The Introduction lays out the theoretical and political stakes of the book. It shows how abolitionist white radicals saw enslavement as a diseased part of the national body that had to be lopped off. Through an exploration of political speeches, cartoons, song-sheets, sermons, fiction, and poetry, the author shows how the amputated bodies of Civil War veterans represented the possibility of a new kind of nation that had Black citizenship at its core.

This introduction first examines what the shifting shapes, geographic relocations, and contextual debates embodied in sculpted monuments to Cuba’s literary-cultural figures tell us about the travels over time and location of Cuban literary culture itself, in order to posit the antimonumentalizing approach to its topic taken by The Cambridge History of Cuban Literature, recognizing the always unfinished, dynamic quality of such histories as they are told and retold from different locations. Exemplifying this approach, the introduction unpacks the complexities inherent in the terms constituting the volume’s title – “history,” “Cuban,” and “literature” – for a book crafted in the twenty-first century, as well as the challenges of literary-cultural “translation” implicit in a volume written in English and conceptualized from the United States about a literary tradition created primarily in Spanish, but also in French, German, English, and, at moments, in Haitian Creole or Kreyòl or Angolan Portuguese. After then reviewing the book’s relationship to existing scholarship, the introduction offers brief summaries of the book’s forty-six essays by fifty-one contributing authors.

This chapter examines the abundance of Cuban fiction that emerged in the “Special Period in Times of Peace,” roughly between the period’s official designation in 1990 and the mid-2000s, as well as major scholarship on the period. Positing the “living ruin” as the period’s primary trope, the chapter sees in this fiction a persistent, unbridled human vitality against a backdrop of urban decay, disenchantment, and political anachronism, with dirty realist Pedro Juan Gutiérrez and Antonio José Ponte as bookends to the period’s spectrum of thematic and formal possibilities. Other fiction writers examined include, among others, José Miguel Sánchez (Yoss), Leonardo Padura Fuentes, Abilio Estévez, Ena Lucía Portela, Senel Paz, Jesús Díaz, Eliseo Alberto, Wendy Guerra, José Manuel Prieto, Anna Lidia Vega Serova, Adelaida Fernández de Juan, and Antonio Armenteros. Among the major transformations registered in this fiction are increased visibility of racial inequities, greater permissiveness toward homoeroticism, representations of tourism and sex as well as poverty, and a range of attitudes toward the Soviet period.

Based on Political Essay on the Island of Cuba by Alexander von Humboldt, this chapter scrutinizes the interactive impact of his ideas about Cuba with those of the island’s criollo intellectual elite, in particular Francisco de Arango y Parreño and José de la Luz y Caballero, also noting the assessment of those collaborations by Vidal Morales y Morales and, in the twentieth century’s first half, by Fernando Ortiz. Central to the 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. The chapter 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, the chapter reinforces his indispensability to imaginings of an antislavery, scientific, and even independentist Cuba.

This chapter addresses the bountiful field of nineteenth-century Cuban poets, highlighting their transatlantic interactions with global Romanticism in creating a corpus of self-consciously “Cuban” literature that forged many of the foundational themes in Cuban political culture and rhetoric, including exile and an “amorous cathexis” to the island, all against the backdrop of racialized slavery and colonialism. Focusing on work by José María Heredia, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés (Plácido), José Jacinto Milanés, Juan Francisco Manzano, Juan Clemente Zenea, and Luisa Pérez de Zambrana, and noting the embrace by Cuban poets of European poetry and lyric conventions, the chapter underscores in Cuban Romanticism the cultural role of the local tertulias of Domingo del Monte and Nicolás Azcárate; the vernacular contexts permeated by slavery and decrying its atrocities; the drive to alter Cuba’s colonial status; 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.

This chapter examines the elaborate poetics set forth by Cuban poets on and off the island in the first three decades after the Cuban Revolution. Using the concept of “dramas of institutionalization,” the chapter traces the (sometimes extremely) divergent esthetic attitudes and geographical and political positioning by poets such as Roberto Fernández Retamar, Heberto Padilla, Eliana Rivero, Jesús Cos Causse, Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Soleida Ríos, Lourdes Gil, Reina María Rodríguez, Angel Escobar, Ramón Fernández-Larrea, and Rolando Prats, among others. The accounts and analyses of Cuba’s voluminous poetic production elucidate its uses of colloquialism, interdisciplinarity, and linguistic confluence, among many other strategies.

