Jenna Leving (University of Chicago)
Critical questions of borders, migratory spaces, and textual and geographic margins inevitably raise a number of subsequent questions of national identity and citizenship. Notions of Cuban identity are at stake in this paper as I look at literature produced both on and off the island: Cerrado por reparación written in Cuba by Nancy Alonso, and El Año que viene estamos en Cuba, written in the US by Gustavo Pérez Firmat. The condition of the city is irrevocable from these stories; both texts evoke an image of Havana through their narrative tours of the city. It might seem that the opposing perspectives in terms of geography, and even politics and history, would produce opposing textual images of Havana. The experience Alonso draws upon, the poverty and hunger of Cuba of the 1990’s, is evidently much different than the personal experience of Pérez-Firmat, looking back on middle-class childhood in Havana, from suburban Miami. Rather than standing in opposition to one another, however, the two visions of Havana in the narratives of Nancy Alonso and Gustavo Pérez Firmat effectively construct a complete literary image of Havana, producing a single, shared narrative space. What’s more, I argue, this space is essentially Cuban.
What is it that unifies this city across 90 miles? Through a close reading of the short stories in Alonso’s text and the episodes in Pérez Firmat, I will explore the ways in which, despite the contradictory visions of Havana produced by these two texts, they are joined together in that they both participate in a paradoxical representation of the Cuban capital. Each illustrates contradictory visions of Havana, simultaneous affection and disappointment for life in the city, support and disillusionment toward the Revolution. It is not only a common national identity, nor a shared nostalgic memory, but these texts repeatedly present Havana as this paradox imbedded in a duplicitous attitude toward the city and their relationship to it. The ultimate irony, I propose, is that these “opposite” visions are unified by their ironies; the contradictions, ironically, are what makes these supposedly opposing perspectives into a single, literary vision of the city of Havana.
