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).

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.