Chapter 16 - Langston Hughes in Cuba and South America

Summary

Hughes did not travel in South America, and his contacts with fellow writers from the southern part of the hemisphere all began elsewhere, notably in Mexico, Spain, and Cuba. This chapter focuses on the circulation of the Spanish translations of Hughes’s poetry in the Hispanic Americas and on the different literary and political personae that Spanish-language translators and journalists constructed for him. For some, Hughes was the race-man celebrated as the purported progenitor of black poetry in the Hispanic world. For others, he was the black Marxist who wrote poetry in the service of global revolutionary politics. While Hughes played both roles at different times in his career, his dedication to black internationalism would eventually prove untenable in the Hispanic Americas.