There is something monumental in conceiving and carrying out a nation-based literary history, at the very least in the size and scope of the endeavor. But aspirations toward comprehensiveness or definitiveness can generate an aura of presumption, even hubris in such an enterprise. We have actively sought to avoid these pitfalls, recognizing the always unfinished, dynamic quality of literary and cultural histories as they are told and retold across time and from different locations. Once etymologically linked to a burial place, the word “monument” is now more broadly understood as a material remembrance of some kind or a site of remembering. In that sense, this book is more a living performance of collective and diversely located remembering than a fixed monument to a literary patrimony. As attested by the twenty-first-century tearing down of monuments, for example of statues commemorating Confederate figures from the United States Civil War, memory is not, to quote Chilean cultural theorist Nelly Richard, “a repository of definitively completed historical meanings that remembrance recovers simply by looking backward.” Rather, she continues, “the formulation of memory undergoes an incessant dispute among different conceptualizations of what and how to remember,” and viable acts of remembering must “move the past beyond the simple revelation of facts to a complex process of critical understanding” (Reference Cabrera175–176; emphasis in original). Thus, while offering an abundance of key information about Cuba’s rich and complex literary history, our contributing authors, writing from different locations and relationships to Cuba, also offer their own twenty-first-century critical understandings of that history.

An antimonumentalizing impulse, then, shapes this book. But if approached reflectively, monuments do have elucidating stories to tell us about Cuba’s literary and cultural history. Richard, after all, wrote these thoughts about the critical process of cultural remembering in order to consider actual physical sites of remembrance of the human rights violations of the Pinochet era. Similarly, monuments to Cuba’s literary-intellectual history can stimulate critical reflections and encourage us to unpack that history’s contested reverberations in different historical moments and locations. They can also bring into view the diverse claimants to that history’s legacies. Monuments offer compelling evidence that cultural memory – like literature – travels. For example, a statue of the institution’s namesake at Humboldt University in Berlin displays a dedication in Spanish: “To the Second Discoverer of Cuba / The University of Havana 1939.” In recognition of his contributions to writers’ imaginings of their own country, this moniker for Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) was first coined by José de la Luz y Caballero (1800–1862), a nineteenth-century Cuban philosopher who, with Humboldt, created Cuba’s first observatory. In 1930, moreover, Cuban anthropologist and cultural theorist Fernando Ortiz (1881–1969), whose research on Afro-Cuban culture deeply marked twentieth-century Cuban literature’s conceptions of race, reiterated Luz y Caballero’s moniker in an introduction to a Cuban edition of Humboldt’s Political Essay on the Island of Cuba (1825–1826), in which Humboldt had addressed Cuban slavery. Echoing the complex, migrating history of the German naturalist and explorer and his legacy for Cuba’s cultural history, a bust of Humboldt is found at the visitor’s center of the 275-square-mile Alejandro de Humboldt National Park, located on Eastern Cuba’s north coast in Holguín and Guantánamo provinces. A UNESCO Natural World Heritage site since 2001, the park website describes it as the best-conserved remnant of forested mountain ecosystems in the Caribbean, a regional identification that has also marked Cuban literary and cultural history.

More familiar than the Humboldt monuments, perhaps, is Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huffington’s bronze equestrian statue of José Martí (1853–1895), dedicated in 1965 at New York City’s Central Park South and Avenue of the Americas. With a pedestal donated by the Cuban government, this gift to the people of New York celebrates, in the moment of his demise, a fallen hero of Cuban independence from Spain and the precursor of Cuban poetic modernismo and of this turn-of-the-twentieth-century literary movement throughout Spanish America. Before returning to Cuba to join the 1895 battle that took his life, Martí, like other nineteenth-century Cuban writers and intellectuals, wrote much of his most important work while living in exile in New York or in several countries in Latin America and working toward Cuban independence. This cause not only located key moments of Cuban cultural history in the US, but also intertwined closely with contentious narratives among nineteenth-century Cuba’s intelligentsia about the role of race and enslavement in the aspiring nation’s future and in an emerging sense of cubanía or Cubanness. Moreover, the placement of Martí’s Central Park statue in a small plaza near those of Simón Bolívar (Venezuela) and José de San Martín (Argentina) inserts Cuba into Latin American nation-formation movements that had culminated decades before Cuba’s. The connections also place Cuba into literary-cultural debates of the twentieth and twenty-first century on the viability of the concept of Latin Americanism as an identity construct. Cuba’s contributions to those debates are central, as in such landmark essays as Martí’s 1891 “Nuestra América” [“Our America”] (2002), Alejo Carpentier’s “De lo real maravilloso americano” (1949) [“On the Marvelous Real in America”] (1995) or poet, essayist, and fiction writer José Lezama Lima’s La expresión americana (1957).

Physical monuments to Martí, of course, abound in Cuba itself, including two well-known Havana sites: the pedestaled marble statue by José Vilalta Saavedra, dedicated in 1905 in the Parque Central to replace the colonial-era statue of Spain’s Isabel II, and the gargantuan monument to Martí, conceived and executed largely during the Cuban republican era and located in Plaza de la Revolución. Traveling under the wire of the brief, Obama-era détente, through negotiations by Havana historian Eusebio Leal and Cuba’s Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes with the city of New York and the Bronx Museum, and with funding from cultural institutions and private individuals, a bronze replica of the original Central Park equestrian Martí statue arrived in Havana in October 2017, the same month that Donald Trump expelled much of Cuba’s Embassy staff from the US. The replica, which attests to the power of artistic bridges across ideological divides greater than the distance from New York to Havana, stands in the garden facing the former presidential palace of Cuba’s republican era, later the Museo de la Revolución. But the replica also evokes the conflicts surrounding its own pilgrimage and underlying debates about the ownership of Cuba’s cultural history. On the one hand, using funds donated by Cuban Americans from around the US, the Central Park Conservancy brought the original Martí statue under its wing in 1992. On the other, Cuban artists living in New York, including performance activist Tania Bruguera (1968 –) and painter and photographer Geandy Pavón (1974–) questioned the 2017 gift of the two-and-a-half-million-dollar replica in a period of extreme economic duress among island-based Cuban artists. Cuban American interdisciplinary artist and performer Coco Fusco (1960–) further questioned the extent to which the Bronx Museum was so invested in Cuba to the detriment of artists from many other places living in that borough.

Over time, Martí monuments have appeared in numerous other locations, including Berlin, Mexico City, Caracas, Los Angeles, and, of course, Miami and Tampa. Emilio Bejel’s illuminating 2012 book, José Martí: Images of Memory and Mourning, unpacks Martí iconography in monuments, paintings, drawings, and film. But in the context of a literary history like this one, the multilayered, sometimes contested acts of public remembrance marking Martí monuments also tell us something important about how literary culture itself travels. Thus, wide-ranging representations of Martí are reenergized by the cultural dynamics of new historical moments. But at the same time, these new representations coexist with palimpsests of the past, to draw on José Quiroga’s pathbreaking metaphor in his 2005 book, Cuban Palimpsests, which he used to characterize literary-artistic culture in the post-Soviet period. An early example of the dynamics of recast remembrance that embody, to reiterate Richard’s words, the “incessant dispute” of “what and how to remember” (176), are the literary-biographical essays crafted by writers of the second republican generation of the 1920s and 1930s that first portrayed Martí as their intellectual progenitor, including Jorge Mañach’s Martí, El Apóstol (1933), still regarded by some as the best biography of Martí. The 1959 revolution’s conception of Martí as its originary hero reinforced this republican consecration. Other creative recastings include the satirical take on the bureaucratic monumentalizing constituted by the mechanically reproduced Martí statues of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s 1966 comedic film La muerte de un burócrata [Death of a Bureaucrat], in which the statue-maker is consumed by the machine he has invented for the job; the 2010 fictionalized biopic José Martí: El ojo del canario [José Martí: The Eye of the Canary], directed by Fernando Pérez, that demythologizes the monumental Martí into a more human-scaled figure to showcase his artistic and intellectual roots; and the 2015 film Héroe de culto [Cult Hero], a documentary short on the continuing mass-production of Martí busts, now made of plastic, directed by Ernesto Sánchez Valdés.

Cuban monuments to key figures in its nineteenth-century literary-cultural history also include, among others, poet and novelist Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (1814–1873), Afro-Cuban Romantic poet Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés (1809–1844), known as Plácido, and journalist, poet, and novelist Cirilo Villaverde (1812–1894), author of the renowned realist novel Cecilia Valdés o La Loma del Ángel (1839, 1882) [Cecilia Valdés or El Ángel Hill] (2005), often regarded as the foundational fiction of Cuban identity. As an activist advocate for Cuban independence, Villaverde, like Martí, spent many years in New York where he completed and published the novel’s longer, definitive version. Since 1946 a sculptured bust of Villaverde by José Manuel Fidalgo Rodríguez has watched over Plaza del Ángel in Old Havana, a key location in his novel’s plot. But in Villaverde’s case, attesting to the power of fiction, his novel’s protagonist, Cecilia, has been the more dynamic time-space traveler. The light-skinned, secret daughter of a slave-owning white man and a Black mother whose aspirations to upward mobility result in tragedy, Cecilia is often cast as an icon of a complex cubanía and as the embodiment of the shifting hierarchical interplay of race, social class, gender, and sexuality marking that construct. She has been subject to multiple acts of artistic reincarnation that exhibit increasing, affective familiarity. Thus, in 2014 a life-sized, street-level statue of Cecilia by Erig Rebull appeared in Old Havana’s Plaza del Ángel, where Cubans or tourists pose by her side for selfies. Although located in the same space as Villaverde’s monument, the life-like Cecilia somehow upstages her creator, whose staid sculptured bust, more evocative of a traditional memorial, sits in a less accessible niche above the small plaza.

