English Title

Abstract

Un arte de hacer ruinas by the Cuban author, Antonio José Ponte, is a narrative that gives purpose to this article. It centers on the analysis of a literary universe parting from an urban context, neurotic, decadent and of mysterious nature. Its nucleus scenario is the city of "La Habana," particularly in the central part of Habana, whose decomposed status has been empowered, not only by the geography and architecture of the ancient city, but it extends to other invisible spaces of the internal complexities of those that lived there. In the story, the inhabited ruins of the Caribbean city serve as a metaphor denouncing the raiding and disintegration of the city's spirit that "has lost the habit to construct", unable to reconstruct and uplift itself. A subterraneous, emblematic and mythical city named Tuguria, which is revealed close to the end of the story, erecting itself parallel to a demolished city that lies on the surface. Ponte creates Tuguria in this narrative account as a place "where everything is preserved as in the memory," a city, homologous to the "old Habana," where no one knows what occurs within it. The ruins of the story are an evident sign of the traumatic events that occurred in the town, its reminiscences of the destruction and fragmentation of the calling of an "imaginary empire" as of the Cuban Revolution.