Content area
Full Text
Jacqueline Loss. Dreaming in Russian: The Cuban Soviet Imaginary. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013. 254 pp.
Far west along Havana's Quinta Avenida looms the sprawling, partially vacant former embassy complex of the Soviet Union, built in monumental, constructivist style. But as Jacqueline Loss reveals in this absorbing study, "Sovietizations" of Cuban culture, politics, and economics in the 1970s and 1980s- coupled with islanders' own travel and educational experiences in the Eastern Bloc-left behind far more than architectural oddities. More than twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Cuban writers, artists, and filmmakers continue to process the multifaceted material, human, and psychic traces of a relationship with the Soviet Union that at times felt ordinary, even intimate, yet at others, epic, unnatural, or forced. The resulting accumulation of cultural production hovers between interpretations of the Soviet legacy as a repressive scar, nostalgic kitsch, or absurdist joke.
Loss opts for a kaleidoscopic rather than chronological approach to her subject. Chapter 1 highlights the efforts of so-called polovinas (children of Cuban and Soviet marriages) to forge bicultural space in the Cuban national ajiaco. Chapter 2 pivots to a different kind of crossing: the drag performance of "La Rusa Roxana Rojo," whose satires of Eastern Bloc material culture exert "revenge" upon "Soviet grayness" (14). Chapter 3, the most ambitious of the book, assesses "fictitious and pictorial travelogues" (17) of the Soviet Union and Russia from the 1980s to the early twenty-first century-a...