In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

11 insPeCtor renko on tHe maLeCón Twenty stories high, a monument to the totalitarian gigantism favored by twentieth-century dictators worldwide, from Benito Mussolini to Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler to Kim Jong Il, the former Soviet Embassy in Cuba to this day dominates the otherwise shining and resort-like skyline of the Miramar section of Havana like a finger stuck in the tropical blue eye of the twenty-first-century nation. If one works at it, the thing can seem vaguely Aztec, Mayan, Toltec, though with jutting angularities of make-believe arms and head looking also like some huge, monstrous Lego or Transformer movie toy, perhaps upreared during a remote geological era now long forgotten. It is largely abandoned now, as it has been for coming up on twenty-five years. A skeleton staff, the story goes, has barely the resources to pay the electric bills that keep the lights on. Though little notice otherwise seems to be paid to it, no one can dispute its centrality to a whole cultural symbolism of USSR abandonment—at the time of the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union itself—of a loyal Marxist-Leninist Cuban government and people crucially dependent on military materiel, foreign aid, international trade assistance, and high-level state investment. Showing that homegrown government propagandists had at least not forgotten their acquired talent for Soviet-style totalitarian euphemism, the Cuban regime put its own historical tag on the economic catastrophe that almost immediately ensued. “The Special Period,” it was called. El Período Especial. What the phrasing actually describes is the nearly complete domestic cultural and economic collapse of a centralized Marxist-Leninist–controlled production system that had already been sputtering for three decades, plunging the whole of the nation into a lean, joyless, unstable era usually described as occupying the decade of the 1990s—though with ravages unabated to the present day. Overnight, the nation is said to have lost both four-fifths of its imports and four-fifths of its exports. The gross domestic product plunged by a third. Oil imports were reduced to a tenth of pre-1990 levels. Inspector Renko on the Malecón 141 Transportation, industry, and agricultural activity dependent on petroleum -based fuels came to a near standstill, with technology replaced by manual labor. In the face of a continuing US embargo, came a breakdown in delivery of the most elementary necessities of everyday life: electrical power, transportation systems, basic consumer goods, essential food, in some cases, potable water. Hunger and malnutrition were ubiquitous, and health, education, and social services had to be radically curtailed. The nation still struggles visibly to recover more than twenty years later. Indeed, for many Cubans, it still seems a shock so recent, so stunning in its inconceivable rapidity and devastation, that people who went through it can barely talk about it. “It was awful,” one will hear someone say. “It was unbelievable.” “It is impossible to make you understand how bad it was.” “Everything was gone; you couldn’t get anything; people had nothing .” At the same time, almost nothing is written about it outside the technical academic literature of politics, economics, international affairs; nor is there yet permitted, it would seem, any published internal description concerning what everyday life was like there in autobiography or popular social history, imaginative literature, or film. It therefore comes as a queer surprise, albeit a welcome and revealing one, as noted by Jacqueline Loss, that the student of the period is able to find a singular, extraordinarily detailed depiction in popular US fiction—to be specific, in a detective novel /espionage thriller by the American writer Martin Cruz Smith, part of a larger series featuring the adventures of the Russian detective, Arkady Renko, and centered itself on the downfall of the Soviet Union, the rise of a corrupt capitalist plutocracy, the evolution of a brutal, bloodthirsty, and utterly lawless Mob system, and not least the collapse of the police and intelligence functions into a shadowy, violent, mirror-image nexus of secret cabal and conspiracy. The title of the proximate text, as well of the center of all the novel’s main actions, is Havana Bay. The resultant genre might be best described as murder mystery and police procedural engrafted upon international criminal conspiracy thriller. Where once, on the eve of Marxist revolution, Graham Greene wrote Our Man in Havana, now, at the end of the great Soviet experiment, in Havana Bay Martin Cruz Smith gives us the adventures...

Share