Table Of ContentDetective Fiction in
Cuban Society and Culture
Detective Fiction
in Cuban Society
and Culture
Stephen Wilkinson
PETER LANG
Oxford (cid:129) Bern (cid:129) Berlin (cid:129) Bruxelles (cid:129) Frankfurt am Main (cid:129) New York (cid:129) Wien
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ISBN 3-03910-698-8
US-ISBN 0-8204-7963-2
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Contents
Acknowledgements 7
Introduction: Why study detective fiction? 9
1. The relationship between literature and society:
a theoretical framework 19
2. Nationalism, Marxism and sacrifice: Cuban
revolutionary ideology and the Cuban state 33
3. Ideology and intervention: understanding Cuban
revolutionary cultural policy 53
4. Bad black men and comical Chinese: the Cuban
detective narrative 1915–1959 81
5. Justice beyond legality: the early development
of the revolutionary Cuban crime novel 109
6. Socialist heroes and capitalist villains: the Cuban
revolutionary crime genre 1971–1991 123
7 The crash of the 1990s and the challenge to modernity:
how crime narrative changes to ‘fit’ the times 159
8. Irony, paradox and temporality: Sartrean morality in
Pasado perfecto 189
9. Critiques of sexual and political intolerance in the
novelMáscaras and the film Fresa y chocolate 217
10. From existentialism to postmodernity: the aesthetic
of doubt in Vientos de cuaresma and Paisaje de otoño 251
Conclusion 283
Bibliography 289
Index 309
6
Acknowledgements
My thanks must first of all go to Professor Catherine Davies for her
invaluable help and advice. To Verity Smith for her suggestions and
support, to Jo Labanyi for having suggested the topic in the first place,
and to my partner, Claudia Guerretta, for having the trust, love and
generosity to pay the bills and endure the process with me.
I must also acknowledge the British Academy for the three years
of funding they provided towards my PhD thesis upon which this
work is based.
In Cuba, I must thank Leonardo Padura Fuentes and Daniel
Chavarría in particular for their help and advice. I must mention also
the help of Rolo Lázaro and the staff at the Biblioteca Nacional José
Martí, as well as the staff at the headquarters of UNEAC, the Cuban
Union of Writers and Artists. My thanks are also due to Ernesto and
Estela Bravo and the staff at the public relations department of Cuban
television. I am grateful also for the advice, help and guidance from
among many others: Luis Adrián Betancourt, Imeldo Alvarez,
Arnaldo Correa, Justo Vasco, Ron Ridenour, Ana Cairo, Salvador
Redonet Cook, Rodolfo Valero, Amelia S. Simpson, Armando
Cristóbal Pérez and Julio Travieso.
I owe a debt of gratitude to the staff of Hispanic Studies
Department at Queen Mary and Westfield College, London and in
particular, Professors Alan Deyermond and Ralph Penny, and Kay, the
department secretary. My thanks also to the staff at the Senate House,
University of London, and QMW libraries for all their patience and
guidance.
Elsewhere, I am grateful to Professor Antoni Kapcia and Dr Jan
Kraniauskas and all those who responded to papers I have given on
subjects covered in this book at conferences and seminars in London,
Newcastle, Leeds, Liverpool, Cambridge, Halle (Germany),
Manchester and Middlesex.
Stephen Wilkinson, London, 31 October, 2005
Introduction
Why study detective fiction?
Detective or crime-related fiction is a cultural phenomenon that has
few commercially successful rivals. In Britain, only the romance
fiction of publishers such as Mills and Boon has greater sales than
crime novels. On the five terrestrial British television channels in one
week of 2005 there were no less than twenty hours of shows with a
police, crime or espionage theme.1 Such is the popularity of this genre
that even the products of crime fiction’s earliest exponents such as
Edgar Allen Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle are endlessly
republished, recreated in new media, translated and marketed
throughout the world.2 Along with the latest offerings these, and other
‘giants’ of the genre, such as Raymond Chandler, Dashiel Hammett
and Agatha Christie, are still to be found on the shelves of bookstores
at airports and railway stations. As detective fiction historian Julian
Symons remarks, Sherlock Holmes became a myth
[…] so potent that even in his own lifetime Doyle was almost swamped by it,
and the myth is no less potent today. Criminal and emotional problems are still
addressed to Holmes for consideration, and pilgrimages are made to his rooms
at 221B Baker St. (1992: 73)
The detective genre is so successful that it has become the
subject of serious consideration. A popular cultural form that occupies
the minds of so many people for so long, that crosses cultural
boundaries so easily (there is a Sherlock Holmes society in almost
1 TV Times, 26 April–2 May 2005. IPC Publishing, London.
2 Conquest (1990) lists 952 authors, 176 feature films, 164 television serials, 56
radio programmes and 1,563 detective characters in the English language alone.
The British National Bibliography (1998) classifies as ‘detective and mystery
stories’ 2,189 titles published in Britain between 1995 and 1998. By
comparison, 3,989 titles are classified as ‘love stories’ published over the same
period.
