Though always unpleasant, historical and economic crises offer windows to examine culture and society. Charles Dickens' view of the Industrial Revolution and John Steinbeck's picture of the Great Depression in The Grapes of Wrath testify to this theme in literature. Esther Whitfield's Cuban Currency graces Latin American comparative literature with an insightful interpretation of Cuba in a post-Soviet era. To be sure, Cuban fiction was alive and well before the unravelling of the USSR and the specialised trade bloc that afforded the island favourable terms of trade. However, the author shows the connections between the ‘Special Period in a Time of Peace’ and how artists and writers push the state's level of tolerance; sometimes intentionally and sometimes not, but always with the passion of writers plying their trade. The burgeoning literature of post-Soviet Cuba written on and outside the island continues to blossom, and if social scientists believe that they have little to learn from their colleagues in the humanities, Whitfield will prove them wrong.
We learn that the changes in the ‘Special Period’ have been no less profound than the massive statisation that took place after the 1959 Revolution. The author's ‘dollar’ represents the commodification of Cuban culture, ranging from the benign export of Che images, tee-shirts and the like, to analyses of how Cuban prostitution corrupts the foreign tourists and voyeurs who come to the Caribbean in search of authentic culture, fiery mulatas, Hemingway, and the crumbling façades of Old Havana. This is comparative literature at its best because the author combs through a vast array of fiction by authors ranging from hard-core exiles to those who remain on the island and are still ‘tolerated’ by the state. Principally, though, Cuban writers such as Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, Antonio José Ponte and Zoé Valdés provide the raw material through which Whitfield explores the Special Period and the commodification of Cuban culture. Through this rich pool of fiction, the reader bears witness to how Cuba becomes an ideological theme park consisting of crowded tenement houses, multiple aesthetic codes, and an array of illegal activities. Whitfield's aim is to answer the questions:
How does the partial dollarization, if not the complete globalization, of Cuban society and literature shape fiction of the subsequent years? How do Cuban writers, implicated in the dynamics of international publishing whether they live in Cuba or abroad, acknowledge a readership whose expectations are vastly different from those of the domestic and non-commercial markets in which their work would previously have circulated? (p. 33)
Heady questions are these, and readers searching to pigeonhole the author's assessment of the vast literature of Special Period fiction will not find an easily compartmentalised answer (as is so often the case, sadly, in Cuban studies). Of course, there is Zoé Valdés' reference to the Comedian in Chief (Commander in Chief) in her I Gave You All I Had, but there is also the tale of heroism among the characters in Ponte's writings and Pedro Juan Gutiérrez's Dirty Havana Trilogy, where the tourist ‘seen’ consists of individuals whose dignity and identity is no more than an international adjective: German, Canadian or Italian. In this venue, the Cuban is empowered to dominate and exploit the foreigner without the latter having any sense of her/his sensation.
Whitfield offers a cogent overview of the many subtenets of Cuban fiction. As she does so, we are treated to a literary and intellectual interpretation of this island of eleven million. The power of the written word is a welcome medium to counter the often superficial account of life there. ‘Tourists do not merely move around Havana, however. They look, recording what they see, and photography increasingly becomes the medium through which Havana is made recognizable abroad … ’ (p. 124). Professors teaching courses about the island will immediately recognise rich opportunities to combine Cuban Currency with Cuban film; old (Lucía), not so old (Fresa y Chocolate), as well as cinema produced outside the island (El arte de hacer ruinas, for example, by Antonio José Ponte).
Readers should not avoid this book simply because they are unfamiliar with Cuban fiction, either in its original or in translation. Whitfield's translations are spot on because she handles Cuban slang refreshingly well. Every verbatim citation carried out in English translation is properly footnoted in the original Spanish. For the most part, the political and historical account of modern Cuba and Havana is objective and accurate (even though this reviewer's last name is misspelled in the book; abolition did not occur in 1882 as noted on p. 102, rather the patronato (tutelage) did not end until 1886; and Old Havana's restoration did not commence immediately after its 1982 designation as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, as suggested on p. 25). In her conclusions, Whitfield draws on the analogy used by Ponce and other ruinologists, that the future of the island will be rebuilt brick by brick and not overnight as idealists might dream (p. 154).
The author's afterword notes that the dollar had already been withdrawn from circulation, and Fidel had proclaimed the end of the Special Period, just as the book project neared its end. She opted to keep the Special Period in the title and, instead, use the so-called termination of the economic crisis as ‘an opportunity to put [her] words in the past tense and consider the last sixteen years as a bygone era rather than a present to keep pace with’ (p. 155). Both Cuban Currency and the island's fiction are a gift to all because of their power of analysis and their ability to stretch the imagination across time, space and ideology. Like the character Tom, in The Grapes of Wrath, who comments, ‘I'll be ever'where – wherever you look’, there are glimpses of Cubans in this corpus of literature that are both unique and widespread.
