The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Voice of the Turtle: An Anthology of Cuban Stories by David William Foster
David William Foster

Peter Bush, ed. The Voice of the Turtle: An Anthology of Cuban Stories. Grove, 1997. 383 pp. Paper: $14.00.

This is, quite simply, a marvelous collection. Cuban cultural production continues to have a special place in the minds of many U. S. intellectuals and artists, not to mention those of us scholars who came of age as students during the beginnings of the Cuban Revolution. While there are many reasons no longer to indulge in jejune enthusiasms, the simple fact is that Cuban culture continues—despite the embargo and despite the virtual poverty in which most of the island lives—to turn out impressive artwork. Filmmaking is one of the best of the Cuban arts which, in general, have probably received more attention than that of any other in Latin America, with the exception of Mexico.
Cuba, as Bush notes in his introduction, has long been a country of short story authors; this is perhaps because of the ease of placing short stories in literary supplements and reviews in a country in which, until the revolution, book publication was difficult. Bush has brought together an inventory of writers that covers every possible variety of the short story in Cuba. He includes not only major figures from the early part of the century, but the principal voices that emerged with the revolution. He includes writers who benefitted from official support alongside those who left Cuba to constitute the complex process of diasporic Cuban culture. Women are very well represented in his inventory, along with figures that have come to be associated with the beginnings of a culture of sexual dissidence. In short, a marvelous collection of texts that will interest a large array of readers. [David William Foster]