This chapter focuses on the poetry, fiction, and essays of José Lezama Lima, the Grupo Orígenes he cofounded, and its literary journal of the same name, noting their reverberations far into the postrevolutionary era. The chapter encompasses the work and poetics of Lezama, other poets in the Orígenes orbit, and the group’s journals, including 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 experienced in Cuba’s postrevolutionary periods. Lezama’s 1957 essay La expresión américana is central to an in-depth analysis of the Orígenes group’s “grand mosaic of hemispheric and transatlantic creation”; Lezama’s intricate conception of a New World Baroque; and the essay’s projection, as in other writing by Lezama, of a distinctively Caribbean Baroque, even as specific Antillean referents remain unnamed.

Chapter 3 focuses on Anna E. Dickinson, a little-read but in her time central abolitionist and antiracist activist, lecturer, and novelist. A riveting speaker who was a major voice for Radical Republicans, Dickinson toured the country addressing mixed-gender audiences on abolition, women’s suffrage, the right for unions to organize, and antiracism. Dickinson’s first novel, What Answer? (1868), follows an interracial couple, William Surrey and Francesca Ercildoune, from their first meeting in 1861 to their deaths in 1863 at the hands of a New York Draft Riot mob. It ends with a climactic scene in which Francesca’s brother, Robert Ercildoune, accompanied by a white friend. attempts to vote in a local 1865 election and is barred by racist poll-goers. The novel takes on issues raised by the debates around the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment that were raging while Dickinson was writing What Answer? Both the Amendment and the novel take as their central theme Black citizenship, without which the losses of the Civil War, represented by the many amputee characters in the book, would have been in vain.

This chapter addresses the “lost” epic poem Espejo de paciencia (1608) by Silvestre de Balboa, which was rediscovered in 1836 and has, since then, been considered the first work of Cuban literature, a status that has also been contested. The poem narrates the 1604 kidnapping and freeing of a Spanish prelate, then Bishop of Cuba, by French pirates. The chapter first examines the poem’s archival history, the nineteenth-century debates about slavery and race that framed the poem’s consideration as a foundational work, and the debates into the twenty-first century contributing to the as-yet-unresolved question of its foundational status. The chapter then details Balboa’s imaginative recasting of European Renaissance conventions of the epic genre, in a version distinct to the Americas and with new epistemological consequences in the treatment of Cuban nature and in the literary creation of a distinct local territory of inhabitants, marked by a poetics of community and loaded with cultural heterogeneity.

This chapter complicates Cuba’s contributions to Spanish American modernismo, interweaving close readings of the poetry of Julián del Casal and others in his circle with larger polemics about Cuban poetry that have marked Casal’s critical reception in Cuba into the twenty-first century. Casal, characterized in the chapter as an enduring mystery, a provocateur, and a dissident, wrote journalistic crónicas, as did José Martí. But Casal’s work embraced the more inward-turning estheticist and decadentist modernista tropes drawn from French Parnassianism, which has led to what the chapter portrays as the protracted debate about Casal and Martí as opposites, an overdrawn contrast in this chapter’s 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, the chapter affirms, 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.

This chapter explores approaches to the theme of diaspora in twenty-first-century Cuban film, demonstrating how archipelagic thinking can help elucidate the transnational connections, translations, and collaborations constituting Cuban cinema and that entail a difficult reckoning with geographical or temporal limits for structuring the analysis of literary-cultural production. The chapter dissects this landscape using four categories – outgoing journeys, returning diasporas, on-island films about migration, and representations of exile from inside Cuba – in an 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].

