News
Tired of Dystopias, Chaviano Writes About a Cuba Voting Democratically
Author: Lorenzo Castro
Source: EFE
EFE News Agency - Tired of the "completely dark future" of dystopias so in vogue in current literature and cinema, Cuban writer Daína Chaviano has glimpsed in her latest book a "utopian" future for Cuba with "democratic elections."
"We are too saturated with dystopias, loaded with the most terrible of what we can imagine as a society and as human beings" and "if we fill ourselves with that burden of negativity we will not be able to create the future that many of us want," said the author in an interview with EFE in Miami, where she lives.
Chaviano believes that to get a "better future" first "you have to visualize it" and precisely a part of the plot of his most recent novel, Los hijos de la Diosa Huracán (2019), occurs within 40 years, "at a time when Cuba will have its first democratic elections in almost a century "(...)
True to her style, in Los hijos de la Diosa Huracán (Grijalbo), the Cuban author mixes genres and elements in what is a creative process that, although it is supposed to "complicate her life", at the same time it gives her much satisfaction, since this way she avoids pigeonholing and enjoys a "huge freedom when it comes to putting together a story."
In their last and voluminous book, which begins with a murder in Miami, the human characters coexist with mythological beings and gods of the Taíno culture, in a plot with two women as protagonists and an ancient manuscript discovered in an indigenous grave.
The plot occurs in two times, one contemporary that moves between Miami and Cuba, and the other one in the 16th Century, just when the Spaniards come into contact with the greater island of the Antilles and "the great catastrophe that happened in this encounter has not been unleashed, "says Chaviano.
The documentation and writing process for this work has demanded a decade, mainly because there has been very little historical fiction in the Caribbean about the Taino, except for sporadic allusions, she said. Chaviano had to meet with academics from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Spain, as well as American specialists in ancient manuscripts... (Complete text in PDF, in Spanish).