Wilderness and marginality of a cuban intellectual in pedro juan gutiérrez’s trilogía sucia de la habana (1998)

Abstract

The article explores how the novel Trilogía sucia de la Habana (1998), by Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, depicts the decline of the subject identity heavily constructed by the paternalist ideology, promises and morals of the Cuban nation-state during the revolutionary period. Instead, emptiness, loss of faith, despair and wild survival became distressing effects of the nineties crisis. Pedro Juan’s marginal existence, constrained agency and sense of lost time embodies a common place for many Cuban intellectuals, trapped in the absurdity of a chaotic national situation. With Trilogía, Gutiérrez re-imagines the Cuban nation at the turn of the century as a dystopian place of material decadence, dehumanization, revival of colonial stereotypes and a rough culture of daily survival by all means. In those circumstances, the present is the only time that really counts and the hypersexualizing of the body became the privilege space for individual agency. The novel moves the spotlight from the collective incarnation of the “New Man” in the official revolutionary propaganda, to the voice of forgotten individuals massively converted into marginal beings. This article dialogues with texts by scholars Odette Casamayor, Guillermina de Ferrari, José Quiroga y Esther Whitfield, and with theories by Pierre Bourdieu, Roberto Bolaño, Frantz Fanon and Stuart Hall.