Cuban Literature Research Articles

Eclipse and Re-emergence of a Critical Discourse on Hemingway in Cuban Literature and Film

This article reviews Hemingway's reception in Cuban literature and film, establishing a periodization that includes the rise, disappearance, and return of a critical discourse on the North American writer. The changes in the way Hemingway is perceived and presented are discussed in terms of Cuba's own political and economic situation.

North Florida in the Cuban Literary Canon: Contact Zone, Chronotope and Liminal Space

Florida and Cuba are culturally and historically connected by two bodies of water, beyond questions of political geography. The Ocean links cultural groups of Atlantic creoles characterized by linguistic dexterity, cultural plasticity, and social agility, according to the historian Ira Berlin (263). At the same time, the Gulf Stream current shaped the location of fortified cities founded throughout the colonial Hispanic Indies to support the return voyages of the Spanish treasure fleet to Europe via the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, a network completed with the founding of Saint Augustine, Florida in 1565. As a result, the approximately eighty-mile length of northeast Florida referred to as the First Coast--comprising Fernandina/Amelia Island, Jacksonville, and Saint Augustine--developed as a historically-unified region under the colonial governance of the capital in Havana. As observed by Keith Cartwright, this micro-region bridges Caribbean and North American cultural space and constitutes the oldest enduring contact zone between Europeans, Africans, and indigenous peoples in the United States (188). The Tallahassee-based, U.S. Cuban writer Roberto Fernandez alludes to a similar connection between Florida and Cuba in the title of his first book published on the in 2004: Entre dos aguas [Between Two Waters]. In light of such linkages, and given the fact that Cuba has been imagined in much U.S. public and literary discourse as an object of desire, fear, and exotic fascination, this article proposes to investigate ways in which Florida's First Coast appears in noted works of Cuban literature. This article will analyze comparatively the representation of and narrative uses for the geography and history of North Florida in three major works published in Cuba during the twentieth century. The first is Jorge Manach's frequently cited 1933 biography of the eminent nineteenth-century Cuban patriot and poet Jose Marti, Marti, el apostol (Marti: Apostle of Freedom). Manach completed the book in Havana in 1931-1932 (248), a critical period of national political crisis and revolution against the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado (Perez Cuba 258-268). The second is Jose Lezama Lima's 1966 novel Paradiso, which has been compared to James Joyce's Ulysses in terms of ambition, research method, and canonical status in Cuban and Latin American literature (Salgado). The third, Antonio Benitez Rojo's historical novel El mar de las lentejas (The Sea of Lentils), was published in Havana in 1979, a year before the influential theorist of the Caribbean as a repeating island left Cuba for Massachusetts. While none of the three authors knew northeast Florida first-hand, the portrayal of the region in their works give some insight into how part of the southeastern United States, beyond Miami, is reflected in the Cuban cultural imaginary. Such portrayals reinforce connnections by which major Cuban literary texts configure northeast Florida as a poetic terrain and amphibious space, where the Caribbean, Atlantic, and Gulf constitute fluid zones of contact. North Florida as Contact Zone The idea of Florida in the context of recent Cuban history may evoke stereotypes of Cuban Miami from the 1960s through the 1980s: an ideologically-conservative voting bloc and moral community in a contested, binary relationship with Havana (De La Torre 22, Portes and Stepick 37). However, scholarship on the Cuban presence in Florida encompasses a broader geographical area and has focused on a time frame reaching further back than the 1959 Cuban revolution. Historians like Louis A. Perez, Jr. characterize the relationship between residents of Florida and Cuba dating back to the 1850s as one of fluid, two-way migrations and binding familiarities facilitated by ease of travel, short geographical distance, commercial ties, and shared histories (On Becoming Cuban). For example, Perez documents the impact of Cuban emigre communities (and the cigar trade that they established) on the development of both major cities and small towns throughout Florida: Key West grew from a population of less than 700 residents in 1840 to more than 28,000 by 1890 as the value of its cigar manufacturers soared from $20 million in 1882 to $100 million in 1892. …

