Cuban Realism, or the Novel as a Democratic Fiction: Abilio Estévez’s Los palacios distantes

Abstract

In the last decades, attention to post-Soviet Cuban fiction has often intimated that this body of literature is the aesthetic counterpart to socialism’s exhaustion and that its narrative is likely to follow a telos of disenchantment. This article argues that counter to such a paradigm and in the wake of the Special Period, Cuban fiction registers the formation of new subjectivities as it opens a space for a new politics through a non-mimetic form of realism that points to writing’s democratic capacity. Taking as an example Abilio Estévez’s 2002 novel Los palacios distantes, this article points to the novel’s suspension of dystopian causality and argues that textual interruptions in the novel afford the repartitioning of the limits of the sayable, visible and possible with respect to socialist ideology. This article draws attention to the politics of aesthetics in post-Soviet Cuban fiction, while also attributing this politics of form to the broader relation of aesthetics to politics.