Breve como un guion, raya que no cesa: «Cincuenta lecciones de exilio y desexilio», de Gustavo Pérez Firmat

After a few years of academic, poetic and essayistic writing in English, Gustavo Pérez Firmat decided to recover the Spanish language and to write in his mother tongue. This is how it was born, among other works, Cincuenta lecciones de exilio y desexilio (2000), a creative book, with short texts between aphorism, «aphorrhythm» –as he himself names some of his short compositions–, poem, play on words close to the humorous and audacious Anglo-Saxon pun, influenced by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, micro-story and the literary micro-essay. Under these principles, Pérez Firmat sets out to describe the inner state in which the members of the Cuban Generation 1.5 find themselves, between English and Spanish, between Cuba and the United States, between two very different cultures and societies where they do not belong entirely and to which they do not identify either. Their life remains always in the hyphen that surrounds the two words that intend to define their identities: Cuban-American.