Literary Culture in Cuba: Revolution, Nation-building, and the Book by Parvathi Kumaraswami, and Antoni Kapcia (review)

Reviewed by: Literary Culture in Cuba: Revolution, Nation-building, and the Book by Parvathi Kumaraswami, and Antoni Kapcia Ignacio López-Calvo Kumaraswami, Parvathi, and Antoni Kapcia. Literary Culture in Cuba: Revolution, Nation-building, and the Book. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2012. 265 pp. This book is a historical study of the role of literary culture (processes, institutions, policies, spaces, circuits) within the Cuban Revolution’s nation-rebuilding project that began in 1959. Instead of the traditional route of studying specific authors and works, the authors reach their conclusions through documentary research and the information gathered by interviewing over one hundred members of the Cuban literary world from 2004 through 2011. The introduction argues that the revalorization of literary culture had a basis in pre-1959 Cuba, with the literary groups around the magazines Orígenes and Ciclón, as well as the group Nuestro Tiempo. The first five chapters are devoted to the exploration of the program to create a literary culture among the masses, focusing on key actors, periods, and spaces. Kumaraswami and Kapcia claim that despite the tensions and economic crises, there is evidence of a sustained vision for the production, distribution, and consumption of literature since 1959. Chapter one provides the wider context of the evolution of the Cuban Revolution as a backdrop against which one can understand a parallel literary culture. Among several other landmark events, the authors mention Castro’s Palabras a los intelectuales speech in 1961; the Final Resolution of the notorious 1971 Congress on Education and Culture, where homosexuality was condemned and art was defined as a weapon of the Revolution; the Lunes and Padilla affairs; and the 1971-76 quinquenio gris. In their view, these events should not determine the interpretation of this period, as “cultural policy was not always defined” (22). We learn that the letters of protest against the treatment of Padilla sent by European and Latin American intellectuals were seen by the Cuban government as cultural imperialism, which was “slavishly European in their thinking” (28). Then, Kumaraswami and Kapcia mention the creation of important institutions, such as the Instituto Cubano de Artes e Industrias Cinematográficas, Casa de las Américas, Ministerio de Educación, Centro de Estudios Martianos, and Casas de Cultura. Other events discussed are the debates about cultural authority between the Nuestro Tiempo and Lunes groups, the camps for misfits (such as religious or homosexual youth) held by the infamous Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción, and the Mariel exodus that encouraged some intellectuals and artists (including Arenas) to leave Cuba. The second chapter articulates the theoretical approach of the book, which is based on cultural studies, Du Gay, Bourdieu, Appadurai, and Frow. It then proposes an alternative way to interpret Cuban literature and culture on the island since 1959 (the Cuban diaspora is excluded). According to the authors, despite the changing sociopolitical contexts, there has been an ideological continuum in the relationship between the individual and the state throughout the five decades of the Revolution. They also address the tension about the prioritization of political or aesthetic value. The chapter presents an overview of existing scholarship on Cuban literature since 1959, dismissing most of it as inadequate and simplistic. In their [End Page 657] view, it tends to focus either only on the moments of extreme conflict or on a supposedly all-powerful monolithic state, with the goal of showing evidence of the subjugation of art by socialist ideology. Incidentally, if the authors wanted to combat this purported stereotype, perhaps they should have chosen a different photo for the cover, where one can see a large photo of Castro at the entrance of a second-hand bookstore. They maintain that other books tend to assess Cuban literature using external paradigms (thus ignoring Cuban exceptionalism) and focusing on selected individual writers or on genres. Then, Kumaraswami and Kapcia sarcastically decry the “selective memory” of memoirs of exile that forget any sort of commitment to the Cuban system or the opportunities brought by the Revolution, to obey foreign publishers’ demand for “readable narratives that reinforce the horrors of the Caribbean gulag” (40, 41). The following three chapters analyze the evolution of Cuban literary culture from...

