Flotar en la viscosidad. Literatura cubana de los 90

Abstract

Flotar en la viscosidad. Literatura cubana de los 90, is a dissertation that focuses on Cuban literature in the 90s as one of the stages of major changes and literary projections after 1959 in Cuba, as part of Latin American literary developments following the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The late twentieth century in Cuba was a time of fractures and vulnerabilities in different representations of the social subject and his/her circumstances, historically manipulated by the government.

As examples of this rupture with the socialist literary canon, I study three authors and their representative works from this period: the poet Reina María Rodríguez, the narrator Pedro Juan Gutiérrez and the poet, narrator and essayist Antonio José Ponte. As I demonstrate in my thesis, their works are able to dialogue with particular and dissimilar voices using original prose fiction, poetry and essayistic elements, mostly absent on the island map during three decades of socialism. Similarly, their books reflect a critical period, damaged paradigms and a new subject that coincides with a novel national imaginary, contrasting with the new man (“el hombre nuevo”) as symbol of the socialist regime. In this regard, I have paid close attention to two major events for the continent after the collapse of the Berlin Wall: the so-called “special period in peace time” and the triumph of neoliberal globalization in the rest of Latin America.