CUBAN CYBERPUNK Juan C. Toledano Redondo From Socialist Realism to Anarchist-Capitalism: Cuban Cyberpunk “We have to make everything here.... We could do it.” “So, why didn’t you?” “It ... I don’t know. It was just too hard, I guess. It would take sacrifices. There’d be less booze, less energy for Curtis and his pals to go riding around in the jeeps. By the time we’d sacrificed long enough that we could actually talk about building the ships, everybody was tired of sacrifices.”—Lewis Shiner, F ntera (1984) ro Intertextuality and hybridity go hand in hand in the creation of literature, including science fiction. As explained by the Cuban sf writer Yoss (José Miguel Sánchez, b. 1969), sf is un género caracterizado por su alto grado de feed back, en el que resulta casi imposible escribir si no se lee, y hasta disfrutar si no se ha leído ya mucho, (porque un lector de ciencia ficción se forma y se educa, no surge de la nada) (a genre with a great deal of feedback, almost impossible to write if you have not read much of it, and even more impossible to enjoy—because a reader of science fiction is formed and educated, he/she doesn’t appear out of the blue). cianos 3) (Mar 1 Any literature that is the product of feedback can only be studied as a hybrid, an intertext that emerges out of the reading, mixing, and creation of different texts. 2 This is the natural origin of Cuban cyberpunk, which incorporates international cyberpunk while subverting other literary models and genres, including socialist realism and its hero, the new socialist man. Cuban cyberpunk cannot be separated from its Cuban social reality and literary tradition, but also cannot be understood without looking at international sf writing—especially the voices arriving from the North. During the 1990s, a young generation of Cuban writers incorporated cyberpunk fiction of the 1980s that was created outside Cuba. Cuba’s version of cyberpunk arose during the economic and ideological debacle caused by the fall of the Soviet Union and the European Communist bloc. During the 1970s, most Cuban sf took as its hero the new socialist man. This hero was replaced in the 1990s by a new model of hero à la Cuban, who resembled the antiheroes of cyberpunk. By the 1990s, the honeymoon period between Cuban sf and the political ideals of the Castro regime was over. Yet before considering the work of the most important Cuban cyberpunk writers of the 1990s—Yoss, Vladimir Hernández (b. 1966) and Michel Encinosa Fu (b. 1974)—it is necessary to look at previous decades in order to understand this new hybrid. Although some sf was published in Cuba prior to 1959, it was during the 1960s that the genre became well established on the island. The works of