‘Fidel is infused in the structures. The Cuban Revolution is a fact and it is difficult to escape’. With this powerful and provoking statement, the Cuban writer Wendy Guerra explains her views on how the revolution has permeated the lives of Cubans and their difficulties in escaping from it. She shows her detachment from a system that is sustained by ideological control; the prolonged threat of censorship, jail and exile due to ‘ideological diversionism’; and other forms of political violence against subordinated individuals, including women and black people, in present-day Cuba.

Guerra was born after Fidel Castro came to power. For her, as for others of her generation, the revolutionary ideal has crumbled, along with the hope of having a prosperous future on the island. This is perhaps because Guerra did not experience the heroic revolutionary excitement of the 1960s but, rather, everything that followed it:

She thus revolts against the ideological directionism that is ‘inoculated’ into individuals in Cuba, using her own words. She claims: ‘I speak, I give myself away, I express myself and realise that I am nothing for which I was designed (or better), assembled’. Guerra is a white woman of Chinese and black ancestry who lives above average Cuban standards. For her, being Cuban involves a complex and rich dimension of Cubanness. She therefore dissents from what Odette Casamayor-Cisneros calls the ‘cosmology’ of the Cuban Revolution, understood as the ideology designed by the government that has brought logic to the world that Cubans have lived in since 1959 ‘and which sustains both the emotional and rational dimensions of their existence’. In response to this, Guerra gives a voice to those who feel they have become outsiders in Cuba, in particular individuals who were born after Fidel Castro came to power, women and individuals who are mixed race or black.