New Toys of the Cold War

NOVEL. SEIX BARRAL, 2015. 448 PAGES

From New York, Iván Morante remembers, or thinks he remembers, his childhood as a ‘pioneering’ student at the Cuban embassy in La Paz. The Berlin Wall had not yet come down and Guevarista guerrilla wars, the Soviet agenda and the regime in Havana came together in Latin America in an almighty clash with the promises and fantasies of another kind of imperialism being imposed by North America.  

An imaginative world full of aliens, light sabres and action figures puts the endurance of the ‘new man’, the first children of Socialism, to the test. This friction functions as a powerful narrative engine, allowing Juan Manuel Robles to tell a brave and moving story that dips into several different genres and draws on uncommon creative maturity to answer important questions such as: How reliable are our memories? Is it possible to reach some kind of truth through the evocation of the past? Which are the true heroes and which are the false ones? and Who are our parents and what have they done to us?