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The Silent Grind (I)

Book Review

Boris González Arenas
Historian and filmmaker
Blog Probidad
Havana, Cuba

E

verydayness cannot be moving; it cannot
cause you to gasp, cloud your intelligence
or make you cry uncontrollably.
Anyone who hasn’t seen a car whiz by at top
speed on a recently tarred highway can marvel at
human inventiveness and remain stunned for
hours, months or years.
The soldier who sees his comrade die at the beginning of a military experience will suffer a
shock typical of newbies; it is very different from
the one he will feel if he continues fighting for
two or three years, sifting through the entrails and
body parts of those with whom he had just been
chatting moments earlier.
Shock is also a form of alienation; an individual
in shock focuses obsessively on that which
shocks him or her, dedicating time and energy to
it.

This makes his or her understanding revolve
around it. If we lived in shock, the universe would
be a scene with only one object, the one that
shocks and only one character, the one who’s
shocked. Shock has to be an extraordinary feeling.
La conmoción es necesariamente un sentimiento
extraordinario.
The book La callada molienda [The Silent Grind]
(La Havana: Ediciones La Memoria, 2011),
which earned the 2012 Memoria Prize from the
Pablo de la Torrente Center is a collection of testimonies by Cuban sugar workers from Matanzas
province.
It reveals the material and emotional condition in
which they were left when most sugar mills in
Cuba were closed, in 2002.

Sugar mill in ruins

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