Emilio Ichikawa Morín

Ichikawa, Cuban writer, essayist and academic, graduated in Philosophy from the University of Havana (1980-1985). Between 1985 and 1996 he taught History of Philosophy at that same University.

Between 1996 and 2000 he collaborated with the Spanish Cultural Center and worked as a literature specialist at the National Library of Cuba.

He studied in Spain, Mexico and the United States, where he visited several universities:

Among his books are Agonistic Thought, Writing and the Limit, Revolutionary Heroicity and Against Sacrifice. A regular contributor to El Nuevo Herald (Miami), in 2010 he published his philosophical poem Everglades (Letra Capital).

Brilliant and controversial, Ichikawa was born in Bauta and was the son of a Japanese immigrant and a Cuban mother.

During a trip to the United States in the year 2000, invited to give lectures by several North American universities, Ichikawa decided to seek political asylum in Miami.

He gave lectures and made visits to several universities: Iowa, Tulane, Georgetown, SUNY, NYU, Brown, Rutgers, FIU, UM.

Together with Rafael Rojas, Emilio Ichikawa Morín made up the most attractive duo of "thinkers in Cuba" of the first decade of the second millennium. He was a columnist for the Miami newspaper El Nuevo Herald and for years maintained a blog considered by many to be a point of reference on Cuban affairs.

He was also a regular panelist on Radio and Television Martí programs. From his personal blog, Eichikawa also wrote about politics, history, literature and other current topics.

Among his works stand out the volumes Agonistic Thought (1986), Writing and the Limit (1998), Revolutionary Heroicity (2001), Against Sacrifice: From Comrade to Good Neighbor (2002) and Before the Verdict. The Too Much Humanity of Father Varela (2020), in addition to dozens of contributions to specialized publications.

Of all his books, it is important to highlight Everglades (Letra Capital, 2009), a long mythical-philosophical poem that is probably the most important work written in Spanish about the geography of Florida.

His writing defines him as a wild philosopher, alien to any disciplinary authority inherent to university cloisters. In this sense, he was perhaps the only Cuban thinker worthy of bearing that label: an authentic thinker. And as such, he remained until the end as a forgotten figure. Like all true intelligence, he rejected fame and refrained from positioning himself in the roles promoted by the social machinery (that is why he admired Vargas Vila's aphorism: "Society is nothing more than the production of excrement"). Indeed, in recent years he withdrew from the madhouse of Cuban geopolitics to his country house in Homestead. Thus, his figure embodied the extreme solitude of an intelligence that did not make pacts with the pieties of a community incapable of welcoming within itself the dissents and striations of reason.

Ichikawa maintained an almost monastic retreat in a rural area, away from the loud noise of the metropolis. Escaping to the countryside: lifting one's head to the sky to make way for imagination. For Ichikawa, thought could only take place outside of and against the bad faith of a community organized from the premises of political hostility.

In his withdrawal from the media and intellectual world (he repeated to me on several occasions that he was no longer a professor, but a "merciful worker" in a boat factory), Ichikawa remained faithful to the only notion of exile worth defending: that of neoplatonic phygé, in which exile constitutes itself as a withdrawal from the community in order to begin living a life without the extensions to which we have subscribed ourselves to historical misery. In this sense, the poetic vortex of Ichikawa's thought is situated under the illegibility of phygé, which is the fugitive condition of one who is no longer interested in competing in the hunting ground of predators and servants. Now we can clearly see that his figure embodied the tragedy of the Cuban thinker who rejects political pathos. The price was solitude and exclusion from the exile community. That is why phygé is both a new beginning and a withdrawal toward happiness (eudaimônon bíos) to return to place and free speech. Returning to the countryside meant the opening to a possible new life: deserting the world of war to cultivate the garden. Of course, the gardener knows the limits of the earth, but is not in a position to probe the unfathomable of the landscape.

Ichikawa had constant participation in debates on Cuban political reality and exile through his personal blog (https://eichikawa.blogspot.com/)