The Island and the Madhouse: Rethinking the Subject and the Archipelago in Recent Cuban Literature

Aunque estoy a punto de renacer,no lo proclamare a los cuatro vientosni me sentire un elegido:solo me toco en suerte,y lo acepto porque no esta en mi manonegarme, y seria por otra parte unadescortesiaque un hombre distinguido jamas haria.Se me ha anunciado que manana,a las siete y seis minutos de la tarde,me convertire en una isla,isla como suelen ser las islas.Mis piernas se iran haciendo tierra y mar,y poco a poco, igual que un andantechopiniano,empezaran a salirme arboles en losbrazos,rosas en los ojos y arena en el pecho.En la boca las palabras moriranpara que el viento a su deseo puedaulular.Despues, tendido como suelen hacer lasislas,mirare fijamente al horizonte,vere salir el sol. la luna,y lejos ya de la inquietud,dire muy bajito:?asi que era verdad?-Virgilio Pinera, Isla, 1979Although I am about to be reborn,I will not proclaim it to the four windsnor feel myself a chosen one:it was just my luck,and I accept it because it is not in myhandsto refuse, and it would, moreover, be adiscourtesywhich a distinguished man should nevercommit.It's been announced to me thattomorrow,at six past seven in the evening,I will become an island,an island as islands usually are.My legs will make land and sea,and slowly, like a Chopin andante,trees will begin to come from my arms,roses from my eyes and sand from mychest.In my mouth the words will dieso that the wind can howl at its pleasure.After, lying as islands usually do,I will look fixedly at the horizon,I will see the sun rise, the moon,and far now from any anxiety,I will say very sofdy:so it was true?Contemporary Cuban literature has mostly been read in relation to the political and socioeconomic context of the Cuban Revolution's post-Soviet period, which obviously is a singular condition of the writing of the island. In this essay, however, I would like to adopt a different scope and explore this literature's Caribbean connection through Edouard Glissant's concepts of relation, archipelago, and diversion. Cuba's connection with Caribbean canonical writing has nevertheless quite often been problematic. On the one hand, Cuba has a very strong notion of nation and national literary canon, in which the gaze of the metropolis and of Latin American avant-gardes is rather more present than is the case for its Caribbean neighbors and in which the insular condition returns once and again as a motif. On the other hand, some Cuban writers, such as Alejo Carpentier and Antonio Benitez Rojo, could even be considered as foundational within a Caribbean context of repeating islands. I will take a point of departure from Glissant's notion of archipelago in relation to one novel in particular, Desde Los Blancos Manicomios (2010), by Margarita Mateo. In this discussion, I will show the ambivalence and the limits of these concepts by Glissant, which deal simultaneously with the limits of belonging and detachment of a community or imaginary identity. I will discuss whether the use of archipelago stands for a deterritorialization and fragmentation in Mateo's novel and whether it produces agency for the subject. This contemporary novel seems to deal above all with the self as such, within an archipelagic constellation of cultural identity in which foundational fictions of belonging are also quite present. This constellation serves as a commentary on those foundational texts, as an interwoven texture of poststructuralist thinking and intertextual voyage.Not only as a scholar but also as a fictional writer, Mateo, who was born in Havana in 1950, offers a refreshing voice in Cuba's contemporary cultural field. …

Translating the Revolution: Otherness in Cuban Testimonial Literature

Drawing on existing theories in the field, this paper seeks to explore the issues that surround the translation of Cuban testimonial texts, emphasizing the inevitable portrayal of the Self as an Other. The notion of translation as an articulation of otherness has become a focus of interest in contemporary translation studies. Notwithstanding the worth of the general framework that has emerged as a result, the need for country-specific research is underscored by Cuba’s unique location on the contemporary political map – and its alleged “exceptionalism” – which sets it apart from cultural contexts that have been previously studied. Because of the isolated nature of Cuba, it is important to highlight the gap between the Cuban literature that is published, translated and read outside Cuba, on the one hand, and the Cuban literature that is published and read in Cuba, on the other. The results of bibliographical research and fieldwork indicate that, although publishers and literary experts alike place great emphasis on the significance of otherness, their interest centres on the dissemination of the Cuban experience seen “from inside” (so as to counterbalance Cuban narratives produced by exiles). In doing so, they underscore the “universal nature” of the human experience and play down any alterity that may hinder the translation process.

