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This chapter outlines the challenges facing Cuba's construction of itself as a modern nation in the wake of its independence from Spain. To address Cuba's postcolonial condition (including the existence of racial others), Cuban writers borrowed freely from both ethnographic and literary conventions to create texts that could mediate the distance between Cuba's lived reality and the nation these intellectuals were engaged in reimagining. As the chapter chronicles Cuban race relations up to and following independence, it traces the representation of blackness in literature of the period. It also outlines the development of ethnography and examines the conditions that influenced the creation of a literature with an “ethnographic spirit,” designed to harness and at the same time neutralize cultural blackness on the island in order to identify Cuba as a modern nation.

The overthrow of Cuban president and dictator Fulgencio Batista in January of 1959, and the triumph of the 26 of July Movement and its charismatic leader Fidel Castro initiated a radical restructuring of many aspects of Cuban society. In the space of two years, both the makeup of the Cuban body politic and the idea of what Cuba underwent when it went through an abrupt, dramatic transformation. Even as the possibility of a single coherent national project became all the more vexed, ethnographic literature was a part of this dramatic transformation of the Cuban imaginary. With the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, the island—and its writers—entered a new moment of national re-definition. This epilogue traces the shifts in the relationship between the ethnographic and the literary and the discourse surrounding blackness in Cuba in the wake of the Revolution. The leaders of the Revolution declared that it had eradicated racism; to talk about racial difference was to focus unnecessarily on divisions of the past. As this revolutionary rhetoric closed the space for discussing race, the space for discursive encounter also changed. Among writers on the island, encounters between ethnography and literature, while still innovative, moved in ways that bolstered the larger narrative of the Cuban Revolution. In an effort to contest the Revolutionary cooptation of earlier texts, Cabrera, in exile in Miami, returned to a more conservative—and more nostalgic—form of ethnographic narration.

This chapter outlines the theoretical framework in which this study is located, emphasising the process's ideological continuum, and the existence, nature and function of different spaces within a constantly changing context, as well as considering the dominant patterns of interpretation in analyses of Cuban literature and culture since 1959. It also looks at the idea of a different notion of value, suggesting an essential framework for understanding the whole question. The chapter ends by setting out the conceptual tools and methods that have been developed here in order to understand literary culture in the Revolution.

This chapter provides a postnational perspective on Cuban history, culture, and its literature, from the moment of its invention until the Castro era. Many of our theories and epistemologies are informed by spatial and static views that keep us from recognizing the highly dynamic developments and processes at their base. As an alternative, Ette appeals to a transition from history informed by spatiality to a history shaped by movement. By examining the first examples of early modern cartography, Ette argues that Cuba had been perceived from the moment of discovery as a potential global island. Furthermore, the author cites prime examples of Cuban literature, among them the works of José Martí, that follow a logic of inclusion, not one of exclusion, based on a theory of global relationality. Given the fact that Cuban literature has been written on all continents—mostly in Spanish, but also on a translingual level in the respective languages of the countries of exile—the idea of Cuba as a global island could become part of a trans-areal archipelago, one built upon the foundation of symmetrical relations that develop a relational logic in accordance with the ongoing process of globalization.

This chapter covers the history of literary culture over the next twenty-eight years, 1961–89, which showed more of a common internal pattern than that whole period shared with the opening years. Each phase's character marked it out from the preceding and following phases: 1961–67 saw the cultural authorities' main focus on the reader, rather than the writer; in 1967–76 the focus shifted to literature's social context, namely both an internal Cuban context and an external context, in the Third World; and in 1977–89, the focus shifted to the book itself, and to publishing, while correcting the neglect of the writer. However, nothing changed the overall emerging emphasis of the strategy for a literary culture, largely determined from 1961 and following the same principles until the crisis of 1989–94, following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

This chapter examines the annual Havana Book Fair (the Feria Internacional del Libro de La Habana, hereafter the Feria), seen here as a revealing microcosm of that literary culture, not just for 2000–11 but also of the whole post-1959 project, with its special unchallenged value placed on literature, the book and reading. After 2000, the Feria was given new purpose and impetus, to develop as an event combining the commercial, publisher-focused nature of the conventional book fair with the author-focused literary festival. It became a social phenomenon with the status of a national fiesta, similar to a festival of culture, with a range of political, cultural and social purposes.

