Alberto Garrido is one of the most respected writers of his generation, which includes Amir Valle, Ángel Santiesteban Prats, and other authors who emerged in the creative world after the 1959 communist revolution in Cuba.

Loyalty to totalitarianism was expected of them, but none of that happened. The New Man who had to be revealed ran towards political opposition, confrontational writing, and a lifestyle that differed from socialist morality.

In the poems and stories of Garrido, now exiled in the Dominican Republic, one can see the transition, especially when he embraced the faith that Marxist ideologues believed was destined to die.

Here is my interview with Alberto.

When did you start writing? What genre attracted you?

My first text was a failed exercise of love for my mother, encouraged by an extraordinary fourth grade teacher named Cari. From that text, only a couple of verses remain in my memory (which I will never say in public) and the friendship I regained with my teacher, who at 88 years old still reads to me from Miami. To her, my gratitude.

However, poetry did not attract me as a child (at least the poetry in textbooks, infernally patriotic and with little poetic value). I liked stories, whether they were real or fictional, realistic or fantastic. I always remember from those times the story of the salmon, swimming against the current, upriver, in order to perpetuate itself. A double metaphor for the man I am: the writer, the Christian.

Have you experienced any discrimination because of your faith in Jesus since your conversion in 1995?

To a greater or lesser degree at the family, social, and professional level. I think they did not understand the inner earthquake I was experiencing. In the professional realm, they said that I had lost myself to literature. The funny thing is that more than a third of my work was written after my encounter with Christ. Socially, they complained that I was proselytizing religiously, because I told everyone what had happened to me.

I remember that when I won the Casa de las Américas prize, the first secretary of the PCC [Communist Party of Cuba] in Las Tunas was wringing his hands and clapping his hands when he saw me thank God for the prize. But it was His grace, because great friends of my generation and excellent writers of other generations must have undoubtedly sent good books that year.

As a writer, I was always under surveillance, as a missionary as well. I remember that a brother came to me one day crying because he had gone to church to see if we spoke against the government. After a while, he had a real encounter with Christ, and he felt guilty. I hugged him and advised him to tell them that there we only exalted one name: that of Christ, before whom all the kingdoms of this world will one day kneel.

In Las Margaritas we founded the El Shaddai church, an independent evangelical movement, in Las Tunas. In 2003 or 2004, they destroyed our church. But that should no longer be seen as discrimination, but rather as a crime against freedom of thought and worship. We built it with the effort and offerings of each brother in the congregation, without help from foreign ministries. So that it would not bother any capricious neighbors, we built it in the middle of a banana grove, which was entered by a long path planted with flowers.

We raised columns and put a roof on it. And then they came like children of the devil, who wants to kill, steal, and destroy. A few days ago, they had gone all out against an evangelical church in the city, in the Buena Vista area, almost next to the railroad tracks. That church was pastored by Brother Mayín Jorge, who is now in the apostolic movement.

They went against his church before dawn. They had no roof but some tarps and they burned them with torches. They broke the door of the instrument room and took everything: piano, guitars, bass, drums, tambourines, even the offering for the last service. They also took the benches and put them in the clinics in the area. So protesting would seem like a crime. Someone warned us that they would do the same to us.

When they arrived, all the benches were hidden in the houses of faithful brothers. We were left without a roof and without walls, but they could not steal the benches, which we had made with our own hands. We met in a brother's yard. And the church grew in the midst of opposition and we saw its miracles in our midst. Today it is a church under the Eastern Baptist convention and has given birth to several missions.

Has the literature you wrote changed? How?

Of course. My worldview has changed with respect to the purpose and destiny of man.

I have more light to denounce injustices, to point out to man what he is and to pile up his laughter and misery at the door. I am more human, I see the complexities of our heart, which is so deceitful in so many things. I am less disappointed by what I do not achieve and by the ingratitude that may come from people I admire or love. And, above all, I have written more than 1,500 pages of essays as a testimony of my gratitude for the one who saved me.

What do you think of the idea that Christians should not get involved in politics or touch on social issues?

The Lord calls blessed those who hunger and thirst for justice. I know that the perfect government will be established only when Christ returns, and that the right and left belong to the system of the world, to dark powers. I don’t have to be a fervent acolyte of a political party, which I distrust, to raise my voice against any crime against freedom that diminishes a human being. If Nehemiah had not complained to the Persian king about the state of the walls of his nation, would they have returned to rebuild it? If Wilberforce, in the 18th century, had not denounced the slave trade in the English parliament, would everything not have remained the same? That is why I have signed letters (one of them with your signature) and have made comments and denunciations, although I know that those who must read it will never do so.

But every injustice that we see and remain silent about makes us complicit in those powers. Jesus called Herod “that fox.” He did not remain silent before the Pharisees and Sadducees, who were two political parties that had moved 180 degrees away from the heart of God to defend their political interests. He called them hypocrites and whitewashed tombs.

Politics, as someone said, is the way to exercise lies and violence. The believer is a civil animal, in the sense that he must have a civic attitude, be a good citizen, obey the laws as long as they do not oppose God, and denounce evil. But, I must tell you, I am not only concerned by the silence of some, but also by the enormous political attachment that many have, the frightening idolatries that they express.

Have you addressed problems of contemporary Cuban society through your work?

Yes, although I have never claimed to be the critical conscience of that country of mine that no longer exists except in my memory. But a writer who does not question, who does not ask questions (and literature is an act of perpetual questioning) is finished.

In each of my books there is that cry of horror: in the outcry against war (I was the first to write against it in Cuba, in my first stories from 1983), in the anomie of those who were left alone (“The Circle of the Infidels,” “A Tale of a Man on the Margins”), in the approach to family division and exile (“All the Hungers”), in the poems that collect the voices of the people of my neighborhood (“A House Called Dream”), in the dichotomy between art and death (“The Arm and the Canvas,” “The Hero”).

Perhaps it is because the story of the salmon weighs on me, because swimming upstream implies confronting, facing the demons that are outside of Cuban literature, in its streets, in the ruined walls, in the desperation of a country that is dying.