The first of Cecilia’s literary reappearances came in the 1891 novel Sofía, by Afro-Cuban journalist and fiction writer Martín Morúa Delgado, a strong critic of Villaverde’s portrayal of Black Cuban life as romanticized and whose own novel offers a grimmer picture of racism and abuse suffered by its heroine. But her reappearance in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have been prolific. These critical remembrances include Gonzalo Roig’s zarzuela [operetta], which debuted in 1932 amidst heated inquiries into race and cubanía undertaken by the second republican generation and has been continuously performed into the twenty-first century in Cuba, Miami, and New York; Humberto Solás’s 1982 film Cecilia, a complex, postrevolutionary interpretation that contextualizes the long-mythologized characters more explicitly in Cuba’s economic and political history and in Afro-Cuban religious practices; the 1987 parodic, postmodern novel La Loma del Ángel [Graveyard of the Angels], which holds a fictionalized Villaverde to account for his work, written in New York by Cuba’s most renowned exile from the 1980 Mariel exodus, Reinaldo Arenas; Abelardo Estorino’s 1994 play Parece Blanca [She Looks White], also performed in New York, Miami, and Cuba, in which the iconic characters dismantle and question their fate in Villaverde’s original book, monumentalized on stage as a central prop on a lectern; Gerardo Chijona’s 1999 film Un paraíso bajo las estrellas [A Paradise Under the Stars], whose Cecilia character, renamed Sissy, dances at the Tropicana during the post-Soviet era’s burst of tourism; and Norge Espinosa’s 2001 farcical puppet play La virgencita de bronce [The Little Bronze Virgin], a parody that hyperbolizes the stereotyping link between race and eroticism inscribed in Cecilia. Although exiled Cuban playwright Abilio Estévez (1954–), living in Mallorca since the early twenty-first century, has affirmed that the centenarian protagonist he characterizes as mulata in his 1994 monologue Santa Cecilia is not based on Villaverde’s iconic figure, numerous critics and directors have interpreted her that way. In this vein, the 2005 Havana production by Grupo Teatro El Público directed by Carlos Díaz queered the Cecilia character’s embodiment of mulata sexuality in a stunning crossover performance by Osvaldo Doimeadios. In 1998, and again in 2022, sculptor and installation artist Juana Valdés, who self-identifies as Afro-Cuban, exhibited her multimedia sculpture “My Inheritance (Las Chancletas de Cecilia Valdés).” The piece’s sculpted, open-backed sandals are accompanied by framed quotations from Arenas’s rewriting of the novel that depict Cecilia wandering Havana’s streets in her chancletas. This work underscores Cecilia’s mobility and agency and claims her legacy for Black Cuban American experience.Footnote ¹

The Cambridge History of Cuban Literature, organized into five chronological parts and an epilogue, addresses one of the richest literary legacies of the Americas. Such a chronology befits a literary history. But these tales of material and literary monuments to Humboldt, Martí, and Cecilia Valdés enjoin us to nuance that chronology. These stories also tell us that Cuba’s literary-cultural history is layered by metamorphosing reiterations and remembrances. These tales, moreover, bring to light four threads that weave through this book, complicating a straightforward chronology and encouraging critical reflections on the ties between any given literary event and its past and its reverberations into the future. These thematic concepts underlying the book’s design and the critical conversations unfolding among the volume’s contributors include (1) that international networks and exchanges have marked Cuban literature and intellectual life – from its emergence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; to the island’s twentieth- and twenty-first-century status as a dynamic literary crossroads with writers and intellectuals from Europe, Latin America, and the US interacting in Cuba’s cultural experiments of the 1920s to the 1950s; to the 1960s epoch of postrevolutionary creative fervor and the inventive literary projects of the postutopian years leading up to and following the end of the Cold War; (2) that Cuban literature and intellectual thought have played a key role in the concepts of and debates about cultural specificity and exceptionality marking the literary history of Latin America and the Caribbean region as a whole; (3) that deep-seated, often contentious imaginings of race, always inflected by complexities of gender and social class, have marked the themes, forms, and language of Cuban literature throughout its history; and (4) that travel and movement – voluntary, exploratory, enslaved, migratory, or exilic – have always marked Cuban literary culture. This includes the nineteenth-century writers crafting an imagined literary-artistic cubanía or Cubanness, as often from the temporary safe havens in the US or other Latin American countries as on the island; the departures and returns of mid-twentieth-century writers who challenged artistic and cultural norms and dodged persecution by repressive governments; and the serial waves of exile and return that followed the 1959 revolution and the post-Cold War era and that challenge categories of nation-based cultural identities and literatures through such concepts as “Greater Cuba” or “Global Cuba.”

History, Cuban, Literature, Translation

Our tales of the complex acts of remembrance embodied in monuments also lay bare the challenges inscribed in this book’s title for an intellectual project conceived and written in the third decade of the twenty-first century, when each of the title’s key words remain – more than ever – contested categories: “history,” “Cuban,” and “literature.” The fact that a book written in English about a literary tradition created largely in Spanish uses concepts and terminology requiring complex maneuvers of both linguistic and cultural translation adds to those challenges. In the moment of this book’s appearance, ideas about what constitutes both “literary history” and the modifier “Cuban” depend on the time, place, and subject position from which they are used. These are theoretical-critical givens in the twenty-first century’s third decade. Thus, chapters throughout the book illuminate cultural conversations about these categories in their own historical moments, but often refiltered through the lens of critical conversations transformed not only by the cultural studies turn of the second half of the twentieth century, but also by gender and queer theory; changing concepts of the postcolonial and decolonial; and scholarly turns toward regional, archipelagic, and transnational networks that undermine boundaries of the national.

But where does such a history begin and end? Although there is an unavoidable arbitrary quality to them, such choices do have some degree of internal logic rooted in the scholarly conversations of the period in which they are written. Cuba’s colonial period – from Columbus’s 1492 arrival and the creation of the first Spanish settlement in 1511 in Baracoa by Diego Velázquez de Cuellar, to independence from Spain in 1898 – lasted decades longer than those of most Latin American countries. The printing press did not arrive in Cuba until 1720, almost two hundred years after its arrival in the Viceroyalty of New Spain – Mexico – and nearly a hundred and fifty years after its arrival in the Viceroyalty of Lima. Not organized by the large administrative and evangelizing entities common to the region, Cuba did not experience the kind of early expansive “lettered city” linked by Angel Rama with early colonial Spanish America. The island’s initial strategic importance as a Spanish colony derived rather from its geographic location as a potential commercial gateway to the Americas and as a military fortification against other colonizing European nations and pirates eager for that access. This book’s story of Cuba’s literary history, then, begins roughly with the advent of print culture in work written on or about the island, a decision guided in part by Ambrosio Fornet’s pioneering 1994 study of the book in Cuba, Reference ArcosEl libro en Cuba: Siglos XVIII y XIX. But we also recognize that, in the context of this volume’s inclusion of performance culture beginning in the nineteenth century and of music in the twentieth, we might have begun with the lasting traces in Cuban dance of the performative, ceremonial areitos of the island’s pre-Colombian indigenous people, who were largely decimated early on and the remnants of whose material culture have drawn recent scholarly attention from cultural anthropologists.Footnote ² Instead, in Part I, “Literature in the Early Colony,” we begin in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with essays on Espejo de paciencia [Mirror of Patience] (1608, 1838) by Silvestre de Balboa (1563–1649?), debated since the nineteenth century as Cuban literature’s possible foundational work, and on the Enlightenment thought of José Martín Félix de Arrate (1701–1765), an early advocate of Cuban exceptionalism.

Locating this history’s ending was perhaps even more challenging than finding its beginning. Following Parts II to IV – on “Cuban Literature’s Long Nineteenth Century,” “Literary and Intellectual Culture in the Twentieth-Century Republic,” and “The Revolution’s Literary-Cultural Initiatives and Their Early Discontents,” the book’s final section, Part V – “Cuba and Its Diasporas into the New Millennium” – takes this history into the twenty-first century’s third decade. This is followed by an epilogue essay that circles back to trace the serial metamorphoses undergone by the reiterating trope of insularismo, from the early twentieth century into the present of the book’s writing. If only time offers perspective on the actual enduring impact of literary-cultural phenomena, the decision of what to include in Part V required a degree of predictive judgment that, in fact, weaves through the volume from the start. The insistent fact that this volume is a history has meant attempting to regard it from a temporal distance. As a capacious Part V attests, it is not that there is an avoidance of the present, but rather that the present needs to be dissolved to another place within the vast history that already spans four hundred years. In that way, one of the greatest challenges has been not to overvalue the present in the story this book is telling, even while immersing readers in the high level of invention and creative activity in Cuba and its diasporas that has marked the younger generations of the post-1989 era.

These challenges of determining a beginning and an end yield the unavoidable recognition that all histories are unfinished in their own moment, that history is always and relentlessly being made and unmade. The book’s opening essay, by Raúl Marrero-Fente, “Silvestre de Balboa’s Espejo de paciencia and the Unfinished Foundational Story of Cuban Literature,” already signals this inevitable incompleteness, as scholars have debated the ostensibly lost manuscript’s foundation status from the early nineteenth century, when it was “discovered,” into the twenty-first century. One envisions a history such as this one to be complete, but this book privileges the fact that it, itself, is “unfinished” and a “story.” This recognition, in turn, points to the corollary set of choices about what to include. More than once, one of us has awakened in the middle of the night to the sensation of wanting to ensure that the whole library is here. It is not, and we remind one another that it cannot be.

But even if we could not include every item from that imagined Cuba-based Borgesian archive, more important has been our commitment to include a full range of the diverse theoretical, critical, and ideological perspectives that, in the contexts particularly of Cuba’s postrevolutionary period, mark the stories of Cuban literary history that are being told, from different geographical locations, in the twenty-first century. Our decision to seek some coauthored chapters arose from this desire, for example the essay “Critique and Decentralization in Cuban Film after 1989,” coauthored by Ann Marie Stock and Dean Luis Reyes, and “Twenty-First-Century Cuban Film and Diaspora” by Dunja Fehimović and Zaira Zarza. Some of the topics introduced by the first of these essays are picked up again in the second. But each of these four authors offers distinct perspectives informed by their own very different relationships to or experiences of Cuba and by their personal and intellectual formations. At times, this below-the-surface dialogue – exemplified in these chapters and many others throughout the book – feels like an expansive and enriching dialogic project in a manner that one envisions not only for Cuba’s future, but also for the US reckoning with that future. Contextualized by such remarkable historical work as Ada Ferrer’s Pulitzer-winning Cuba: An American History (2021), which illuminates the inextricable, enduring ties among the peoples of two nations, it is also a project in which we, neither of us Cuban and both positioned in the US, are invested. Not surprisingly, at other points in the book, the tensions between different modes of assessing Cuban history and its literature, and especially the cultural policies of the twenty-first-century Cuban revolutionary state, lead to an implicit debate that is at times unequivocally disharmonious, even within a single essay. And yet, a good part of our investment in undertaking this project has been seeing and teasing out the rich potential of such discords. Such periodic critical disharmony is consistent, moreover, with our commitment to diversity and inclusivity of viewpoints, and with our goal to do justice to the dynamism, complexity, and creativity of Cuba’s literary-cultural history.

