Resumen de Negotiating Culture in Cuba’s Special Period. A Review of Sujatha Fernandes' Cuba Represent!: Cuban Arts, State Power, and the Making of New Revolutionary Cultures (Durham: Duke UP, 2006)

Tania Triana

• Beginning in 1990 and continuing into the present day, Cuba’s “special period in times of peace” has brought about historic changes in Cuban socialist society. The virtual overnight disappearance of economic subsidies after the dissolution of the Soviet bloc initiated a crisis marked by severe rationing and shortages in food, fuel, and medicine. In order to avert the collapse of Cuban socialism, conditions forced the state to implement economic reorganization geared toward a level of integration into the global economy. Signaling these changes, tourism eclipsed sugar production as the island’s primary industry in the new millennium. New joint economic ventures with foreign investors in tourism, mining, and biotechnology are gradually reviving a Cuban economy that was in profound crisis a decade ago. That the Cuban Revolution is experiencing an unprecedented transformation is undeniable.