De Ferrari - Community and Culture in Post-Soviet Cuba

Community and Culture in Post-Soviet Cuba

Following the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the globalization of Cuban culture, along with the bankruptcy of the state, partly modified the terms of intellectual engagement. However, no significant change took place at the political level. In Community and Culture in Post-Soviet Cuba, De Ferrari looks into the extraordinary survival of the revolution by focusing on the personal, political, and aesthetic social pacts that determined the configuration of the socialist state.

Through close critical readings of a representative set of contemporary Cuban novels and works of visual art, this book argues that ethics and gender, rather than ideology, account for the intellectuals fidelity to the revolution. Community and Culture does three things: it demonstrates that masculine sociality is the key to understanding the longevity of Cubas socialist regime; it examines the sociology of the cultural administration of intellectual labor in Cuba; and it maps the emergent ethical and aesthetic paradigms that allow Cuban intellectuals to envision alternative forms of community and civil society.

Guillermina De Ferrari is Professor of Caribbean Literature and Culture at University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. Her previous book, Vulnerable States: Bodies of Memory in Contemporary Caribbean Fiction (2007) studies the metaphorical power of the vulnerable body in comparative Caribbean literature.

Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature

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Edited by Stephanie LeMenager, Teresa Shewry, and Ken Hiltner

2 Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature

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3 Resistance to Science in Contemporary American Poetry

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4 Magic, Science, and Empire in Postcolonial Literature

The Alchemical Literary Imagination

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5 The Black Female Body in American Literature and Art

Performing Identity

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6 Narratives of Migration and Displacement in Dominican Literature

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7 The Cinema and the Origins of Literary Modernism

Andrew Shail

8 The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture

Pop Goth

Edited by Justin D. Edwards and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet

9 Wallace Stevens and Pre-Socratic Philosophy

Metaphysics and the Play of Violence

Daniel Tompsett

10 Modern Orthodoxies

Judaic Imaginative Journeys of the Twentieth Century

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11 Eugenics, Literature, and Culture in Post-war Britain

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12 Postcolonial Readings of Music in World Literature

Turning Empire on Its Ear

Cameron Fae Bushnell

13 Stanley Cavell, Literature, and Film

The Idea of America

Edited by Andrew Taylor and ine Kelly

14 William Blake and the Digital Humanities

Collaboration, Participation, and Social Media

Jason Whittaker and Roger Whitson

15 American Studies, Ecocriticism, and Citizenship

Thinking and Acting in the Local and Global Commons

Edited by Joni Adamson and Kimberly N. Ruffin

16 International Perspectives on Feminist Ecocriticism

Edited by Greta Gaard, Simon C. Estok, and Serpil Oppermann

17 Feminist Theory across Disciplines

Feminist Community and American Womens Poetry

Shira Wolosky

18 Mobile Narratives

Travel, Migration, and Transculturation

Edited by Eleftheria Arapoglou, Mnika Fodor, and Jopi Nyman

19 Shipwreck in Art and Literature

Images and Interpretations from Antiquity to the Present Day

Edited by Carl Thompson

20 Literature, Speech Disorders, and Disability Talking Normal

Edited by Chris Eagle

21 The Unnameable Monster in Literature and Film

Maria Beville

22 Cognition, Literature and History

Edited by Mark J. Bruhn and Donald R. Wehrs

23 Community and Culture in Post-Soviet Cuba

Guillermina De Ferrari

Community and Culture in Post-Soviet Cuba

Guillermina De Ferrari

First published 2014

by Routledge

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2014 Taylor & Francis

The right of Guillermina De Ferrari to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

De Ferrari, Guillermina, 1966

Community and Culture in Post-Soviet Cuba / by Guillermina De Ferrari.

pages cm. (Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature ; 23)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Cuban literatureHistory and criticism. 2. Literature and society Cuba. 3. Gender identity in literature. 4. Masculinity in literature. 5. Communities in literature. 6. CubaIntellectual life20th century. I. Title.

PQ7378.D43 2014

860.997291dc23

2013033775

ISBN13: 978-0-415-73785-2 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978-1-315-81737-8 (ebk)

To Mario and Paloma.

To my friends.

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Like many other literary critics and students, I became fascinated in the 1990s by a curious cultural phenomenon: A huge amount of shelf space in bookstores in New York, Madrid, Seville, and Mexico City (remember bookstores?) was dedicated to novels written in a country that history seemed to have forgotten. Those novels shook my foundations. Whereas their fictionality was not in question, imagination alone didnt fully explain the power of these novels or the continuities among them. In no other literature produced at the end of the twentieth century was the context so defining of the way novels were written and the way we were consuming them. In spite of individual differences, they consistently provoked the same two expressions of incredulity: How can so much creativity happen amid so much devastation; and why is the revolutionary government still in place? It was during my first research trip to Cuba in 2001, however, that this book took root in my mind. I was puzzled by a number of contradictions that Cubans are particularly good at: scarcity and generosity, material poverty and intellectual sophistication, chaos and brilliance, isolation and cosmopolitanism, premodernity and post-modernity. But most of all, I was perplexed at the distance between the language of national dignity and the personal sufferingthe indignityI saw everywhere. The first objective of this book was to explain this distance to myself.