Polina Martínez Shviétsova

(La Habana, 1976).

Fiction writer, poet, visual arts performer, freelance journalist.

She graduated as a Library Technician in 1999.

Polina has published the following poetry collections in Cuba: Gotas de fuego (2004) and Tao del azar (2005) with Unicornio editorial house, as well as the narrative volume Hechos con Metallica (2008).

She has participated in a research panel on “Russian literature in Cuban culture” (2010) and her essay “Borsch no liga con Ajiaco” appears in the book Caviar with rum; Cuba-USSR and the Post-Soviet Experience, from Palgrave Macmilliam, NY, USA (2012).

She is a columnist for the international websites CubaEncuentro, Diario de Cuba, and CubaNet.

She lives in Havana.

Polina has been very underestimated by the local experts on Cuban literature. However, her writing has that fragmentary strength that emanates both from delirium and ingenuity. In fact, she doesn’t need to make “good literature” to permeate us with a sense of beauty and powerlessness that transforms us as readers.

Interview of Polina Martínez Shviétsova, by Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo (INEDIT).

“Writing poetry predominates among the Cuban-Russian artists within the Island, as wells as visual arts and film. But nowadays they are lacking impact in Cuban literature. The best Cuban-Russian authors are, in my opinion, Anna Lidia Vega Serova (novel “Anima Fatua”), Ernesto Gonzalez Litvinov (“13 Gothic poems”) and the essayist and anthropologist Dmitri Prieto Samsonov (“Trans-domination in Haiti, 1791-1826”).”

“From now on, this impact will depend largely on the artists themselves, who are quite adrift after many attempts to reunite them, starting in 2001 and reaching the bigger efforts in 2007. But in 2010, I had the strange feeling of fighting against windmills and, finally, in June 2012 I gave up my plans of working with the Cuban-Russians within the island. I felt that everything was falling in a black hole, because of the deaf ears and the apathy of our national bureaucracy. For instance, the anthology Cherez Paru Shagov / En un par de pasos was never published by Letras Cubanas editorial house, nor it was of any interest for the Russian Embassy in Havana. Thus, in general, the textual corpus of these mixed generations has not been materialized.”

Read 17 Abstracts of a Notebook’s Entries by Polina Martínez Shviétsova