RUSSIANISMS AND SOVIETISMS IN THE CUBAN FICTION
The large corpus of Cuban literary texts on Soviet topics, completely or partially structured as the memories of any of the protagonist’s/ narrator´s contact with the USSR and its culture, has developed a special kind of language, whose target was to reflect in the literature that new Otherness Cuban nation had to deal with from the beginning of the 1960s. This language is formed by numerous Russianisms (proper and common nouns, transcriptions of Russian sentences) and semantic neologisms ( bolos, muñequitos rusos etc.) and it is one of the essential features of the poetics of these texts, especially, short stories, characterized by the so called Ostalgie, an ambivalent and very important phenomenon in the Cuban collective memory. We will analyze texts written by contemporary Cuban authors (Jesús Díaz, José Manuel Prieto, Emerio Medina, Yoss, Gleyvis Coro Montanet, etc.) to see how the elements of this language work in the narrative: the grade of their exoticism, their ethic and aesthetic meaning, the internalization of the barbarisms in a text written in Spanish, their role in the creation of the mythic image of the Russian, the relationships with the narrator/character in the terms of one’s own/unfamiliar and, generally, the importance of these poetical resources in the new Cuban literature.