This chapter unpacks the category “Cuban America” in order to examine Cuban fiction and nonfiction prose in the US by a rich ensemble of writers whose work elucidates how deterritorialization makes deciphering questions of belonging through literary categories challenging. Whereas Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s literature and criticism popularized the notion of hyphenated identities beginning in the 1990s, this chapter conveys a plethora of issues around Cuban Americanness for a rich and diverse ensemble of writers who, having arrived in 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 US – is complicated. The chapter organizes these writers into four groupings: writers linked to the first postrevolutionary wave of exiles, who, it is argued, keep acculturation at arm’s length; writers whose exile was propelled by or contemporaneous with the 1980 Mariel exodus; second-generation Cuban US writers producing work primarily in English and pointing toward a Cuban US Latinidad; and Cuban writers who migrated to the US in the post-Soviet era.

Anchored in rich archival material, this chapter 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 stereotypes of ethnicity, race, and social class that often peppered theatrical genres, the chapter frames its detailed examples within the larger questions posed by a literary history, including whose theater history should be told 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.

This chapter addresses key currents in Cuban poetry, on and off the island, from 1989 to 2020, a body of work rich in experimentalism and in dialogue with the coloquialista [conversationalist] poetics that characterized earlier postrevolutionary poetry. Synthesizing the work of numerous poets, the chapter demonstrates that, with the disillusionment that accompanied the disintegration of the Socialist Bloc, poets such as Marilyn Bobes, Soleida Ríos, and the influential and award-winning Reina María Rodríguez were at the forefront of antiheroic representations and of reinvigorating philosophical thought through their lyrical work. The chapter also explores the embrace of detotalization, deterritorialization, intertextuality, and hybridity, contributing to forms of radical rupture in the poetry of Juan Carlos Flores, Omar Pérez, and Legna Rodríguez Iglesias, as well as the postmodern strategies, reflections on the act of writing, and new identitarian sites found in the work of Caridad Atencio and the group of seven Black poets/creators calling themselves “El Palenque.”

This chapter surveys the economic, cultural, and political factors that transformed the Cuban audiovisual landscape beginning in 1989, elucidating the multiple challenges tackled by filmmakers: material shortages, intermittent censorship, and a sometimes tense relationship with the official Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC). The chapter demonstrates that, in this richly inventive period, films of all length and genres, drawing on multiple media and replete with Cuban versions of manga, gangsters, and zombies, not only questioned what constitutes state-sponsored, independent, national, or transnational filmmaking, but also carried out a revision of Cuban history into contemporary everyday life. Key factors illuminated include the mentoring role assumed by seasoned director Fernando Pérez; the emergence of women filmmakers for the first time since director Sara Gómez (1942–1974); the entrepreneurial deployment of new technologies; the hybridity of local, international, official, and nonofficial funding sources; the diversification of constituencies and locales represented; and the critical importance of ICAIC’s annual Muestra Joven, or Festival of Young Cuban Filmmakers.

This epilogue chapter draws on metaphors of opera to offer a layered meditation on recurrent themes, teleologies, and tropes of identity, exceptionalism, and authenticity – 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 José Martí, Julián del Casal, Alejo Carpentier, Nicolás Guillén, José Lezama Lima, Lorenzo García Vega, Virgilio Piñera, Reinaldo Arenas, Roberto Fernández Retamar, and Antonio José Ponte, among others, and noting the writing of numerous literary women and men of different postrevolutionary generations who echo, mythologize, undermine, or shift directions from these legacies, the chapter asks that readers of Cuba’s cumulative literary history attune themselves to the performative voices through which this operatic literary history unfolds.

This chapter examines alternative cultural projects that emerged in Cuba from the 1980s into the new millennium: intellectual groupings, periodicals, and writing initiatives neither fully in the state’s purview nor fully outside of it. The chapter elucidates the national and international factors as well as intellectual and artistic goals marking such projects as Paideia (1989–1990), Diáspora(s) (1993–c.2002), Torre de Letras (2001–2016), OMNI Zona Franca (1995–?), and la noria (2009–) and notes their impact on the writers of Generation Zero, born in the late 1970s and early 1980s, who published some of their work in these venues. Although the chapter includes numerous writers, key figures addressed include Rolando Prats (Paideia); Reina María Rodríguez (Paideia and Torre de Letras); Rolando Sánchez Mejías, Carlos A. Aguilera, Ricardo Alberto Pérez, Pedro Marqués de Armas, and Rogelio Saunders (Diásporas); Juan Carlos Flores, Amaury Pacheco, David Escalona, Luis Eligio Pérez, Alina Guzmán, Nilo Julián González, Damián Valdés, and Jorge (Yoyi) Pérez (OMNI Zona Franca); and Oscar Cruz and José Ramón Sánchez (la noria).

