Cuban writer Amir Valle has just published his two most recent books. Both, in different literary genres, are linked by a topic that remains to be explored: the political police of socialist Germany, the Stasi.

“Your Most Secret Face,” his latest novel, addresses a real case of a descendant of German soldiers and investigates the relationship between the Stasi and the birth of the Cuban State Security Organs in the 1960s. This kinship between socialist repressive bodies is a topic that I was connected to, and from that curiosity, the book “Leviathan” was born in 2021.

“The Breath of the Wolf: The Stasi, the Berlin Wall and Our Lives,” for its part, takes the journey from the History, with a capital H, of the Stasi through non-fiction.

Without exhausting his strength to work, Amir researches and writes while leading a prolific company like Ediciones Ilíada since 2016. In addition to the distance of exile, his name does not stop resonating in contemporary Cuban literature.

Here is my interview with Amir.

In your case, what made you look at the Stasi with a story like “Your Most Secret Face”?

For anyone who has lived in a dictatorship, whether Left or Right, it is almost impossible to live in Germany and not snoop around in history or not visit those places where the horror of those two monstrosities that were Hitler’s National Socialism and the communism of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), with their respective political police, which of the two is more sinister, materialized.

Meeting Cubans who were victims of the Stasi was, perhaps, the first step. Then my human curiosity took over: how was it possible that in a nation that has generated so much humanism and so much beauty in culture, philosophy, and universal thought, these two irrational, inhuman, and horrendous phenomena would emerge?

All of this drove the journalist who lives within me, who was the one who decided to investigate, taking advantage of the fact that those archives, those testimonies, and the victims of that perfect political control of a people that the Stasi achieved between 1950 and 1989, the year in which the Berlin Wall fell and, with it, that oppressive system, were there, at hand.

Your book “Breath of the Wolf: The Stasi, the Berlin Wall and Our Lives,” which is a historical investigation into the German repressive body, has also come to light. What historical discovery impacted you the most during the research process?

That those who have decided to impose communism on this planet, supposedly the most humane, most just, most inclusive, most democratic level of human society, were willing, and demonstrated this with undeniable facts, to use inhuman, unjust, exclusive, and anti-democratic methods to achieve these supposedly higher purposes.

That in pursuing this idea of ??a better world, horrendous crimes have been committed, serious violations of human rights and even destruction of the economic, social, historical, and cultural framework that had been consolidated naturally and organically for centuries in many countries whose leaders opted for this model of society.

That is to say, researching Stasi documents, listening to the testimonies of the victims, delving into those dark intricacies of the history of communist Germany (and its truly sinister connections between the communist parties and the political police of the countries of what was called the Socialist Camp) has allowed me to reaffirm myself in the horror and the lies with which that ideology and that model of system have been built, which, fortunately, until today has convinced a large part of the world of its ineffectiveness precisely by the most effective means: that of its absolute failure.

As in other cases in your literature, the most recent novel has a real character at its center. Did his story find you or did you find it?

I came across that story in a summary of the content of the files that I reviewed during the months I was a Guest Writer at the Stasi Central Prison Museum in Hohenschönhausen: there they spoke of German citizens who, when they were able to review the files that the political police had prepared for them, discovered that they had been born in Cuba, almost all of them in the 1970s, and, for various reasons, had ended up and grown up in the GDR.

I found it a very seductive historical anomaly, as well as the Machiavellian nature of the fact that their true origins had been hidden from them for decades, so I began to ask and search in that direction, and one of the researchers from the federal office for the Stasi archives gave me the key to locate one of those files.

What came next was meeting this man, a young Stasi officer, who believed himself to be the legitimate son of one of those high-ranking officers who advised Cuban State Security in the early 1960s.

And here I must be honest, because it was the easiest moment of my research: that man opened the door to his life and his memory without many obstacles because he seemed desperate not to take his very unique story to the grave, I believe pressured by the cancer from which he would die some time later, in 2018. And that life story showed me the old thesis that reality often surpasses any fiction.

In Germany, where you have lived in your years of exile, how is that repressive force of socialist Germany perceived among the new generations?

That is one of the aspects to which I dedicate the most time in “Breath of the Wolf: The Stasi, the Berlin Wall and Our Lives,” the book resulting from my research on the subject. Even today, more than 30 years after the fall of the wall, the supposed “German reunification” is a national trauma with many unresolved issues, essentially in the economic differences between the territories that were in communist Germany, the GDR, and those that were in the then-called Federal Republic of Germany (FRG).

The same happens with the Stasi: there is consensus about the horror it imposed, but unfortunately, to give just one example, while the laws protect the majority of former repressors by preventing their personal stories as executioners from being used publicly to denounce this horror, the victims have been involved for years in endless trials seeking justice and even more bureaucratic processes to receive the compensation that the State promises for such cases.

This makes the panorama more complicated, makes research difficult and, I believe, prevents this enormous wound in the historical memory of Germany from being fully healed. Even so, there is historical awareness about the need to not lose memory.

You have just published in two very different publishing houses: Verbum, one of the publishing icons of the Cuban exile, and Anaya, a powerful Spanish-language publishing house. How are the Cuban publishing houses in the diaspora doing?

I think we are in one of the best times; and here I speak as the editor of Ilíada Ediciones, which I founded in 2016 and where nearly 200 titles by Cuban, Latin American, and Spanish authors have already been published, with a single yardstick: literary quality.

Basically, in the United States and Europe, very different publishing houses have emerged in recent years, in an attempt to provide coverage for the incessant literary production both on the island and in the diaspora.

Each editor, as we know, has his own little book, and each of us who have dared to get involved in this madness in a world that barely reads anymore, is observed and criticized from many sides. Some of us are accused of being elitist, others of being too inclusive in terms of quality, several of us for hasty editions, some for publishing books outside of Cuba and bringing them to the island, a few for publishing only writers who are outside the cultural circuits within Cuba. Criticism rains down and often does not take into account the risk we run or the challenges we must overcome simply to exist.

But the important thing is that today hundreds of authors, many of them of great quality and with excellent literary proposals, are there, visible, and all that is needed is to approach them. That, in any case, is a sign of good health.