A popular joke in Cuba says of the Revolution that the script is excellent but that the mise en scène leaves a lot to be desired. The joke's effect derives, clearly, from a kind of deflation or trivialization: the Revolution is not the epic culmination of an era of struggle, as official discourse portrays it, but an isolated performance to be reviewed by historians, in the form of a quip or sound bite, before moving on to the next of many Major Events. But the flip side of the trivialization is a rudimentary theorization – the positing of a persistent slippage between speaking and acting, or even of an incommensurability between literary virtuosity and theatrical and historical protagonism – an incommensurability that registers in different forms, in a variety of sources, since the earliest days of the Revolution. In Virgilio Piñera's 1960 Prologue to his own Teatro Completo, “Piñera Teatral,” the playwright bemoans with no little irony his incapacity for protagonism and resigns himself to the role of wordsmith: “la literatura me ha impedido hacer en la vida dos o tres ‘salidas teatrales’, de gran aparato, con las cuales habría gozado de lo lindo” (7).

A related theater allegory organizes Leonardo Padura's 1997 novel Máscaras. Padura makes Piñera the central literary icon of his novel, in fact, elaborating his own “Piñera Teatral” more than thirty years after Teatro Completo was published. In the first of three epigraphs, which comes from Piñera's Electra Garrigó, the character El Pedagogo says:

Máscaras immediately connects Piñera, then, to the theater's potential for deceiving the social collectivity.

The corrosive potential of Piñera's will-to-be-deceived thesis for Cuba's enthusiastic spectator-citizens is evident, and as the play predates Castro's assumption of power by roughly ten years, the passage may even assume a certain prescience.