The Cuban Post-Socialist Exotic

Travel writing is more than the simple account of a journey. It is a political act. There is an entire market of travel books about Cuba that emerged in the United States in the 1990s and that subscribe to a long tradition of narratives serving as a space of projection for U.S. political fantasies. The journey-based stories offer an intricate maze of perspectives and personal impressions, which translate history and politics with a considerable dose of sentimentality. Using an interdisciplinary approach anchored in the field of Inter-American Studies, this book investigates the relation between the Cuban cultural imaginary and U.S. American exceptionalism in a series of travel narratives about the island that conceive of Cuba as the Caribbean locus of a post-socialist exotic. The goal of this book is to raise awareness of the othering discourses at work in travel writing that foster hidden political agendas and that may easily be overlooked when reading travel literature for leisure. In reality, the cultural labels endorsed by travel writing shape our expectations, our interpersonal relations, and the way we see the world.