Representing Post Soviet Cuba: Media, Literature and Cultural Memory

The Cuban media has played a central role in shaping ideas of nation and national identity linked to the political system installed after the Revolution. The aim of defending the homeland is still regarded as a mobilizing force and an incentive to safeguard the island’s unity. To furnish those discursive strategies, the past is evoked either in epic terms, reflecting on the heroism of the early revolutionary years (Bay of Pigs, Missile Crisis, the Battle of Ideas) or to contrast it with a well-known catalogue of all the ills of pre-revolutionary Cuba. In order to support the status quo and the permanence of the revolutionary present, the Cuban media has directed the country’s collective memory to specific targets, to those events and scenarios that have enabled a positive reinforcement of the “authenticity” and legitimacy of the revolutionary government. This has been possible by implementing a national scheme of collective forgetting (Connerton, 2009), where versions of the past favourable to the ideological aims of the Revolution have been essentialised to suit a common narrative about nation and national identity. Outside this cultural amnesia (Connerton, 2009) and epic representation of the past within the revolutionary and post-Soviet eras, Cubans’ personal accounts of these events have remained largely absent or inaccessible. This panel discussion will reflect on issues of collective and personal memory in contemporary Cuba, and will be followed by a launch of Ivan Darias Alfonso’s book of short stories, 'Viejos Retratos de la Habana' (2017)