The literature of Cuba, argues Eduardo Gonzalez in this new book, takes on quite different features depending on whether one is looking at it from -the inside- or from -the outside, - a view that in turn is shaped by official political culture and the authors it sanctions or by those authors and artists who exist outside state policies and cultural politics. Gonzalez approaches this issue by way of two twentieth-century writers who are central to the canon of gay homoerotic expression and sensibility in Cuban culture: Jose Lezama Lima (1910-1976) and Reinaldo Arenas (1943-1990). Drawing on...

The literature of Cuba, argues Eduardo Gonzalez in this new book, takes on quite different features depending on whether one is looking at it from -the inside- or from -the outside, - a view that in turn is shaped by official political culture and the authors it sanctions or by those authors and artists who exist outside state policies and cultural politics. Gonzalez approaches this issue by way of two twentieth-century writers who are central to the canon of gay homoerotic expression and sensibility in Cuban culture: Jose Lezama Lima (1910-1976) and Reinaldo Arenas (1943-1990). Drawing on...