Excedente español en la Cuba postsoviética: Muerte de un murciano en La Habana (2006)

Abstract

This essay analyzes the visual strategies used in Muerte de un murciano en La Habana (2006), by Teresa Dovalpage, a novel that parodically interrogates the social impact of economic dynamics in post-Soviet Cuba, based on a scriptural enterprise that uses intertextuality and self-referentiality. The writer deploys a series of postmodern strategies in which both subjects and Spanish Baroque pictorial signs are mobilized and parodied in the same operation as they are relocated onto a specific local urban space: Havana. I propose here that the author includes herself, as Velázquez would do in Las Meninas, not to shed light on representational strategies, but to draw attention to the figure of the migrant writer in a regional linguistic market, who must capture the gaze of Spanish transnational publishers, who exercise a hegemonic control in that market.