Abstract

In present-day Cuban society, women’s status is still tinted by the limitations and subjugations of the ancient Hispanic patriarchal ideology, affecting women in both their personal and their professional lives, according to the persistent “home (private)/street (public)” separation. As such, women writers suffer from a multidimensional marginalization based internally on gender, sexuality, and regionalism, as well as externally on political and economical factors. Moreover, Cuban feminism is also affected by the traditional and politicized criticism of the movement. The present work creates a dialogical space, more precisely a direct opening for the voice of four female Cuban poets from the provincial city of Ciego de Avila, on a national and more importantly international scale, otherwise unattainable to this nation. Through the innovative use and inclusion of interviews as an inter/active basis for a classical literary analysis, an “open dialogue” is created with the audience, giving access to the “illocutionary force” of the poets. Furthermore, the theoretical analysis of the condition of the woman-writer in Cuba is supported by a presentation, and my analysis, of several outstanding examples of poetry of the four women. This second part also creates an interactive space, as it integrates conceptual components s of the interviews, which underlines the role of the poetry as being one of self-liberation.