EVENTS

A grim underground portrait of today's Cuba, where young people
struggle to shake off the vestiges of Castroism.

From Monday to Saturday, Mary is a young and talented artist in the artistic, bohemian and fringe circles of Havana. But on Sundays, Mary becomes the sex toy of a high official of the regime. Her condition as a woman and artist, bisexual and alienated from Castroism, inevitably pushes her towards social exclusion, and
Mary begins to need a strong reason to remain in Cuba.

Featuring a host of unforgettable, colourful, and irreverent members of the Havana underground, The Weasel and The Whore raises vitally important questions which a whole generation is finding increasingly difficult to ignore: how to live under a regime that promotes class abuse and hate, whether it be sexual or for reasons of gender identity, or the simple fact of voicing one’s own thoughts?

Martha Luisa Hernández Cadenas (Guantánamo, 1991) is a playwright, writer and performer. She has written three poetry collections, and won the David Prize for Poetry in 2017 and the Havana Poetry Biennial Prize. She is the creator of several performances in Colombia, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Spain, German, Canada and Switzerland. The Weasel and The Whore is her debut novel and was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize in 2020 as well as the English PEN Award for our English translation.

Julia Sanches is a translator from Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan. Recent translations include Living Things by Munir Hachemi and Mammoth by Eva Baltasar, both longlisted for the Cercador Prize. Sanches was shortlisted for the Booker International Prize for her translations of Boulder and Undiscovered, and longlisted for her translation of Reservoir Bitches.

Jennifer Shyue is a translator from Spanish. Her translations include Julia Wong Kcomt’s poetry collections A Blind Salmon and Vice-royal-ties, as well as Augusto Higa Oshiro’s novel The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu, which received the ALTA First Translation Prize. She can be found at shyue.co