Mi hermano y amigo Manuel Verdecia Here is my statement.
Mi hermano y amigo Manuel Verdecia
Offering this Article, Alice Walker Mujer Meridiana Publicación 2004-02-16
Cuban friends with Manuel Verdecia, in light colored shirt, and Maricela Verdecia, his wife and my friend, front row, left, at UNEAC in Holguín, Cuba, the Unión de Escritores y Artistas, i.e., Organization of Writers and Artists. June, 2025.
Dear Brother,
Here is my statement.
Love to you.
Alicia
“It is a pleasure and a joy to realize my brother and friend Manuel Verdecia will be speaking to you today about my work. As he will tell you, our working relationship goes back many years! I am amazed at how long we’ve worked together. Over decades. Built on a trust that mere human citizens of diverse countries can reshape the world’s climate so that peace and friendship can more successfully flourish. We are friends, yes, and we are also by now, along with his beloved wife Maricela, family. Whatever happens to one of us is felt, deeply, by the other. This is as it should be, in the entire world.
I think now, for instance, of an image I saw yesterday on Tik Tok: a Palestinian boy of perhaps eight years old, weeping in heartbreak, as he holds his murdered father’s shoes. I remember also the child whose mother was murdered by the Israeli government’s bombs, and how he could not be torn from her gravesite. These are times of deepest heartbreak. Many of us realize there is no deliverance from our tears.
But what helps? We ask. And I answer: it is friendship. It is knowing we can rely on each other, no matter the severity of the storm. My own people, black African and mixed race people in the United States, endured horrors so clandestine and hideous most of us will never “know” them except in the deformities of spirit and soul that were left behind. In the descendants of the enslaved, yes, but also in the descendants of the slaveowners. Look at the United States closely now and you will see its entire history.
And here we are. My brother and friend, Manuel Verdecia and I, writer and translator, sharing this harrowing moment, offering whatever we can to help each other through the dark inevitability of this time.
Yes, inevitable. For we could not know, decades ago, that we would still be, not just in touch, since meeting in Cuba so long ago, but still working together faithfully to present to the world our vision of what is happening and what must be changed.
Manuel Verdecia, of Cuba, and I, Alice Walker, of the United States, prove by our long friendship – when we have seen each other in person only once! – that it is possible to believe we can rely on each other’s integrity to care so much about the world that we will cross oceans, translate languages, use new-to-us tools of communication, to continue to repair and to love this extraordinary Earth which it is our honor to defend.” ~aw
Es un placer y una dicha saber que mi hermano y amigo Manuel Verdecia les hablará a ustedes hoy sobre mi obra. Como él les dirá, nuestra relación de trabajo se remonta a muchos años atrás. Me asombro de cuánto tiempo hemos trabajado juntos. Basados en la confianza de que simples seres humanos pueden reformar el ambiente mundial de modo que la paz y la amistad puedan florecer más exitosamente. Somos amigos, sí, y también somos ya ahora, junto a su querida Maricela, familia. Cualquier cosa que suceda a uno de nosotros lo siente, profundamente, el otro. Es así como debía ser en todo el mundo.
Pienso ahora, por ejemplo, en una imagen que vi ayer por Tik Tok: un niño palestino de quizás unos ocho años, llorando en desconsuelo, mientras sostiene los zapatos de su padre asesinado. Recuerdo también al niño cuya madre fue asesinada por las bombas del gobierno israelí, y cómo no podían apartarlo de la tumba de ella. Son estos tiempos de la más profunda congoja. Muchos de nosotros nos percatamos de que no podemos librarnos de nuestras lágrimas.
Pero ¿qué es lo que ayuda? Nos preguntamos. Y yo respondo: la amistad. Saber que podemos confiar en el otro, sin importar la intensidad de la tormenta. Mi propia gente, negros africanos y personas mestizas de los Estados Unidos, soportaron horrores tan recónditos y espantosos que la mayoría de nosotros nunca los “conocerá”, excepto por las deformidades de espíritu y de alma que dejaron detrás. Entre los descendientes de los esclavizados, sí, pero también entre los descendientes de los dueños de esclavos. Miren a los Estados Unidos detenidamente ahora y verán su historia completa.
Y henos aquí. Mi hermano y amigo Manuel Verdecia y yo, escritora y traductor, compartiendo este desgarrador momento, brindando lo que sea que podamos para ayudarnos uno al otro a través de la oscura inevitabilidad de este tiempo.
