Over the past thirty years, nineteenth-century prose narrative has held a privileged position in the critical analysis of the development of Cuban literature. Critics have been particularly drawn to the anti-slavery narratives produced by the circle of Domingo Delmonte in the 1830s, as the great number of books, articles, and dissertations on this topic attests. This intense scrutiny of Cuban short stories and novels has obscured the importance of poetry in the nineteenth-century efforts to create a national literature. We must not forget, however, that around 1829, Delmonte himself wrote some romances cubanos in an attempt to Cubanize a popular Spanish poetic form. Nor should we forget that the first book to sell thousands of copies throughout the island was a collection of poetry: the Cantos del siboney by Jos? Fornaris achieved this unprecedented success, warranting five editions within eight years of its 1855 debut, and two subsequent edi? tions. While censorship severely limited the Cuban audience of anti-slavery narratives, the Cantos collection was able to avoid censorship and expand the reading public, geographically and possibly in terms of social class. Cantos del siboney also initiated the Indianist literary school known as Siboneyismo, which lasted from the 1850s to the late 1880s. Perhaps because most Siboneyista works are considered popular, low-quality literature, very little critical work has been published on them. Besides the commentary on Siboneyismo in histories and anthologies of Cuban poetry, only two critical articles have been published recently: In 1972 Alberto Guti?rrez de la Solana surveyed the critical responses to Cantos del siboney from the nineteenth century through the twentieth. Ivan Schul man's 1992 essay, which will be discussed below, compares Siboneyista poetry to Cuban antisla very narratives. The objective of this present essay is to add depth to the critical discussion of Siboneyismo. After evaluating relevant critical approaches to nineteenth-century Indianism, I will provide an overview of the literary and historical context in which Siboneyismo emerged. Then, by reading the poems in Cantos del siboney through the theoretical frame of postcolonialism, I will examine three important elements found in the poems of the collection: the engagement of the poetic voice in dialogue with two indigenous characters; the use of an allegory in which Creoles and Spaniards were represented by two indigenous groups; and the appropriation of the figures of Christopher Columbus and Bartolom? de Las Casas. I will then highlight some of the formal and thematic strategies that Fornaris incorporated into the Cantos, presumably as a way to expand the readers? hip to include people from provincial and rural areas, and those with less sophisticated literary