Tra avanguardie e mitologie: l’uragano in ¡Écue-Yamba-Ó! di Alejo Carpentier

The myth of Urakan, the great god of the Antilles, reveals a certain persistence in Cuban literature and in Alejo Carpentier’s production ever since his first text (1917), which was a “pequena prosa” about the importance of Caribbean cyclone (Alejo Carpentier, Entrevistas, La Habana, Letras cubanas, 1985: 254). This theme, actually, both in his ethical and aesthetic aspects, will recur frequently in his work, with the symbolic and contradictory connotation of Apocalypses.

O rastro do dragão em quatro narradores cubanos

Seguindo o rastro da cultura chinesa na cultura e literatura cubanas, este trabalho revela-se como um espaço para a discussão de um tema pouco tratado pela crítica, a presença chinesa na constituição da literatura cubana. O "rastro do dragão" é acompanhado desde o século XVII até a contemporaneidade, passando pela obra de autores como Severo Sarduy, Ramón Meza, José Martí e José Lezama Lima, máximos expoentes da modernidade nas letras em Cuba.

Racial Experiments in Cuban Literature and Ethnography

Racial Experiments in Cuban Literature and Ethnography

Escaping isn't what it used to be: Review of Ana Menendez's Adios, Happy Homeland!

Ana Menendez’s latest collection of short stories, Adios, Happy Homeland! is a labyrinthine metafictional construction of cultural and literary references that responds to the appropriation of Cuban literature.

Racial Experiments in Cuban Literature and Ethnography by Emily A. Maguire, (review)

Racial Experiments in Cuban Literature and Ethnography by Emily A. Maguire, (review)

