This chapter unpacks the hegemonic attitudes within the extensive anticolonial project of Cuban feature-length and documentary film from 1959 to 1989. The chapter first explores the centrality in and contributions to the New Latin American cinema movement of Cuba, the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC), and Cuban film directors Julio García Espinosa, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Humberto Solás, and Santiago Álvarez. At the same time, the chapter makes visible the many accomplished though lesser-known creative agents who helped shape these directors’ model of auteur esthetics, demonstrating how films by Sara Gómez and Nicolás Guillén Landrián also constitute fundamental and critical contributions to the Cuban cinematic canon of the period, which typically privileged the contributions of white men.

This chapter on Cuba’s avant-gardes of the 1920s and early 1930s focuses on writers associated with the Grupo Minorista and the Revista de Avance, examining their cultivation of porous intellectual communities and the attention they paid to everyday expressive forms in seeking to translate Cuban orality into writing. These writers, the chapter argues, sought new ways of characterizing Cuban experience and identity, engaging critically with their surroundings and positioning themselves as consequential cultural actors. The chapter portrays the Minoristas’ approach to the tertulia as an affective assemblage that thrives on difference and artful disagreement, welcomes international visitors, and, while being capacious enough to include women, clings to gender stereotypes. It also draws connections between the group’s tertulias and the international cosmopolitan interactions forged by the conversational qualities of the Revista de Avance, with a literary and linguistic “art of eavesdropping,” stylistic self-consciousness, interstitial participant-observer positions, and hierarchical views of culture projected by such Minorista writing as the crónicas and essays of Jorge Mañach.

This chapter argues that reading music and musicians is fundamental to understanding Cuban literature and its temporality, geography, and community-formation. After tracing some of the standard ways in which critics have aimed to connect music to the literary, the chapter suggests more social approaches to what it might mean for literary or cultural studies scholars to take music in more fully as part of social life. This conception of the social, the chapter argues, is not one to which a new or revolutionary socialism aspired after Cuba’s revolution, but rather something more ancient, less prescribed, more improvisatory, and experienced with others. Attention to popular music and the worlds it forges through the chapter’s analysis of a postrevolutionary musical primer, as well as to lyrics, sounds, and even visuality, grounds the chapter’s conception of music as an entrée into epochs beyond the historical confines of a particular musical entity or event. The complete somatic experience of music’s nuance, irony, submerged histories, happenings, and temporal overlaps can enliven and expand what literary scholars might conceptualize as an individualized “close reading.”

Chapter 5 interrogates the multiple meanings of dismembered hands in the 1880s as the changes made by Reconstruction were steadily clawed back. Given the centrality and materiality of touch, the representation of hands is not only verbal but also visual – the author interrogates how hands are not just imagined in text but also imaged in drawings and cartoons. At the core of the chapter are some of the drawings Thomas Nast made about the politics around Reconstruction. Then the chapter moves from images of interacting hands to actual shaking hands during the twenty-fifth anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg, which brought together veterans of both the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia in 1888. The chapter ends with A Hazard of New Fortunes, by William Dean Howells. Hazard is especially interesting because of a secondary character, Berthold Landau, a German 1848-er who lost his hand in the Civil War. Overlaid by a North-South romance, Hazard’s ambivalence toward Landau and Howells’s decision to kill him off are another sign of the abandonment of white commitment to Black freedom.

This chapter addresses the developments in literary and intellectual culture following the 1959 triumph of the Cuban Revolution, including the complex debates about the relationship between form and content that featured in the literature and the literary landscape of the new revolutionary society. Outlining the national and international contexts in which cultural policy was being developed and implemented, and within and against which individual and grouped actors, discourses, and texts were contributing to a heterogeneous understanding of literature in the revolution, the chapter underscores the relationship in the 1960s and 1970s among literature, cultural trends, processes of legitimization, political actions, and newly founded state institutions. In this context, the chapter then investigates how intermedial creations – and,m more specifically, the testimonio, a genre portrayed as a “radical anticolonial and decolonizing experiment” – negotiate individual agency and collective identity.

This chapter analyzes the life writing of Mercedes Merlin, who wrote about Cuba, and other topics, entirely in French, after adopting Paris as her intellectual home. The analysis teases out the singularities and paradoxes of her relatively late inclusion – a process the chapter notes in other recent scholarship – in the historical imaginary of Cuban literature. That imaginary, the chapter argues, is prone to privileging signs of emancipation and racial justice in nineteenth-century writing, whereas Merlin, even as she depicted Cuban slavery’s cruelties, did not call for its abolition. Yet, even while her work exhibits some disturbing views of Black and mixed-race people, the chapter suggests that her nuanced considerations of Black subjects intimate a glimmer of proto-abolitionism. The chapter further demonstrates and details that, for Merlin, the rhetoric of life writing provided an avenue to tell her own story and that of other rebellious lives, such that her work projects a notion of freedom, not only in its subject matter but also in its inventive mix of autobiography and fiction.

