Jacqueline Loss – författare

The specter of the Soviet Union lingers in Cuba, yet until now there has been no book-length work on the ways Cubans process their country’s relationship with the Soviet bloc. Dreaming in Russian at last brings into the light the reality that for nearly three decades, the Soviet Union subsidized the island economically, intervened in military matters, and exported distinct pedagogical and cultural models to Cuba. Drawing on interviews with Cuban artists and intellectuals, as well as treasures from cinematographic and bibliographic archives, Jacqueline Loss delivers the first book to show that Cuba remembers and retains many aspects of the Soviet era, far from shedding those cultural facets as relics of the Cold War.Weaving together intriguing, seldom-seen images, Dreaming in Russian showcases the ways in which Cuba’s relationship to its Soviet benefactors lingered after the disintegration of the U.S.S.R. in 1991. Analyzing numerous literary texts and works of visual art, Loss also incorporates aspects of architecture, popular culture, the space race, and other strands to create a captivating new perspective on Cuban society. Among the luminaries featured are poet Reina MarÍa RodrÍguez, writer Antonio JosÉ Ponte, visual artist Tonel, and novelist Wendy Guerra. A departure from traditional cultural history, Loss’s approach instead presents a kaleidoscopic series of facets, reflecting the hybrid nature of the self-images that emerged in the aftermath of the Soviet aegis. As speculations about Cuba’s future under Fidel Castro’s heir apparent continue, the portrait that emerges in Dreaming in Russian is both timely and mesmerizing.

With the disintegration of the Soviet bloc, the ongoing uncertainty surrounding Cuba's political future, the onslaught of tourists, and the economic upheavals in their society, Cubans face an important, perhaps epochal, moment of cultural change. It is a moment amply and complexly reflected in the fiction collected here, twelve short stories written in Cuba during the past ten years and published in English for the first time with the collaboration of some of today's finest translators. An eclectic selection, the stories offer an exhilarating sense of a rich literary diversity and cultural history, an experience of Cuban literature that has rarely been available to an English audience. They differ widely, even wildly, in style and theme: from an impromptu encounter with Ernest Hemingway to an imagined romance mapped onto Cuba's foundational nineteenth-century novel; from a witty, Borgesian satire on bureaucracy and officialist identity to a gothic adventure in homosexual voyeurism and mental illness; from an allegorical travelogue set in repressive China to a semi-surreal celebration of angels in Havana. These are the voices of Cuban fiction today, reflecting the past, anticipating the future, and composing in their infinite variety the stories of their culture.

Extending from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, The Cambridge History of Cuban Literature is the first book in English to tell the intricate story of Cuban literary-intellectual culture from the seventeenth-century to the twenty-first century. This landmark book highlights the intricacies of linguistic and cultural translation embodied in telling a story in English about a body of work expressed predominantly in Spanish, but also French, Haitian Krey-l, Angolan Portuguese, and English. Broad in its scope, this book encompasses such major figures as Gómez de Avellaneda, Heredia, Plácido, Manzano, Villaverde, Martí, Casal, Carpentier, L. Cabrera, Mañach, Loynaz, Piñera, Lezama Lima, and Cabrera Infante, as well as theatre and performance groups, film, post-revolutionary projects, post-1989 Special Period writers, and literature of Cuba's diasporas. It highlights four key features weaving through Cuban literary history: its engagement with international networks; its key role in cultural identity debates throughout Latin America; persistent debates about race, gender, and class; and the tropes of travel and movement-voluntary, exploratory, enslaved, migratory, or exilic.