Multiple Havana. Historical imaginaries and urban experiences in Cuban literature

Abstract

In this paper I analyze some urban imaginaries of Cuban literature that are produced between the mid-20th century and the 21st century. In the first section I describe the city that Antonio José Ponte builds in “Un arte de hacer ruinas” and I compare that fragmented city with the organic imaginaries of José Lezama Lima and Alejo Carpentier. I propose as a hypothesis that the changes in the way of understanding Havana are linked to the dissolution of the Socialist Bloc. In the second section I examine the importance of Russian-Cuban relations to understand the city and for this I analyze the film Soy Cuba, by Mikhail Kalatózov, and La mala memoria de Padilla. In the third section I describe the film The Work of the Century (2015) to think about the fracture of that relationship and the impact that this fracture has on the city. In the following section I contrast the different urban experiences that are appear, on one hand, in the books by Ponte and Iván de la Nuez and, on the other, in the most recent novel 9550: una posible interpretación del azul (2014), by Abel Arcos. In the conclusions I reflect on the current experience of the city from the imaginary that this last writer proposes.