The literary texts examined in this study were written in the wake of a paradigm crisis for socialism and revolution, as well as for Marxian cultural analysis – an intellectual and political crisis that was nowhere experienced as more validating, perhaps, than in extra-insular Cuban cultural discourse. As I write these pages, however, socialism's radical other undergoes a no less astonishing crisis of legitimation, and indeed of faith in those revealed historical truths to which the neoliberals raised their glasses as the Socialist bloc disintegrated. Less than twenty years passed between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the global financial crisis that left Alan Greenspan “shocked” and President George W. Bush “sorry it's happening”. In the same hemisphere and in the same several years, even as postmodern enthusiasts pondered the end of such grands récits as Marxism and socialist revolution, variations of these praxes had taken root in South America, arguably with an unprecedented level of coordination.

This book considers the ways in which a post-socialist narrative was inscribed in Cuban literature and Cuban cultural criticism in the years of neoliberal triumphalism, years during which the Cuban cultural artifact was recommodified for a trans-Atlantic market. More specifically, it examines how the origenistas, writers associated with the magazine Orígenes and its cultural movement, were appropriated as emblematic of Cuban literature's return to an authentic aesthetic sensibility, its liberation from the strictures of the socialist state, and indeed, from external political imperatives in general. I should stress from the outset that as one who followed the Orígenes revival from a distance and who understood it to be urgent and necessary, I do not read the reappropriation of Orígenes by Cuban writers and the recommodification of Cuban literature by a transnational culture industry either as evidence of a false consciousness among the Cuban literati or of complicity between these writers and market forces. On the contrary, what I find fascinating about the transnational neo-origenismo of the 1990s – as distinct from the state's rehabilitation of Orígenes in 1980s’ Cuba – is its reappropriation of a literary ethos that emerged in the 1940s and 1950s in large measure as a reaction to Cuba's neocolonial relationship with the United States, to the dissipation of a properly criolla Cuba, and in opposition to the mass culture of consumer capitalism.