Chapter 4 focuses on the importance of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Using Albion Tourgée’s 1883 novel Bricks without Straw, Oliver Otis Howard’s account of his time as director of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and archival records of the Bureau itself, the novel is read as a fictional reenactment of the work of Reconstruction. Bricks without Straw features two male protagonists, one Black, one white. The emancipated Nimbus lives in Red Wing, a self-sustaining Black-owned Southern community. Hesden Le Moyne, the scion of the leading family in town, is a Union sympathizer but is pressured to join the Confederate Army and loses his left arm in battle. Hesden returns from the war both a pacifist and an abolitionist. In the novel, amputation forces readers to focus on the present and move beyond the past, in recognition that the past of the intact body is irrecoverable. The past of a South organized around the enslavement and exploitation of Black Americans is buried, like Hesden’s lost arm, discarded in favor of a future that puts Black self-determination at its core. Moreover, Black and white characters work together to create a postwar nation organized around racial equality and justice.

This chapter examines the pioneering role of Getrudis Gómez de Avellaneda as a transatlantic intellectual; as the initiator of what became the long-lasting trope among Cuban writers of lejanía [distance] or imagining Cuba from afar; and as a precursor of modern feminism whose persistent interweaving of race and gender, the chapter argues, constitutes the writer’s signature contribution to Cuban literature. Devoting much of the essay to Gómez de Avellaneda’s fiction, including Sab, Dos mujeres, Guatimozín, and El artista barquero o los cuatro cinco de junio, the chapter teases out this body of work’s exemplification of both early abolitionism and a feminist consciousness, tracing the latter to Gómez de Avellaneda’s essay on Mercedes Merlin, which established the first female genealogy of Cuban literature.

This chapter analyzes the work of Havana-born José Martín Félix de Arrate, often regarded as Cuba’s first historian and deemed the most representative Enlightenment writer of the island’s emergent criollo elite. The chapter focuses particularly on Arrate’s Llave del Nuevo Mundo, antemural de las Indias Occidentales: La Habana descripta (1761), a detailed historical account of Havana as the “key” to the entire New World and its antemural, or rampart. Grounded in in an emergent Cuban consciousness nurtured in exceptionalism, the chapter argues, Arrate showcased the island’s military value; the commercial and economic potential of its environmental and geographical attributes, natural resources, and excellent ports; and the emergent cultural prestige of Havana as a site of reason, while also connoting a race-based hierarchy, typical of the Enlightenment era, of the island’s human potential for labor and defense.

This chapter examines the configurations of Latin Americanism enacted by the renowned and enduring cultural organism Casa de las Américas, established shortly after the Cuban Revolution’s triumph in 1959. The chapter provides a detailed overview of the diverse thematics and functions in the purview of Casa, which positioned itself as a beacon for José Martí’s hemispheric vision of the Americas, encompassing the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America, and South America. The chapter examines Casa’s relationship to emancipatory thought in opposition to capitalist and imperialist visions, exploring its role as cultural producer and disseminator, with an emphasis on particular genres such as the testimonio and theater and through the prestigious Casa de las Américas awards for Latin American writers (1960–); a publishing house; theater festivals; the journals Casa de las Américas (1960–) and Conjunto (1964–); the organization of multiple international events focusing on literature, music, theater, and visual arts; and, toward the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, in new research centers related to cultural studies.

Following the chronological contours of Virgilio Piñera’s biography, this chapter explores his initial involvement with the Grupo Orígenes writers and his subsequent rejection of the group’s esthetics; his poetry, particularly his inventive long poem La isla en peso; his pioneering satirical and absurdist plays; the acerbic humor, nonconformist characters, and existential despair characterizing his short stories; the convention-shattering treatment of sexuality and homoeroticism in his novels; and his literary-journalistic writing. Noting Piñera’s enthusiastic initial embrace of the revolution and engagement in its artistic projects, the chapter also details his subsequent arrest, ostracism by the state, and censorship of his work until his death in 1979; the official Cuban resurrection of his legacy beginning in the 1980s; and international recognition of his work into the twenty-first century.