Of Sonic Attacks and Errant Threads: Works by Marcelo Morales and Reina María Rodríguez

Two contemporary Cuban poetry collections depict disorienting experiences of the home, which make the necessity for emotional endurance visible. These works frame ways of viewing recent island history, while suggesting a wide range of personal implications for everyday citizens. Marcelo Morales began The Star-Spangled Brand in 2015 with an interest in the tourism industry’s destination branding of Havana; he was soon caught up in odd twists of North/South political relations. Following visits to the United States, he returned home to a new “Special Period” (a phrase originally referring to the island’s period of response to economic crisis in the 1990s) and a life he depicted through ever more labyrinthine imagery. Writing from her apartment in Havana at the turn from the 1990s and into the first years of the new century, Reina María Rodríguez generated a rich sense of otherness within the home. Her poems gathered in Jigs and Lures explore family life and the home of the past, including long-term effects still unfolding from the Special Period. Her prose poetry from this period also references the outflow of migration from her city, registering its cumulative impact on local creative community life, including the well-known literary salon that Rodríguez had hosted in her home.

As the translator of both collections, published in Spanish/English bilingual editions in 2024 and 2025, I compiled this commentary by drawing on diverse disciplines: literary translation, creative writing, Cuban studies scholarship, and recent studies of tourism and international relations. These remarks are also informed by many conversations with Morales and Rodríguez over the course of years.^[1] Their internally expansive literary works accommodate multilayered investigations. Another contemporary poet, Srikanth Reddy, asks us to conceive of a “wondrous category of things that are larger inside than outside, like a poem, or a person, or a world” (2024, 52). In this spirit, I consider elements that Morales and Rodríguez code into their poetic homes.

Marcelo Morales: The Star-Spangled Brand

The Star-Spangled Brand, by Marcelo Morales (b.1977), is a work of prose poetry that charts tensions in and beyond the city of Havana. Morales presents fragmented thoughts of a speaker whose life parallels his own, allowing for a semi-biographical reading. The speaker’s interiority manifests in fraught relation to exterior forces. Morales began this project in 2015 with an interest in depicting an “Americanized” Cuba, conceiving his work as a contemporary reply to Roberto Branly Deymeir’s 1956 chapbook-length prose poem on the same theme, entitled El cisne (The Swan).

Morales began to present images of his home city of Havana as a site existing inside, and partially outside, loops of US cultural and political influence. “The Swan II,” the extended opening poem that serves as his most direct sequel to Branly’s work, quickly invokes the Obama administration’s 2015 reopening of the US embassy in Havana: “La bandera americana ondeando en la embajada. Ahora había Coca Colas, rodaban rojas por el suelo” [“The American flag waving over the embassy. Now there were Coca-Colas, red and rolling across the ground” (13/77)]. In 2016, President Barack Obama visited Havana as part of his administration’s plan to normalize US/Cuban relations. Morales took a photo in the street that may depict the head of state himself, a silhouette of a figure touring Havana in a black limousine, now incorporated into The Star-Spangled Brand (146-147).

Morales expected tourism to occupy a central role in his exploration of Havana: How was his home marketed for visitors? As the opening poem shows, he also noted the use of US symbols in Havana, displayed in part for a Cuban gaze—images arriving in the reverse direction. The title of The Star-Spangled Brand— which Morales uses in English for the original, Spanish-dominant collection – points toward exchanges. The title calls up a time when the idea of branding permeates economic, political, and cultural life.

This phenomenon is international and studied by scholars interested in how tourism and nation-states co-create and message about each other, a cross-pollination that Morales writes into his poems. Gregory Fayard proposes that we envision actual nation-states today in just such a fusion with tourism:

Morales’ image of the United States embassy, accompanied by its iconic Coca-Cola cans, depicts the fusion of nation-states with industries in “forged” imaginaries. It is important to keep in mind that Morales does not see branding as particular to either the US or Cuba. He writes in the spirit of Nedelea & Nedelea (2024), who observe that around the world, “In this era of super-brands it is not unusual to consider a city, country or region as a successful brand” (149).