This concluding chapter considers author Evelio Grillo (Black Cuban, Black American: A Memoir), a prominent figure in discussions of Afro-Cuban American literature. The recovery of Black Cuban, Black American compensates for the “irrecoverability” of its earlier-period Afro-Cuban American context, as well as its two representative figures: Alberto O'Farrill and Eusebia Cosme. O'Farrill's and Cosme's irrecoverability is due, partially, to the ephemerality of their performance texts. The fact of their afrolatinidad in the entertainment industries of the early twentieth-century Americas made finding work and leaving a trace even more difficult. Meanwhile, in Black Cuban, Black American, a “living author” articulates these dead ones; Grillo offers his text in a way that recalls their places. The chapter closes with discussing another group of Grillo fragments, the nine issues of the online journal Asili: The Journal of Multicultural Heartspeak.

This study started by posing a question about the apparent contradiction between the fact that literature in Cuba since 1959 seems to have been both relatively privileged and problematic. This chapter argues that this question is an over-simplification of a highly complex reality, but also that the apparent contradiction arises in great part from the implications of the special value which literature has always held within the equally complex phenomenon of revolutionary change since 1959. In the Cuban case, the situation of an almost universally literate population that was created by the Literacy Campaign and subsequent educational programmes would thus have heightened the desire to control the production of literature. The chapter ends by reiterating the centrality of literary culture to the Cuban Revolution.

This chapter shows how revolutionary enthusiasms, experimental magazines, and translation fueled inter-American relations in the 1960s on the countercultural left. Previous critics note the Boom, but most US accounts of the period’s poetry center on the intra-national polarities (“margin versus mainstream” or “raw versus cooked”) inflamed by Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry (1960). The chapter instead describes a larger formation called “the new inter-American poetry,” recovering dialogues best emblematized by the hemispheric little magazine El Corno Emplumado, and the reciprocations engendered between the works of rebellious Beats and revolutionary Cuban barbudos, Paul Blackburn and Julio Cortázar, Clayton Eshleman and Javier Heraud, Pablo Neruda among his English translators, and others. These exchanges were not without their blind spots, and the chapter concludes by comparing the communities imagined by Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems (1964) to poems by contemporaneous visitors to Manhattan such as Mario Benedetti (Uruguay) and Alcides Iznaga (Cuba).

This concluding chapter explores how the narrative of new memory is a locus for empowerment. The more frequent development in the narrative of new memory in Cuban American literatures and literatures about or portraying Central American characters has everything to do with the specificity of difference among immigrants, exiles, and refugees. Indeed, the portrayal of exiles and refugees can offer authors the space to write new memories of their relationships to their own nations of origin, to nations they have emigrated to, or to nations with which they may wish to develop solidarity. Because of the generational and cultural variations between their literatures, the critical models currently existing for understanding US multiethnic literatures need revision.

The second part of the book is not divided into chapters. Rather, it is composed of sections of varying length. Its central concern is to trace the treatment of the question of the void in the writing and thought of José Lezama Lima. This entails an examination of Lezama’s reading of the history of void throughout the Western philosophical, religious, political, and artistic traditions. The central tension of this section lies in tracing Lezama’s engagement and ultimate unworking of the structure of a transcendental dictation, which informs and splits the subject, and which is the structure central to modern political and aesthetic subjectivity. Taken together, these readings can be understood as the unfolding of Lezama’s own highly idiosyncratic and baroque take on the question of the ontological difference (which he ironically and famously dismissed in his comments on Heidegger). The central insight that ensues is that of a thought on time that is beyond the forming or framing dialectic of the One and the Many. It is in this idea of a time beyond Time(s) that we find Lezama’s most radical political insights.

Novás Calvo's Pedro Blanco, el negrero novelizes the life of an infamous slave trader from Málaga who was responsible for the transportation of thousands of enslaved Africans to Cuba early in the nineteenth century. His Atlantic is a space of international exchange, aloosely regulated space where the forces of nature and currents created conditions for massive accumulations of capital. This essay argues that Novás Calvo writes against the narrative of European superiority through a depiction of the Atlantic Ocean as the determining his fate. Finally, the essay makes a methodological claim for reading transatlantically as a means to appreciate the Atlantic as both a space and a place that shaped human culture on land, at seas, and there lations among them.