Perhaps the most challenging term in the book’s title is the word “Cuban,” charged with encompassing shifting genealogies, geographies, and communities that put the goal of a nation-based history to the test. The already mentioned, ostensibly foundational work of Cuban literature, Espejo de paciencia, which narrates the 1604 kidnapping and freeing of a Spanish prelate, then Bishop of Cuba, by French pirates, already poses the question of what makes a literary-cultural phenomenon “Cuban,” as highlighted by Marrero-Fente’s exploration of the work’s long-debated cubanía in Chapter 1. If one were to base cubanía on the fraught concept of a national language, one might well ask what Chapter 3, by Daylet Domínguez, about Humboldt, a German naturalist and his work originally written in French, is doing in a book about Cuban literature; similarly, why include Chapter 5, by Roberto Ignacio Díaz, on Mercedes Merlin (1789–1852), who wrote her work entirely in French, after adopting Paris as her intellectual home. If one were to base Cubanness exclusively on matters of citizenship or birthright, similar questions might be raised by Chapter 7 on Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda by Adriana Méndez Rodenas, or even Chapter 20 on Alejo Carpentier (1904–1980), in which Anke Birkenmaier unpacks how Carpentier, born in Switzerland as the son of a French father and a mother of Russian origins, became “Cuban” after his arrival in the country at an undetermined time in his youth. And yet few, if any, would dispute the key presence of any of these figures in this book.

For that matter, what exactly constitutes the label “Cuban American” or “writer of the Cuban diaspora?” Iraida López articulates this issue in Chapter 44, “Prose Narratives of Cuban America”: “The type of literature this essay addresses has been variously called exile, ethnic, Cuban diasporic, 1.5 and second-generation literature, Cuban American literature of exile, and Cuban literature in the United States, with the qualifier Cuban American being the most common.” López’s essay treats writing in the post-1989 period, but, having written much of their work in the US, do nineteenth-century writers Martí and Villaverde, then, qualify for one or several of these terms? And alongside the experiences of Cuban exile reiterated throughout its history, we must also consider the impact of the insilio [insile] of some who stayed, a term employed by turn-of-the-millennium writer Antonio José Ponte and alluded to by Esther Whitfield in Chapter 33, “The Fiction of Cuba’s Special Period,” as “the strangeness of a home whose physical and ideological anchors have eroded.” At the same time, for some Cuban writers whose work traverses geographically framed borders or categories, the term “Cuban American” does not sit easily. The fiction of novelist Guillermo Rosales, for example, who was born in 1946 in Havana and died in 1993 in Miami – much like that of the more widely known Reinaldo Arenas (1943–1990) – charts his disaffection with both the revolutionary state and the prosperous Cuban American Miami community. Similarly, one would be less likely to use the term to characterize the writings of Generación Cero, a term used for authors who began publishing in Cuba after 2000, for example Legna Rodríguez Iglesias (1984–), whose work chronicles the city of Miami. Evoking an imaginary of other forms of postnationalism, authors of newer fictional forms, addressed by Emily Maguire in Chapter 38, “Anti-Exceptionalism in Detective Fiction, Speculative Fiction, and Graphic Novels,” beckon worlds where characters live their lives never having heard of a place called Cuba.

As we look back over the time-span encompassed by this book, in fact, some of the most difficult issues that shaped our consideration of the question of cubanía across the centuries emerged from events of the present of this book’s writing. Most Cuba watchers are familiar with the postrevolutionary waves of departures from the island, including the initial 1959–1960s exodus, the 1980 Mariel boatlift, and the 1990s balseros. But in 2022, Reference CabreraMauricio Vicent reported in Spain’s El País that, between 2021 and 2022, 180,000 people fled the island, “surpass[ing] previous mass emigrations like the 1980 Mariel boatlift (125,000 people) and the 1994 rafter crisis (35,000 people).” In the context of the reiterative arrivals, departures, and returns characterizing Cuba’s demographic history, one might recall Cuban journalist Reference AlfonsoRandy Alonso’s 2016 comment on Cuban TV about “the case of ex-Cuban Orlando Ortega,” a track-and-field athlete who won a silver medal competing for Spain at the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro (our emphasis). However one might interpret the use of this term in its context, it would be a more felicitous narrative to envision such a statement as having no crossover to literature in the twenty-first century; after all, literary scholar Ambrosio Fornet already rejected exclusivist nationalism at the start of the new millennium.Footnote ³ But it would be erroneous not to see analogies with young Cuban activist writers like Carlos Manuel Álvarez (1989–) (winner in November 2022 of the prestigious Anagrama Award for Los intrusos [The Intruders], a book-length literary-journalistic crónica) being denied reentry to their homeland. This raises the question, harking back to the origins of Cuban print culture, of who is given rights as a Cuban, or, for that matter, when it comes to Cubans, who is granted rights as an American, one more dimension of why the Cubanness of this book’s title is so complex.

The principles of diverse inclusivity that have guided our choices about whose perspectives should shape the stories of Cuban literature this book seeks to tell and our criteria as to what this book’s title word “Cuban” includes yield a particularly rich panorama in the volume’s overarching focus on “literature.” Our approach to what belongs in a literary history recognizes the flexibility and shifting categories that have characterized human creative expression since before print culture’s emergence and into the present of this book’s composition. Here, then, the stories that Cuban “literary” culture has spun about itself, its key actors, and the multifaceted experiences coalescing around the metamorphizing category “Cuban” over time encompass, in our contributors’ essays, not only poetry, theater, and prose, but also Enlightenment-era geographic, political, and demographic reports; philosophical inquiry; journalistic crónicas; tertulias [informal cultural or literary gatherings]; artistic pedagogies and literacy campaigns; literary-critical essays; experimental magazines; film; music; artistic book objects; and performance art, all of which participate in the Cuban literary-cultural imaginary that this book charts. In Chapter 9, “Journalism and Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture,” Víctor Goldgel-Carballo points directly to the permeable and circuitous boundaries between literature and its neighboring genres, as he unpacks the nuanced differences of the time between periodismo [journalism] and literario [literary]. In Chapter 25, “The Social Life of Music in Cuban Literary Culture,” Alexandra Vazquez, in a related vein, refuses to perceive music as subordinate to written words, even within the study of Cuban literature, and asks critics to understand the extent to which music shapes that word. In Chapter 40, David Tenorio, investigating what they call a “dance between revolutionary masculinist dogmas and queer cultures,” appears almost to riff on Vazquez’s assumption when Tenorio opens their essay with a description of Ernesto Lecuona’s 1955 Rapsodia Cubana.

A few of our authors incorporate visual arts into their work, for example Juanamaría Cordones-Cook in Chapter 32 on the visually creative book objects of the turn-of-the-millennium Ediciones Vigía of Matanzas. The lost Book of Paintings by José Antonio Aponte (1760?–1812), a narrational work from the turn of the nineteenth century, also finds its way briefly into critical discussions in Chapter 8 by Gerard Aching, “Racialized Futures: Slavery, Miscegenation, and Speculative Literature;” Chapter 12 by Jill Lane on “Performance Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Cuban Theater;” and Chapter 36, “The Long Reach of Haiti in Cuban Literature,” by Elzbieta Sklodowska. In Aponte’s account, the Book of Paintings charted a global history of a Black diaspora; the paintings were also taken as evidence of his alleged organizing of slave conspiracies and rebellions, for which he was eventually arrested, tried, and executed in 1812.Footnote ⁴ Figures and art forms, then, perhaps still viewed by some as extraneous to the study of literature, move across this volume, showing that literature encompasses a tapestry of expressive forms whose hierarchies always need to be questioned.

Perhaps the most distinctively local yet simultaneously global facet of the literary that emerges in this book is the idea that literature in Cuban contexts has long been regarded, from very different perspectives, not only as a path to emancipation or freedom, but also as an expressive form whose creators have often experienced it, and themselves, as endangered or under siege. The most well-known nineteenth-century emancipatory example is likely Juan Francisco Manzano (1797–1853), the enslaved poet and author of Autobiography of a Slave (1840) who achieved his emancipation through his association with Domingo del Monte’s tertulia writers and intellectuals, who advocated reforms in slavery as an institution and, collectively, bought his freedom.Footnote ⁵ Less known is the work of Ambrosio Echemendía (1843–?), who, as Víctor Goldgel-Carballo notes in Chapter 9, wrote poetry that “established a dialogue with the press” and “gained his freedom through literature.” At the other end of the colonial class spectrum, Mercedes Merlin used literature as a path to a kind of discursive freedom whereby a woman might weigh in on matters of politics and race, as Roberto Ignacio Díaz illuminates in Chapter 5, although her periodic pro-slavery stances underscore that she did not extend this freedom equally to all. Often regarded as Cuba’s precursor of modern feminism, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, as Adriana Méndez Rodenas explores in Chapter 7, cleared her path as a self-fashioned public intellectual through poetry, travel writing, memoir, and fiction in which abolitionism and feminism converged, achieving a “conversion into the lettered sphere marked by an awareness of women’s restricted role and the ambition to expand that role beyond the age’s permissible limits.” Among the openly feminist writers of the 1920s to the 1940s, Ofelia Rodríguez Acosta (1902–1975), as Jorge Marturano illuminates in Chapter 17, engaged in journalism and fiction to activate social reform as well as to bring the experiences and perspectives of queer subjects openly into the realm of the literary. The latter was also undertaken by fiction writers Carlos Montenegro (1900–1981) and Alfonso Hernández Catá (1885–1940).

Fast-forwarding to the early postrevolutionary era, and as examined by Par Kumaraswami in Chapter 22 and Paloma Duong in Chapter 24, cultural policies and practices of the Cuban state rested on the premise that universal access to literacy could ideologically emancipate all Cuban citizens from class structures, such that all could become creative cultural producers through, for example, testimonios or plays and performances drawn from their own experience. But burning questions soon surfaced about which forms, styles, and subject matter for literature and the arts fell on the correct side of the boundary between “within the Revolution” and “against the Revolution,” as articulated in Fidel Castro’s renowned “Words to the Intellectuals” (1961). Those unresolved questions quickly modified that imagined cultural emancipation and unfolded in alternating periods of what writers and artists experienced as an ambiance of potential endangerment: tighter or loosened parameters on what was permissible or publishable; open state censorship; or self-censorship. Numerous chapters in this book’s Parts IV and V register the mark of this shifting cultural politics on the persistent achievements, breakthroughs, and trajectories of many talented Cuban writers. Moreover, as Walfrido Dorta explores in Chapter 31, the 1980s and 1990s into the early 2000s witnessed the emergence of several “alternative cultural projects” – that is, intellectual groupings, periodicals, and writing initiatives neither fully in the state’s purview nor fully outside of it.