In Havana, Morales has earned some of his income as a cultural guide and driver, occupying a real albeit marginalized role in relation to tourism when writing the book. He captures images and language from contemporary tourism, juxtaposing them with phrases evoking the perspective of a local whose historical frame and philosophical concerns diverge from industry norms. The term “Paraíso” (Paradise) appears in his original Spanish, deliberately capitalized to emphasize that this is a construct. Alongside it in “The Swan II,” Morales inserts a similarly deliberate pattern of code-switching: “Emulación socialista. In the arecas Paradise. In the fifties Paradise. American tourist, Obama’s tourist” (“Socialist emulation. In the betel palm Paradise. In the fifties Paradise. American tourist, Obama’s tourist,” 14/78).

Morales commented to me during the translation process that the tourism industry brands Havana with a “realidad vintage” (vintage-reality) aesthetic noted in the poems. It is generated through visual designs evoking earlier decades, such as the 1950s. Morales also grabs fragments from taxi conversations and restaurants. His use of code-switching for Havana’s tourist corridors prompted me to return to a choice I made for an earlier bilingual edition: to use a mix of standard text and italics within the English translation, emphasizing recurrent contacts and tensions.^[2]

As the speaker prepares to drive visitors, his private feelings reflect an awareness of history:

As Morales continued his composition of the poems, the Obama administration gradually reconfigured relations in favor of “normalization,” an intervention in which the neighboring nations would draw down from oppositional strategies, policies, and behaviors in keeping with a new, post-Cold-War landscape. The Cuban government participated as a partner in that change: “Cuban agency in the normalization process was geared toward protecting the Revolutionary regime during a period of economic reform and leadership change. The move was very popular with the Cuban public” (Biegon 2020, 48).

Morales was invited to present his poetry in the United States, reversing the direction of travel, and he logged notable moments in the next poems: “Un sándwich cubano en el aeropuerto de Miami. / En Chicago leí con un tipo que escribía cosas como: / Y yo le dije algo and she said, oh yes! or Hell no!” [“A Cuban sandwich in the Miami airport. / In Chicago I read with a guy who wrote stuff like: / And I said something to her and she said, Oh yes! Or Hell no!” (26/90)] The poetic speaker falls in love with a woman in Miami. He travels to Washington DC, and his lack of commentary on national politics or branding hints at a desire for other experiences: “Hoy pasé la mañana en el cielo, vi, en el aeropuerto de Washington, el retiro de un avión” [“Today I spent the morning in the sky. At the Washington airport I saw an airplane’s retirement” (31/ 95)].

As he continued to compose poems, occasionally traveling along the south/north axis again, Morales witnessed transformations to physical elements around Havana made possible by the new policy arrangements, documenting design choices for show windows and building facades in photographs. Two of his photos grappling with visual indices of change in his home city were published  on January 20, 2017, in an online interview at BOMB Magazine. There I cited a quotation about memory, change, and home from our 2016 bilingual edition, El mundo como ser / The World as Presence:

To Morales, these passages connected to his photographs, because the Cold War world seemed to be disappearing gradually from the streets of the new Havana.

He was able to visit his girlfriend at her home, walking through Havana’s Cuban mirror city of Miami, where other codes of change were surfacing. His speaker remarks, “Hoy caminé por Coral Gables, vi una gallina muerta, una paloma muerta, un Mustang, una grúa. Make América Great Again! Carteles” (“Today I walked through Coral Gables. I saw a dead chicken, a dead pigeon, a Mustang, a crane. Make America Great Again! Signs” (32/96). Addressing the city, he delineates an emotion capable of outlasting human historical time: “‘Mayami,’ ella es mi amor por ti. / Va a durar más que el plástico, te digo” (“‘Mayami,’ she’s my love for you. / It will last longer than plastic, I tell you” (36 /100).

But ten days after the publication of our interview, Donald Trump was inaugurated as the new president of the United States. The branding trend in the tourism industry now intersected with Trump’s branding, a fusion of celebrity and for-profit business with national politics. The degree and meaning of “change” in Cuba/US relations, from that point forward, would be “largely dependent upon the Trump Administration’s political will to remain committed to Obama’s changes in policy” (de Bahl 446). Trump himself brought a long-term negativity about Latin America to the presidency (Weeks 119). It was not clear during his campaign whether his apocalyptic, unfriendly rhetoric would impact policy: Trump initially seemed to lack motivation to change Obama-era policies significantly (Biegon 2020, 63).

