The special period and the postmodern turn: Rewriting the Cuban Revolution in the Cold War aftermath
Description
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, the interpretive framework for cultural analysis in Cuba has shifted in fundamental ways. On the material level, the cultural institutions of the Cuban Revolution---the UNEAC, the ICAIC, or Casa de las Americas, for example---no longer fund the arts as they had for the first thirty years of socialist government. Cuban writers, filmmakers and musicians living on the island have thus come to depend, to a large extent, on the same foreign markets, and companies as their contemporaries in exile, blurring like never before the already confining categories of 'revolutionary' and 'counterrevolutionary.' Although the new market realities, together with the perceived failure of the socialist economic model throughout the world, constitute a crisis for the official narrative of the Cuban Revolution, the three texts that are the focus of this study rewrite not only the triumphant socialist narrative but the hegemonic narrative of exile as well. 'El lobo, el bosque y el hombre nuevo' by Senel Paz (1991), Las palabras perdidas by Jesus Diaz (1992) and Informe contra mi mismo by Eliseo Alberto (1997) do not participate in a common social movement or belong to a common literary school; all three, nonetheless, deconstruct the nostalgia-driven narrative of a paradise lost that has characterized much exile literature as well as the Utopian narrative of socialist revolution and redemption. The authors themselves, moreover, resist categorization as either old-guard exiles or militant revolutionaries---a fact that may not justify positivist or deterministic conclusions about the nature of their work but that does, nonetheless, structure the cultural significance or reception of that work. We are confronted, then, with works that occupy more ambiguous cultural and ideological spaces than revolution and exile had generated heretofore, and that cultivate, at the textual level, an ideological and cultural middle ground. The challenge these texts pose to the contending hegemonic narratives of revolution and exile, then, comes not in the form of an alternative and definitive counternarrative, but rather in the form of self-consciously partial and multiperspectival narrative modes that undermine the very premise of narrative authority or objectivity