This book examines the complex ways in which a literary culture has been created and sustained within the Cuban Revolution. Based on the insights gained from original interviews with over 100 participants and sustained documentary research, it offers new perspectives and challenges long-held orthodoxies regarding the place of literature in the Cuban Revolution. By departing from the conventional focus on individual texts and authors to instead examine the actors, processes and spaces (writing, regulation, publishing, promotion and reading) through which literature has operated inside Cuba...

This study explores the social functions of literature from the perspective of policymakers, writers, readers and residents in contemporary Cuba. It provides a new perspective on post-59 Cuban literature that underlines how cultural policy has made literature a hybrid activity between elite and mass culture, with inherent social, rather than aesthetic or political, value. Whilst many traditional studies of Cuban literature assume either its subjugation to politics and ideology or, conversely, its role in resisting political discourse via a rather naive notion of artistic freedom, this...