Everything Fades Away (“Todo se desvanece”) tells the story of Samuel Estigarribia, a filmmaker once acclaimed by critics, who is now caught between romantic abandonment and creative exhaustion. L, the woman he loved, has left; the screenplay he is supposed to be writing barely exists; his flat, stripped of furniture and warmth, serves as the physical extension of a mind unable to move forward. Samuel witnesses the collapse of the version of himself he still wanted to believe in.

His routine is disrupted when Carmen, his sister, asks him to take in their father following a disturbing incident. The old man’s arrival forces Samuel to provide a form of care for which he has neither the vocation nor the words. In this forced intimacy, affection, revulsion, duty and resentment become intertwined. His father’s decline becomes a mirror that is hard to bear: what is inherited, what is feared, what can be explained by the illness, and what remains morally intolerable.

At the same time, two girls go missing in the city. Collective fear grows, the media conjure up a monstrous figure, and Samuel, increasingly trapped by his anxiety, begins to behave in a way that makes him a suspect.

Told in the second person, the novel traces the psychological breakdown of a man who is unable to control the way others perceive him.

In Refugees (“Refugiados”), two realities intertwine. In the first, a mother and her son struggle to survive on a post-apocalyptic Earth, where government robots maintain an iron grip over a polluted and resource-depleted planet. On the other hand, there is the perspective of a spaceship, where a privileged and gifted few live. They have access to artificial girls, drugs and rock music to take their minds off the fact that they have been chosen to save the human race. Or, at least, that is what they believe at first. Despair and uncertainty are commonplace in both realities.

At the same time, memories of a better past give the characters the courage to try to change their circumstances. The turning point comes when the mother and child attempt to escape and the prime minister’s son is captured by a group of rebels aboard the spaceship, who wish to blackmail his father. Is there a way back to a better world?

The author portrays Cuba’s society, the hopes and dreams of the generation which lived the days of the revolution and the young people who have grown up afterwards. There are those who engage in political life like the student leader Carlos in Las iniciales de la tierra (“The Initials of the Earth”), who experiences all the contradictions of revolutionary Cuba. There is the impossibility of realising the great dreams of freedom and justice cherished in the youth in Las palabras perdidas (“The lost Words”), where the young people’s passion for literature, love and pleasure is crushed and their ideals destroyed. And there are those who live in exile and return as visitors or suffer from nostalgic memories like Iris and Lidia who return to Cuba on a visit after long years of exile in La piel y la máscara (“The Skin and the Mask”). As exciting as a polit-thriller, as stimulating as an erotic novel, Díaz provides us with a vivid slice of Caribbean life and some deep insight into the current turmoil of Cuban society. In Dime algo sobre Cuba (“Tell me something about Cuba”) the dentist Stalin Martínez stays in the United States illegaly, in the end is broken by the inner turmoil produced by his love-hatred of his country. In Las cuatro fugas de Manuel (“Manuel’s four Attempts to flee”), Manuel, a highly gifted Cuban student of physics in the Soviet Union is on the run from the Cuban secret police. In an attempt to reach the Promised West, he fails three times, before finally succeeding and arriving in Germany, while the demise of the Soviet Union is in progress. His story occasionally reads like a parody of the fate of countless refugees. His wanderings stand for those of many people in flight from persecution and in search of the right to a self-determined life in dignity.

The Happiness Machine (“La máquina de ser feliz”) covers a period from 1980, the year of the refugee crisis and long revolutionary speeches, to Obama´s arrival in Cuba in 2014, and follows Marcel´s life as a young man who aspired only to achieve the best grades and be loved, to the time when he aspired to be president of Cuba, all marked by the trait of racism and by his double life, unconfessable even to the people closest to him, and by the pain that both things cause him. As a teenager, he begins to hatch a plan to ensure his social advancement: he becomes a delegate at his school, starts a political career and discovers his passion for women. His official girlfriend is Eva, the brunette with whom he has a platonic relationship, and his unofficial lover is María Teresa, the blondest girl in town and daughter of the secretary general of the party in Cienfuegos, with whom he will have his first illegitimate child. Marcel is a born social climber, a sort of Julien Sorel from Stendhal´s famous novel “The Red and the Black”, equally charming but much more devious and capable of the worst evils because he has the wrong idea of what it means to be bad. He will get to know the powers that determine the life of the country and will get to know the likes of Fidel Castro and García Márquez. At the same time, he lives surrounded by his ghosts, beings that follow him, pursue him and mark and determine his future. The Happiness Machine is, in conclusion, the story of a young man of great charisma, reminiscent of Tom Ripley, Patricia Highsmith´s great character, willing to do anything to succeed in a Cuba that is forced to reaffirm its revolution and in which large doses of pragmatism and a sense of humour are needed to avoid capitulation.

