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The fiftieth anniversary of the Cuban Revolution two years ago coincided with another anniversary of central importance to Cuba and the wider world: the twentieth of the fall of the Berlin Wall. If January 1959 signaled the beginning of the decades of cataclysmic change that characterized Cuba's Revolutionary project, 1989 once again heralded economic, social and cultural upheaval. The sudden scarcity of material goods precipitated the legalization of the US dollar and the promotion of foreign tourism, policy changes that undermined the Revolution's egalitarian principles and marked a new period in its history. This post- 1989 period goes by several names. It is clearly "post-Soviet," as Jacqueline Loss has discussed in her work on the cultural legacy of Havana's alliance with Moscow; it is also, Ariana Hernández-Reguant indicates with reference to scholarship on the final years of the Soviet bloc, "late socialism" (11).
Fidel Castro's own neologism is "the special period in times of peace," a term that is particularly productive for reading Cuban fiction of the 1990s because it foregrounds the economic context in which this fiction was produced (Whitfield 2-3). During this period of crisis, an unprofitable but ideologically vetted Cuban publishing industry faced the lurid demands of an international market in an encounter whose troubling dynamics are rehearsed in two emblematic texts of these years: "La causa que refresca" by Yoss (José Miguel Sánchez) and Pedro Juan Gutiérrez's novel Trilogía sucia de la Habana, both published in 1998. Moreover, the measured duration of the "special period" - which Castro, albeit with some ambiguity, had declared over by 2005 - permits us to discern more recent modes of writing in a post-"special period" Cuba. This is a Cuba whose economy is less volatile than it was in dbe 1990s, whose political leadership has changed, and whose authors are better connected internationally, particularly via the internet.1
The present essay traces how "special period" fiction of the 1990s has gradually ceded ground, over the course of the past decade, to what we might think of as, to use John Earth's phrase, "a literature of exhaustion." Exhaustion marks both the mood and the dissemination of post-"special period" writing. Having abdicated from the frenzied interpersonal encounters and the conflicts between Revolutionary ideals and market forces that marked...