Muñeco para armar: un personaje literario llamado Fidel Castro

Abstract

The literary production in Cuba after 1959 has been marked by the conditions imposed from power even on the literature produced behind the back or as resistance to such conditions. If, for a long time, the government was able to control much of the cultural production in an attempt to present a homogeneous culture, what happens when political restrictions control over discourse, and modes of literary production and circulation have been fragmented, radically modified, or disappeared? Is it possible to speak of a new epistemology to understand the literature written by Cubans from any corner of the planet? This essay explores three essential transformations: the atomization and the fading of the enunciation site of what can be considered Cuban literature; the permanence and scriptural persistence on the island of authors whose work could be considered “uncomfortable” by the official discourse; and the transformation, within Cuba, of the symbolic weight given to the figure (historical and literary) of Fidel Castro. This last mutation is the one that best symbolizes one of the most drastic changes in Cuban literary production: the desacralization of historical personalities, in particular of the former Cuban leader, by authors who continue to reside on the island.