The “New Man” in Cuba (review)

Ana Serra has written an original, useful book about the complex relationship between culture and politics in one of the most interesting experiments in twentieth-century Latin American history. Focusing on key moments like state-sponsored campaigns or times of ideological crisis, she studies novels that set out to produce models of revolutionary behavior. Che Guevara’s paradigmatic New Man is the conceptual frame for the interrogation of the negotiations between the discourse of the Cuban Revolutionary State and novelistic writing.

The choice of situations to be studied is lucid: Serra looks at the literacy campaign of 1960, the Ten-Million-Ton Sugar Campaign of 1970, the fraught question of the location of women and intellectuals within the Revolution’s priorities, and at the polysemic tensions which obtain around the concept of utopia. The main strength of Serra’s book is its contextual richness. The novels are located not only in their specific historical site or context of production; they are also framed by non-fictional discursive forms such as political speeches, proclamations, journalistic writing, essays about the defining features of Cuban identity, periodical publications, and film.

In this sense, this book illustrates the potential of cultural history as it unpacks the ideological forces at work in the novels under consideration. Yet, it is perhaps in this intersection that the analysis tends to falter. As nicely presented as the context is, Serra occasionally wants to read the novels with critical categories which they cannot be expected to fulfill. Indeed, the novels in question are what Susan Suleiman called “authoritarian fictions,” the critic cannot really fault them for failing to convey the “peasant students as subjects in the discourse of the campaign” (p. 42), for constructing women characters ultimately subjected to the patriarchal imaginary of the Cuban Revolution, or for the lack of the character development one might expect in the fulsome psychological development of the canonical novel. The novels Serra picked are immersed in the dominant fiction of the Cuban Revolution. It is the Revolution that constitutes their condition of possibility as well as the limits of what they can represent.

Serra’s analysis is at its most felicitous when it gets at the productive tensions between the dominant fiction and a novel’s ostensible goals. Her reading of Memories of Underdevelopment in Chapter 2 effectively grapples with the puzzling and contradictory aspects of the main character as the reader waivers in her identification. Here Serra works as a careful, sagacious reader who can chart areas of interpretive ambiguity and make them productive. Serra’s analysis manages to identify unanswered questions as she pries into the open nature of a work which is itself uneasily situated vis a vis the Cuban regime. Perhaps this is the most productive reading; it pries open the creative interstices between authority and its interrogation, unfolding the power of ambivalence as a productive force in writing. Serra achieves this in Chapter 5 as well, where she studies Pablo Armando Fernández’s 1968 Los niños se despiden, a novel that slyly faces the problem of utopian discourse by resorting to the ruses of narrative voice and character. Serra shows how this self-conscious novel subverts the conventions of the bildungsroman which it invokes, managing a veiled critique of the Revolution and its foundational assumptions. In her analysis of these two novels (Memories and Los niños), Serra shows herself to be an astute reader who sets these two novels apart from other more militant and rigid ones, such as Sacchario (1970) and La última mujer y el ultimo combate (1971).

Serra’s book shows a scholar in the making, and one of considerable promise. Trying to enrich her critical repertoire, she occasionally invokes cultural theorists such as Foucault, Derrida, or Bhabha. Their ideas are not fully integrated into the argument; they read as rather strained ornaments, instead of being organically integrated into the critical impulse. I would hope that as she continues to mature critically, Serra will find...