Havana Does Not Believe in Tears

"My preoccupation has been a curiosity to discover what's behind people, my neighbors, especially those who are considered marginal," Uria explains. "In a certain way I've also felt like an outcast for philosophical or metaphysical reasons -- in my family, a preference for art and literature was always something a little weird. So you start to feel like an outcast, if you like to read and all that."

Uria found his niche when he entered the University of Havana in 1977. He studied literature and began composing short stories, always writing longhand in pencil, then marking his revisions in ink. He won several prizes in poetry and fiction before receiving the 13 de Marzo award, in the process becoming one of a handful of young authors recognized as leaders in new Cuban fiction.

The mid-Eighties marked a turning point in all of the arts on the island. In fiction changes were brought about by young writers who broke away from the literary precepts previously established under the Castro regime. While the officially sanctioned writers in the Seventies used fiction to create positive role models and put forth the lofty goals of the revolution, this younger generation turned to their grittier everyday reality for inspiration.

One of Uria's stories written during this period takes the reader inside the head of a young man dying in a public hospital, while another reveals the thoughts of a man and a woman preparing for a date in their separate homes. In a third, the writer orchestrates a comedy of errors in which a boy introduces a schoolmate to his parents as his "husband." And in a particularly fanciful tale, Uria turns an elderly mulatto woman's trip to the market into the journey of a Creole princess.

"I write about people with serious conflicts of integration," Uria explains, "be it for reasons that are ideological, sociopolitical, or within the family. This applies to a gay character as much as it does to the defiant character who's been placed in an interrogation room." That last allusion refers to a scene from Uria's "Inf centsrmese por favor," wherein the story's unnamed protagonist is being interviewed for military service. But the subtext touches on other kinds of interrogation. Uria structured the story as a dialogue in which a bureaucrat's voice reels off standard questions about political affiliation, religion, and sexual orientation. He is answered by an interviewee who philosophizes about homeopathic herbs; recites a love poem; remembers a bus ride; ponders the Venus de Milo, el Greco's View of Toledo, and a Bach cantata; and briefly acknowledges his dismal fear.

"The story shows the absurd vision that I have of life," says Uria. "It's an encounter between the tragic and the comic. My perspective of life is that it's not tragic, it's absurd, and the absurd ends up being comic. It's amusing. People laugh about what happens but it's really tragic. Cuba is a country that's absolutely delirious. The absurd is our daily bread."

A prestigious cultural institution in Havana, the Casa de las Americas (House of the Americas) hosts academic conferences and theatrical performances. Additionally, it edits publications to promote the culture of Cuba and that of other Latin American countries. Uria started working at the institution's self-titled magazine in 1988. His job was to write book reviews and informational copy on cultural conferences and prizes. He was not given a byline. "I had a reputation for being difficult, of being critical of the government and the system," Uria recalls, leaning forward in a rocking chair in the spotless living room of his cousins' Hialeah house. "Because of what I wrote, because of what I said, because of what I did or didn't do."

Uria was already considered untrustworthy enough that he had been forbidden by government officials from taking part in the so-called "voluntary jobs" -- actually an obligatory work detail in which Cuban citizens toil in the fields or on construction sites, clean buildings, or build bomb shelters. It didn't help his reputation when on an especially trying day he stood up from his office desk and announced that he was not a communist. "I didn't have a good reputation there," he admits, laughing. "But there was no real excuse to get rid of me until this incident occurred A this absurd incident in which I had no direct participation. It was Kafkaesque."