CAMAGÜEY.- Not always a single term portrays the person and the trade, but with Víctor Hugo Pérez Gallo (Nuevitas, 1979) the happiness of those who finds the natural pearl in an ocean of oysters without inheritance does embrace us. Fantastic. He is fantastic. We knew it since the summer of 2015 in the literary café La Comarca when he read a fragment of Los demoniados de Yaguaramas, where he proclaimed Camagüey the capital of the country and Ignacio Agramonte has not died. He participated in the Literary Crusade of the Hermanos Saíz Association (AHS) in this city with urban takeoff from medieval Spain.
“Ignacio Agramonte was of Navarre and Aragonese lineage. His last name is related to the main Navarrese houses, that is a heraldic study that Cuban historiography still has to do. For me, Ignacio Agramonte is part of my imagination: he is a demigod, at the level of Achilles, ahead of his time. In Los demoniados… he is a minor character but I have had a draft of a novel for years with himself as the main character. Agramonte's novel is yet to be written. His figure is already mythical ”, he tells as clues from the conference on the historical novel, given a few days ago at the Cuba Pavilion, the national headquarters of the AHS in Havana.
With that text, Víctor Hugo, or Solo Víctor Hache, as he is identified in the literary field, won the Hidra science fiction story contest, convened by the magazine Juventud Técnica in 2013; later published by Casa Editora Abril. Authors like him, Yoss and Elaine Vilar Madruga consolidate the national profile of science fiction literature in Cuba.
Along with a group of young Cuban writers, including Elaine Vilar Madruga.
─You invent worlds, what doesn't this have to suggest others?
─I believe that the writer is a kind of demigod, a being that creates new worlds and new lives and I invent the worlds to justify this world of mud where we all live; I believe that writing is a lifeline, which we can always use when sad daily life surrounds us.
Literary criticism finds in Victor Hugo a reinvention of magical realism and dares more to identify in his writing the birth of Caribbean neo-surrealism. For Los demoniados… he consulted the archives of Camagüey, Bayamo, Havana and Madrid. His intellectual stature was an endorsement for collaborating with the book When the light of the world grows. Sesquicentennial of the Assembly of Guáimaro (1869-2019) (Ediciones El Lugareño, 2019) He contributed to the segment "Confluent Voices" a different point of view by relating the mysteries of the origin of our nation with rites of Eleusis, a city of ancient Greece.
On his way through the Cuban capital he met the writer Yunier Riquenes and remembered his student years at the Universidad de Oriente, Santiago de Cuba.
─In a world where the past does not seem to matter, what sense do you find in researching and teaching the stories of writing?
─In my creative writing classes I always tell my students that written literature is superior to audiovisuals, but that it must be well written. Precisely the other project where I am working is entitled "Medieval History of Aragon for ababoles". "Ababol" is a word in Aragonese that literally means "fools", innocent, but the catch is in the very title: we are fools, we are innocent who do not read, who do not know history, although this ignorance today is more widespread of what we believe.
A stranger would highlight the charismatic big guy as one of the most witty of the generation, indeed, he has the ability of Cronos to trace a serpentine path with times and characters at his whim. On the other hand, due to the traps of looking with stereotypes, I would not suspect that he has forged himself as an outstanding professor: Doctor in Sociological Sciences from the Universidad de Oriente, Visiting Professor at the University of Santiago de Compostela and Zaragoza and Chercheur agrégé at the Université de la Sorbonne. He was awarded the Prize of the Academy of Sciences in Cuba for Holguín in 2015. Although he has specialized in Sociology of Conflict, an area to explain the internal mechanisms of conflict, protests and social movements, he recognizes being a writer as his true profession.
“Currently I teach creative writing classes at the National Distance Education University (UNED), which, as you know, is the largest public university in Spain both in number of students and academic offer, as well as the largest campus in Europe, and has been dedicated, for 50 years, to universalizing quality Higher Education through a model of online and blended learning, being a leader in its sector”, he adds.
The author of La Escritura Demential (Egarbook Editorial, 2017) usually asks students the origin of their names and surnames. In Zaragoza he has become familiar with other languages such as Catalan, Galician, and even Aragonese. He assures that they have their own literature and in many cases as rich as that written in Spanish.
“Now I am involved in two projects: a historical essay on the personalities from Zaragoza who were in Camagüey in the 19th century, such as Ramón y Cajal; and a historical novel trilogy, grimdark, based on the context of 12th century Aragon. Men and women inventors of modern Aragon. That's what the trilogy is about, the first part of which, Confabulados con Dios (Edhasa, 2023), I would love for Editorial Ácana to publish it for me, too, because I think my natural reader is the Cuban public."
This desire for adventure and the construction of imaginable environments is based on sediment and travel experience. A glimpse of social networks is enough to come across the surprising gallery. He spent a year in Cambodia. He was in Vietnam. He rode an elephant in Laos, where he worked as a reading promoter. He appears alongside Paris landmarks like the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower. The photo with the Acropolis of Athens in the background highlights the encounter with a point of reference in his approach. Indeed, every good fantasy knows how to place the mirror in the future and also in the past to understand, interpret and reconstruct the cultural present.
Pérez Gallo, from Camagüey, is a respected voice in the European academic sphere.
─Even drawing another future, you bring the roots to the work, in very creative ways. I think of The sea in the background, your book to Nuevitas…
─The region of Santa María del Puerto del Príncipe is always in my experiential and literary imagination; especially the northern part of the region, specifically the village of San Miguel del Bagá and its estuary, where a mint operated and through which the Trocha del Este passed in the 19th century, the futile attempt to stop the Mambi guerrillas ; is the town of San Fernando de Nuevitas, a city besieged by three islets that resemble mythologically petrified calves at the entrance to the bay. A villa always wet by the Caribbean Sea. That region is perennially in my imagination.
“I'll tell you a secret: I want to grow old on the coast of Nuevitas, I want to have a wooden house facing the sea, with my library there, and wake up every day of my life smelling the saltpeter and eating boiled crab dough with a bit of spice for breakfast, and accompanied by a drink of coffee. Although I have lived in Rome, Barcelona and Caracas, Camagüey is always in my head, and wherever I go I find similarities with my homeland, that is the truth. For example: Zaragoza, the current city, is very similar to Camagüey, its central street to its Cisneros street; as you already know, José Martí, our apostle, lived there, on Manifestación street. I visit the house where he lived often and it is always a party for me because I think: the greatest man that politics and literature has given in history walked here. Cuba, here he studied Law and here he fell in love with these narrow medieval streets barely illuminated by the sun, humid due to its proximity to the great Ebro river that flows into the Mediterranean Sea. Getting lost in those arteries of the historic center of Zaragoza is like being in the maze of streets of my Camagüey; in fact I have an unpublished novel where it takes place between Zaragoza and Camagüey and begins with the capture of the city of Santa María del Puerto del Príncipe by the pirate Morgan.
This is one of the most epic chapters that have occurred in the legendary Camagüey, and it is unfortunate that the new generations do not know about it. The historical research that I did in this regard is enough for an entire novel ”.
Memory of his experiences in Asian nations.
Next to the Seine, in Paris, as the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar (1914-1984)
In Laos he was a promoter of reading.
With the new generations he insists because "writing is a lifeline".
He is Chercheur agrégé Université de la Sorbonne.
In Santiago de Compostela.