From Socialist Realism to Anarchist Capitalism: Cuban Cyberpunk
Toledano Redondo, Juan C. "From Socialist Realism to Anarchist Capitalism: Cuban Cyberpunk." Science Fiction Studies #97 = 32.3 (November 2005): 442-67. As of June 2022, Abstract on-line here.[1] As of date "FULL TEXTS OF SOLD-OUT BACK ISSUES" does not include Issue #97, but just case, the link is here.[2]
Abstract:
Cuban cyberpunk developed during the Special Period in Time of Peace of the 1990s. After the fall of the USSR, Cuba went through its worst economic and social crisis since 1959. The Revolution seemed to be falling apart. At the same time, capitalism became the economic credo for the new globalized economy. Cuba was completely isolated. Among its youngest generation of sf writers, some adapted the cyberpunk style of the US in the 1980s to express their new reality. Yoss, Vladimir Hernández, and Michel Encinosa created a new hero, defiant of the late capitalist world and impregnated with a traditional anarchist view against the state. The new socialist man was replaced by the new anarchist hero/ine. (p. 466)
Notes Bruce Sterling in the introduction to the Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology describing cyberpunk "as 'the unholy alliance of the technical world and the world of organized dissent — the underground world of pop culture, visionary fluidity, and street-level anarchy' (xii) [...]." But,
When cyberpunk entered Cuba [...] it was recharged with historical perspective and ideology — an ideology that embraces some of the values of the bourgeois individual who faces the oppression of the imposed norms of socialist realism,[3] but that also shares the fears of multinationals taking over Cuba and draining away the wealth of the country. Anarchism, as the DIY[4] symbol of original punk and as an expression of nonconformity, became very appealing to a Cuban generation in crisis during the "Special Period in Peace Time" during the 1990s. This does not mean that the Cubans who wrote cyberpunk during the 1990s were anarchists themselves or even punks. What cyberpunk offered them was a literal style suitable for the representation of a particular Cuban reality. [... Among other issues,] Technology was becoming the new reality that was allowing big corporations to achieve their imperialist dreams across the planet; and Cuban authors were ready for a change from socialist realism to something else. (p. 448)
Works dealt with by Toledano Redondo include:
RDE, finishing, 24/25Jun22