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  • The "New Man" in Cuba: Culture and Identity in the Revolution
  • Barbara Riess (bio)
Ana Serra . The "New Man" in Cuba: Culture and Identity in the Revolution. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007.

This is not a book about the New Man. Rather, it is a book about the "New Man" as a construct through which Ana Serra examines official discourse from the revolution's first decade, four novels published between 1959 and 1971, and four written post-1989. Serra's methodology functions on the premise that political and literary discourse are "both textual conduits of the pedagogical mission of the Revolution" (5). The concomitant use of political and literary narratives of identity exemplifies the shift from literary criticism to cultural studies, but more important, it forms the basis for the book's compelling main [End Page 254] argument about the literature of the Cuban Revolution in the field of Cuban studies.

The introduction smartly lays the ground for this broader argument. A transformative event for Latin American cultural identity, the Cuban Revolution imposed its own solution to the literatura comprometida versus "art for art's sake" debate, as did subsequent poststructural conclusions about the constitution of the canon. In this context, Serra deploys the narrative of the Sovietization of Cuban culture as constitutive of both literary history and identity formation. She associates the New Man with his aesthetic counterpart (socialist realism) and argues that, just as not all writers accepted a wholly socialist realist creative framework, not all writers populated their texts with a prescription for the New Man. Critics then and now exclude texts remotely suspected of doing so, adhering to outdated criteria in a poststructuralist environment. Thus, Serra concludes that previously shunned texts should "be appreciated as part of Cuba's literary production, and that discussions of the difference between the literary and nonliterary in post-1959 Cuba be rendered unnecessary" (23). The body of the work aims to prove this point.

The first four chapters study specific campaigns to create a new identity: literacy, formation of a revolutionary intellectual, reaching the sugar harvest of 10 million tons, and integration of women into the workforce. In each, Serra reads different manifestations of the New Man that functioned to produce a unifying official discourse. She then analyzes four novels in and against this framework: Maestra voluntaria (Daura Olema, 1962), Memorias del subdesarrollo (Edmundo Desnoes, 1965), Sacchario (Miguel Cossío Woodward, 1970), and La última mujer y el próximo combate (Manuel Cofiño, 1971). Serra's application of provocative literary theory through the identity lens serves her well in highlighting the aesthetic and historical importance of these novels. For example, in "Harvesting the Nation: How Cuba Became Unified in the Historical Zafra," she reconstructs a nation-building narrative to subsequently debunk it by highlighting the provocative narrative structure of Woodward's Sacchario. The revolutionary everyman emerges in the book, yet the narrator's "pleasure in the text prevents him from disappearing behind the unity of the nation he has created" (108). In each case, Serra teases out complex figures from seemingly homogeneous narratives, and in this way she invites all readers of the revolution's first ten-plus years to carefully reconsider uniform stereotypes when examining Cuban cultural identity.

The final chapters study the problematic nature of the New Man in novels from two important periods. Serra sees its subversion in Pablo Armando Fernandez's Los niños se despiden (1968). The novel's rich cultural sediment, she argues, is too complex a terrain into which such a homogenizing concept could seed itself. The epilogue tills the Special Period for the cultivation of the New Man using Leonardo Padura's tetralogy: Las cuatro estaciones (1991-1998), [End Page 255] arguing provocatively that "the New Man is dead" (162). In both chapters, the deftness of Serra's readings underline the value of these novels to informing more generalized notions of Cuban culture.

Although the imperative to narrate the cultural politics of the revolution's first decade leads to some repetition in the text, it is a refreshing approach to the different ways in which this narrative can be deployed. The book lacks a consideration of the Soviet...

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