These in turn have unfolded into the numerous publishing ventures, primarily online, that have come into being as of this writing and that seek spheres independent from the Cuban state. One of these is the prolific Cuban blogosphere, in which the blog by Yoani Sánchez (1975–) chronicling everyday Cuban Life, Generación Y, begun in 2007 and recast in 2014 as the digital daily 14ymedio [14andahalf], is likely the best known internationally. Sánchez’s blog was originally transmitted directly from Cuba, but after its accessibility was cut off by state action, she had to rely on a network of contacts outside the island to transmit her chronicles. Comparable networks have created what Carlos Aníbal Alonso (1987–), founder in 2017 with a group of intellectuals in Mexico of the online Rialta Magazine and director of its book-publishing arm, often terms an “ámbito de actuación” [sphere of action] for Cuban writers and intellectuals living elsewhere. Undertakings similar in kind to Alonso’s include Hypermedia Magazine, headquartered in St. Augustine, FL; the archival project Incubadora, overseen from Prague by Cuban poet, writer, and critic Carlos A. Aguilera (1970–); the publishing enterprises Almenara and Bokeh Press (Leiden, Netherlands), overseen by Cuban poet, narrator, and scholar Waldo Pérez Cino (1972–); and El Estornudo, founded in 2016 in Cuba by a group of journalists that included Carlos Manuel Álvarez (1989–) and Carla Colomé Santiago (1990–) and continued from elsewhere after the Cuban state cut off its island access in 2018. In an online interview convened in May 2023 by the cultural journalist Wendy Lazcano of the Madrid-based Diario de Cuba, Alonso, Aguilera, and Pérez Cino reflected on how these enterprises have responded constructively to what Lazcano termed the “endangerment” of turn-of-the-millennium Cuban literature by commercial and ideological parameters. Fittingly, El Estornudo established in its use of narrative journalism provocative links to analogous challenges faced by nineteenth-century Cuban writers who wrote from locations that shifted from the island to exile and back. The magazine thus portrays itself as “made from Cuba, from outside Cuba, principally about Cuba and Latin America,” as a mechanism to contribute to a civic sphere. And yet, many of these and other publications – many conceived as responses to the idea of an “endangered” Cuban literature – are not accessible on the island, evidencing, yet again, the importance of considering Cuban literature globally.

Taken together, such projects are creating new archives of twenty-first-century Cuban literature which future literary historians will incorporate in their accounts. An element that characterizes some of these initiatives is an awareness of the potentially diverse languages of readers, and in particular in some cases of the need to bring awareness of Cuba’s literary-culture contexts to readers in other countries; thus, in some cases, readers are invited to click on a link to read a Spanish-language online publication in English. The same question of language underscores the challenges of cultural and linguistic translation posed by The Cambridge History of Cuban Literature, written for print in English and with no alternate-language click options, about a body of work created primarily in Spanish but also in French, German, and English and, at moments, in Haitian Creole (Kreyòl) or Angolan Portuguese. These questions have shaped our editorial discussions and decisions, beginning with our inclusion of some essays written – for this volume – in Spanish and translated into English by one of our five translators or, in a few cases, by the authors themselves or a coauthor. But beyond the challenges of cultural translation posed by any rendering of one language into another, language usage also encompasses the sometimes-perplexing realms of identity politics, naming and even grammar, as well as the social well-being implicit in how such issues of usage unfold in Cuban or US contexts. With some caveats, we have opted to allow contributors themselves to have the last word on some of these stylistic matters, reflecting their own stakes in these discussions. We have also asked that our authors provide English translations for all quotations from primary works and of any titles in languages other than English of works discussed (rather than simply named) whose cognate-based meaning might not be obvious to the English-only reader.

Other Histories

In the context of Cuban literature’s richness and complexity, its pivotal place in the literary-cultural experience of the Americas, and the dynamic contemporary scholarship by Cuban literary-cultural specialists in Cuba, the US, Europe, and Latin America, The Cambridge History of Cuban Literature offers the first comprehensive volume of its kind in English. The closest related volume in English may be the comprehensive, two-volume Cuba: People, Culture, History (2011), edited by Alan West-Durán. But although this rich reference work includes entries and short essays on literary phenomena, its vast scope also includes multiple other topics in Cuban history, society, and culture. The now thirty-year-old Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Cuban Literature, edited by Julio A. Martínez (1990), offered literary scholars a valuable English-language reference tool for its moment. The most recent comprehensive history of Cuban literature in Spanish, launched in this century’s first decade under the initial editorial direction of Jorge Luis Arcos and executed by a team of top scholars at Havana’s Instituto de Literatura y Lingüística José Antonio Portuondo Valdor, is the remarkable 2,000-page Historia de la literatura cubana. This work’s three volumes, which appeared in 2002, 2003, and 2008 and span the sixteenth century through to the 1990s, offer the most detailed treatment of Cuban literary history to date, superseding earlier literary histories published in Cuba and offering an unmatched informational resource for those who read Spanish. (The Historia notably also includes some writers or literary phenomena previously omitted from the two-volume Diccionario de la literatura cubana [1980, 1984], edited by the Instituto, then under the directorship of the late José Antonio Portuondo, whose name it now bears.) The three-volume, sweeping, and comprehensive Historia, contextualized by in-depth historical background for every period it covers, draws its contents and secondary bibliography primarily from work by Cubans or published in Cuba and hews to a straightforward, widely encompassing account of generations, genres, movements, and writers judged to be significant.

While also organized chronologically but necessarily a less comprehensive and detailed account, The Cambridge History of Cuban Literature manifests the late-twentieth and early-twentieth-century critical conversations about Cuban literature and its history that have unfolded among Cuban, US, European, and Latin American specialists in Cuban literary-cultural studies, through international conferences, including some in Cuba; journals and webzines; and an abundance of monographic studies. A selected and by no means complete list of the these focused, monographic micro-histories of Cuban literature, written in English or Spanish, that have marked the scholarly milieu from which this book has emerged would include some that address a specific period and genre, such as Seymour Menton’s Prose Fiction of the Cuban Revolution (1975), Rine Leal’s Breve historia del teatro cubano (1980), Magaly Muguercia’s El teatro cubano en vísperas de la Revolución (1988), Sintia Molina’s El naturalismo en la novela cubana (2001), Michael Chanan’s Cuban Cinema (2004), or Anne Marie Stock’s On Location in Cuba: Street Filmmaking during Times of Transition (2009). Peter Hulme’s Cuba’s Wild East: A Literary History of Oriente (2011) stands out for its attention to literature connected in some way with Eastern Cuba, when other literary histories consistently privilege Havana and its environs. Others have focused on single authors or works, for example Roberto González Echevarria’s pioneering Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home (1977), Raymond Souza’s Guillermo Cabrera Infante: Two Islands, Many Worlds (1996), Thomas F. Anderson’s Everything in Its Place: The Life and Works of Virgilio Piñera (2006), or Raúl Marrero-Fente’s Epic, Empire and Community in the Atlantic World: Silvestre de Balboa’s “Espejo de paciencia” (2008).

Monographs often circumscribed by a specific time period unpack a particular cultural, social, or thematic phenomenon, filtered through a distinct critical or theoretical optic. Vital examples, to name a few, include early to mid-twentieth-century making and remaking of identity constructs in Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s The Cuban Condition: Translation and Identity in Modern Cuban Literature (1989) or its expanded version, My Own Private Cuba: Essays on Cuban Literature and Culture (1999); constructs of gender and identity or nation-making in Adriana Méndez Rodenas’s Gender and Nationalism in Colonial Cuba: The Travels of Santa Cruz y Montalvo, Condesa de Merlín (1998), A Place in the Sun? Women Writers in Twentieth-Century Cuba (1997) by Catherine Davies, Emilio Bejel’s Gay Cuban Nation (2001), or Madeline Cámara Betancourt’s Cuban Women Writers: Imagining a Matria (2008); theories and tropes of Caribbean identity anchored primarily in Cuban writing, as in Antonio Bénitez Rojo’s The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective (1992); philosophical concepts of race and liberty in Gerard Aching’s Freedom from Liberation: Slavery, Sentiment, and Literature in Cuba (2015); transnational market forces shaping literary culture in Esther Whitfield’s Cuban Currency: The Dollar and “Special Period” Fiction (2008); postrevolutionary cultural policy in Parvathi Kumaraswami and Antonio Kapcia’s Literary Culture in Cuba: Revolution, Nation-Building and the Book (2012); the cultural politics of literary-intellectual dissent in Jorge Fornet’s El 71: Anatomía de una crisis (2014) or Marta Salván’s Mínima Cuba: Heretical Poetics and Power in Post-Soviet Cuba (2015); dystopian constructs in Odette Casamayor-Cisneros’s Utopía, distopía e ingravidez: Reconfiguraciones cosmológicas en la narrativa postsoviética cubana (2013); affective structures of fellowship in Guillermina de Ferrari’s Community and Culture in Post-Soviet Cuba (2014); the overlay or interweaving of other national or cultural presences in Cuba’s literary-cultural imaginary, such as Elzbieta Sklodowska’s Espectros y espejismos: Haití en el imaginario cubano (2009) [Ghosts and Mirages: Haiti in the Cuban Imaginary], Jacqueline Loss’s Dreaming in Russian: The Cuban Soviet Imaginary (2013), or Lanie Millar’s Forms of Disappointment: Cuban and Angolan Narrative After the Cold War (2019); and artistic reverberations of planetary capitalism and climate change in Rachel Price’s Planet/Cuba: Art, Culture and the Future of the Island (2015).

