Generation Zero

There are many writers currently creating canon-defying literature inside Cuba. With this in mind, the online magazine SampsoniaWay.org asked its Havana-based Cuban columnist and correspondent Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo to compile a collection of short stories from writers who are creating new trends in Cuban Literature. For this anthology, Pardo Lazo decided to focus on writers of Generación Año Cero (Generation Year Zero), a movement of writers who began publishing in 2000. The selected writers included in the anthology are: Jorge Alberto Aguiar Díaz, Lien Carrazana Lau, Gleyvis Coro Montanet, Ahmel Echevarría Peré, Michel Encinosa Fú, Jhortensia Espineta Osuna, Carlos Esquivel, Abel Fernández-Larrea, Raúl Flores, Jorge Enrique Lage, Polina Martínez Shviétsova, Lizabel Mónica, Osdany Morales, Erick Mota, Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo, and Lia Villares. "Cubans no longer speak the same language. The rhetoric of monolithic thought has contaminated words, which do not have the same meaning for the elite as they do on the streets. Today, the alternative cultural scene stands against such manipulation and against all nationalistic fictions on the island. In Generation Zero, sarcasm, deterritorialization, transvestism, fragmentation, colloquialism, hybridization, adventure and imagination are redesigning Cuban identity, recovering their power of subversion and resignifying Utopia." -Paulo Antonio Paranaguá, Le Monde. (France) "This compilation of short stories might well say more about Cuba's reality than most news reports. Some of the island's best emerging writers reach outside Cuba through their work -even as we look in- sometimes with depth, sometimes with irreverence, but always with great punch." -Juan O. Tamayo, El Nuevo Herald (USA) "Although some may believe it's not true, freedom of expression is never completely undermined. This has been demonstrated by this brilliant group of Cuban authors: with their stories they prove that the days of the Communist Inquisition on the island are about to end." -José María Ballester Esquivias, La Gaceta Intereconomía (Spain)