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.

This chapter examines the state-organized cultural literacy movements of postrevolutionary Cuba and the dynamics of the demands of the collective sphere, along with individuation and standing out. The chapter analyzes the model of the socialist worker-amateur citizen fostered by the revolutionary state, arguing that the figures of the amateur and the “art instructor,” as well as the creation of local casas de cultura [houses of culture], became antidotes to capitalist consumer culture. Along with their positive, diversifying effects, the chapter suggests, there came a deep suspicion toward practitioners of so-called elitist culture, demonstrating how, within this process, the state emerged as both benefactor and punisher.

This chapter examines the work of numerous creative artists in multiple media and genres, some of whom wrote works that formed part of the Cuban literary canon, but whose lives and identities were seen as problematic for the revolutionary state. Focusing particularly on figures whose intersectional identities somehow threatened hegemonic biases, the chapter elucidates the extent to which a preoccupation with sexual practices and gender identities was at the core of the Cuban revolutionary state and the homophobic legacies it inherited from the bourgeois past. The chapter teases this out by exploring critical and theoretical rereadings, in addition to numerous musical, literary, theatrical, and cinematographic works and productions from multiple postrevolutionary periods, wherein queerness emerges as central to the nation and its diaspora.

This chapter examines Cuban fiction about slavery emerging in the 1830s–1840s: Petrona y Rosalía (1838) by Félix Tanco y Bosmeniel; Francisco, el ingenio o las delicias del campo (1838–1839) by Anselmo Suárez y Romero; the short story “Cecilia Valdés” (1839) by Cirilo Villaverde (1812–1894), who later developed it into the novel Cecilia Valdés o La Loma del Ángel (1882); Autobiografía de un esclavo (1840) by Juan Francisco Manzano; and Sab (1841) by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda. The chapter contextualizes the analysis in tensions between the demands for labor and “ad hoc moral alibis” characterizing Plantation America, particularly the improvised concepts of racial differentiation – Blackness and Black-and-white miscegenation – typifying responses to these tensions. The analysis of this literature as speculative writing that looks simultaneously toward the past and future links it to the sometimes improvisational and speculative nature of the new plantation-based societies, which were themselves entangled between speculative finance capital and moral reflections on freedom, and to the intensified anxieties about Cuba’s racialized future generated by the 1841 demographic census.

Chapter 2 explores accounts by Civil War nurses and surgeons – first-person nonfiction, lightly fictionalized narrative, sensationalized memoir, and fiction. The central texts in this chapter are Walt Whitman’s Memoranda after the War, Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches, John Brinton’s Personal Memoirs, Susie King Taylor’s Reminiscences of My Life in Camp, and S. Weir Mitchell’s “The Case of George Dedlow.” These narrators represent amputation in different ways, especially the scene of amputation itself, the image of a basket or trough of dismembered limbs, and amputee reflections on the relationship between their remaining bodies and their absent limbs. However, for all the narrators in these texts, amputation is part of a meditation on the meanings of intact and amputated bodies, and their role in making sense of the Civil War. The chapter ends with a discussion of the Army Medical Museum, in which amputated limbs were catalogued, stored, and displayed as examples of the damage done by gunshots and shells. This dovetails with a reading of George Dedlow, in which the protagonist’s legs, stored in alcohol at the Museum, return to him briefly during a séance, absurdly marrying hopes for bodily resurrection with spiritualism’s belief in a humanized heaven.

This chapter addresses Cuban performance art of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In spite of the apparent ephemerality of performance, the body of work explored in this chapter is among the Cuban art most well known worldwide, sometimes for such unfortunate reasons as a controversial death (Ana Mendieta), detainment/house arrest (Tania Bruguera), or imprisonment (Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara). The chapter approaches performance art through four overlapping themes – play, betweenness, memory, and voice – to explore the ways in which individuals use an art form that unites physical body and message to intervene in varied sociopolitical and cultural fields. Other artists whose work the chapter considers include, among others, Alina Troyano (aka Carmelita Tropicana), Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Yali Romagoza, Coco Fusco, Alicia Rodríguez Alvisa, Leandro Soto, and Carlos Martiel, and the collectives ARTECALLE, Los Carpinteros, and Desde Una Pragmática Pedagógica (DUPP), among others.

This chapter examines the recurrent search for self-determination and identity at the core of modern Cuban theater, a search portrayed as embodied in theater’s own distinctive engagement with time. The chapter locates the birth of modern Cuban theater between 1902 and 1959 as a point of departure to elaborate upon representations of family and the disintegrating republic in the mid-twentieth century, characterized by a nonprogressive temporality within works by Virgilio Piñera and José Triana. The past, contrasted to the utopian-seeking, revolutionary present, unfolds in work by, for example, Abelardo Estorino and Eugenio Espinosa Hernández, the chapter argues. However, the chapter suggests that, by the end of the twentieth century, such a paradigm was replaced by undeniable frustration and desire for change in work, for example, by Alberto Pedro Torriente and Ulises Rodríguez Febles, as well as within the many new theater collectives, for example El Ciervo Encantado, that arose in the midst of the socioeconomic and political crisis of the Special Period and beyond.

Drawing on work by numerous playwrights, this chapter provides a detailed overview of the theater of the Cuban diaspora in the US, including extensive contributions to elaborate theater scenarios and initiatives since the 1960s, and addressing some playwrights, like María Irene Fornés (a mentor to numerous US Cubans) and Nilo Cruz, who have been instrumental within US American drama as a whole. The chapter organizes its account of many well-established theater groups and ensembles; theatrical venues and performance spaces; festivals and regular events; and key playwrights, directors, and mentors into those linked to New York and those anchored in Miami, and also includes the work of a new generation of millennial playwrights, most of whom were born in the US but who continue to evoke in their work complex, sometimes painful, connections to the island.