art review

A Stateless Man's Dream

July 17th, 2026 | By Ahmel Echevarría

Fossil (detail) 2008
Cockroach wing fragments on translucent stone, light, and pedestal | 36 x 18 x 18 in

Call Me Ahmel

January arrived, and so did 2025. Halfway through the month it will pierce my head and my body in much the same way 2024 did—with hypersonic calm. Be careful. In Miami everything happens too fast, a good friend warned me, sounding more alarmed than concerned. Another good friend, one we have in common, calls him my fascist friend. Cuba, the way tango does to the men—and to the women—in Borges's magnificent story The Man on Pink Corner, has its own way with him. It bends him to its will, drives him on, loses him, commands him, then finds him again.

Even so—and I have no wish to turn a deaf ear—I shall go on sighting reality, or perhaps the Real, with the faulty aim of the nearsighted. I have no other choice.

Does true beauty reside in imperfection? "...man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and radiant creature, that over every blemish in him all his fellows should hasten to throw their costliest robes..." I came across those words in a digital edition of Moby-Dick and could only shrug. It is hardly a maxim to be followed without exception, though I have known a few wonderfully imperfect souls who looked as though they had just staggered out of a blood-soaked championship bout inside the UFC octagon.

It is the imperfection of what is seen, joined to the eye's own physical imperfection. Here in Miami, where life travels in missile mode, where every shot must strike the target—or the bull's-eye—the task is simply to fail as little as possible, whether in the smallest routine or the largest act of living.

By the time I reach the fifteenth day of the month, perhaps I will be able to cast an oblique glance across my first three hundred and sixty-five days, plus one, away from Cojímar, Havana, Cuba. A year and a day. A foundational span of time?

"There were the fixed threads of the warp, held fast by a single, ever-recurring, invariable vibration, a vibration scarcely sufficient to admit the transverse interweaving of other threads with its own. That warp was necessity itself. Here, I thought, with my own hand I guide my own shuttle and weave my own destiny upon those unalterable threads."

So Herman Melville reminds us in that odyssey where obsession takes the shape of a sperm whale. Fabric, texture, text—or Textum.

A lingering ache remains in a cluster of muscles at my waist, a pain earned like a cheap tin medal after grueling physical labor in a filthy place in Little River. I fall into bed with all the weight and pliancy of wild cane. My dreams possess the very qualities Italo Calvino believed literature should carry into the new millennium—lightness, multiplicity, exactitude, quickness, visibility. Six proposals that remained five. Death pulled Calvino out of the octagon before he could deliver the last.

Dreams deserve a paragraph of their own. A substantial part of the lived tragedy of many Cuban immigrants and exiles unfolds in bed. After a day's labor worthy of The Old Man and the Sea or Moby-Dick, beaten or merely worn down, "living in pain or dying in torment," they dream they have returned to Cuba, only to discover they cannot leave again.

I could safely wager that, once a year and a day have passed, I still will not have dreamed of returning to Cuba. My dreams never leave it. They unfold there as though I had never departed. Havana in full color.

Since details matter, let me add this. My dreams contain a little of everything—living relatives and dead ones, the neighborhoods of my childhood, adolescence, bachelorhood and restless desire; friends who remained on the island and friends scattered beyond it; brawls and love affairs, as though I myself were one of Borges's knife fighters, perhaps someone in the mold of Rosendo Juárez the Brawler, one of those "who stamped hardest through Villa Santa Rita," a young man "with a reputation for the knife." Or perhaps closer to Borges's anonymous narrator, an ordinary patron carrying a short, razor-sharp blade tucked beneath his vest "under his left arm," who returns home, inspects the knife one more time, slowly, and discovers that it is "new, innocent," its blade bearing "not the faintest trace of blood."

In my dreams—in that oneiric Cuba that seems determined to have its way with me, convinced it can drive me, lose me, command me, then find me again the following day—I inhabit absurd, laughable situations. Solitude. Happiness so guileless it borders on innocence. At times even improbable State Security agents or informants intrude. Yet it is no real homeland, however insistently the country pretends otherwise through the night and inside my head. It exists without being present, like the lingering pain in an ankle long after the shackle has been removed.

Borrowing once more from Melville—from the white whale, from Captain Ahab and Ishmael—I might venture, at the risk of imprecision, to write that this is "happiness weighed and discovered in absence."

More than solidarity, I have come to know profound sadness through people I have deeply loved. Seen in that light, and not merely by logical consequence, if the previous sentence holds true, then alongside sadness I too have known happiness weighed and discovered in absence.

I have left Cuba to my dreams. Perhaps it is the consequence of the hypersonic calm with which each day has passed as I crossed the threshold of a year and a day. Or perhaps it is simply because a dog has four legs and only one road to follow. Or because, in all likelihood, I now belong to a line from a song by Elvis Manuel, the first martyr of Cuban reggaetón—perhaps even of reparto itself: "I'm not the man I used to be. Let's erase the time we lost."

Is the Republic of Cuba a disease? A public secret disease?

