39 - Cuban Women’s Writing at the Turn of the Millennium

Summary

This chapter examines what critics have often called the “boom” of women’s literary writing that emerged beginning in the 1990s, providing detailed analyses of challenges to the patriarchy and to “state machismo” that, the chapter argues, are enacted by seven paradigmatic women writers of the period: Mylene Fernández Pintado, Mariela Varona, Anna Lidia Vega Serova, Jacqueline Herranz-Brooks, Mildre Hernández, Yordanka Almaguer, and Martha Luisa Hernández Cadenas. Key to the emergence of these writers, who stand in for numerous other women who began publishing after 1989, the chapter argues, was the groundbreaking appearance in 1996 of the story anthology Estatuas de sal: Cuentistas cubanas contemporáneas: Panorama crítico (1959–1995), edited by Mirta Yáñez and Marilyn Bobes, the first island-published anthology featuring only women authors and women living in exile. The anthology’s characters and situations generated a new national and transnational discourse, the chapter posits, and were reproduced rhizome-like in the following decades through hundreds of stories and novels written by the authors it included and others.