Groundbreaking historical studies have also provided a context for this volume written in English and conceptualized from the US. As noted, Ada Ferrer’s Cuba: An American History (2021) traces centuries of intricate ties between Cuba and the US. Focused distinctly on cultural history, Louis A. Pérez’s On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture (1999) illuminates those ties at the level of everyday lives of Cubans and US Americans from the late nineteenth century into the 1950s. More recently, historian Michael J. Bustamante’s Cuban Memory Wars: Retrospective Politics in Revolution and Exile (2021) showcases the contested aspects of history contingent on the position of who remembers and tells it, something this volume’s inclusive perspectives also seek to respect. Moreover, historian Alejandro de la Fuente’s groundbreaking work on race in Cuba, for example A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba (2001), is evidence of the rising multidisciplinary scholarly focus on race, a key throughline in this volume. The vast oeuvre of Cuban intellectual historian Rafael Rojas – whose work often encompasses literary-intellectual culture, with a sampling being available in English in Essays in Cuban Intellectual History (2008) and Fighting over Fidel: The New York Intellectuals and the Cuban Revolution (2015) – has had a profound impact on twenty-first-century Cuban literary-cultural studies, exemplified by the fact that his books or articles are among the most frequently cited by this volume’s authors, to whose work we now turn.

Part I: Literature in the Early Colony

Conventional historical wisdom locates the initial flourishes of Cuban colonial literature in the turn of the nineteenth century, to which this book turns in Part II. But Part I addresses two key works often linked to Cuba’s literary beginnings. In Chapter 1 on the 1608 “lost” epic poem Espejo de paciencia by Silvestre de Balboa (1563–1649?), as noted, Raúl Marrero-Fente first examines the archival history and critical fortune surrounding the work’s “discovery” in 1836 and the debates about slavery and race that framed its designation as the first work of Cuban literature, a status as yet unresolved. He then unpacks Balboa’s imaginative recasting of European Renaissance conventions in a version of the epic genre “distinct to the Americas” and with new “epistemological consequence” in the treatment of Cuban nature and in the literary creation of a distinct territory marked by a “poetics of community” and “loaded with cultural heterogeneity.” In Chapter 2, Mariselle Meléndez analyzes the work of Havana-born historian José Martín Félix de Arrate (1701–1765), deemed the most representative Enlightenment writer of Cuba’s emergent criollo elite, in particular his 1761 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,” she 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 of the island’s human potential for labor and defense, demographic stereotypes that, as subsequent chapters show, persisted into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Part II: Cuban Literature’s Long Nineteenth Century

Ambrosio Fornet’s 1994 pioneering study of print culture in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Cuba enumerates European legacies following Columbus’s arrival: after eighteen years, “colonialist repression; after twenty years, African labor; after thirty, sugarcane; after two-hundred-and-thirty-eight years, the printing press” (Reference ArcosEl libro 11). The flourishing of literary culture from the turn of the nineteenth to the turn of the twentieth centuries was made possible by the spread of printing, which accompanied rapid economic, infrastructure, and population growth and expanded interactions with the US, changes intertwined with the growth of Cuba’s sugar industry and the slave trade. The essays in this section illuminate the convergences in literary culture of debates about slavery, Cuba’s colonial status, and consequent repression of writers through censorship and exile, as well as a range of ideas about the uses of the written word and emerging concepts of the “literary” in distinct and overlapping genres.

In Chapter 3, based on Ensayo político sobre la isla de Cuba [Political Essay on the Island of Cuba] by Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), Daylet Domínguez scrutinizes the interactive impact of Humboldt’s ideas about Cuba with those of the island’s criollo intellectual elite, in particular Francisco de Arango Parreño (1765–1837) and José de la Luz y Caballero (1800–1862), also noting the assessment of those collaborations by Vidal Morales y Morales (1848–1904) and, in the twentieth century’s first half, by Fernando Ortíz (1881–1969). Central to her analysis is how these writers drew on Humboldt’s “antislavery and scientific legacies” while “silencing” the essay’s predictive advocacy for an African confederation in the future free states of the Antilles. Domínguez elucidates an “abolitionist turn” in Arango’s writing and the role of Luz’s extensive journeys to meet with such international figures as Humboldt for modernizing scientific research and education in Cuba. While noting a “canonizing halo” later surrounding Humboldt’s role in Cuba, her analyses reinforce his indispensability to imaginings of “an antislavery, scientific, and even independentist Cuba.” Extending the attention devoted in Chapter 3 to Luz y Caballero, Chapter 4, by Vicente Medina, traces his rigorous intellectual work as a philosopher-pedagogue, along with that of Félix Varela y Morales (1788–1853) and Enrique José Varona y Pera (1849–1933), demonstrating what he terms their shared “anti-authoritarian pedagogy,” exemplified not only in how they taught philosophy and science, but also in their liberal and republican views of politics and their model roles as public intellectuals engaged with the righting of social ills. While the three men’s philosophical and pedagogical arguments, progressive for their time, might on the one hand appear to “to challenge the class and racial interests supporting the tyrannical regime imposed by Spain on the island,” Medina’s chapter complicates this view as he observes their periodic “myopia” to authoritarian abuses around them.

In Chapter 5, Roberto Ignacio Díaz analyzes the life writing of Mercedes Merlin, all of whose work was written in French, teasing out the singularities and paradoxes of her relatively late inclusion – a process he traces in other recent scholarship – in the historical imaginary of Cuban literature. That imaginary, Díaz argues, is prone to “privilege signs of emancipation and racial justice” in nineteenth-century writing, whereas Merlin, even as she depicted slavery’s cruelties, did not call for its abolition. Yet Díaz suggests that, even while exhibiting some “disturbing views” of Black and mixed-race people, her nuanced considerations of Black subjects intimate “a glimmer of proto-abolitionism.” Díaz argues that for Merlin, the rhetoric of life writing provided an avenue to tell her own story and those 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. Rachel Price, in Chapter 6, turns to the populous field of Cuban poets, highlighting their transatlantic interactions with “global Romanticism” while they created a bountiful corpus of “self-consciously ‘Cuban’” literature and forged many of the “foundational themes in Cuban political culture and rhetoric,” including exile (contributing to the widespread nineteenth-century trope of the Latin American writer in exile) and “an amorous cathexis to the island,” all against the colonized backdrop of “racialized slavery” and colonialism. While noting the welcoming embrace by numerous poets of key European poetry and lyric conventions, Price underscores in Cuban Romanticism the cultural role of local tertulias, or salons; the vernacular contexts permeated by slavery and that decry its atrocities; the drive to alter Cuba’s colonial status in relationship to Spain; early reactions to European extractivism of New World resources; and racial and gender hierarchies, further complicated by the writing and reception of poetry by people of color and by women.

While Price includes the poetry of Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (1814–1873) in Chapter 6, in Chapter 7, Adriana Méndez Rodenas examines her pioneering role as a transatlantic intellectual; as an initiator of what became the long-lasting, experiential practice among Cuban writers of lejanía [distance], “imagining Cuba from afar”; and as a precursor of modern feminism whose persistent “interweaving of race and gender,” Méndez Rodenas argues, constitutes the writer’s “signature contribution” to Cuban literature. Devoting much of the essay to Gómez de Avellaneda’s fiction, Méndez Rodenas 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 (the subject of Chapter 5), which, she argues, established the first female genealogy of Cuban literature. In Chapter 8, Gerard Aching turns to the autochthonous corpus of Cuban fiction emerging roughly in the 1830s and the 1840s, most of it connected to the reformist criollo bourgeoisie literary circle of Domingo del Monte (1804–1853) (but also including Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab, which was not), narratives long regarded as the foundations for a self-aware Cuban literature and that have “loosely and inadequately,” in Aching’s reading, been designated “antislavery.” Aching contextualizes his analysis in the tensions between the demands for labor and “ad hoc moral alibis” that characterized Plantation America, and in particular the “improvised concepts of racial differentiation” – Blackness and Black-and-white miscegenation – that typified responses to these tensions. In portraying this literature as “speculative,” as writing that looks simultaneously toward the past and future, Aching links it to the sometimes improvisational, ad hoc, and speculative nature of the new plantation-based societies that were themselves entangled between “speculative finance capital and moral reflections on freedom” and to the intensified anxieties about Cuba’s racialized future generated by the 1841 demographic census.

If Aching highlights in conclusion that del Monte’s circle saw literature as an urgent form of esthetic and political engagement with social crises, in Chapter 9, Víctor Goldgel-Carballo illuminates the diverse, emergent views of reading, writing, and the literary that unfolded in Cuban journalism, a key player in nineteenth-century print culture. Drawing on an archival trove of both ephemeral and longer-lived newspapers and magazines, Goldgel-Carballo unpacks the questions of normative practices; cultural tastes; linguistic correction; and tensions between the informational, didactic, or entertainment functions of the printed word versus the literary-artistic value implicit in the notions of the “highbrow,” all of which were raised by the democratization of print culture’s reach to anybody who could read or find someone to read to them. His analysis of the shifting meanings of the words periodismo [journalism] and lo literario [the literary] anchors these questions. He also contextualizes journalism’s rise within pressing social issues and questions about access to literary culture by focusing further on journalism’s role as a forum for writing by free men and women of color, a few enslaved individuals, and white women. In Chapter 10, Esther Allen and Pedro Pablo Rodríguez address the most renowned nineteenth-century Cuban journalist, José Martí (1853–1895), also known as a precursory founding figure of the transformative poetic movement Spanish American modernismo and an essayist, fiction writer, playwright, orator, political activist, and national hero. Connecting sequential key moments of Martí’s personal, intellectual, and political biography with his writing, ideas, and emergent social and political consciousness, Allen and Rodríguez consider Martí as a “hemispheric” figure whose work intertwines Cuba, Latin America, and the US. The chapter focuses particularly on Martí’s extensive body of journalistic crónicas, the majority of which were written outside Cuba, demonstrating his adept use of the genre’s stylistic and thematic malleability for multiple social and political effects and in the creation of his social philosophy and a hemispheric imaginary.

In Chapter 11, Norge Espinosa Mendoza complicates Cuba’s contributions to Spanish American modernismo as he interweaves selected close readings of the poetry of Julián del Casal (1863–1893) and other poets in his circle with larger polemics about Cuban poetry that have marked Casal’s critical reception in Cuba into the twenty-first century. Like Martí, Casal, whom Espinosa characterizes as an enduring “mystery, a provocateur, and a dissident,” also wrote journalistic crónicas. But Casal’s work embraced the more inward-turning estheticist and decadentist modernista tropes drawn from French parnassianism, which have led to what Espinosa terms the “protracted debate about Casal and Martí as opposites,” a likely overdrawn contrast in his view, ranging from attacks on Casal as “exotic” or “Frenchified” to his recasting as an “autonomous agent” who rebelled against literary norms. If Martí rebelled “on behalf of others,” Espinosa affirms that Casal rebelled “to free himself, even if it meant denying his body certain desires and habits,” an observation pointing to critical initiatives to contextualize Casal as a gay writer, which the essay also examines. Drawing on rich archival material, Jill Lane, in Chapter 12, explores the diverse performance centers; dramatic genres; and key writers, actors, metamorphosing stock characters, and forms of humor that marked theater in Cuba’s long nineteenth century. Drawing on the growing diversity of Havana audiences for theatrical entertainment, interwoven with the performed stereotypes of ethnicity, race, and social class that often peppered theatrical genres, Lane frames her detailed examples within the kinds of larger questions posed by this volume as a whole, including whose theater history such a chapter should tell, and, in the context of the widely located political, economic, and commercial forces marking the island’s history, to which geographies and colonial or national temporalities its nineteenth-century theater history should belong.

