IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 3 ENGLISH | Page 39

and its deconstructive metaphors regarding “phalocentric” hegemony.
Rocío is interested in the world of perversion, relaxed norms, and the particularly dramatic violence of homoerotic tensions that recall certain
scenes in U.S. African-American film.
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 c ۝^