The Journey. Miguel Collazo
managed to get free from the mark of the symbols became indestructible.
They had no family lines or surnames. Their strange names (Bímer, Jalno, Orna, Catal, Casel) could not be recognized as belonging to any known culture on Earth.
Life on Ambar was very hard for those humans, who had barely held onto the gift of speech but who continued to question things. That might be why they had started talking about “the Journey,” which I immediately assumed meant some sort of repatriation, a physical return to their origins: leaving Ambar and returning to their home planet, probably Earth, though they had forgotten where they were from. Otherwise, why did they insult one of the characters, Borles, with names like “Pigeon,” “Etruscan Shrew,” and “Noahsark,” which had no direct meaning for the Ambarines?
I gradually grew excited about the great mosaic of groups and generations that Collazo’s prose constructed with surprising skill—and, even more commendably, without relying on any sort of technological novum. I found myself on Ambar before I knew it, suffering along with them in the mists of forgetfulness, searching for the light of “the Journey.” I was there at the flirtation, almost the rediscovery of sex, between Teles and Orna. I learned about Jalno and the powerful, terrible forgotten machines he preached about. I wandered with Casel, his descendant, the man (?) who could read minds and who single-handedly stopped a possible invasion by the alien Cuantas (yes, a few spaceships finally do show up in the novel, after all), people who follow another symbol, the Sphere, rather than the Ellipse of Ambar, by unmasking their ambassador and explorer and convincing him that the planet held nothing that his race would find useful. I grew terrified together with Vet, a clear symbol of environmental indifference and moral failing, the ruminant human who lived only to eat from the day he sat down under a tree and never got up again, because nothing else had ever been good for him. And I was there at the tearful birth of Cadars, whose name means “that which comes with pain,” the one predestined to make “the Journey” possible and to set it in motion.
Entranced and intrigued to see where this epic would take me, page after page I watched the generations go by. Watched skeptics denying the possibility of “The Journey.” Renegades fighting against their champions and prophets. Immortal cynics without bodies and beyond time, incapable of believing in the project and unhappy on account of it. And, before I realized it, I was coming up to one of the most beautiful endings in all of Cuban SF, when, before any new cities, technologies, or futuristic weapons had been built but when plans to make them were already in the works, Tulque, one of the Men of the Projects, the followers of Cadars, announces simply that “the Journey has begun.”
That’s when I came to the anagnorisis, the revelation. I understood that in The Journey, Collazo wasn’t talking about anything so vulgar and pedestrian as a physical trip. It wasn’t about flaming rockets and lifting up from the gravity well of the colonized planet of Ambar to return—where, to space? to Earth?—but about something much deeper: humanity’s metaphysical voyage inwards, to a full acceptance of our past, of our roots, of our mistakes: the only way we can have a future again; can look past today, past mere survival; can attain spiritual growth.
Obviously the novel made an indelible impression on me. Since that time in Alquízar back in 1982, I must have reread it at least five or six times. And I am hardly the only one who continues to consider it one of the finest SF books published in our country. Indeed, in the late 1980s, the Oscar Hurtado Science Fiction Workshop to which I belonged, led by Daína Chaviano, considered it part of a sort of hexagon of top-notch, almost inimitable Cuban books of the genre.
The other five sides of the hexagon, not to leave you hanging, were: the short-story collection Historias de hadas para adultos (Fairy tales for adults, 1986), edited by Daína herself; another collection, Espacio abierto (Open space, 1983), by Chely Lima and Alberto Serret; and the novels Una leyenda del futuro (A legend of the future, 1985), by Agustín de Rojas; Kappa 15 (1983), by Gregorio Ortega; and ¿Dónde está mi Habana? (Where is my Havana?, 1985), by F. Mond.
You will notice that all but Collazo’s novel are from the 1980s. Plenty has been written and published in Cuba in the years since. But even today, though many might include one or more of my own novels or short-story collections in a similar hit parade, along with works by younger writers such as Elaine Vilar Madruga, Erick Mota, or Michel Encinosa Fú, I am pretty sure that The Journey by Miguel Collazo would still hold its firm place on every such list.
