Paper short abstract:

I am interested in understanding how writers become writers socially, not necessarily pedagogically, in Havana, Cuba, where the socialist economy creates a very different relationship between author, the text and the reader.

Paper long abstract:

In Havana, Cuba, the writers with whom I conducted fieldwork, struggle to call themselves 'writers', although they graduated from the nation's top centre for the study of narrative fiction, practice their craft regularly and publicly present their writing in formal workshops and literary salons. The government operated printing presses, imprints and bookshops are not interested in profits and often are not monitoring how books sell or whether the public may or may not want to buy them. In this paper, I will discuss how this type of market challenges the relationship between an author and their reader, whether 'real' or 'imagined', and how it influences the way young writers on the cusp of publication understand what it means to be a writer in Cuba. Centring the discussion on the Declaracion de Principios (Declaration of Principles) written and edited cooperatively by one group of writers, I will show how my interlocutors in Havana conceive of the literary old guard (las vacas sagradas), the vanguard (vanguardia), the Cuban publishing infrastructure and the craft of writing. I will also examine how these writers discussed what it would be like to be a writer in a more market-driven publishing system and how they imagined an ideal future for writers in Cuba. In examining these topics, I hope to contribute to broader questions about what it means to 'be' a writer socially and how certain conceptions of 'readers' and 'markets' influence how a person conceives of their writer status.