Persistent Matrioshkas

Abstract

These two epigraphs tell us more about the authors’ fantasies than about the young Russian-Cuban ladies. My own interlocutors over the years have been similarly enticed upon speculating about the attributes of the offspring of the distant entities from the former Soviet Bloc and Cuba, in part because the approximately three-decade-long relationship between the Soviet Union and Cuba is so often conceptualized as a long marriage followed by an abrupt divorce. Drawing on the multidisciplinary artistic projects of Gustavo Pérez (1962) and Onedya González (1961), Lissette Solórzano (1968), Gertrudis Rivalta Oliva (1971), Wendy Guerra (1970), and Polina Martínez Shvietsova (1976), this chapter reveals diverse affective responses to the Soviet-Cuban union: renewed transnational identifications, resentment, as well as complicated and seemingly irresolvable bicultural identities. With a few exceptions, artistic representations by Cuban men that express a sense of identification with the Soviets are not as frequent. I postulate that the fact that many Soviet women actively participated in an underground economy, reselling to Cuban nationals goods that were accessible only to foreigners, brought them closer to the Cuban everyday sphere. In contrast to the Soviet men, who had primarily come as technicians to the island and who were subjected to Soviet regulations regarding their integration on the island and, “[did] not mingle much with Cubans,” as portrayed in a 1963 Life Magazine photograph, many of the Soviet women who emigrated for romance remained (even after the Soviet Union disappeared) and integrated into a Cuban way of life.¹

Her name is Carmen. This is a name for a Russian girl? … Actually it’s an interesting mix, Russian and Cuban. Very precocious, a little of the exhibitionist.

—Martin Cruz Smith, Havana Bay, 1999

La rusita era linda y estaba consciente de ello. La mezcla de sangre la había favorecido mucho. Tenia a un tiempo la enigmatica belleza de las mujeres rusas y la salsa … de las chicas cubanas.

(The little Russian girl was pretty and conscious of it. The mix of blood had favored her a lot. At once she had the enigmatic beauty of the Russian women and the salsa … of the Cuban girls.)

—Antonio Álvarez Gil, Naufragios (2002)