To the degree that, as recently as 2015, one of the most famous comic-book artists in Cuba, Luis Arturo Palacios, won a prize for his (necessarily partial) version of the symbolic adventures of the inhabitants of Ambar. His comic was later turned into an animated cartoon that proved popular among Cubans of all ages.
Reading The Journey over and over again, while I grew and matured, I slowly came to understand all (or at least a fair amount) that I had only vaguely guessed at in 1982 but would have been incapable of expressing in words. Especially three years later, in 1985, when I met Raúl Aguiar, a young writer and, like me, a fan of the fantasy genres, though he was a few years older—which means a lot when you’re a teenager in search of a mentor or someone to emulate.
Raúl revealed to me that my beloved The Journey had originally been published in 1968, no less, and he shared his personal theory that it was chronologically a hippie novel, a child of the summer of love! He also loaned me his copy of Collazo’s other SF novel, published only two years earlier but totally distinct: El libro fantástico de Oaj (Oaj’s fantasy book, 1966), which I had already heard about from another friend, mentor, and science fiction colleague, my neighbor Arnoldo Águila.
So I discovered that the irreverent and intellectually restless Miguel Collazo, born in 1936 and raised under capitalism, a professional illustrator who was only twenty-three years old when the Cuban Revolution triumphed in 1959, seemed to enjoy subverting the codes of the genre: El libro fantástico de Oaj was a sort of Martian Chronicles but turned upside down, brimming with humor where Bradbury is filled with melancholy. Here it is the Saturnians who come to Earth—to be more specific, to Havana in the 1950s. While the authorities are dithering about whether they should deny the aliens’ presence or officially recognize them, the people of Havana have no problem interacting freely with them: a pimp from a poor neighborhood becomes a Saturnian woman’s boyfriend and begins to “Cubanize” her, a crazed and ragged beggar who had prophesied the extraterrestrial invasion tries to destroy them for “stealing his idea,” and so on, with ever more absurd and hilarious situations.
Unfortunately, Miguel Collazo, the pioneering author of these two novels, so indispensable for the history of SF in Cuba, during its incipient “Golden Age” in the 1960s, suffered the same fate as his handful of fellow devotees—writers such as Ángel Arango, Arturo Correa, Germán Piniella, Carlos Cabada, Juan Luis Herrero, Agenor Martí, and even the father and greatest promoter of SF on the island, Oscar Hurtado. When the institutional cultural paranoia of the Quinquenio Gris (the “Five Gray Years,” 1971–1975) fell upon Cuban literature and writers were constrained to follow the hegemonic Soviet model of socialist realism, science fiction, once seen as the herald of a bright tomorrow, became an object of institutional distrust. The crazy Caribbeans who had been writing about a future with robots and spaceships but figuring there would still be contradictions, were treated much the same as Mayakovsky and the other Futurists had been in Russia after its revolution. They weren’t the obliging cheerleaders that the Cuban Revolution suddenly thought it needed, but rather a bunch of dangerous purveyors of foreign ideas and perhaps even doctrines contrary to the teachings of Marxism-Leninism. So the role of ideological torchbearer passed, almost by decree, from SF to the new genre of Cuban revolutionary spy and detective novels, often written by soldiers or former soldiers, which always narrated the victories of the heroic fighters of the Police or State Security against thieves / assassins / homosexuals / drug addicts / CIA agents, with the help of The People and their monitoring agencies, such as the omnipresent Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, led by the inevitable little old neighbor gossip.
Of the small group of writers who had thought a Cuban SF was possible and necessary in the 1960s, only to be banned in the following decade, some died, while others emigrated. Most of them stopped writing their beloved genre throughout the 1970s, at any rate. Meanwhile, the Soviet editions of SF books published by Mir, Progreso,