Cuba on the Edge: Cuban Short Stories

Author Ed. MG Berg,P Carmell, A Fountain
Culture in Cuba has become a space discussing controversial topics. This collection of short stories explores a range of such themes: sexuality, prostitution, crime, exile, disillusionment, deception; but through irony and sometimes despair, stories of complex and diverse lives ultimately celebrate survival, love and human commitment.
Publisher: CCC Press | ISBN no: 978-1-905510-04-7 | Year: 2007

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Culture in Cuba has become an immense space for offering up difficult questions for debate, as intended by the revolution. Serious controversial social-economic-political issues are discussed within popular literature, film, music, theatre, TV drama and visual arts. This latest collection of 31 short stories, although put together by US academics, really feels like a Cuban collection.

The writers (12 men and 9 women) live on the island and many are popular and successful within Cuba. The title refers to Cubans’ acute awareness of living with uncertainties since the early 90s, but the book does not present an anti-government agenda.  The content is provocative: sexuality, prostitution, crime, exile, disillusionment, scepticism, deception; but through humour, irony and sometimes despair, stories of complex and diverse lives ultimately celebrate survival, love and human commitment.

Leonardo Padura Fuentes, (known here for his police crime fiction revealing critical analyses of recent Cuban history), gives an amusing magical realist offering; Senel Paz, whose earlier short story was turned into the popular important film ‘Strawberry & Chocolate’, tells a beautiful bittersweet story set in rural Cuba of a young boy’s first meeting with his father. Aida Bahr, (winner of the 2006 prestigious Alejo Carpentier prize), examines self-sacrifice and ego in a subtly unravelling family saga.