Mirta Yáñez’s Dystopic Vision of Havana

In her 2010 novel Sangra por la herida, the Cuban novelist, poet, and essayist Mirta Yáñez constructs a panoramic view of metropolitan Havana, following the model of Latin American fiction starting in the 1980s based on a revised version of the detective novel. Sangra por la herida functions best as a narrative that juxtaposes a dystopic vision of several neighborhoods in the city, with multiple narrative voices, mostly female, depicting the everyday experience of people surviving in Habana del Este, Vedado, and Alamar. The novel allows the detective format to recover the memory of Cuba’s utopian dreams of the early 1960s, a period that, according to the novel, was already showing signs of corrupting those dreams. The novel structures its narrative around the unsolved crimes against two women, yet the author is ultimately concerned with the disintegration of popular memory around violence to women during the last decades of the twentieth century. Yáñez emphasizes the novel’s capacity to recover that memory through a chorus of voices recorded for the reader in a melodramatic, humoristic manner.