Framing Reinaldo Arenas’s memoir Antes que anochezca [Before Night Falls] as “the best-known Cuban book to have never been published in Cuba,” this chapter explores the relationship to imagination, literary history, desire, pleasure, and death that pervades its author’s entire oeuvre. With readings, along with the memoir, of the fictions Celestino antes del alba (1967), El palacio de las blanquísimas mofetas (1982), Viaje a La Habana: Novela en tres viajes (1990), La loma del Ángel (1987), and El color del verano o nuevo jardín de las delicias (1991) and with allusions to other works, the chapter sees Arenas’s work as successive acts of revenge against all conformity and against all that sought to constrain imaginative freedom. This underscores his importance for individuals and communities composed of queer, dissident, and marginalized individuals in Cuba and worldwide.

This chapter examines the work of Alejo Carpentier, who achieved canonical status linked to the 1960s Latin American Boom but whose body of work registers distinct literary-cultural moments of Cuba’s and Latin America’s almost entire twentieth century and who, unlike many other Cuban writers of his generation, 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), the chapter suggests that the writer’s prevarications regarding his origins tell us something about notions of belonging and membership in Cuba in the republican and revolutionary periods. The chapter organizes its concise overview of Carpentier’s entire oeuvre into successive periods of Carpentier’s “becoming” – first a Cuban, then a Latin American writer, and then a writer of the revolution.

This chapter investigates the tensions between the so-called cosmopolitan and national realms in works of several writers who departed the island at various points after Cuba’s 1959 revolution, spending much of their subsequent lives in the diaspora in Mexico, Spain, Paris, or the US. Some of these writers had impactful careers in Cuban publications and institutions prior to their departure. Through close readings of the fiction of Nivaria Tejera, Julieta Campos, Severo Sarduy, Antonio Benítez Rojo, Jesús Díaz, and Eliseo Alberto, the chapter unpacks the heterogenous travelers’ gazes and experiences that frame Cuban history, literature, and identity at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries.

This chapter examines Cuba’s most renowned nineteenth-century writer, José Martí, also known as the 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, the chapter considers 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 the context of rapid modernization, urban growth, and immigration, this chapter examines the fiction of Carlos Montenegro, Lino Novás Calvo (both working-class Spanish immigrants), and Ofelia Rodríguez Acosta (a feminist from a bourgeois background). The analysis elucidates the emergence from the 1920s to 1940s of new urban characters whose stories were brought into Cuban literature by these writers, and these characters’ complex enactment of the intertwining of class, gender orientation, sexuality, and race. The chapter’s comparative analyses of work by writers who all enjoyed 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, and 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 of sexuality, marriage, motherhood, and heteronormativity.

This chapter 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 both ephemeral and longer-lived newspapers and magazines, the chapter unpacks questions of normative practices, cultural tastes, linguistic correction, and the tensions among the informational, didactic, and entertainment functions of the printed word and with the literary-artistic value implicit in the notions of the “highbrow,” all of which were raised by the democratization of print culture’s outreach to anybody who could read or find someone to read to them. An analysis of the shifting meanings of the words periodismo [journalism] and lo literario [the literary] anchors these questions, in a chapter that 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, by a few enslaved individuals, and by white women.

In a detailed analysis of selections from Dulce María Loynaz’s poetry and nonfiction prose, and her radically experimental avant-garde novel Jardín (1951), this chapter demonstrates 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 changing times and shifting literary styles, consistently resisted classification in any category other than, perhaps, the paradoxical. The essay highlights throughout the “mixed 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.

This chapter addresses the literary-artistic worlds marking the work of Cuban fiction writer, journalist, and film critic Guillermo Cabrera Infante, demonstrating first that 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 Cabrera Infante played in them during these years. But, as the chapter details, Cabrera Infante’s own masterpieces, Tres tristes tigres (1967) and Vista del amanecer en el trópico (1974), are also more fully illuminated by pursuing such connections. In making these links, the chapter proposes that the convergences in Cabrera Infante’s journalism, cinema criticism, and fiction created a “poetics of the fragment” that embodied a privileging of ambiguity over didacticism in art.

This chapter examines what critics have often called the “boom” of women’s literary writing that emerged beginning in the 1990s, providing detailed analyses of challenges to the patriarchy and to “state machismo” that, the chapter argues, are enacted by seven paradigmatic women writers of the period: Mylene Fernández Pintado, Mariela Varona, Anna Lidia Vega Serova, Jacqueline Herranz-Brooks, Mildre Hernández, Yordanka Almaguer, and Martha Luisa Hernández Cadenas. Key to the emergence of these writers, who stand in for numerous other women who began publishing after 1989, the chapter argues, was the groundbreaking appearance in 1996 of the story anthology Estatuas de sal: Cuentistas cubanas contemporáneas: Panorama crítico (1959–1995), edited by Mirta Yáñez and Marilyn Bobes, the first island-published anthology featuring only women authors and women living in exile. The anthology’s characters and situations generated a new national and transnational discourse, the chapter posits, and were reproduced rhizome-like in the following decades through hundreds of stories and novels written by the authors it included and others.