You Will Hate Your Neighbor

The laureate poet, writer and psychiatrist from Santiago, Reynaldo Duret Sotomayor, is the author of the book of short stories You will hate your neighbor, published by the capital Editions Extramural, and extended by the writer and editor Dulce María Stooling Carrington. In this volume, Dr. Duret Sotomayor asks the reader two fundamental questions: Is the deprivation of liberty (one of the most precious treasures of the human being) the ideal sanction to solve the causes and effects of the crime or adjust deviant behaviors of the behavioral norm, accepted and perceived as adequate by the current socio-cultural programming? How far can someone sentenced to live a certain period behind bars be re-educated or rehabilitated from the psychosocial side?

From an objective-subjective perspective par excellence, the answers to these questions are offered by the experienced mental health professional who has become a narrator of raw, shocking stories, whose realism hurts human sensibility, since he explores the primitive regions of the world to satiety human brain. In those unknown places, the wild beast that brings us closer to the “steppe wolf” crouches, which, according to the laureate poet and novelist Hermann Hesse (1877-1962), Nobel Prize for Literature 1946, is hidden in the most intricate areas of the psyche from homo sapiens. In You will hate your neighbor, the author dissects - with sharp scalpel - the essential components of the prisoners’ personality. Virtues (some possess them, why refuse them?), Defects (that identify the majority), inconsistencies, needs (including psychosexual, which pushes them to establish intimate relationships with other men to release repressed sexual libido or desire, such as consequence of prison confinement), weaknesses and inconsistencies, among other features of the character. The psychopathic level of psychological functioning is the one that prevails in the characters that play leading, secondary or occasional roles, in the 20 stories in which this work is structured, and that begin with an appointment of the poet and writer Dulce María Lonza, Cervantes Prize of Literature 1992, a quote that illustrates-masterfully-the content of each one of the stories included in that text, where it is not abused-in any way-of the bad words, typical of the prison language, but that the foul jargon is only used when the tense moment or occasion requires it.

On the other hand, this level of psychological functioning is characterized-precisely-by the annulment of the superego (ethical-moral code that regulates the behavior of the human being in society), and the opening towards the outside of the “Pandora’s Box”, located in the instinctive component of the Freudian unconscious, and that is usually triggered in prison or closed regimes. A famous Canadian psychiatrist and Rorschach’s classified-with great ingenuity and sense of humor-the different levels of psychological functioning: the normal, the neurotic and the psychotic, but-did she do it deliberately? -left out of that classification the levels defective and psychopathic. It occurs to me to describe the latter as the behavior of that subject who sells, mortgages, rents or sets fire to the castle. This is how almost all the characters that, in that literary context, develop their usual activities in prison, either as inmates or as jailers (with honorable exceptions, there are) work.

In the pages of that true jewel of the new insular realistic literature, those interested in that controversial thematic line will be able to know the misfortunes and misadventures of the inmates who, by judicial opinion of the competent courts, serve sentences in that jailcreated by the Dr. Duret Sotomayor’s fertile imagination-for having incurred dissimilar criminal acts. From rape to minors, to homicides or murders, typified and sanctioned in the current Criminal Code of the Republic of Cuba. You will hate your neighbor could be classified as a sadomasochistic book, where the characters-far away light years from the idyllic world that some people dream of-go beyond the limits to look for actions that give them security and satisfaction in an incompatible and repetitive scenario. Black humor tends to save islands to those who immerse themselves in those turbulent sewage waters so that the anguish (fear of the unknown, according to the Spanish-Cuban psychiatrist Emilio Mira y López) does not suffocate him. Despite the moral and spiritual rot that records that text, Dr. Duret Sotomayor puts the official Abel Rosales (“Cachet”) in the mouth, who replaces his late predecessor, a message of an ethical-humanistic nature, based on two Martian aphorisms: “the notion of good floats above all and never wrecks”.