Part III: Literary and Intellectual Culture in the Twentieth-Century Republic

With Spain’s withdrawal in 1898 and the three-year occupation by the US at the close of the Spanish American War, the turn of the twentieth century ushered in Cuba’s republican era. Although Cuba adopted two constitutions (1901 and 1940) during the six decades of the republican era, the country also experienced intervening periods of authoritarian rule: Alfredo Zayas (1921–1925), Gerardo Machado (1925–1933), and Fulgencio Batista (1952–1959), who had also served as president from 1933 to 1944. These decades also included rapid, radically unequal modernization; urban growth; demographic diversification; growing movements for rights of unions, women (who won the right to vote in 1932), and Black Cubans; the further expansion of mass-circulation periodicals; and extensive cultural influence from the US, coupled with resistance to this through identity discourses about Cubanness. As the essays in Part III investigate, Cuba’s burgeoning, creatively rich literature of this period exhibits an intensified discursive struggle over whose stories the country’s literature would tell and in what literary and linguistic registers they would be told.

In Chapter 13, Ángel Esteban and Yannelys Aparicio Molina showcase the writing of Cuban intellectuals of the early republican years, when excitement about the achievement of independence was muted by the overbearing presence and influence of the US and by concerns about Cuban identity or “character” as involving moral or social problems that needed to be corrected before full-fledged citizenship could be achieved. Noting the continuing influence of ideals for an educated citizenry held by nineteenth-century philosopher-educator Enrique José Varona (vice president from 1913 to 1917); the hierarchies of Cuban ethnicities and negative stereotypes of Black Cubans promulgated in Fernando Ortiz’s early work and by essayist Francisco Figueras (1853?–?); and the role in these cultural conversations of Cuban journalism, including Cuba Contemporánea and Social, Esteban and Aparicio Molina tease out shifting views of what were portrayed as strengths or weaknesses of Cuban character in essays, drama, and novels by José Antonio Ramos (1885–1946), Miguel de Carrión (1875–1929), and Carlos Loveira (1882–1928), with attention to Jorge Mañach (1898–1961) as a key figure in a second republican generation. Odette Casamayor-Cisneros turns in Chapter 14 to representations of Black Cubans, primarily by white intellectuals seeking to consolidate an assuring image of nationhood by rendering it “understandable within the Eurocentric hegemonic epistemology.” She addresses Fernando Ortiz’s early criminalization of Black Cuban religious practices, which were viewed as primitive, fanatical, and ignorant, and the terrorizing warnings by Ramiro Guerra against the “Haitianization” of the countryside. She examines the Black protagonists in the first two novels by Alejo Carpentier (1904–1980), who were isolated, she argues, in the first by a lack of agency, and enveloped, in the second, in the uncanniness of the Surrealism-inspired “marvelous real.” The chapter discusses portrayals by Lydia Cabrera (1899–1991) of the religious practices attributed to Black Cubans, laced with “condescending tenderness,” early poems by Nicolás Guillén (1902–1989) and his portrayal of “Cuban color” as a mestizo identity,” and Ortiz’s subsequent concept of multiethnic transculturation, which Casamayor-Cisneros sees as a more detailed elaboration of Guillén’s earlier idea. However, even this “mestizo happy-ending,” she argues, suppressed the sexual violence meted out to the persistently stereotyped Black female body, unaddressed until Nancy Morejón (1944–), writing after the 1959 revolution, located that experience in the literary renditions of Cuban history.

In Chapter 15, on Cuba’s avant-gardes of the 1920s and early 1930s, Vicky Unruh, focusing primarily on writers associated with the Grupo Minorista and the vanguardist Revista de Avance, showcases their cultivation of porous, intellectual communities and their related attention to everyday expressive forms as they aspired to translate Cuban orality into writing. Through these activities, she argues, these writers sought new ways of characterizing Cuban experience and identity, engaging critically with their surroundings and positioning themselves as “consequential cultural actors.” Unruh sees the Minoristas’ approach to the tertulia as an affective assemblage that thrives on “difference and artful disagreement,” welcomes international visitors, and, while capacious enough to include women, clings to gender stereotypes. She draws connections between the group’s tertulias and the international cosmopolitan interactions forged by the conversational qualities of the Revista de Avance, and with the 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. In Chapter 16, Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann unpacks the relationship between Lydia Cabrera’s ethnographic and literary work, which draws extensively on Black Cuban informants, and work by “generators of Afro-Caribbean imaginaries,” including Francophone writers Aimé Césaire and Suzanne Césaire and Anglophone writers Sylvia Wynter and E. K. Brathwaite, in order to show that these writers’ distinct approaches to translation illuminate their diverse contributions to these imaginaries. After analyzing the roles of authorship and translation in Cabrera’s fiction and nonfiction, Seligmann showcases Cabrera’s choices in translating Aimé Césaire and her impact on his and Suzanne Césaire’s translation of Leo Frobenius’s ethnographic work. She then compares these activities with the work of Wynter and Brathwaite, teasing out Cabrera’s contributions to dismantling the “racial hierarchies” produced by colonialism and slavery, while at the same time signaling ways in which she reproduced the “communicative inequality” of that legacy.

In the context of rapid modernization, urban growth, and immigration to Havana, and turning to the fiction of Carlos Montenegro, Lino Novás Calvo (both working-class Spanish immigrants) and Ofelia Rodríguez Acosta (a feminist from a comfortable bourgeois background), Jorge Marturano elucidates in Chapter 17 the emergence from the 1920s into the 1940s of new urban characters whose stories these writers brought into Cuban literature, and the nuances these characters enact on the intertwining of class, gender orientation, sexuality, and race in their experiences and fate. His comparative analyses of the work of writers who all enjoyed either the promotion by or association with the avant-gardist Minorista group or the Revista de Avance, encompass Montenegro’s prison narratives, told through the perspective not of intellectual political prisoners but of working-class inmates who have committed crimes, exploring complex hierarchies shaping interracial, homoerotic love; Novás Calvo’s stylistically inventive narratives of the fluidity of race and class intersections in settings of exploitative heavy labor; and Rodríguez Acosta’s fictional renditions of middle-class women resisting norms for sexuality, marriage, motherhood, and heteronormativity. In a detailed analysis of selections from the poetry, nonfiction prose, and the highly experimental avant-garde novel of Dulce María Loynaz, Zaida Capote Cruz demonstrates in Chapter 18 that this 1992 winner of the prestigious Cervantes Prize, who wrote much of her important work in the interwar years but maintained during her long life “an ear attuned to the changing times” and shifting literary styles, consistently resisted classification in any category other than, perhaps, the paradoxical. Throughout her essay, Capote Cruz highlights the “contradictory signals” that emerge from the work of a formidable literary figure who was simultaneously “romantic and modern, avant-garde and critical of the avant-gardes, intimist and anchored in the historical context.”

The reverberations and impact of the subject of Chapter 19 by César A. Salgado – the poetry, fiction, and essays of José Lezama Lima, the Grupo Orígenes he cofounded, and its literary journal – extended far into the postrevolutionary era. Salgado’s tour through the work and poetics of Lezama, other poets in the orbit of the Grupo Orígenes, and the group’s journals includes their high modernist esthetic and internationalist reach; Lezama’s view of poetry’s “epistemic role in Western and non-Western cosmologies” and “innate resistance to causal and empiricist visions of time and progress,” and the group’s incursions into myth and cosmogony; the canonical or cult status later achieved by many Orígenes poets; and the critical ostracism and resuscitations Lezama and Orígenes writers experienced in Cuba’s postrevolutionary periods. Lezama’s 1957 essay, La expresión américana, is central to Salgado’s in-depth analysis of the Orígenes journal’s “grand mosaic of hemispheric and transatlantic creation,” Lezama’s intricate conception of a New World Baroque, and the essay’s projection, along with other Lezama writing, of a distinctively Caribbean Baroque, even as specific Antillean referents remain unnamed. Chapter 20 by Anke Birkenmaier turns to Alejo Carpentier, who, like Lezama, achieved canonical status linked to the 1960s Latin American Boom, but whose body of work registers distinct literary-cultural moments of almost the entire twentieth century in Cuba and Latin America and who, unlike Lezama, navigated postrevolutionary cultural politics such that he continued to be viewed as a “revolutionary” writer. Drawing on persistent questions about the legitimacy of Carpentier’s claims to Cubanness (he was a childhood immigrant whose first language was French), Birkenmaier, suggesting that the writer’s prevarications on his origins “tell us something more about notions of belonging and membership in Cuba” in the republican and revolutionary periods, organizes her concise overview of his entire oeuvre into successive periods of Carpentier’s “becoming” – a Cuban, then a Latin American writer, and then a “writer of the revolution.”

Also catapulting into the revolutionary era, as did the work of Carpentier and Lezama, is the highly inventive, prolific literary production and fraught career of Virgilio Piñera, taken up in Chapter 21 by Thomas F. Anderson. Following the chronological contours of Piñera’s biography, Anderson explores his initial involvement with Orígenes writers and subsequent rejection of the group’s esthetics; his poetry, particularly his inventive long poem La isla en peso [The Weight of the Island]; 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, Anderson 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 the international recognition of his work into the twenty-first century.

Part IV: The Revolution’s Literary-Cultural Initiatives and Their Early Discontents

In the years after the revolutionary victory in 1959, the Cuban state enrolled culture as one of its most important arms to develop new citizenry, through the creation of widespread transnational and national literary and artistic institutions and workshops. The goal was not solely to instruct everyday Cubans in literature and the arts, but also to extract them from their former places in the republican society – tied to their class and racial positions and biases – and unite them around revolutionary ideals. Through a process frequently expressed through the work’s own dialectical structure, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s 1968 film Memorias del subdesarrollo [Memories of Underdevelopment] gets to the core of how the nation positioned its citizens, embodied in the protagonists and those around him, to choose among “insile,” immediate exile, a position somewhere in between, or an active part in the revolutionary landscape. Instead of relying on ready-made assessments of cultural debates, the essays in this section assess multiple facets of seemingly conservative and experimental currents and discussions that characterized the revolution’s first three decades, from those early moments when it had not yet aligned itself with the Soviet Bloc to the practical and theoretical repercussions of the nation’s own international plights and of perestroika and glasnost on the island.

