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).

This chapter begins by considering Lorine Niedecker’s reception as a "rural surrealist" as a deliberately minoritizing gesture with a primitivist agenda. It then moves on to claim that Niedecker’s surrealism-inspired explorations of unconscious processes overlap significantly with her (auto-)ethnographic take on her own rural Wisconsin surroundings. The chapter positions Niedecker’s short, witty, object-oriented poems in her book New Goose (1946) as ironic embraces of the primitive, in which the appropriation of rural artifacts functions analogously with the appropriation of the poet herself as a rural artifact. Niedecker’s work is rooted in an antimodern epistemology that links it with the overlapping discourses of ethnography and surrealism, in which the rationalized logic of capitalist modernity is challenged through an embrace of its opposites, the premodern and the prerational. The chapter contends that the objects one encounters in Niedecker’s poems are produced through a “poetics of detachment” in which, following a surrealist theory of the object, they assume a fetishistic ability to conjure up repressed and residual libidinal economies that form the obverse of modernity.