It turned out that the first Trump administration would work actively to make the emerging new state of improved Cuba/US relations disappear, which again recalls the disappearing worlds of Morales’s earlier poem, but within a different political frame. Analyses of policy shifts from the first Trump administration present varied perspectives on intentions, strategies, and results. Because the US never dismantled its economic embargo of Cuba, scholars such as John de Bhal (2018) quickly emphasized continuity amongst the successive US administrations: “The overall strategy of ‘bringing [of] capitalism and pluralist democracy to Cuba’ is the same under both the Obama and Trump Administrations; the only shift has been in the methods for pursuing this objective” (2018, 437). Still, this point remains so general as to pass over experiences made possible by the policy differences, with real outcomes experienced by citizens such as Morales.

Biegon subsequently characterized the Trump administration’s global stance as a “return to a hardline position” (2020, 49). Weeks has pointed out a meaningful item, the terrorism designation that Obama’s administration had ended in 2015: “Mere days before Trump left office, the State Department placed Cuba on the State Sponsor of Terrorism list, which it shared with Iran, North Korea, and Syria. From 1982 to 2015, Cuba had been on that list, with the evidence for sponsoring terrorism becoming increasingly tenuous” (127). Weeks explains that being returned to this list has broad real-world consequences for Cuban people: “Being on the list entails sanctions not only on the country but on anyone trading with them, thus complicating commercial relations” (128).

As for the U.S. embassy and its flag, restored by the Obama administration, Trump’s administration cut employees and services. Initially, representatives explained that move with reference to mysterious “sonic attack” symptoms suffered by diplomats, which Morales would code into his poems:

With less staff, the embassy greatly reduced services. Debates will continue as to how much Trump “hardline” diplomacy differs from Obama’s vision and completed actions. Meanwhile, The Star-Spangled Brand  speaks in microcosm, sheltering emotional experiences such as love and uncertainty.

Morales’ speaker begins to experience a doubt that permeates everyday activities, like shopping, and it acquires existential weight: “Como un pez de pecera que escapa y encuentra, que la única manera de vivir era en ese cuadrilátero minúsculo. […] El minotauro y el ovillo, el laberinto y la salida. Lleno el carrito de cosas, cosas que vuelvo a dejar. Comprar la depresión. El laberinto sin salida” (“Like a fishtank fish who escapes and learns that the only way to live was inside that tiny quadrilateral. […] The minotaur and the ball of yarn, the labyrinth and the exit. I fill the cart with things, things that I put back. Purchasing depression. The labyrinth with no exit” (39 /103).

As logged by Morales, the experience of the late 2010s became bizarre – a world filled with spectacle, news colliding with mythology. Headlines stretched and distorted. In compiling the remaining poems, he confronted the challenge of transforming the weird, disturbing political content of the era into effective poetry. Cuban poetry dealing directly with local and international politics has long faced concerns about whether artistic language too easily collapses into propaganda.^[3] Morales opted to keep a focus on emotions, needs, and desire. He delivered a straightforward statement about the co-present nations and their actions affecting everyday life: “La realidad habla, el universo. Esto es lo que siento, el poder de dos estados en mi nuca” (“Reality speaks, the universe. This is what I feel: the power of two nation-states on the back of my neck,” 40/104). 

As relations sour on two planes, those of the speaker’s romantic life and the Cuba/US relations structuring political and economic realities, he revisits his sense of home:

As these passages foreshadow in their melding and splintering, the book concludes with the breakup of the transnational romance, which did not “last longer than plastic.” The Star-Spangled Brand also depicts the speaker’s return to a life of driving tourists around Havana, albeit with a shrinking pool of US visitors. International policy implications fold into the scenes of his homecoming, as Morales gestures toward the return of economic crisis to Cuba. Severe crisis had previously been associated with the 1990s: The term “The Special Period,” which Morales incorporates into his final poem, is shorthand for the Cuban experience and state strategies following the collapse of global alliances that supported socialist economic alliances prior to 1989. The Special Period has returned to the forefront of the speaker’s mind:

Enduring homecoming as crisis, within the twisting and bending of temporal frames, this poetic speaker is anything but okay.