Chapter 1 traces the antebellum faith in the non-finality of death and its antithesis in the irreparable change wrought by amputation. In sentimental theology, the dead are never wholly gone – they live on to inspire and save, awaiting reunion with those they leave behind. The dead child embodies the reality of unpredictability and at the same time operates within a narrative that soothes. The author contrasts antebellum postmortem photography and images of amputees and amputated limbs. Postmortem photography of children reinforces the sense that the family has not really been ruptured, that death isn’t really the end. Photographs of amputee Civil War soldiers do quite the opposite. Rather than operating as postmortem photography does, as a mediator between the living child, its dead body, and the family left behind, the portrait of the amputee is insistently in the present, even as the lost limb is consigned to an unrecuperable past. While nineteenth-century pictures of dead children often encouraged the fiction that the photograph’s subject was an ongoing member of the family, amputation photography – both medical and vernacular – insists on the permanence of bodily change.

Departing from a detailed examination of a new enthusiasm for the genre of science fiction among Cuban writers in the aftermath of the 1959 Cuban Revolution, this chapter analyzes major trends and themes in detective fiction, speculative fiction (including its subgenre cyberpunk), and graphic novels in the pre- and post post-1989 periods, along with their relationship to other bodies of knowledge and literary production, on the island and elsewhere. Through the examination of work by writers as diverse as José Miguel Sánchez (Yoss), Daína Chaviano, Leonardo Padura Fuentes, Jorge Enrique Lage, and Arturo Infante, among several others, the chapter demonstrates how these writers not only register the changing temperatures of ideology, morality, and everyday realities in ways that challenge Cuban exceptionalism, but also project dreams for a better planet, less tempered by utopian discourses of the past.

This chapter showcases 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 concerns about Cuban identity or “character” as a moral or social problem deemed as needing correction to achieve full-fledged, autonomous citizenship. 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; and the role in these cultural conversations of Cuban journalism, including Cuba Contemporánea and Social, the chapter examines shifting views of what were portrayed as strengths or weaknesses of Cuban character in essays, drama, and novels by José Antonio Ramos, Miguel de Carrión, and Carlos Loveira, with attention to Jorge Mañach as a key figure in a second republican generation.

This chapter analyzes first-hand, multifaceted accounts within poetry and literary and documentary narratives that portray the experiences of the encounters between Cuba and Angola generated by Fidel Castro’s mobilization of Cubans to Angola in the mid-1970s, the nation’s most significant international mission. In the early years of the encounter, the chapter demonstrates, this body of work highlighted historical parallels of liberation from colonialism and celebrations of Cuban sacrifices but also revealed linguistic and cultural misunderstanding and the reproduction of stereotypes of Africa and Africans. Work on the subject published in the late twentieth century and first two decades of the twenty-first, by contrast, generally manifested the war’s after-effects, highlighting isolation, miscommunication, and uncertainty.

This chapter examines the Matanzas-based Cuban publishing house Ediciones Vigía, founded in 1985 by writer Alfredo Zaldívar Muñoa and the poet and graphic and set designer Rolando Estévez Jordán, initially as a space for artistic events and performative encounters through a network of writers, artists, artisans, musicians, students, teachers, professors, and workers. Situating the publishing enterprise and its singular book objects within Matanzas’s rich and disturbing economic development and cultural history, forged by slavery and the amassing of sugar wealth in the nineteenth century, the chapter 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 in its book objects, among multiple artistic forms and techniques.