A History of the Cuban Revolution

This book is a useful textbook for undergraduate students and a welcome addition to the historiography on the Cuban Revolution. I would even strongly recommend it to any tourist visiting the island since it is concise, very well written, and easy to digest. Despite Chomsky’s sympathies for the Cuban Revolution, her account provides a balanced history of Cuba after 1959.The book contains an introduction and eight chapters covering a wide range of topics, effectively cultivating a fascinating multidisciplinary approach. Chomsky reminds us that the Cuban Revolution was not only a political event but, equally important, it “was also social, cultural, economic, artistic, and many other things” (p. 6). This of course is easy to say but very difficult to illustrate in a textbook. Chomsky manages to do so in a stylish fashion. Finally, the general context in which the Cuban Revolution takes place is also well established in an engaging way.Most chapters can stand alone. Chapter 1 deals with Cuban colonial history, post-colonial history up to 1959, and the 1959 revolution itself. Chapter 2 deals with the first years of the revolution. Here Chomsky makes it clear that “Cuba’s new leaders vowed to break the island’s historic dependence on sugar exports” (p. 50), but I was unable to discover why, despite this resolution, Cuba remained so dependent on sugar for so long after the revolution. Chapter 3 provides fascinating material on Cuban relations with the United States, in particular for the 1960s, by focusing on the many terrorist attacks against Cuban subjects performed with the support of the CIA and the FBI. The treatment of the Cuban Missile Crisis, albeit brief, provides an up-to-date version of this important event in world history.Chapter 4 is about emigration and internationalism, very different topics indeed, and their juxtaposition is questionable. Regarding emigration, the section on Miami is expressively written, but surprisingly nothing is said about Cubans emigrating elsewhere (e.g., Spain, South America). Indeed, after reading this chapter the reader unfamiliar with Cuba would believe that Cubans have emigrated only to Miami. In relation to internationalism, the section on black internationalism is a significant and impressive contribution to discussion of the topic. Chapter 5 deals with art and culture in revolutionary Cuba. It contains very useful reviews of Cuban literature, dance, film industry, sport, food, and music (although there is no mention of the hugely popular Los Van Van). It also contains an interesting section on political culture (in particular the discussion of the concept of democracy and multiparty systems), which would be better placed within another chapter instead.Chapter 6 is on diversity within Cuban society, touching on race, gender, sexuality, and religion. The treatment of race inequality will be particularly illuminating for those unfamiliar with the subject, given its huge complexity. As highlighted by Chomsky, despite the commitment of the revolutionary government to eliminating racial discrimination, even after over 50 years of revolution this issue still remains a challenge on many fronts. Likewise, the revolution’s repression of Cuban homosexuals is also well handled by Chomsky.Chapter 7 deals with the so-called Special Period, the time of harsh economic conditions after the collapse of the Soviet bloc in the early 1990s and the subsequent reforms introduced in Cuba to cope with these difficulties. The section on the increasing inequalities during this period is particularly striking. This is the most fascinating chapter of the book. Finally, the last chapter of the book takes the history of Cuba into the twenty-first century.A few minor issues could usefully be rectified in a second edition. At times the text is overly centered on the United States. Chomsky draws many comparisons between Cuba and the United States (which will doubtless be welcomed by US undergraduate students), but it would be more useful to compare Cuba with other Latin American countries as well.Having lived in Cuba myself for over 15 years, I also missed a more extensive treatment of these topics: abortion in Cuba; wages differences and income inequality before 1990; statistics about economic development; schools in the countryside; and childhood in Cuba. One figure unexplored (or perhaps avoided) by Chomsky is Fidel Castro himself; a judgment on his character or at least more references to his life, beliefs, and actions would have been welcome. Finally, the section on the Cuban intervention in Africa is perhaps too small given its importance. In future editions the author may wish to call students’ attention to a useful documentary entitled Cuba, an African Odyssey, by Jihan El Tahri (2007).All in all, I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the Cuban Revolution and in particular to those teaching at the undergraduate level. I am sure this book will become the standard textbook on the subject for many years to come.