Call me Cassandra (“Llámenme Casandra”) is the story of Rauli, who is ten years old and an avid reader of classical literature. He was born in the wrong body and can see the future: he already knows that as the years go by he will fight in Angola and that he will die pierced by bullets that distil homophobia. He already knows how his companions will die. And he would like to be called Cassandra. Between childhood and adolescence, the novel narrates the search for an identity in a hostile environment that witnesses the collapse of the dream of the new man and the internationalist utopia. Lyrical and realist at the same time, “Call me Cassandra” reconstructs everyday life in Cuba in the 1970s, with a loving gaze at his characters and a great ability to embed the classic myth and characters of the Trojan War into the history of the Angolan war. A novel of initiation and identity that grabs you from the very first pages.

Young Alejandro and Ismael are doing their Cuban military service in the 1980’s. Both are outsiders because of their nonconformist attitude, sharing their aversion to Cuban rhythms and an enthusiasm for Western rock music, a symbol of freedom and against uniformity. Alejandro devoted himself to illegal cannabis cultivation. When a girl he was in love with informs on him, he is sent to the army. While he tries to obtain a quick release by playing the fool, Ismael takes advantage of the opportunity to transfer to a special unit which enjoys certain privileges. The reader learns about their destinies and about Cuban daily life in the second half of the twentieth century.
All this opens up a historical dimension that attests to the Cuban Revolution and its shortcomings. But Rocanrol also tells the story of those who are nobodies, pushed by the winds of change. For Alejandro and Ismael rock music is an effective means not to lose their own essence. This connects them even after their paths separate. The stories of Alejandro and Ismael write their own narrative within the immense narrative of history. What may at first seem like a witty book about growing up into adulthood, thus becomes charged with the tragedy of lives lived, and transforms into great literature.

In The Black Cathedral (“La Catedral de los Negros”), a couple from Camagüey arrives in a scruffy neighbourhood in the city of Cienfuegos. The father is a Christian belonging to the Holy Sacrament congregation who soon discovers that God has given him a mission: to build a church that surpasses anything previously seen in Cuba. The neighbourhood is a hive of passions and conflicts, and alongside the cathedral that rises day by day in Cienfuegos, a generation grows marked by violence, cruelty and the most extreme selfishness – defects that the characters carry with them well beyond the borders of their neighbourhood, their city, and Cuba itself, as though they could not escape the cursed, nefarious shadow of the unfinished cathedral. The novel opens out into a multiplicity of voices that discuss, explain and complete each other. This is a novel of broken architectures, characters, and narrators. A reflection of what is left when dreams are exhausted.

Sitting in a Lime Tree (“Sentada en su verde limón”) owes its title to a child’s song about a little bird. The novel takes place in the 1990s in Cienfuegos. It is the time of the economic crisis after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, but this is only the background for an extraordinary love story: the crazy love affair between the eighteen-year-old white Kirenia, who writes poems, and the fifty-five-year-old black Harris, a jazz saxophonist, who originally grew up in the USA and has already played with all the great figures of jazz. The love between the unconventional girl and the angry alcoholic is doomed from the beginning. It is Kirenia who is crushed by it. The story is told by Ricardo, a painter who sells his pictures to tourists for US dollars and is friends with both of them, drinking, smoking marijuana and listening to music with them. In such passages, the text rises to the intensity of a saxophone solo, while in others it calms down to soothing inner monologues, in which the spirits as well as the living have a voice. A book that hurts and at the same time makes you happy.