Cubana: Contemporary Fiction by Cuban Women

By Mirta Yáñez

Book Overview

Until recently, the combination of a Cuban old boys' network and an ideological emphasis on "tough" writing kept fiction by Cuban women largely unknown and unread. Cubana, the U.S. version of a groundbreaking anthology of women's fiction published in Cuba in 1996, introduces these once-ignored writers to a new audience. Havana editor and author Mirta Y ez has assembled an impressive group of sixteen stories that reveals the strength and variety of contemporary writing by Cuban women-and offers a glimpse inside Cuba during a time of both extreme economic difficulty and artistic renaissance.

Many of these stories focus pointedly on economic and social conditions. Josefina de Diego's "Internal Monologue on a Corner in Havana" shows us the current crisis through the eyes and voice of a witty economist-turned-vendor who must sell her extra cigarettes. Others-Magaly S nchez's erotic fantasy "Catalina in the Afternoons" and Mylene Fern ndez Pintado's psychologically deft "Anhedonia (A Story in Two Women)"-reveal a nascent Cuban feminism. The twelve-year-old narrator of Aida Bahr's "The Scent of Limes" tries to make sense of her grandparents' conservative values, her stepfather's disappearance, and her mother's fierce independence. The Cuban-American writer Achy Obejas recreates the strange dual identity of the immigrant, while avant-garde stories like the playful and savvy "The Urn and the Name (A Merry Tale)," written by Ena Luc a Portela, reveal the vitality of the experimental tradition in Cuba. And Rosa Ileana Boudet's "Potos 11: Address Unknown" is both a romantic paean to a time of youth, passion, and revolution, and an attempt to reconcile that past with a diminished present.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807083372
• ISBN13: 9780807083376
• Release Date: May 1998
• Publisher: Beacon Press
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.4"