Cuba i+real: Singularidades de lo Fantástico y la Ciencia Ficción en la Cuba Contemporánea

Ever since the triumph of the Revolution in 1959, Cuba has witnessed an unprecedented productive boom in the genres of science fiction and the fantastic. A large number of the literary and cinematic works that have surfaced during the last half-century attempt to replace and ultimately reify motifs and scenarios appropriated from the various science fiction and fantastic narratives in world literature and have generated alternative or imagined settings that challenge extant sociopolitical realities and certainties of the island. My dissertation, “Cuba i+Real: singularidades de lo fantástico y la ciencia ficción en la Cuba contemporánea”, examines these literary texts in a Post-Soviet context, analyzing the ways they reimagine the themes, plot devices, and scenarios traditional to the different genres. My argument is that, in most cases, the narratives are carefully and intentionally transformed, adapting them to the strenuous political and economic circumstances of the island and to the tense social conditions of the post-Soviet era. My thesis both decentralizes and expands contemporary debates about fantastic and science fiction theories by recognizing—and including—Cuban science fiction and fantastic production within broader conversations about the relationship between science fiction, the fantastic, and politics. My dissertation builds and expands upon the contemporary currents in literature, exploring how Cuban science fiction and fantastic texts provide a new, imaginative space and frontier to interrupt and contest the Cuban Revolution\u27s hegemonic and monolithic discursive arcs, while allowing for a unique transnational corpus formation which not only crosses many generic and formal boundaries, but also evades and goes beyond existing theoretical and thematic paradigms