Abstract
“¿Pathos o Marketing?” screamed the heading in El Caimán Barbudo, the cultural journal of Cuba’s young communists’ union (UJC) in 1998, echoing a tension between literature and the unfortunate necessity of selling it that has tormented writers since at least the Romantic period.1 But Rafael de Aguila, the article’s author, set his question specifically in the rapidly globalizing literary sphere of Cuba’s “Special Period in Times of Peace,” going on to ask why a Cuban writer should feel obliged to engage in “un séptico flirteo para agradar a una casa editora extranjera” [a septic flirtation to please a foreign publishing house, 3]. As if this were not direct enough a question, he invoked as the epitome of market-driven fiction a bizarre but highly saleable amalgam of “Special Period” types: “un cuento sobre una frikie jinetera drogadicta de padres balseros y hermano con sadismo anal” [a story about a freaky drug-addicted hustler whose parents left on a raft and whose brother is an anal sadist, 3]. De Aguila pitted literature against the market in especially vivid terms, but his concern was shared by milder-toned contemporaries and it fueled serious debate about the survival of aesthetic principles against the threats of a foreign publishing industry perceived as lowbrow.
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Notes
Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen (1999), in their introduction to The New Economic Criticism, trace how elite writers in the Romantic period opposed a market-economics way of determining the value of their work, defending instead a specifically literary form of value distinct from market price or readers’ popularity.
In “Médiations sur la littérature cubaine d’aujourd’hui,” Estévez (1999: 221) states “C’est bien connu: les frontiers entre la vraie et la fausse littérature, entre le roman, la nouvelle et le simple témoignage, dans un présent chaotique comme tous les présents, ne sont pas toujours délimitées avec precision” [It is a well-known fact: the borders between true and false literature, between the novel and news and simple testimony, in a present as chaotic as all presents are, cannot always be precisely discerned]. In an interview with François Maspero for Le Monde that I quote subsequently, Díaz (2002) expounds on the idea of “la literatura verdadera.”
To give just a few examples of the widespread use of the term el boom cubano in publishing-related articles and in the press: Ruben Cortés, in a 1998 article in Mexico’s La Crónica de Hoy newspaper, writes that “luego de cuatro décadas publicando dentro y casi exclusivamente para la isla, los escritores cubanos asaltan las librerías de España y América Latina para destapar un Boom de la literatura cubana” [after four decades publishing within and almost exclusively for the island, Cuban writers are storming Spanish and Latin American book-stores to unleash a Boom in Cuban literature]. In Spain’s El Pais, Amelia Castilla and Mauricio Vicent (1997) referred to “La explosion literaria de La Habana” [Havana’s literary explosion], and some time later, the monthly book review Leer published an article entitled “El nuevo boom de la narrativa cubana en España” [The New Cuban Narrative Boom in Spain], tracing the increasing popularity and visibility of Cuban literature in Spain (Cremades and Esteban 2000). In Cuba, the Communist Party international weekly has also referred to it (Perdomo 1999).
The novísimos, championed by the late Salvador Redonet (1993), were writers born after 1959 whose work, in comparison with the more rigidly monitored literary output of earlier generations, he touted as iconoclastic. Ivan Rubio-Cuevas (2000) explores their representations of the “margins,” and José B. Alvarez (2002) reads their works as a continuation of the “contestatory” practice of Cuban short-story writing.
Law-Decree No.145 of 17 November 1993, on the conditions of labor for creators of literary works, acknowledges the status as worker of creators whose artistic work is not linked to an institution, and at the same time establishes a Ministry of Culture registry for such works. Law-Decrees No. 105 (5 August 1998) and No. 144 (19 November 1993) had established these same rights for visual artists and musicians, respectively. As stated on a Cuban government’s website on cultural legislation, these law-decrees recognized the possibility of artistic work performed independently from a state institution. They also provide for the creation of a registry where these independent artists will affiliate (http://www.cubagob.cu/des_soc/cultura/legis.html).
Anke Birkenmaier’s (2004) “El realismo sucio en America Latina: Reflexiones a partir de Pedro Juan Gutiérrez” considers Gutiérrez’s “dirty realism” in a Latin American context.
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© 2009 Ariana Hernandez-Reguant
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Whitfield, E. (2009). Truths and Fictions: The Economics of Writing, 1994–1999. In: Hernandez-Reguant, A. (eds) Cuba in the Special Period. New Concepts in Latino American Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230618329_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230618329_2
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