Racial experiments in Cuban literature and ethnography

Racial experiments in Cuban literature and ethnography

A Friendship Forged with Blood: Cuban Literature of the Angolan War

IN September of 2007, Angolan president Eduardo dos Santos made a state visit to Havana to meet with Cuban president Raul Castro in to renew the official ties that had been established between the two nations after 1975. While Cuban troops saw the birth of the modern Angolan state at its independence from colonial Portuguese control in 1975, also serves as a historical point of reference to Cuba's history of slavery and a metonymic source for Afro-Cuban culture. Dos Santos' remark that la amistad [entre Cuba y Angola] ha sido forjada con sangre (Presidente de Angola n/p) evokes not only Cuba's military, technical and humanitarian assistance to Angola's MPLA party from 1975-1991, but also recalls the renewed importance of African diasporic heritage and resulting creolized cultures in both Cuban and Angolan national narratives after their respective revolutions. The long fight for African decolonization and its intersections with the polarizing ideological and rhetorical divides of the Cold War converged in the Angolan war. As might be expected, this period of ideological agreement and close political ties between Cuba and during the conflict of 1975-1991 resulted in more than a military exchange. Cuba sponsored thousands of African students on the island and sent teachers, engineers and doctors to to fill the technical voids left when Portuguese personnel abandoned the country in 1975. Angola's politicians and intellectuals expressed their gratitude publicly, and the two writers unions signed an agreement of mutual publication in 1976. Cuba officially exited triumphantly in 1991 leaving in place a cease-fire agreement that outlined the process to presidential and parliamentary elections in 1992. The outbreak of violence and return to armed civil conflict that continued until 2002, however, points to a host of simmering undercurrents that disrupt the official Cuban narrative of revolutionary triumph. In a 1984 article on revolutionary poetry from and Mozambique, critic Russell Hamilton identifies posturing--a careful combination of affect and politics evoked through poetic arrangement--as an essential element of revolutionary literature, particularly the sort that harbingers a new, presumably more socially progressive economic and political order (158). However, how do aspects of posturing as Hamilton defines it appear in literary works by authors who criticize, ironize or part from revolutionary orthodoxy? This article discusses Cuban literature of the Angolan War, looking at two modes. First, it traces patterns in orthodox literature written about the war that characterizes both the Cuban and Angolan revolutions as situated at the crossroads of discursive decolonization and trans-African alliance, evidenced in war memorials, poetry such as Waldo Leyva's Reencuentro and films such as Rogelio Paris's 2005 war epic Kangamba. However, there is a second, parallel critical mode of literature that indirectly criticizes Cuba's fifteen-year military presence in Angola. I argue that as revolutionary euphoria subsides, Cuban literature of the Angolan war begins to reflect a growing ironic distance from their contemporary political polemics in to negotiate the social problems (racism, poverty, underdevelopment, displacement) that remain unacknowledged within the polarizing rhetoric of patriotic sacrifice and revolutionary duty. This second mode of literature counteracts the triumphal narrative of Angolan assistance, where the realities of wartime violence point to fissures in these trans-Atlantic alliances and a familial dissolution that serves as a symptom of a parallel critical strain of Cuban literature of disappointment. The sociopolitical break that the Cuban Revolution and Angolan independence initiated in the two nations' respective histories presented the opportunity in both locales for a reformulation of the old relationships to the West in terms of a new culture unhinged from decadent Western (step)-ancestors. …

From Coney Island to La Isla del Coco

This article analyzes the history and cultural significance of the Cuban Coney Island Park. It argues that the park both allegorizes a series of geopolitical and urbanistic trends true for Havana more generally throughout the twentieth century, and figures as a significant reference for Cuban film, literature, and philosophies of history. It begins by reading Martí and Meza's chronicles about the Brooklyn park, analyzes a 1906 film about El Parque Palatino, ‘el Coney Island cubano’, and considers the Republican-era development of both parks and the suburbs of Marianao and Playa, designed to include amusement parks. The article then unearths the history of the Coney Island built in Havana in the 1950s, owned by a US businessman executed in 1961 for conducting counterrevolutionary activities within the park itself. Even as a cold war skirmish unfolded in the real park, in literature José Lezama Lima moved away from such ideologies to introduce amusement parks in his 1966 Paradiso as spaces for reflection on themes of originality, desire and substitution – themes central to the parks themselves, and to Cuba's intellectual tradition. The article ends with a history of post-2008 Chinese-built parks conceived within the ‘Batalla de Ideas’.

Sobre a narrativa cubana contemporânea: O estilo noir de Leonardo Padura Fuentes

The present essay presents some considerations about novels and the noir style of Leonardo Padura Fuentes, a Cuban writer who revisits the police genre. Intertextuality enables many voices to introduce Mario Conde´s successful adventures; Mario Conde is a skeptical investigator aspiring to be a writer. However, nostalgia deeply affects his human perspective so that, from disappointed to hopeful, he solves despicable and famous crimes of ordinary and important personalities. The analysis focuses on the tetralogy Las cuatro estaciones, extended to two other narratives through different perspectives, and introduces La Havana to the reader. These brief notes aim to present the current state of Cuban Literature through an author who retakes a genre deeply marked by the castrist system in order to transform it into discourse about the country, contemporaneity and the act of writing

Cuba and the New Origenismo (review)