Reina María Rodríguez:  Jigs and Lures

Reina María Rodríguez has written a series of books depicting speakers who struggle to maintain a home through states and stages of crisis that transform it. Hers is not only a domestic challenge, but a professional one. These books include poems that we selected for her bilingual edition, Jigs and Lures (2024), composed in Havana during the late 1990s and the early 2000s.

The poems were originally published in three different books. The majority are taken from Catch and Release (for which Rodríguez selected an English-language title, though the poems appear in Spanish), published by Letras Cubanas in 2006 and rereleased in 2007 after winning the Cuban Book Institute Critics’ Prize. We paired them with selections from El libro de las clientas (The Book of Clients, from Letras Cubanas, 2005) and Bosque negro (Black Forest, from Ediciones Extramuros, 2005).

By this stage of her career, Rodríguez was an internationally prominent voice in Spanish-language literature, having emerged on the island in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In the 1990s, she hosted a cultural salon in her rooftop Havana home, “a space that came to represent the most effervescent and transgressive poetic scene of the time” (Hernández Salván and Rodríguez 2024, 676). The energy of this ambitious creative community that gathered within her literal home propelled her into new stages of her writing and onto the international stage. Because the poetry we selected for Jigs and Lures turns the corner from the late ‘90s into the twenty-first century it depicts a new phase, when the cultural activity in her home has changed.

Creators play special roles in Jigs and Lures. Rodríguez includes imagery of Havana fisherman catching something only to release it as a metaphor for the writers, artists, and other creators who populate the poems selected from Catch and Release. While using accessible vocabulary and everyday images from her city, Rodríguez generates places where self and home become other, elusive as the fish that gets away in the end. She works with oppositions that split every scenario at its center: catch and release, here and there, place and non-place, then and now, presence and absence. The delicate and otherworldly results recall Reddy’s “wondrous” interiorities. Wonder is fugitive, Reddy observes; it “has a way of disappearing the moment you speak of it” (2024,48). Rodríguez portrays her creators in association with this fugitive sort of truth, shifting within her oppositions. 

The prose poem that we selected as our title poem for this bilingual edition, “Jigs and Lures,” dreamily enacts her signature otherness within the home. There the poet’s mother slowly moves past, while the poet considers how to portray her, a reminder that this home is a literary space.

A thoughtful contemplation of a home remembered for creative work –yet missing something for which the speaker searches– also appears in polytemporal poems from The Book of Clients, as does the poet’s mother. Here Rodríguez takes memories of her mother’s labor as a seamstress as a central metaphor. Elements of her poems slide across each other like the slippery textures of fabrics that her mother worked into gowns in the same building.

The creative home to which Rodríguez returns in memories is not utopian. The fabric of family, and of life itself, slides and frays. She winds poems from threads of tension; even as they come together, they are always in the process of wearing apart. As a result, Rodríguez portrays existence as an errant thing, unstable as circles moving in the water of the bay:

She depicts more threads chafing at the heart of the family’s fabric in a major poem, “Céline y las mujeres” (“Céline and the women”):

In other moments throughout the bilingual edition of Jigs and Lures, a transformation in the view of the fragile home —and the creator inhabiting it— has more to do with the dynamics of migration, which accompanied crisis from the 1990s into the first decade of the twenty-first century. Rodríguez adopts a dry, matter-of-fact tone in “Voces” (“Voices”), a poem from Black Forest. Her speaker perceives that a critical mass of the creative community —made up of those figures who formerly gathered at Rodríguez’s real-life rooftop home— has exited the island.

Their nonreturn leaves the poetic speaker disoriented, isolated, again errant as she fails to connect with her distant friends on the telephone. 

These bilingual editions, Jigs and Lures and The Star-Spangled Brand, represent poems composed in separate decades. While there are many contrasts between the poetic scenes and strategies of these authors, their poetic worlds include a shared gesture: referencing the memory  of Cuba’s traumatic Special Period as a key for interpreting a different historical present. In so doing, the writers code shared, exterior realities into their poems, opening polytemporal fault lines of association, experience, and emotion that expand the interior dimensions of their written worlds. Morales and Rodríguez suggest questions about the duration, nature, and return of economic crisis affecting home and professional life, and with it their everyday sense of possibility, in the early decades of the twenty-first century.