Roberto Bolaño wrote in Antwerp:

There is a secret disease called Lisa. Like every disease, it is undignified, and it comes at night. It inhabits the fabric of a mysterious language whose words all mean, without exception, that the foreigner "is not well." I wish she could somehow know that the foreigner "is having a hard time," "in unknown lands," "with little chance of writing epic poetry," "with little chance of anything." The disease leads me to strange, motionless bathrooms where the water obeys an unforeseen mechanics.

And so I tell myself:

One. Cuba could be Lisa.

Two. I have stood in bathrooms where the water obeyed an unforeseen mechanics. Still, I keep notes in a small notebook with a worn green cover, marked by a stubborn metallic capital H embedded in the upper left corner. A troubling letter. H for Ahmel. Or H for Ishmael.

Three. Those notes have gradually woven themselves into a long epic poem that also happens to be a book of chronicles, or perhaps the fortunes and misfortunes of a nearsighted man wandering "through the middle of an incongruous landscape, lights emerging from the fog, the conversation of two passersby meeting in the midst of their daily bustle..." I borrow the image from Invisible Cities. I am speaking of a black man with an afro, nearsighted, carrying a metallic H fixed to the left side of his name, a man writing each page while narrating, in the first person, his own belated Bildungsroman—or his own Book of Genesis—as each day finally settles into silence with the coming of night.

Four. That long epic poem, that book of chronicles in the form of a late Bildungsroman, might well be titled Miami Grand Prix, after the Formula One race held in Miami in 2024. A few days before the event, while helping build tables subcontracted for the race, the nearsighted black man with the afro begins to feel a faint pain clustered around his waist. The pain could be called Lisa. Or Cuba. Pain as a double allegory.

If, in Moby-Dick, the sea may carry four or five solemn, terrifying, biblical meanings for Ishmael—desert and solitude, exile and exiles, orphanhood and orphans, miracle and rescue—might that city where the protagonist of Miami Grand Prix has arrived hold a comparable meaning for him? What exactly is he pursuing in Miami, or in Miami Beach?

Call him Ahmel. Other questions boil against the walls of his skull.

Is the Republic of Cuba, for the black man with the afro, a public secret disease—a condition, an affliction whose true cause no one wishes to name? What would be the proper antibiotic? What antidote?

Overdose, 2010 (detail) Crushed flies and fly wings on walls, ceiling, and floor. Miami Art Museum. Dimensions variable.

The Cuban visual artist Fabián Peña (Havana, 1976) has worked with the bodies and wings of insects that habitually infest Cuban homes. He has also worked with the political corpus of a State that habitually inhabits the Cuban's most intimate space.

Cockroaches and flies. Magazines, newspapers, and books. Bodies and wings, intact or fragmented, pulverized or preserved, together with printed paper, confront us with a succession of paradoxes, perhaps even a false dichotomy. Lightness and gravity. Solemnity and plainness. The private and the public... I could go on multiplying pairings that strain toward contradiction. Archive and oblivion. Putrefaction and purity. The politics of art and the art of politics. I would accomplish only one thing. I would persist in my own secret disease.

Frozen Flight, 2008. Flag made of fly wings, nylon thread, fishhook, and light. Dimensions variable.

Frozen Flight (2008), a frozen flag. Fossil (2008), the globe imprisoned within a translucent stone. Faith (2010), a baseball whose leather has long since surrendered its pristine white. In each of these works, the wings of flies and cockroaches become the substance hidden beneath a national banner, the planet trapped like an insect suspended in amber, the horror of an ideology embedded within a sport. These are the signs—or perhaps the symptoms—I refuse to forget, the traces the ideological machine inoculated into me and into so many others so they might flare up, like a rash, from time to time in waking life and in dreams alike, especially now, after spending nearly a year inhabiting the fissure of statelessness.

Stripped of every bright geometric emblem, the flag hangs from a fishhook tied to an almost invisible nylon thread. The fabric, woven from the wings of countless flies, contains nothing but a dark star. The slightest current of air is enough to set it in motion.

Political scatology. Populist rhetoric and its reverse side. Perhaps also twilight, obsolescence, and the direct and collateral damage left behind by totalitarianism?

Is the flag bait and prey at once? Does the grayness that dominates its fabric, its porous surface, its astonishing lack of weight, speak of the future awaiting populisms of every creed and every flag?

No items found.

Frozen Flight, 2008 (detail) Walking beside the banner is enough to move it. A yawn will make it turn. So will your voice, whatever words you happen to utter.

Like a mosaic, fragments of cockroach wings spread across the leather surface of the baseball. Their varying shades of brown mimic the color left behind by years of use and abuse on the playing field—or on the theater of operations—of opposing governments. The baseball becomes the emblem of people compelled to move frantically, or slowly, from one point to another. It also becomes the emblem of the expelled.

If I allow the metaphor another turn of delirium, I can even imagine within the ball's trajectory the relationship between victim and persecutor. Opposition and escape—stealing signs, stealing bases, running, batting, sending one over the fence. Control—catching the runner off base, preventing the stolen sign, the strikeout, the out at home plate. Everything becomes a matter of faith. Faith in one's resolve. Faith in one's ability. Fragments of thousands of lives and destinies held captive by gravity enforced with an iron hand.

