits of ideas. Also with landscapes and no-less picturesque protagonists.

Is Martí one of them? No doubt, Secades frequently dealt with the Apostle.

“With Martí, we Cubans are committing the tiny error of remembering him instead of imitating him.” And “we have learned to turn his memory into sacred uselessness.” Which indicates that the man who “memorized Martí to win an argument at a dairy store” is an individual who must have survived all revolutions without really participating in them.

Secades, who studies sayings and mocks them, offers an endless number of definitions between verse and anathema. Speaking of pearls:

“The Pearl of the Antilles is an island situated at the entrance and the exit of the Gulf of Mexico, whose forehanded inhabitants must carry in their pockets a roll of adhesive bandage and a vial of iodine, in case they have the misfortune of landing in a hospital.”

“The paradox is that, to buy faith, you need to have a lot of faith.”

“What we really do is to turn woes into jokes, but, to do that we must have woes.”

“The writers who have no ideas and write only with words are the fortune-tellers of literature. They build pretty houses of cards with language.”

“A funeral is a snake that sheds tears from its head and laughter from its tail.”

“Because of their total lack of poetry, we can see that some newspapers are written in the fullness of digestion.”

Is Secades returning, then? Yes, at the right time, too, because what we consider “the bad habits of the past” appear today so fresh that they might never have disappeared. Did they hibernate? Or was it us who hibernated in the tropics?

I realized this one night that I saw an elderly black man, without shoes, sleeping under an ATM. I won’t say anything more, because, as the writer observes, “there’s no need to describe examples that we always see before us.”

*Eladio Manuel Secades Rodríguez (1904-1976) was a Cuban journalist, who excelled in sports writing and folklore. Through his Images of the Era, Secades’ style set standards in Cuban journalism.