Cuban Currency: The Dollar and ”Special Period” Fiction (review)

WHITFIELD, ESTHER. Cuban Currency: The Dollar and “Special Period” Fiction. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008. 248 pp.In her precise and well-crafted monograph, Cuban Currency: The Dollar and “Special Period” Fiction, Esther Whitfield explores print culture of the Cuban Special Period by employing a cultural studies theoretical framework to holistically validate her arguments on the exotics of Cuban culture as currency. She not only analyzes fiction print culture but also other cultural media (e.g., music, photography, film) that have shared the circuits of Cuban cultural consumption in recent decades. Whitfield explains the importance and intricacies of the production and consumption of these materials, while tying them to consumerist trends of Cuban cultural goods, on and off the island. Whitfield formulates a detailed argument about the global cultural proliferation of Cuba and Cuban goods that thrived during the historical time frame of post-Soviet Cuba, better known as the Special Period. This period dates roughly from the early 1990s until 2005, an end date that is debatable, given that for some scholars Cuba is still amidst a “special period.”From the initial discussion of her first chapter, Whitfield clearly establishes the importance of U.S. currency to the Special Period, explaining its legalized circulation between 1993 and 2004. One of the many compelling arguments she introduces in the first chapter pertains to the use of the dollar and the far-reaching implications that the 1993 measure to depenalize the U.S. dollar held for Cuba. Whitfield goes on to list the policy implementations that were most significant for social and cultural developments during this period, specifically those affecting literary production. Among them, Whitfield describes a November 1993 decree allowing writers to negotiate contracts with foreign publishers independently of state organizations; the April 1994 consolidation of a ministry of tourism, under which Cuba’s physical landscape and social hierarchies would be dramatically altered; and a 1995 law that promoted foreign investment in Cuba. Concurrently, Whitfield analyzes how writers during this period address both monetary and cultural currencies, specifically by participating in the creation of an image milieu of a “ruined social project,” which Whitfield identifies as becoming a literal “selling” point for the aesthetics found in their fiction. For example, she shows how the current moment in Cuban culture has adopted “scarcity as a staple,” insightfully highlighting current-day topics such as colloquial language usage, for instance, in which she explains how two popular verbs, resolver and inventar, register the needs of the times.These have become a leitmotif of recent Cuban popular culture, particularly in spoken Cuban Spanish. They can also be repetitively observed in fictional and nonfictional narrative accounts and heard in the lyrics of many songs produced in the 1990s and early this decade.Whitfield further explains what happened with the adoption of the dollar as Cuba’s new currency in the nineties. She narrates societal changes from a primarily agricultural economy to a service- oriented economy geared toward non-Cuban consumers. Her explanation of these changes solidifies her thesis on the centrality of the U.S. dollar, emphasizing the importance of the circuits of currency brought about by books. In one of her summarizing remarks pertaining to the emblematic importance of the U.S. dollar, Whitfield states, “The fiction I read here . . . interrogates the U.S. dollar both as text and as the motor of a new society and publishing economy in which books circulate as politically charged artifacts and their authors are assessed for their authority as survivor- witness es” (5). With this observation, Whitfield broaches the topic that occupies the greatest part of her monograph: an interpretation of the narratives of the Special Period and their vast fictional engagements with Cuban currencies, and an argument for the importance of each of these texts to studying the commodification of print culture inside and outside of Cuba