In Chapter 22, “Beginnings: Testimonios, Experimentalism, and Their Legacies,” Par Kumaraswami underscores the relationship in the 1960s and 1970s among literature, cultural trends, processes of legitimization, political actions, and newly founded institutions. Rather than focusing on the undebatable tensions within those decades’ cultural landscape, central within Chapter 23 and Chapter 24, Kumaraswami investigates how intermedial creations, and more specifically the testimonio, a genre she refers to as a “radical anticolonial and decolonizing experiment,” negotiate individual agency and collective identity. The hegemonic attitudes within that anticolonial project come to the fore in Chapter 23 on Cuban film from 1959–1989. Here Jessica Gordon-Burroughs not only explores the centrality of the Caribbean nation, the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC), and specific directors – Julio García Espinosa (1926–2016), Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (1928–1996), Humberto Solás (1941–2008), and Santiago Álvarez (1919–1998) – in the New Latin American Cinema movement, but also makes visible the many lesser-known creative agents who helped shape their authorial esthetics. In so doing she demonstrates how films by Sara Gómez (1942–1974) and Nicolás Guillén Landrián (1938–2003) must be viewed as critical contributions to the Cuban cinematic canon, which previously privileged the contributions of white men.

The demands of the collective sphere, along with individuation and standing out, is approached in a different manner by Paloma Duong in her analysis in Chapter 24 of the socialist worker-amateur citizen fostered by the revolutionary state. For her, the figures of the amateur and the “art instructor,” as well as the creation of local casas de cultura [houses of culture] become antidotes to capitalist consumer culture. Along with their positive, diversifying effects, Duong suggests, there comes a deep suspicion toward practitioners of so-called elitist culture. Within this process, she exposes how the state emerged as both benefactor and punisher. This persistence of and antagonism toward elitism are echoed within critics’ relationship to their objects of study, as recounted by Alexandra T. Vazquez in Chapter 25, “The Social Life of Music in Cuban Literary Culture.” Here she demonstrates that musicians and reading music are part and parcel of understanding Cuban literature, its temporality, geography, and community formation. Paying attention to popular music and the worlds it forges through the analysis of a postrevolutionary musical primer, as well as lyrics, sounds, and even visuality, provides Vázquez with an unexpectedly elaborate entrance into epochs that go far beyond their historical confines.

Community formation is also foregrounded in Chapter 26 by Idalia Morejón Arnaiz, on configurations of Latin Americanism by the renowned cultural organism Casa de las Américas. She provides a detailed overview of the diverse thematics and functions in the purview of Casa, which “positioned itself as beacon” for José Martí’s vision of the Americas. Morejón Arnaiz 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 prizes, a publishing house, and journals. That cosmopolitan circuits are entwined in very particular relationships to the nation is also explored in Chapter 27, “The Travels of Fiction in the Cuban Diaspora,” in which Rafael Rojas investigates the tensions between the so-called cosmopolitan and national realms throughout works of several writers who, after the revolution, spent much of their lives in the diaspora, and some of whom had careers in Cuban publications and institutions prior to their departure. His close readings of works by authors such as Nivaria Tejera (1929–2016), Julieta Campos (1932–2007), Severo Sarduy (1937–1993), Antonio Benítez Rojo (1931–2005), Jesús Díaz (1941–2002), and Eliseo Alberto (1951–2011) reveal heterogenous travelers’ gazes that frame Cuban history, literature, and identity at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries.

Although Cuban literature is a terrain about which critics might argue ad infinitum, the sheer number of Cuban poets never comes under dispute, and Kristin Dysktra in Chapter 28, “Cuba’s Poetic Imaginary (1959–1989),” had the difficult task of engaging the elaborate poetics set forth by poets on and off the island in the first three decades after the revolution. Her term “dramas of institutionalization” enables her to follow extremely divergent esthetic attitudes and geographical and political positioning by poets, such as Roberto Fernández Retamar (1930–2019), Heberto Padilla (1932–2000), Eliana Rivero (1941–), Jesús Cos Causse (1945–2007), Gustavo Pérez Firmat (1949–), Soleida Ríos (1950–), Lourdes Gil (1950–), Reina María Rodríguez (1952–), Angel Escobar (1957–1997), Ramón Fernández-Larrea (1958–), and Rolando Prats (1959–), among many others, some of whom are studied more in-depth in Chapters 31 and 43. Like Dykstra’s, those chapters are challenged by the breadth of Cuba’s extraordinary poetic production that draws from colloquialism, interdisciplinarity, and linguistic confluence among many other strategies.

Literary figures whose spells are cast grandiosely upon the worlds they inhabited and whose legacies permeate future works often end up in these positions not solely on account of their own indisputable talent, but also because of the interconnections between their person and history. For instance, the stories of cultural publications in the 1950s, like the longstanding Bohemia and Carteles, and of the new postrevolutionary initiative of the early 1960s, Lunes de Revolución, cannot be understood without tracing the key role that Guillermo Cabrera Infante (1929–2005) played in them during these years. But, as Isabel Alvarez Borland details in Chapter 29 on his work, it is also the case that Cabrera Infante’s own masterpieces, Tres Tristes Tristes (1967) [Three Trapped Tigers] (1971) and Vista del amanecer en el trópico (1974) [View of Dawn in the Tropics] (1978) are more fully illuminated by pursuing such connections. In making these links, Alvarez Borland proposes that the convergences in his journalism, cinema criticism, and fiction created his “poetics of the fragment,” which embodied a privileging of “ambiguity over didacticism in art.” Something similar occurs with Reinaldo Arenas (1943–1990). In Chapter 30 by José A. Quiroga, readers get the feeling that Cuban literature as a whole would have been entirely distinct had Arenas not existed. Calling Antes que anochezca (1992) [Before Night Falls] (2000) “the best-known Cuban book to have never been published in Cuba,” Quiroga explores the relationship to imagination, literary history, desire, pleasure, and death that pervades its author’s oeuvre. Arenas once asked for enough time to “complete his memoirs.” Quiroga agilely transcends this moment to make readers viscerally feel Arenas’s importance for individuals and communities composed of queer, dissident, and marginalized individuals in Cuba and worldwide.

Part V: Cuba and Its Diasporas into the New Millennium

This volume is marked throughout by the impulse to read Cuban literature through extratextual realms, at the same time that it insists upon tackling literary history on its own terms. Nowhere are these interpretative tendencies more evident than in Part V, which addresses the epoch emergent in the 1980s, in which rupture was a pervasive quality, not solely within philosophy – postmodernism was internalized by Cuban literati worldwide – but also in terms of historical circumstances. As the essays in this section unpack, the disintegration of the Soviet Bloc had traumatic effects in Cuba, yet also productive consequences in the cultural sphere.

Chapter 31 captures a different moment on an island and in a diaspora that Reinaldo Arenas unfortunately never got to know. Despite that, his is an important influence on many writers of much younger generations, such as Ahmel Echevarría (1974–), whose work was frequently published in la noria, one of the “alternative cultural projects” that Walfrido Dorta addresses in this chapter, along with Paideia, Diáspora(s), Torre de Letras, and OMNI Zona Franca. From the 1980s to the second decade of the twenty-first century, forms of creativity and collaboration proliferated, often beyond the contours of revolutionary institutions and beyond what Pascale Casanova termed “the world republic of letters.” Understanding how these projects emerged and what they were responding to nationally and internationally also elucidates a new and distinct era of largely digital publications like Rialta Magazine and El Estornudo, the latter headlined by journalist/novelist Carlos Manuel Álvarez (1989–), whose raw and sometimes embittered poetics also have points in contact with Arenas. To contemplate the terms “alternative,” “independent,” “state-sponsored,” “capitalistic,” and “sell-out” in complete isolation from one another is tempting, but it is more fruitful to imagine them on a continuum, with the awareness that future knowledge may cast a different light on our highly politicized object of study.

The Cuba-based “independent” publishing house in Matanzas, Ediciones Vigía, the subject of Chapter 32, is exceptional not solely because its books are exquisitely rustic and well crafted, and because its founders in 1985, writer Alfredo Zaldívar Muñoa (1956–) and the poet, graphic designer, and set designer Rolando Estévez Jordán (1953–2023), did not initially seek for Vigía to be a proper publishing house, but rather a space for encounters. Instead, comparable to Torre de Letras, a small press led by Reina María Rodríguez with Jorge Miralles in Havana, Vigía came into being through a network of friends functioning as makers, critics, and collaborators. This was the case, for instance, of Linda Howe, who, as early as 2005, began curating Vigía’s books for US exhibitions, and of Juanamaría Cordones-Cook, author of Chapter 32, who organized a conference, exhibits, and documentary films about the project. Situating the publishing enterprise within Matanzas’s rich and disturbing cultural history, which, as she details, was forged by slavery and the amassing of sugar wealth in the nineteenth century, Cordones-Cook analyzes the twentieth-century economic factors that contributed to the Vigía endeavor and provides illuminating and detailed information about its unique strategies of bricolage and convergences among multiple artistic forms.

The economic hardships faced by Vigía characterized the 1990s as a whole, known officially as the “Special Period in Times of Peace.” In Chapter 33, Esther Whitfield puts forth as “the primary Special Period trope” the “‘living ruin,’ in which unbridled human vitality persists against a backdrop of urban decay and political anachronism,” with dirty realist Pedro Juan Gutiérrez (1950–) and Antonio José Ponte (1964–) “bookend[ing] the [period’s] spectrum of possibilities.” More visibilization of racial inequities; greater permissiveness toward homoeroticism, and representations of tourism and sex as well as poverty; and a range of attitudes toward the Soviet period are some of this fiction’s many transformations outlined by Whitfield. The aftermath of Soviet disintegration also had a serious impact on film, as evidenced in Chapter 34, “Critique and Decentralization in Cuban Film after 1989,” by Ann Marie Stock and Dean Luis Reyes, but it is only one of many factors that transformed the audiovisual landscape over three decades. Stock and Reyes identify challenges tackled by filmmakers, leading to an increasingly tense relationship with the ICAIC. As they show, films of all lengths and genres, replete with Cuban versions of manga, gangsters, and zombies, did not just question what constitutes state-sponsored, independent, national, and transnational films, but also carried out a revision of Cuban history, from the distant and not-so-distant past to everyday life.

