Cubana : contemporary fiction by Cuban women / [edited by Mirta Yáñez ; foreword by Ruth Behar ; translated by Dick Cluster and Cindy Schuster].

Women's voices from the Great Blue River / Mirta Yáñez -- Somebody has to cry / Marilyn Bobes -- Japanese daisies / María Elena Llana -- Internal monologue on a corner in Havana / Josefina de Diego -- A tooth for a tooth / Nancy Alonso -- Anhedonia : a story for two women / Mylene Fernández Pintado -- The scent of limes / Aida Bahr -- My aunt / Esther Díaz Llanillo -- Disremembering a smell / Ana Luz García Calzada -- Catalina in the afternoons / Magaly Sánchez -- Potosí II : address unknown / Rosa Ileana Boudet -- A whiff of wild desire / Sonia Rivera-Valdés -- Dust to dust / Mirta Yáñez -- I just can't take it / Uva de Aragón -- The Egyptians / Adelaida Fernández de Juan -- We came all the way from Cuba so you could dress like this? / Achy Obejas -- The urn and the name (a lighthearted tale) / Ena Lucía Portela.

Until recently, the combination of a Cuban old boys' network and an ideological emphasis on "tough" writing kept fiction by Cuban women largely unknown and unread. Cubana , the U.S. version of a groundbreaking anthology of women's fiction published in Cuba in 1996, introduces these once-ignored writers to a new audience. Havana editor and author Mirta Yáñez has assembled an impressive group of sixteen stories that reveals the strength and variety of contemporary writing by Cuban women-and offers a glimpse inside Cuba during a time of both extreme economic difficulty and artistic renaissance. Many of these stories focus pointedly on economic and social conditions.