Buckwalter-ARias, james. Cuba and New Origenismo. Woodbridge, Eng.: Tamesis, 2010. viii + 206 pp.James Buckwalter-Arias's Cuba and New Origenismo is a lucid, finely argued book that brings depth and perspective to scholarship on post-1989 Cuban literature. For a period whose cultural production, broadly defined, has been abundantly celebrated in popular and academic venues, this book invokes distinction of literary as a category and an aspiration. It reads reemergence of Origenes - literary movement that flourished in Cuba in 1940s and 1950s - in post-1989 writing as a repudiation of socialist imperatives that in first decades of Revolution, as now standard history tells us, privileged politically committed works. But new of narrative by Senel Paz, Jesus Diaz, Eliseo Alberto, Leonardo Padura, and Antonio Jose Ponte is rich with contradictions and unanswered questions, which Buckwalter-Arias elucidates with remarkable rhetorical eloquence and conceptual confidence. Indeed, like article on Reinscribing Aesthetic: Cuban Narrative and Post-Soviet Cultural Politics that author published in PMLA in 2005, Cuba and New Origenismo is notable for unusual elegance of its writing.Buckwalter-Arias's critique of 1990s origenismo finds prerevolutionary movement and its individual writers rehabilitated for what they represent politically - as emblems, that is, for a literature independent of State - rather than as models of style or form. Novels of 1990s have far less in common with Lezama's Paradiso, for example, than they do with more prosaic and historically situated works of socialist realism ostensibly favored by Revolution. At same time, Revolution as a negative force has an importance in 1990s writing that it lacked in Origenes movement, which was neither clear nor organized in its relationship to Castro's regime and cultural policies, while object of origenistas' more cohesive and sustained derision, namely US neocolonialism and the consumer-driven culture industry (8), is conspicuously spared censure in their recent revival. This silence connects to a more general failure on part of Cuban writers post-1989 to acknowledge material conditions that govern publication of their work: namely, those of transatlantic publishing market in which, Buckwalter-Arias proposes with careful nuance, works read as dissident, while not just commodities (160), carry a historically determined and economically advantageous appeal. This final argument is both crux of book and basis for its own vision of a new origenista literature that would transcend simple aesthetics versus ideology - or Lezama versus Guevara - binary and enter the realm of oppositional praxis (195).In some ways first and last chapters, on Paz's lobo, el bosque y el hombre uevo and Ponte's El libro perdido de los origenistas, are most interesting: first because it demonstrates where book's compelling narrative of rediscovery begins, and last where origenismo may lead. In a skillful dialogue with some of more strident criticisms of Paz's sexual politics, BuckwalterArias suggests that his story stands as a final but doomed attempt to reconcile Revolutionary teleology with notion of transcendence that origenistas had drawn from modernists and, in its more redemptive strain, from Catholicism. Ponte's essay enters narrative as an exception - inevitably, perhaps, Ponte being so deft a critic that he often seems to anticipate analyses of his work. Buckwalter-Arias, however, draws El libro perdido into a larger interrogation of origenistas' legacy precisely through loss that, for Ponte, is at core of their project: finding in his work a poetics of history, [a] means for mapping a historico-literary landscape that contributes at very least to task of conceptualizing current impasse (162). …

Essay: Has There Been Any Cuban Literature Since the Revolution?

Essay: Has There Been Any Cuban Literature Since the Revolution?

Contemporary Cuban Literature: A Way Out

Contemporary Cuban Literature: A Way Out

Introduction: Cuban Literature Inside and Out

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsJosé Manuel PrietoJosé Manuel Prieto (Havana, 1962) is an essayist and translator, as well as the author of several novels, including Livadia (1999; Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire, 2000) and Rex (2007; Rex, 2009). The recipient of a Guggenheim award, he has taught at Princeton and Cornell. He currently lives in New York, where he has just finished his latest novel, Voz humana (Human Voice)

Imaging the Chinese in Cuban Literature and Culture ‐ by López‐Calvo, Ignacio

Imaging the Chinese in Cuban Literature and Culture ‐ by López‐Calvo, Ignacio