List of readings keeps expanding. This time: Guillermina de Ferrari latest book Community and Culture in Post-Soviet Cuba.

De Ferrari joins a growing list of woman scholars who have recently been publishing seldom books and texts reflecting on post-soviet Cuban culture.

Is it possible to identify the emergence of a distinct female gaze in studies about Cuba's cultural production and narratives of identity since the end of the 20th century, including but not limited to literature? If that is the case, what does this entail?

De Ferrari, Guillermina. Community and Culture in Post-Soviet Cuba. New York: Routledge, 2014.

Book Synopsis: Following the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the globalization of Cuban culture, along with the bankruptcy of the state, partly modified the terms of intellectual engagement. However, no significant change took place at the political level. In Community and Culture in Post-Soviet Cuba, De Ferrari looks into the extraordinary survival of the Revolution by focusing on the personal, political and aesthetic social pacts that determined the configuration of the socialist state.Through close critical readings of a representative set of contemporary Cuban novels and works of visual art, this book argues that ethics and gender, rather than ideology, account for the intellectuals’ fidelity to the Revolution. Community and Culture does three things: it demonstrates that masculine sociality is the key to understanding the longevity of Cuba’s socialist regime; it examines the sociology of cultural administration of intellectual labor in Cuba; and it maps the emergent ethical and aesthetic paradigms that allow Cuban intellectuals to envision alternative forms of community and civil society.

Latest books by three women thinkers on Cuba. Odette Casamayor, Jacqueline Loss and Lilian Guerra. Highly Recommended.

Casamayor, Odette. Utopía, distopía e ingravidez: reconfiguraciones cosmológicas en la narrativa postsoviética cubana. Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2013. Print

Book description by the author:

¿Cómo afrontar los desafíos existenciales de la Cuba post-Soviética? ¿Cómo el cubano reacciona ante la crisis identitaria, la incertidumbre y pérdida de confianza en la Historia y el futuro, provocados por el colapso del socialismo en Europa del Este, la repentina exposición al capitalismo global y la aceleración de los movimientos migratorios? Las respuestas se leen en la ficción escrita en la isla tras la Caída del Muro de Berlín en 1989: son la reinvención de la utopía, su negación distópica y la ingravidez ética. Este libro las examina en narradores contemporáneos muy diferentes estética, ética e ideológicamente, como Abilio Estévez, Wendy Guerra, Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, Leonardo Padura, Orlando Pardo Lazo, Senel Paz, Antonio J. Ponte, Ena L. Portela. Evitando rígidas determinantes generacionales, se considera también cómo sus propuestas retoman o desvían derroteros narrativos establecidos antes de los noventa por Carpentier, Lezama Lima, Piñera y Reinaldo Arenas, canónicos autores. 

Utopía, distopía e ingravidez es el primer libro en investigar cómo la ficción literaria recrea a los cubanos reorganizando su existencia frente a la crisis de lo que llamo la cosmología de la revolución cubana . La actualidad post-soviética es aquí analizada más allá de sus condicionantes estrictamente políticas, económicas y sociales, que suelen dominar la literatura crítica sobre Cuba. Examinada en la encrucijada de la experiencia socialista y la pertenencia al llamado Tercer Mundo , se evita además redundar en una supuesta excepcionalidad cubana. De existir, tal particularidad puede considerarse únicamente a partir de la visibilidad que en esta sociedad adquieren los avatares existenciales del sujeto contemporáneo global. En América Latina, Cuba representaría tan sólo el sitio en el que, concretamente, la saga de la revolución aporta mayor nitidez a tales procesos."