Through the Gothic black letters embedded in the ball's leather, spelling the word Faith, Peña speaks of something that reaches far beyond domestic politics or geopolitics. The tight stitching prevents the sphere from coming apart. Every fragment inside that small, tolerably murky world is compelled to perform its assigned function.

Faith, 2010. Fragments of cockroach wings on baseball.

The baseball becomes an Aleph. It contains dawn and dusk, life and death, illusion and despair. Only rupture—a crack, or total disintegration—can bring the imposed faith to its end.

In Bottled (2016) and Coca-Cola of Oblivion (2017), Peña reduces part of his personal library to pulp. Once bottled and dried, the pulp assumes the iconic shape of a Coca-Cola bottle and other familiar containers, retaining their form after the glass molds have been removed. Novels, essays, magazines, along with the very books that accompanied his education at the National Academy of Fine Arts and later at the Instituto Superior de Arte, are dissolved and compressed into a single material body. To press upon the cultural and political canon. To collapse every voice into a new Babel. To render icons, ideas, and discourses illegible. To drink, and to forget. Is this an attempt to exist with fewer bonds? To silence all that accumulated noise? To reduce the world to something bearable?

Embotellados (Bottled), 2016. Compressed paper (books and magazines from the artist's personal library in Cuba, including materials used during his high school and college education), glass, and wood.

For Peña, living as an immigrant "is, in a way, like living a double life." Becoming an artist means continuing to produce and create while learning other trades simply to survive. "I've worked as a social worker. I've worked on golf courses, in stores, in offices. But I've never given up art. I've never stopped creating. My work takes a long time to think through, to make, to produce. It's a very long process."

Possessions become handicaps in the life of a migrant. Entire lives must often fit inside a suitcase, inside one's memory, inside a smartphone.

The paradoxes—perhaps the allegories—that traverse Peña's work also pass through the images released inside my head each night as I fall asleep. The sleep of reason produces monsters. Then again, perhaps I am one of them. The consequence of reason's sleep belongs not only to the man I have become, the one who lies down after the day's labor. It also belongs to those who, with unwavering faith, assembled themselves beneath a chain of command that presented itself as civilian, humanist, committed to harmony and happiness within the social fabric, within that culture endlessly proclaimed as "the shield and sword of the nation." A chain of command conceived to herd subjects like me from childhood onward.

Bacchanalia, 2022 (detail). Compressed printed papers (historical documents mixed and transformed into the interior shape of glass containers), glass, pulp, and wood. 60 x 144 x 36 in

My elementary-school teacher, swelling with conviction, used to say she was a woman of "Patria o Muerte"—Homeland or Death. From my desk in first grade, and later in every grade until the fourth, I watched her repeat those words while tapping her chest with quiet pride. She was a loving, gentle Black woman, already elderly. Unlike other teachers at my school, she never struck any of my classmates. Yet whenever one particular bully crossed the line, she would sometimes call him a Batistiano. That single word carried the force of a sentence.

Calvino saw in lightness, multiplicity, exactitude, quickness, and visibility a constellation of values proper to literature. Literature yet to come. Those are the very qualities my dreams possess. Dreams in which I am also a monster. Dreams where an intangible country still exists, where a flag hangs from a fishhook, where I have pursued a sperm whale more than once.

Calvino hoped those qualities would endure. He devoted one lecture to each. "There are things," he wrote, "that only literature, through its specific means, can give us." Those lectures were gathered after his death in Six Memos for the Next Millennium.

Death of a Printed Story, 2014. Tree root, compressed paper rolls, and paper pulp from art publications. Art Space, Miami. Dimensions variable.

Thinking of Calvino, I find myself returning to a conversation between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo in Invisible Cities:

Kublai asked Marco:

"You who explore the world and read its signs, can you tell me toward which of those futures the favorable winds are carrying us?"

Marco replied:

"To reach those ports I would not know how to trace the route upon the chart, nor could I name the date of arrival. Sometimes all it takes is an oblique glimpse opening in the middle of an incongruous landscape, lights emerging from the fog, the conversation of two passersby crossing paths amid the day's bustle, for me to believe that from there I shall piece together, fragment by fragment, the perfect city, made of remnants mixed with everything else, of moments separated by intervals, of signals sent without knowing who will receive them."

What fragments am I gathering in order to complete, at least for myself, the puzzle of a perfect city? What invisible city am I pursuing? What, exactly, is my size within that vast invisible city?

The narrator of Moby-Dick writes:

"...in calm weather, to an experienced swimmer, the open sea is as easy to navigate as a cushioned carriage is to ride upon land. But the awful loneliness is unbearable. The intense concentration of one's own being amid such merciless immensity—my God, who can describe it?" If I were to pursue greater exactitude, I would add something else. There is also an immeasurable solitude in what is small. Who can describe that?

Note
This text is part of the forthcoming book Miami Grand Prix, a project that was awarded one of the Artists at Risk Resilience Grants in 2026.