Although Jesús Díaz's 1992 novel Las palabras perdidas is set primarily in the 1960s, and although there is no reference in the text to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Socialist bloc, this novel would have been difficult to imagine prior to these momentous events in Eastern Europe. Once the basic narrative structure has been imagined, though – as in the Senel Paz story examined in the first chapter – it becomes paradigmatic. Like the Senel Paz story, Jesús Díaz's Las palabras perdidas is told from the perspective of a young, ambitious, white male writer who liberates himself, through the act of writing, from the ideological and aesthetic–expressive constraints of the socialist state apparatus. Artistic genius wins out over state bureaucracy, and, more broadly, a transcendent aesthetic wins out over earthly politics. The text we read, in fact, is the embodiment of el Flaco's personal evolution from revolutionary enthusiasm to intellectual and artistic maturity. Like the other narratives examined in this study, the novel tells the story of its own ideological and artistic genesis.

Like the Senel Paz short story, Las palabras perdidas accomplishes its literary recuperation by means of an appeal to pre- or extra-revolutionary writers, and to Lezama Lima in particular. In the Paz story Lezama was “el Maestro”; here he is “el Inmenso” – terms capitalized in both texts. In Las palabras perdidas, in fact, Lezama appears as a literary character. Whereas in “El lobo, el bosque y el hombre nuevo” Diego recites passages from Lezama's novel Paradiso, in Las palabras perdidas the fictional Lezama incorporates fragments from Lezama Lima's real essays into his conversation. In both cases, then, Lezama's writing comes to life in the spoken language of a literary personage, by means of the almost sacerdotal recitation of his written word. Indeed, the very future of Cuban intellectual and literary history is projected, in large measure, by means of a return to this pre-revolutionary or extra-revolutionary past. Cuba's intellectual and literary history has presumably been interrupted in the more than thirty years of Cuba's socialist experiment, but the reader of Las palabras perdidas sees that the day of its regeneration has dawned.