Introduction: The “Stranger Relations” of Beat

Abstract

This chapter provides a backdrop of political and cultural stirrings in Fidel Castro's Cuba. Cubalogues emerged in the thick of the cultural and intellectual history—an explicitly political subgenre of Beat travel narrative which included works such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti's “Poet's Notes on Cuba,” Amiri Baraka's “Cuba Libre,” and Marc Schleifer's “Cuban Notebook.” Driven by a profound skepticism concerning the negative portrayal of Castro's revolution within the mainstream U.S. media, each of the Cubalogue writers decided to witness the revolution firsthand. The Cubalogues, in other words, are best understood as a politically engaged form of literary reportage in which stock features of Beat writing were explicitly recast against the backdrop of early revolutionary events. As rhetorical travelogues, the Cubalogues exemplified a mode of descriptive argumentation that Walter Fisher has identified as the “narrative paradigm.”