Fictional First-Person Discourses in Cuban Diaspora Novels: The Author Within and Beyond Textual Boundaries by Raúl Rosales Herrera (review)

Raúl Rosales Herrera’s Fictional First-Person Discourses delves into the dynamic representations of self and the blurred distinctions between autobiographical texts and first-person narratives. Focusing on post-1959 Cuban exile first-person texts, Rosales Herrera deconstructs the clear autobiographical pledge between author and fictional narrator by examining how five authors writing in Spanish incorporate self and their surrounding community into their works. The critic suggests that the exile condition for Cubans writing off the island has yielded a distinctive literary expression, blending the personal and the collective. Rosales Herrera effectively argues that the diasporic writer “who through the imaginative and creative process narrates himself or herself, embedding his or her experience into the fictional fabric of a literary text” (231).

Rosales Herrera divides his manuscript into three parts that pertain to time periods or events in post-Cuban Revolution history. In the forward, Cuban-American scholar Gustavo Pérez Firmat gives a brief but relevant synopsis that summarizes topics such as the “other” and the authorial “I” found in diasporic Caribbean literature. Rosales Herrera then lays out his theoretic framework in his introduction, harnessing the likes of James Clifford, Edward Said, and Ricardo Ortiz to address autobiographical performance and first-person texts within a diasporic Cuban context. Offering a general overview of the literary waves of Cuban exile writing, he accurately recounts significant and influential phases, such as the Mariel generation and The Special Period, during the second half of the twentieth century in Cuba.

In the first part of his book, Rosales Herrera dedicates the first two chapters to literary texts of Mariel writers, Guillermo Rosales’s Boarding Home (1987) and Miguel Correa’s Al norte del infierno (1983). He highlights the unique situation of Mariel writers in the 1980s, explaining that they were excluded from a national space and the Cuban literary canon both on and off the island: “They [marielitos] were outcasts and found themselves in a seemingly perpetual state of limbo, as victims of marginalization, incomprehension and hostility before and after their maritime experience” (23). As the critic successfully posits, both Rosales and Correra write from an ambiguous space and as the “other” within the Cuban exile community. Moreover, Rosales Herrera’s reading emphasizes the subtle bond between autobiographical acts and fictional accounts in the interpretation of these two novels as testimonies of multiple selves of both an author and his primary protagonist.

Moving from the 1980s to the 1990s, the second section of Rosales Herrera’s work examines Cuban exilic literature published during The Special Period, a prolonged and economically depressed era due to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Fittingly, he chooses to focus on two female authors writing in the diaspora, one in the United States and the other in France. Both Zoé Valdés’s La nada cotidiana (1995) and Daína Chaviano’s El hombre, la hembra y el hambre (1998) employ the use of the physical and textual female body to question and confront the exilic condition. In turn, Rosales Herrera competently applies the familiar angel/monster dichotomy to propose that the female protagonists in each novel, Patria/Yocandra and Claudia/La Mora, not only characterize their respective creators (Valdés and Chaviano) by blurring the borders between literature and extra-literary narrative discourses but also obtain temporary escape in the power of the erotic.

The manuscript’s third and final part tackles recent Cuban exile literature written by first-generation authors. Rosales Herrera dedicates his last chapter to the prolific scholar Hilda Perera and her experimental work La noche de Ina (1993). As with the other chapters in his book, the critic presents an in-depth reading of the narrative in question by drawing attention to the hybrid quality of the work (part theatrical piece and part novel) and the merging lives of Perera and her fictional character, Ina...