Loss, Jacqueline. Dreaming in Russian: The Cuban Soviet Imaginary. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013. Print. Book description by the author:  The specter of the Soviet Union lingers in Cuba, yet until now there has been no book-length work on the ways Cubans process their country’s relationship with the Soviet bloc. Dreaming in Russian at last brings into the light the reality that for nearly three decades, the Soviet Union subsidized the island economically, intervened in military matters, and exported distinct pedagogical and cultural models to Cuba. Drawing on interviews with Cuban artists and intellectuals, as well as treasures from cinematographic and bibliographic archives, Jacqueline Loss delivers the first book to show that Cuba remembers and retains many aspects of the Soviet era, far from shedding those cultural facets as relics of the Cold War. Weaving together intriguing, seldom-seen images, Dreaming in Russian showcases the ways in which Cuba’s relationship to its Soviet benefactors lingered after the disintegration of the U.S.S.R. in 1991. Analyzing numerous literary texts and works of visual art, Loss also incorporates aspects of architecture, popular culture, the space race, and other strands to create a captivating new perspective on Cuban society. Among the luminaries featured are poet Reina María Rodríguez, writer Antonio José Ponte, visual artist Tonel, and novelist Wendy Guerra. A departure from traditional cultural history, Loss’s approach instead presents a kaleidoscopic series of facets, reflecting the hybrid nature of the self-images that emerged in the aftermath of the Soviet aegis. As speculations about Cuba’s future under Fidel Castro’s heir apparent continue, the portrait that emerges in Dreaming in Russian is both timely and mesmerizing.

			Guerra, Lillian. Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption, and Resistance, 1959-1971. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Print. Book description by the author: In the tumultuous first decade of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro and other leaders saturated the media with altruistic images of themselves in a campaign to win the hearts of Cuba's six million citizens. In Visions of Power in Cuba, Lillian Guerra argues that these visual representations explained rapidly occurring events and encouraged radical change and mutual self-sacrifice.Mass rallies and labor mobilizations of unprecedented scale produced tangible evidence of what Fidel Castro called "unanimous support" for a revolution whose "moral power" defied U.S. control. Yet participation in state-orchestrated spectacles quickly became a requirement for political inclusion in a new Cuba that policed most forms of dissent. Devoted revolutionaries who resisted disastrous economic policies, exposed post-1959 racism, and challenged gender norms set by Cuba's one-party state increasingly found themselves marginalized, silenced, or jailed.  Using previously unexplored sources, Guerra focuses on the lived experiences of citizens, including peasants, intellectuals, former prostitutes, black activists, and filmmakers, as they struggled to author their own scripts of revolution by resisting repression, defying state-imposed boundaries, and working for anti-imperial redemption in a truly free Cuba.

Interactivo | Que Lindo Es el Amor | CD Baby Music Store

The latest CD by Cuban band Interactivo, "Que Lindo es el Amor," directed by pianist and composer Robertico Carcasses, is now available online. The album is produced by Dafnison Music, an independent record label from outstanding percussionist Dafnis Prieto, who is based in New York since the late nineties. Previous collaborations between Prieto and Carcasses, together with Descemer Bueno and Yosvany Terry, dates back to the 80s in the art schools where they studied, and later in jazz venues and festivals in Havana and New York in the band Columna B.

Interactivo is part of what I call the Transnational Cuban Alternative Music Scene (TCAMS), a network of Cuban music production, interactions and collaborations among academically trained musicians, songwriters and singers, operating across urban spaces like New York, Miami, Madrid, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Italy, and France, etc., including the island, which emerged after the massive migration of artists and musicians born and raised after '59, prompted by the profound nineties' crisis in the island.

This network of musicians have created a boheme transnational scene, based on their own interpretations and updates of the incredible music made since the 1970s in the island by renown musicians like Grupo de Experimentacion Sonora, Chucho Valdes' Irakere, Emiliano Salvador, Afrocuba (Oriente Lopez), Van Van and NG La Banda, among many others. They eclectically fusion Afro-Cuban music, Timba, Funk, Jazz, Hip-Hop, Brazilian music, Argentinian Rock, and Pop, resulting in an irresistible dance music with conscious lyrics. This generation of musicians have been an important part of the sound production of several Cuban singers and songwriters since the 1990s like Santiago Feliu, Carlos Varela, Xiomara Laugart, Gema Corredera, Pavel Urquiza and Habana Abierta, to name a few.

Please check an interview I made to Robertico Carcasses, Interactivo's director, previously published in Cubaencuentro online magazine in 2012.

Dirty Loops...No need for words...First album coming soon

Dirty Loops