En todo caso, publico las páginas que siguen para ayudar a que la obra y vida de José Lezama Lima no resulte tan mal administrada como la de José Martí. Para que no echen a perder a futuros lectores las páginas de Orígenes. Porque la verdadera pérdida del libro no está en su desaparición, en su censura. Llega, no cuando los inquisidores ordenan la fogata, sino, en el momento en que frases entresacadas de esos libros negados pasan a formar parte del sermón de los inquisidores y fortalecen la digestión de la ortodoxia. (Ponte, 2002: 11)

This chapter's epigraph, from Ponte's Prologue to his El libro perdido de los origenistas, articulates a central impulse not only of his own origenista imaginary, but a central impulse of the broader extra-official or anti-official recuperation of Orígenes in the 1980s and 1990s. This contestatory recuperation is carried out under the aegis of the literati – not bureaucrats, propaganda ministers or “inquisidores” but artists. In the narratives we have looked at in this study and in the critical literature as well, the vindication of the individual artist and the oblivion of the bureaucrat is a central trope for the overarching cultural struggle. Eliseo Alberto, we will recall, declared the victory of the artist in his 1996 memoir: “en la isla, el arte y la literatura cubana habían vencido el reto. Hoy nadie recuerda los nombres de los funcionarios. Se hizo justicia. Los condenó el olvido” (167).

The neo-origenismo I have examined, then, is not only distinct from what Ponte calls the state's “official pardon” and from its subsequent commemoration and institutionalization of Orígenes but is declaredly faced off against it. Cintio Vitier's argument that the origenistas were essentially proto-revolutionaries battling in the national–spiritual realm and preparing the way for – or even catalyzing – the flesh-and-bones battles in the mountains and the cities is a lonely one, however widely disseminated in Cuba. In a historical moment in which socialist revolution appeared to have run its course, few post-Soviet Cuban writers, artists and intellectuals took up the cause of Vitier's musa barbuda – if we can call it that.