IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 3 ENGLISH | Page 37

due to circumstances beyond their control, like
the Peter Pan airlift, for example. Exodus as an
alternative for subjects of a subaltern culture
causes them to live with the feeling of having lost
the identity of their heritage and some part of
memory in which their status resides. Through
acts of reminiscence, memories become provisional vignettes with a sense of realness, but that
are shaped by incomplete images revealed
through a spectral view of certain facts, objects
and events as evidence of also migrating to other
affective and expressive, conceptual frameworks.
The vestiges that made their mark at a concrete
moment, that have been accepted, suffered and
examined in the context of existence’s good and
bad in a totally different place, in a different
world, have been buried by a fully hegemonic,
consecrating exercise. Its destructive effects are
sings of the times for people who have known and
admired things that are hardly admired anymore;
they saw living truths that are now practically
dead; in essence, values whose decline or collapse
is as evident, as obvious and as destructive for
their hopes and beliefs as the decline or collapse
of the titles and coins that previously were considered to have indestructible value.
In the socio-cultural context, other countercultural and discrepant rhetorical directions crop up;
a literature that bursts on the scene and reveals the
city like a metro to which different stations are
added. This makes reference to an underground
city in Havana, localized spaces as small focal
points or key points within which a socially subaltern disfavored population lives. With its own
codes and behaviors for surviving at the law’s
limits, it indicts its subsistence in a morally transgressive way.
Its antecedents can be found in the narrative style
known as “dirty realism,” first seen in Carlos
Montenegro’s novel Hombres sin mujer [Men
without Women], which lays bare the truth about
the penal system and prison life during the Cuban
Republic. It reveals minutia about a prison population distanced from all of human behavior’s
rules, and accommodates, or takes on a kind of

conduct ruled by codes of violence and marginalization that are contrary to the established morality that society used to exclude them as human
beings and separate them from the order established by civic morality’s transgressive acts and
behaviors—a system of parallel behaviors in the
prison underworld.
By 1998, Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’s novel Trilogía
sucia de la Habana [Dirty Havana Trilogy] is
published (he was born in 1955). It deals with sordid or miserable subjects to reveal both the physical and moral, human misery, lurid events devoid
of any ethical commitment that highlight moral
decay.
The plotlines express a blend of reality and fantasy in which what is reflected is young people,
generally, whose behavior is transgressive and attitude towards life is that anything is justifiable in
chaos, so long as to be able to coexist in a burdened world lacking in moral values and created
by a deterioration of human relations and improper conduct. This novel comes out at a critical
moment in Cuba, at a time when an “anything
goes” philosophy is embraced and practiced by a
large number of people during the peak of the
1990’s crisis. Art and literature of that period express a poetics of despair, frustration and disenchantment with everyday social life, reflecting
some of the minimalist expressions of minimalism. This is reflected in a life that is out of step,
in which everything happens in a short cycle, in a
contradictory context.
Everything happens abruptly. People have no
time for spiritual pleasure because they are too
self-absorbed in their own survival, or in actions
called “the struggle.”1 Art and literature of this
period hav