Coming of Age During the Cuban Revolution

Anna Veltfort on turning memories of living in Castro’s Havana into art

ANNA VELTFORT

Panel from Goodbye, My Havana »

 

Stanford University Press is proud to present a Q&A with Goodbye, My Havana» author Anna Veltfort

1. What made you want to write this memoir?

I had never been able to explain, to the people in my life in the US, what the Cuban Revolution was like or what my experience living in Cuba during the early years of the Revolution as a teenager and young adult was like, much less how it was to come out gay there. I attended all of high school and college in Havana, and came of age in a country, a historical period, utterly different from life in the United States. Writing and illustrating this memoir was the solution to my desire to convey at long last this strange and amazing experience of life on another planet.

 

2. Why did you choose to tell this story in color?

Cuba is a land of intense color, impossible for me to imagine in anything but full color. I also set out to use color as a visual stand-in for music and sometimes emotions. Thus to life in the USA, before moving to Cuba, I gave a muted palette intended to evoke the period of my childhood in the US during the 1950s. The long, difficult wait in Mexico before getting to Cuba, I rendered in a limited palette of blues and greys, and the times of terror in Cuba, when homophobic repression touched my life and of others I knew, in reds and orange.

 

3.  What was the writing process like?

1. First I created an annotated chronological timeline of the events, places and characters that I felt played a role in the story.
2. Guided by that timeline I wrote a running narrative of what would roughly be the whole book, subject to many changes, omissions and additions along the way. While crafting this narrative, I mined many letters, diaries, and photographs from that past, and consulted photographs that I commissioned as references from friends in Havana, drawings I had made in Cuba at the time, letters from my family. I had a trove of materials that I had brought from Cuba in 1972-- vinyl records, posters, books, magazines, political pamphlets, school papers, calendars... all very useful to transport my mind back into that time and place.
3. The key, and for me, most important and difficult part of the whole process happened now: translating this textual narrative into a visual narrative. This involved creating first rough thumbnail page-by-page sketches of panels and art and then more detailed storyboards of the panels, art and speech balloons for texts.

 

4. Can you walk us through the drawing/layout process?

Guided by the storyboards, I created layouts in the computer program QuarkXpress, now with finalized panels for art and text balloons as well as the texts that would appear between panels. These layouts became the basis for three eventual, individual, and editable overlays: on top, black line drawings, then second, the type for text balloons, and third, a base with color art. The sketches and line art I created by hand with paper and ink and then scanned, adjusted, cleaned and elaborated in Photoshop for each page. The texts were all added as type first in Photoshop then later imported into the final inDesign layout of the whole book. The color art was created directly in Photoshop under the type and black line layers. These art layers and text layers were then ready for line editing and finalized for the printer.

 

Panels from Goodbye, My Havana »

 

5. What’s your favorite part about making a comic?

It is like making my very own miniature paper movie with all the elements—story, music (in the form of color), visual action; saying the unsayable through diverse media all in one.

 

6. Have any graphic novels/comic books influenced your work? If so, how?

1. The Little Nemo newspaper comic strips by Winsor McKay (early XX Century), later compiled into books. I fell in love with his clear-line style and the emphasis on architectural realism and detail.
2. The work of Joost Swarte, Dutch graphic artist (from the 70s to the present)— I was very impressed by his page layout designs, his use of clear-line styling and gorgeous color work.
3. The Pogo books by Walt Kelly, for his veiled, understated, and sharp political observations of the times, embedded in a comic about the daily lives of a series of characters. I was drawn to the wonderful visual expressiveness of emotions and body language of the characters.

 

7. Earlier this year Bernie Sanders remarked on Cuba’s literacy rates. As someone who lived in Cuba during the Cold War did you have a reaction to these remarks?

Bernie Sanders praised the literacy campaign of 1961 where thousands of school children and teenagers were sent all over Cuba with a notebook and a Chinese kerosene lantern, to teach people of all ages, in their homes, to read. This was a transformative experience for the students and young teachers alike and this initiative taught many illiterate Cubans how to read. What Bernie Sanders left out was that from that time forward the people of Cuba were told what they could read and what they could write. The rest was forbidden and remained so by greater or smaller degrees over the ensuing decades.   

 

8. What is the biggest misconception people have about living in Cuba? Has this changed over the years?

For the traditional, political left, that came up in the 1960s and 70s, in the United States, Latin America and Europe, Cuba still embodies the illusions of the first years of the Revolution, the utopia of our youth. But that utopia, with bountiful, free, first-class health care for all; first-rate education for all; and milk for every child, is non-existent and has been for decades. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, Cubans who don’t receive hard currency remittances, or who are not family members of the military class or the Communist Party elite; or who do not go into exile, are fated to live lives of dire hardship. Decades of living with intermittent water shortages, dirty and understaffed hospitals, long lines for all the simple necessities of life, from soap to bread, have dimmed the ardor of all but the most diehard of the older generations. The Cuban millennials and younger people have no connection to the broken dreams of their parents and grandparents. Most want to leave. That is what I believe is the sad state of affairs in Cuba today. Old myths die hard.

 

Set against a backdrop of world-changing events during the headiest years of the Cuban Revolution, Goodbye, My Havana » follows young Connie Veltfort as her once relatively privileged life among a community of anti-imperialist expatriates turns to progressive disillusionment and heartbreak.

9. What would you like people to take away from this book?

That Cuba is a heartbreakingly beautiful country, with a rich culture, and a history much more complicated than any tourist or casual academic can see or imagine. That homophobia, an outsized thread in the fabric of Cuban life, was there right from the beginning of the Revolution and it tragically affected the generations that came into the Revolution in 1959, lived through the 1960s and 70s and beyond.

 

10. What was the one surprising thing you learned while writing the book?

I learned that there were old sorrows and unresolved issues in my life that transformed, defanged, into stories, into characters, into another dimension, as I crafted the book. When I finished, I felt like a burden had lifted from my shoulders and I could go forward lighter, freer, and move on into the present. Of course the current present, dominated by the terrible coronavirus was not what I had in mind!

 

11. What’s next?

Before traveling to Cuba, my mother sent me on my own to Germany in August 1961, when I had just turned 16, to say goodbye to her very conservative mother and brother, my grandmother and uncle. They received me warmly but decided to send me to Berlin, alone, to see the Berlin Wall just as it was being constructed, as a cautionary tale of what moving to a Communist country meant. I’m thinking about maybe turning that episode into a graphic novella. Plenty of drama to work with there!

Start reading Goodbye, My Havana »

Anna Veltfort is a graphic designer and illustrator who lives in New York.

Comments

[E. C. Fragos]

Anna Veltfort's superb book, Goodbye, My Havana, introduced me to a time and a land and a people I did not know at all. Veltfort writes and illustrates with such eloquence and passion about hard, repressive times, about courageous, loving times. Her voice is true and honest; it is without easy bitterness or rage. This book is about a deep life lived, about transformation, about personal dignity and freedom.