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  • Sun, Sex, and Socialism: Cuba in the German Imaginary by Jennifer Ruth Hosek
  • John D. Pizer
Sun, Sex, and Socialism: Cuba in the German Imaginary. By Jennifer Ruth Hosek. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. Pp. xvi + 266. Cloth $60.00. ISBN 978-442641389.

In most Western mass media outlets, the island nation of Cuba was portrayed as an enemy Soviet satellite state from shortly after the revolution which overthrew the regime of Fulgencio Batista in 1959 until the fall of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Block toward the close of the twentieth century. Since then, it has been consistently represented as an anachronism, one of the few remaining Communist dictatorships in the world. Reporting in the Federal Republic of Germany both before and after reunification has mostly followed this pattern. Jennifer Hosek's study is groundbreaking in its persuasive, well-documented argument that, despite such reporting, Cuba exercised a powerful pull on what she terms "the German Imaginary" on both sides of the previously divided nation and continues to do so in the current era of the Berlin republic. This is in spite of the fact that not only the West German government, but also, for most of its existence, the officials of the German Democratic Republic were uncomfortable with Cuba's influence on the nation's youth due to the iconic status [End Page 735] of such revolutionary figures associated with the Cuban Revolution such as Ernesto "Che" Guevara and Tamara Bunke, a discomfort which belied the GDR's close economic and political ties to the island nation. Hosek shows that popular and intellectual constructions of Cuba as an exotic site of sexual allure, mass social solidarity, and heroic sacrifice still constitute the island as a locus both strongly attractive in its alterity and highly influential for self-representation among contemporary German citizens.

After an introduction, which succinctly and cogently lays out the book's arguments, Sun, Sex, and Socialism consists of five chapters. These chapters do not follow a chronologically linear model in showing how Cuba has constituted a contested but consistently powerful place in postwar German representations of self and other. Hosek's work concludes with a brief epilogue and an afterword by the Cuban Victor Fowler, who reverses Hosek's analysis by briefly elucidating how Germany is perceived, and influences popular thought as well as self-image, in his own country.

The first chapter examines how the nascent Berlin Republic used—and continues to use—Cuba to shape its own national identity. Hosek speaks of an ongoing "Kuba Welle" that constitutes a core element in competing narratives concerning how reunified Germany navigates its "search for national authenticity" (37). Hosek draws on popular culture texts such as the films Buena Vista Social Club and Havanna mi amor, as well as the sophisticated Internet marketing campaign of Havana Club Rum to indicate how such identity is shaped through aesthetic engagement with the island nation. Chapter two shows how Cuba became an "extended Socialist Heimat" for the GDR in the 1960s; in such works as the film Und deine Liebe auch, Cuba is represented as a utopian model of how individual and collective impulses can be productively merged in a socialist republic. The film Preludio 11 casts the East Germans as heroic defenders of the Cuban Revolution, while Irmtraud Morgner's novel Rumba auf einen Herbst reflects Cuba's role as a locus of yearning for holistic existence and gratifying sexuality in a genuinely grassroots-organized socialist republic. Hosek turns to the FRG in chapter three to show how Rudi Dutschke and other leading leftists used Cuba as a point of departure for developing a discrete West Berlin identity in the 1960s; the "anti-authoritarians" in that city saw themselves, like the Cubans, as living in a uniquely insular geopolitical sphere marked by freedom from domination by both US or West European capitalism and Soviet Communism. The fourth chapter focuses on works by FRG author Hans Magnus Enzensberger and GDR author Volker Braun to reflect on intellectual struggles in the 1970s, when Cuba started to disillusion intellectuals as it adapted to global power politics and became less involved in leftist revolutions around the world. Two...

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