Cuban Currency: The Dollar and “Special Period” Fiction (review)

To almost anyone who does not live here, the United States is synonymous with capitalism. Yet the word “capitalism,” is almost completely absent from everyday discourse, as though we lived in a classless capitalist society where the state of the stock market had nothing to do with the flow of capital. Much like the state of being “healthy” that we only come to notice when we are sick, the “economy” only becomes visible to us, as a concrete, undeniable reality, when things are not going well: in times of recession, of high unemployment, slow growth, depression, budget deficits, etc. But the economy, or as our nineteenth-century economists called it, our political economy, is always there and determines every aspect of life. One of the first literatures to call attention to the effects of the economy on individuals was the Spanish picaresque novel or novella. This quintessential modern genre focused on the pícaro, the first self-made man, who had to survive by his own wits after the end of feudalism, when it was no longer possible to live solely by working the land. The age of the pícaro, was the age of the great mercantile cities, the beginning of modern capitalism, and what Immanuel Wallerstein has called the “modern world system.” However, seldom do we literary critics turn our attention to the impact the economy has on the kinds of literature that an epoch or a nation produces, or do we notice how political economy is reflected in literary texts. One such recent exception is Esther Whitfield’s study of “post-Soviet Cuban literature,” Cuban Currency: The Dollar and ‘Special Period’ Fiction (2008).

Composed of five chapters, beginning with a chapter on the quintessential novel of the special period (1990–2004), Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’s El rey de la Habana (1999), and ending with a chapter on Antonio José Ponte’s notion of urban architectural ruins as the visual metaphor of political and economic decay, Cuban Currency covers territory most books fail to explore. From the start, Whitfield notes that most of the Cuban literature of the “special period,” and especially the more shocking and controversial kind like El rey de la Habana was published outside of Cuba, by Spanish publishers in Madrid and Barcelona. In short, they were meant for mass consumption outside the island, the way Cuban “culture” (the music of the Buena Vista Social Club), cigars, rum, and the sex trade of jineterismo was meant for European tourists travelling to the island, spending much needed dollars to make up for the billions of rubles given Cuba by the ex-Soviet Union. Ironically and sadly, in order for Cuba to survive the economic crisis that ensued after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba had to sell itself the way it had done so in the past through travel and prostitution, and Castro found his way out of the crisis by making the once illegal American dollar legal in the travel industry. Thus, Cuba suddenly became the “hot spot” for Europeans tourists to visit and to consume. “Somos lo que hay/Lo que se vende como pan caliente… somos lo máximo,” say the lyrics to a song of the period that Gutiérrez cites as the epigram of El rey de la Habana, as though calling attention to both himself and his novel as products of capitalist exchange and consumption. “It is no coincidence, then, that the tourist boom was closely followed by a boom in cultural exports, foreign-financed literature among them,” writes Whitfield (9). The consumers in G8 countries wanted to experience the carefree life of the body, unadorned, naked and truthful in all its sensuality; and for this, they turned to the “authentic” Cuban Other. Gutiérrez gave his “foreign readers” what they desired, says Whitfield, by simulating “an authentic portrayal of Cuban life” (128). And what was this “authentic portrayal?” A zoological, scatological, and picaresque portrayal of a Cuba as a brothel where the two most used words...