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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The book concludes with a meditation on the movement to remove statues of Confederate veterans and officers from public spaces throughout the South. This development is seen as an extension of the theory of amputation promulgated throughout the book: that removal is both a reminder of a white supremacist past and a repudiation of it, as well as a hopeful projection of an antiracist future.

This chapter examines early-twentieth-century representations of Black Cubans, primarily by white intellectuals seeking to consolidate an assuring image of nationhood that would be understandable within Eurocentric hegemonic epistemology. These include Fernando Ortiz’s early criminalization of Black Cuban religion, viewed as primitive and ignorant; terrorizing warnings by Ramiro Guerra against “Haitianization”; the Black protagonists in the first two novels by Alejo Carpentier, isolated in the first by a lack of agency and in the second enveloped in the uncanniness of the Surrealism-inspired “marvelous real”; portrayals by Lydia Cabrera of religious practices attributed to Black Cubans with condescension; early poems by Nicolás Guillén and his portrayal of “Cuban color” as a mestizo identity; and Ortiz’s subsequent concept of multiethnic transculturation, considered as a more detailed elaboration of Guillén’s earlier idea. But even this “mestizo happy-ending,” the chapter argues, suppressed sexual violence against the stereotyped Black female body, unaddressed until Nancy Morejón, writing after the 1959 revolution, located that experience in the literary renditions of Cuban history.

This chapter unpacks the relationship between the ethnographic and literary work of Lydia Cabrera, 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 Edward Kamau 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, the chapter showcases her choices in translating Aimé Césaire and her impact on his and Suzanne Césaire’s translation of Léo Frobenius’s ethnographic work. These activities are then compared 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.

This chapter examines the reverberating presence of Haiti in Cuban literature, in the context of the inextricable political, economic, and cultural ties linking the two nations from the early nineteenth-century Haitian Revolution into the twenty-first century. Examined in writing ranging from sketches of everyday customs to ethnographic surrealism and fiction, the chapter showcases Cuban writers evoking a myriad of themes beyond the Haitian Revolution, including syncretic religious beliefs and spirituality (Joel James Figarola, Mayra Montero); musical genres and dances (Olavo Alén and Méndez Rodenas); the round-ups 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 were 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).