Reviewed by: Dreaming in Russian: The Cuban Soviet Imaginary by Jacqueline Loss Michael Bustamante Jacqueline Loss. Dreaming in Russian: The Cuban Soviet Imaginary. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013. 254 pp. Far west along Havana’s Quinta Avenida looms the sprawling, partially vacant former embassy complex of the Soviet Union, built in monumental, constructivist style. But as Jacqueline Loss reveals in this absorbing study, “Sovietizations” of Cuban culture, politics, and economics in the 1970s and 1980s—coupled with islanders’ own travel and educational experiences in the Eastern Bloc—left behind far more than architectural oddities. More than twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Cuban writers, artists, and filmmakers continue to process the multifaceted material, human, and psychic traces of a relationship with the Soviet Union that at times felt ordinary, even intimate, yet at others, epic, unnatural, or forced. The resulting accumulation of cultural production hovers between interpretations of the Soviet legacy as a repressive scar, nostalgic kitsch, or absurdist joke. Loss opts for a kaleidoscopic rather than chronological approach to her subject. Chapter 1 highlights the efforts of so-called polovinas (children of Cuban and Soviet marriages) to forge bicultural space in the Cuban national ajiaco. Chapter 2 pivots to a different kind of crossing: the drag performance of “La Rusa Roxana Rojo,” whose satires of Eastern Bloc material culture exert “revenge” upon “Soviet grayness” (14). Chapter 3, the most ambitious of the book, assesses “fictitious and pictorial travelogues” (17) of the Soviet Union and Russia from the 1980s to the early twenty-first century—a surprisingly developed and diverse genre in Cuban letters. Chapter 4 considers the writing and art of what Loss terms the “muñequitos rusos [g]eneration” (18), those Cubans indelibly marked in the 1970s and 1980s by Eastern Bloc entertainment products as children. Their post-Soviet melancholia spills onto the pages of a final chapter focused on contemporary Cuban artists’ and writers’ sardonic takes on [End Page 233] Soviet discourses of progress and modernization. If the order or progression of arguments in this analytical “jigsaw puzzle” (15) is at times dizzying—moving back and forth between past and present, island and diaspora, literature and film—this effect appropriately encapsulates a Soviet legacy that remains fragmented, disjointed, and in some ways submerged. Drawing on Svetlana Boym’s distinction between “restorative” and “reflective” nostalgias in Eastern Europe, Loss positions her eclectic collection of texts against the backdrop of recent Cuban government efforts to repair diplomatic ties with Russia after a prolonged post–Cold War freeze.1 In this light, the 2010 Feria del Libro—with Russia as guest of honor—highlights state attempts to selectively suture cultural and historical memories into a rehabbed narrative of “Russian-Cuban friendship” and common resistance to US hegemony. In contrast, the “reflective” nostalgics of Loss’s literary and artistic archive remain more circumspect, hunting down the Russian science fiction films of youth, yet lingering on the asymmetries of a thirty-year partnership that did not always live up to pretensions of eternal brotherhood. Indeed, while Cuban intellectuals and politicians have long distinguished their country’s relationship with the Soviet Union from a prerevolutionary history of dependence on the United States, the specter of empire haunts many of Loss’s sources. Cubans jokingly disparaged Russian technical and military advisers as bolos (bowling pins). Yet such benign expressions of cultural superiority did not diminish the ways Soviet “structure[s] of knowledge” (7), consumer products, heroes, and visions of modernizing, technological utopias (contrasted with perpetual Cuban underdevelopment) bored their way into Cuban consciousness, especially that of youth. When Cuban writers critically assessed Cuban-Soviet ties—particularly in the wake of perestroika—the ultimate “incommensurability” of Russian and Cuban historical circumstances, cultural outlooks, and power relations came to the fore. Novels and short stories described the racism suffered by darker-skinned Cubans contracted to work in Russia, not to mention their exotic appeal to Soviet women, some of whom relocated to Cuba to find themselves marooned in the post-Soviet “Special Period” of the 1990s. In this way, writers on and off the island exposed the “tense and tender ties” of empire of which Ann Laura Stoler has written in another...