Sí, inevitable. Pues no podíamos saber, décadas atrás, que todavía estaríamos, no solo en contacto, desde que nos conocimos en Cuba hace tanto tiempo, sino aun trabajando juntos fielmente para presentar al mundo nuestra visión de lo que está aconteciendo y lo que debe ser cambiado.
Manuel Verdecia, de Cuba, y yo, Alice Walker, de los Estados Unidos, demostramos con nuestra larga amistad –¡cuando nos hemos visto en persona solo una vez! – que es posible creer en que podemos confiar en la integridad de cada uno para preocuparnos tanto por el mundo que cruzaremos océanos, traduciremos idiomas, usaremos herramientas de comunicación nuevas para nosotros, para continuar remediando y amando este extraordinario tierra que nos honra defender. AW
Discussing MERIDIAN once more, after all these years. The “Meridian” – the highest point of a heavenly body in its course. Which is how I thought of our Civil Rights Movement in the Southern United States and the black people who believed, struggled, marched, and sometimes died, but also, somehow, rose with it.~aw
Beloved, the chat about your literary work was an absolute success. People loved it. They thank you for your especial statement.
I send a picture of me with the anchor person, professor Lino Verdecia (my same second name though we’re not relatives) and another picture of some of the enthusiastic attendants who wanted to greet you. With tons of love 💕.
Manuel and friends.
ALICE WALKER, A MERIDIAN WOMAN, BY Pedro De La Hoz. February 16, 2004
Alice Walker makes herself loved not just because of her exceptional narrative efficacy –no one denies her place among the greatest American writers of the last four decades– but also because of her courage and commitment to human dignity.
Yesterday she was in Havana and she was news due to the presentation of her novel Meridian, published by Arte y Literatura editing house, in one of the final activities of Havana´s phase of the XIII International Book Fair.
She was surrounded by friends: Nancy Morejón, poet and sister by profession; Manuel García Verdecia, faithful translator; Josefina Ezpeleta, capable editor, and Elizabeth Díaz, director of the editing house, who was kind enough to recall how, almost twenty years ago, she met the author in Nicaragua and asked her for the possibility to publish in Cuba The Color Purple. Alice ceded her rights then as she has now done for Meridian.
It was then and now a gesture that goes farther than its symbolic value. In Nicaragua, Yankee USIA gave The Color Purple for free to the attendants to a book fair so as to sow the illusion that a black writer fit in the bag of imperial promotions. Now to come to Cuba, once more, highlights her rebellious profile: imperial power cannot count on her.
He who reads Meridian will know of the unity between thought and word of this American writer. “I thought about Cuba as I was writing it”, she confessed while explaining how the novel, set in the decade of the sixties, in the vortex of the movement for civil rights, attempts to reach the depths of the spirit of a black, humiliated, discriminated against woman, Meridian Hill, who redeems herself out of conviction that the world of spirit and friendship and honor is worth saving.
She thought about Cuba because the island embodies a social project that could have been endorsed by the main character, Meridian Hill, as the author has done herself: “I am very close to the ideals of this country (Cuba) and that feeling should not be considered extraordinary. I don’t know how anyone cannot want culture, education, public health and dignity to be valued in their milieu as is the case in Cuba. Many people in my country, lulled by consumerism, don’t want to know about what’s happening in other parts of the world. They are terrified of recognizing human suffering and how one must fight unceasingly to overcome it.”
Alice knows how to place herself emotionally at the ethical center of her intellectual mission. Meridian was written based on her own experiences. Residing in Mississippi, her marriage, to a white man, was illegal. Neither the white man nor the black woman, neither the black man nor the white woman could evade the historical weight of brutal segregation following hundreds of years of enslavement of black people. But the most important aspect of the novel’s foundation and what Alice proclaims as the cornerstone of her political discourse lies in assuming a transformative will from within. “The Revolution –she affirmed– is not a fad, nor is it worn like someone showing off a hairstyle. One must work to develop one’s beliefs and strive to be consistent in one’s actions.”
Meridian,, according to Walker, is a tribute to the spirit of resistance and rebellion and to those who remain faithful to it.
Finally, she affirmed: “The spirit of rebellion, of resistance, is like a sweet scent we might lose if we become trapped by false odors of conformity and bourgeois ease. Though not appearing in my novel, I was deeply feeling our loss of both Martin and Che and I wanted to keep them, and their awareness of the dailiness of struggle – which is, in essence, a reckoning attended only by the soul- in our memory.”
Alice Walker Mujer Meridiana Publicación 2004-02-16