In Chapter 35, “The Temporality of Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Cuban Theater,” Camilla Stevens reveals a “recurrent search for self-determination and identity” at the core of this period’s production. The birth of modern Cuban theater between 1902 and 1959 is Stevens’s point of departure to elaborate upon representations of family and the disintegrating republic in the mid-twentieth century, characterized by a “non-progressive temporality” within works by Virgilio Piñera (1912–1979) and José Triana (1931–2018). The past, contrasted to the utopian-seeking revolutionary present, unfolds in work by, for example, Abelardo Estorino (1925–2013) and Eugenio Espinosa Hernández (1936–2022). Stevens suggests, however, that by the end of the twentieth century such a paradigm was diminishing. Instead, frustration and desire for change are undeniable within the work of Alberto Pedro Torriente (1954–2005) and Ulises Rodríguez Febles (1968–) and within the many new theater collectives, for example El Ciervo Encantado, that arose in the midst of the socioeconomic and political crises of the Special Period and beyond.

Given such pervasive disillusionment, it is difficult to believe that there was a time, not long before, when Latin Americans looked toward a sovereign and revolutionary Cuba as its leader. Latin Americanism, for example, as discussed by Idalia Morejón Arnaiz in Chapter 26, needs to be understood in light of that relationship. Moreover, Cuba’s sense of exceptionalism, dating back, as this volume argues, to the eighteenth century, has meant that its own identification with other parts of the world is complicated. The parts of the world to which Cuba has had ties, but toward which its writers have conveyed conflicting feelings, include Haiti. In Chapter 36, on the reverberating presence of Haiti in Cuban literature, Elzbieta Sklodowska states that after the Haitian Revolution, “the two islands, separated by the fifty-mile strait of the Windward Passage, became inextricably linked politically, economically, and culturally,” and it is that link, from the early nineteenth century to the twenty-first century, that she explores, through sketches of everyday customs to ethnographic surrealism and fiction. Her extensive investigation shows Cuban writers evoking a myriad of themes beyond the Haitian Revolution, including syncretic religious beliefs and spirituality (James Figarola, Mayra Montero), musical genres and dances (Olavo Alén and Adriana Méndez Rodenas), the roundups of Haitians and forced repatriations (Dalia Timitoc Borrero, Antonio Benítez Rojo, and Gloria Rolando), migration (Marta Rojas), the condemnation of the exploitation of workers (many of whom are Haitians) (Luis Felipe Rodríguez, Lino Novás Calvo), “ethnographic surrealism” and the “political impact of Vodou spirituality” (Alejo Carpentier), and Haitian otherness (Mirta Yáñez, Abel Prieto, and Marcial Gala).

Other idiosyncrasies within Cubans’ representation and recollection of their role in another nation’s history are examined in Chapter 37, “Cuban Afterlives of the Cuban and Angolan Revolutions.” Here Lanie Millar combs through multifaceted firsthand accounts within poetry and literary and documentary narratives representing the experiences of the encounter between the two countries during Fidel Castro’s mobilization of Cubans to Angola in the mid-1970s, the nation’s most significant international mission. According to Millar, in the early years of the encounter, this body of work highlighted historical parallels of liberation from colonialism and celebrations of Cuban sacrifices, but it also revealed shared linguistic and cultural misunderstandings and the reproduction of stereotypes of Africa and Africans. Works on the subject published in the late twentieth century and first two decades of the twenty-first, by contrast, generally manifest the war’s after-effects, highlighting “isolation, miscommunication, and uncertainty.”

Such missions were intertwined with the Cuban state’s decisive casting of the Cuban nation as modern. Despite the debates over whether Cuba was acting in Angola as surrogate for the Soviet Union or autonomously, the notion of modernity it embraced pertained to a scientific-materialist concept of the universe and a Soviet-inspired vision of scientific advancement. It should come as no surprise, then, that in the aftermath of the 1959 revolution, there was a “new enthusiasm for the genre [of science fiction] among the island’s writers,” fleshed out by Emily A. Maguire in Chapter 38, “Anti-Exceptionalism in Detective Fiction, Speculative Fiction, and Graphic Novels.” Maguire details trends within these three genres, along with their relationship to other bodies of knowledge and literary production, on the island and elsewhere. Through reading authors as diverse as Yoss (born José Miguel Sánchez Gómez, 1969–), Daína Chaviano (1957–), Leonardo Padura Fuentes (1955–), Jorge Enrique Lage (1979–), and Arturo Infante (1977–), among others, readers take the temperature not just of ideology, morality, and everyday realities, but also of dreams for a better planet, less tempered by utopian discourses of the past. That women writers feature less frequently in some of these discussions is undeniable. It was not until the 1990s when women writers emerged en masse so undeniably that critics often touted the following few decades as the “boom” of Cuban women’s literature. In Chapter 39 on Cuban women’s writing at the turn of the millennium, Mabel Cuesta pays detailed attention to the patriarchy and “state machismo” that, she argues, are challenged by the seven paradigmatic writers whose work she explores. They are Mylene Fernández Pintado (1963–), Mariela Varona (1964–), Anna Lidia Vega Serova (1968–), Jacqueline Herranz-Brooks (1968–), Mildre Hernández (1972), Yordanka Almaguer (1975–), and Martha Luisa Hernández Cadenas (1991–).

In Chapter 40, David Tenorio embarks on another story about invisibilized subjects, some of whom wrote works that formed part of the Cuban literary canon, but whose lives were seen as problematic for the revolutionary state. This was especially the case when their intersectional identities somehow threatened hegemonic biases. The “queering” in the chapter title, “Queering the Revolution and Its Diasporas,” shows the extent to which a preoccupation with sexual practices and gender identities is at the core of the Cuban revolutionary state and the homophobic legacies it inherited from the bourgeois past. Tenorio teases this out by exploring critical and theoretical rereadings, in addition to musical, literary, and cinematographic productions wherein queerness emerges as central to the nation and its diasporas. In Chapter 41 on performance art, Bretton White elucidates another arena in which Cuban artists have made visible what otherwise might have been hidden. Surprisingly, given the apparent ephemerality of performance, the body of work she explores is among the Cuban art that is most well known worldwide, sometimes for unfortunate reasons such as a controversial death, (Ana Mendieta [1948–1985]), detainment/house arrest (Tania Bruguera [1968–]), or imprisonment (Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara [1987–]). Dividing the topic into four overlapping themes – play, betweenness, memory, and voice – White explores the ways that individuals using an art form that unites physical body and message intervene in varied sociopolitical and cultural fields.

Dunja Fehimović and Zaira Zarza’s approach to film in Chapter 42, “Twenty-First-Century Cuban Film and Diaspora,” demonstrates how archipelagic thinking helps elucidate the “transnational connections, translations, and collaborations” constituting Cuban cinema that entail a difficult reckoning. They dissect this landscape using four categories – “outgoing journeys, returning diasporas, on-island films about migration, and representations of exile from inside Cuba” – in their analysis of Juan Pablo Daranas’s Ángela (2018), Sebastián and Rodrigo Barriuso’s 2018 Un traductor [A Translator], Armando Capó’s Agosto (2019), and José Luis Aparicio’s 2021 Sueños al pairo [Dreams Adrift]. Facile geographical or temporal limits can be inadequate methods of structuring literary production, as Fehimović and Zarza make strikingly clear, but they can sometimes serve as provisionary tools to establish currents, as in Marta Hernández Salván and Milena Rodríguez Gutiérrez’s Chapter 43, “Cuba’s Poetic Imaginary (1989–2020).” The poetry that takes center stage in this chapter is rich with experimentalism, and is in dialogue with the coloquialista [conversationalist] poets. With the disillusionment of the disintegration of the Soviet Bloc, poets like Reina María Rodríguez (1952–), Marilyn Bobes (1955–), and Soleida Ríos (1950–) were at the forefront of antiheroic representations and of reinvigorating philosophical thought. As Hernández Salván and Rodríguez Gutiérrez illustrate, the embrace of detotalization and deterritorialization, intertextuality, and hybridity is brought to distinct forms of radical ruptures in the poetry of Juan Carlos Flores (1962–2016), Omar Pérez (1964–), and Legna Rodríguez Iglesias (1984–).

Another place where deterritorialization makes it particularly difficult to decipher questions of belonging through categories is in Chapter 44 on Cuban fiction in the US, where Iraida H. López reveals what is at stake in the category of “Cuban America.” Whereas Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s literature and criticism popularized the notion of hyphenated identities beginning in the 1990s, López conveys a plethora of issues around Cuban Americanness for a rich and diverse ensemble of writers who, having arrived to the US in different eras, may write in English, Spanish, or a mix of the two, and whose relationship to their country of origin – Cuba or the United States – is complicated at best. Chapter 45 on theater of the Cuban diaspora, authored by Lillian Manzor, who has herself been crucial to the survival of this artform through her Cuban Digital Theater Archive, examines Cubans’ contributions to elaborate theater scenarios and initiatives in New York and Miami since the 1960s, some of whom, like Irene Fornés (1931–2018) and Nilo Cruz (1960–), have been instrumental within US American drama as a whole. In addition to these well-established groups, theatrical forums, and figures, Manzor carves out the role of “new-millennium playwrights,” most of whom were born in the US, but who continue to evoke a painful connection to the island.

Epilogue

In Chapter 46, Alan West-Durán’s closing essay for this volume draws on metaphors of opera to offer a layered meditation on recurrent themes, teleologies, and tropes of identity, exceptionalism, and authenticity that have been “stated, reworked, subverted, abandoned, and resurrected” in Cuban literary culture from the end of the nineteenth century into the third decade of the twenty-first. Revisiting such figures as Martí, Casal, Carpentier, Guillén, Lezama, Lorenzo García Vega, Piñera, Arenas, Fernández Retamar, and Antonio José Ponte, among others – and noting the writings of numerous literary women and men of different postrevolutionary generations who echo, mythologize, undermine, or shift directions from these legacies – West-Durán asks that we attune ourselves to the performative voices through which this operatic literary history unfolds.

Following the forty-six essays, this volume concludes with a comprehensive secondary bibliography that incorporates but also expands on key sources cited by the volume’s authors. This selection encompasses some studies that were pioneering for their moment and that have withstood the test of time in their continuing impact, as well as work that embodies current trends and points toward future directions.