Ahmel Echevarría Peré’s La noria: Resisting Memory Erasure in XXI Century Cuban Fiction

Abstract

This article analyses the literary strategies employed by Ahmel Echevarría Peré in his novel La noria (2013), which examines a fundamental period in Cuba’s cultural politics known as the “gray quinquennial” (1971-1976). Among the narrative strategies used by Echevarría are intertextuality and metafiction. The novel dovetails Jorge Fornet’s book: The 71: Anatomy of a Crisis (2013), published in Cuba the same year that Echevarria’s novel was published. However, paraphrasing Rafael Rojas, we are interested in highlighting how Echevarría uses fiction to break the silence and let those who witnessed and suffered censorship be heard. According to Fornet, on the other hand, this period should not be analyzed by taking into consideration those testimonial voices. In Fornet’s view, his book gains traction thanks to the temporal and critical distance from which he considers the first half of the 70s in Cuba.