Below is my translation of a recent post in his Emanaciones blog by Juan Abreu, a Cuban exile writer based in Spain who was part of the Mariel exodus with his friend Reinaldo Arenas, the author of Before Night Falls. Like Arenas, Abreu has a caustic tongue–sin pelos en la lengua–and a deep loathing for the Castro regime and its effects.
He routinely refers to Cuba simply as la pavorosa, which can be translated as the dreadful one, the frightful one, etc.
Today I spoke with a Cuban friend. I haven’t bothered with news of la pavorosa for a long time, but once in a while, inevitably, news reaches me. For example, this Cuban friend clued me in on the romance of the famous actress Ana de Armas with the stepson and adviser of the designated Castroite dictator, read Díaz Canel. “How does it strike you?” this friend wished to know after informing me of the new romance between the actress and the Castroite aristocrat, and without thinking—it was the first thing that came to mind—I said that in light of what he’d told me, what Miss de Armas reminded me of was one of those shiny green flies one sees posed on piles of shit, flies irresistibly attracted by shit, which cannot, given their nature, pass up any opportunity to wallow in shit—thus Miss de Armas.