Who can still speak of the island, who still has the privilege of gnosis intact? From that branch of fire embedded in the origin of Cuban history to the obese sun that settles in the middle of the street at two in the afternoon, forcing us to believe so we can stay or to flee so we can survive, a key aspect of contact with Cuban literature has experienced the temptation of finding a destiny behind that sign of the island. Today, neither so unknown nor so distinct in the cosmos, that island seems to have gained in emptiness by saturation. Those who narrate it don’t do it justice; those who live it say they do not know it. A Cuba that repeats itself also drifts apart and is alien. Even those who inhabit it find it different from its previous versions. Ghostly, it insinuates itself in a narrow street of balconies, on a beach of black sands and little breeze, on the domino table, in that statue lost in Central Park that everyone celebrates, in a volume of Alexander von Humboldt, on YouTube, in the ice. That’s why the news of the publication of The Cambridge History of Cuban Literature, with that title that combines an occlusive language and the familiarity of the native country, is less than surprising. It was in a Havana park where I first read and underlined in a Monte Ávila edition George Steiner’s dictum that a literature that is not translated is lost. I can’t say that was my first thought when I saw the cover of The Cambridge History of Cuban Literature circulating on social media, but at the time I remember fantasizing about the odds that a project like this would help to think Cuba out of its damned exceptionality, to scatter it out of the oyster where it seems to be frozen and trapped. Vicky Unruh and Jacqueline Loss, the book’s coordinators and editors, determined to serve as hosts in a house to be built, invited scholars and essayists to read and reread in their own way, but from the present and from wherever they might be. Feeling curious about how it all happened, I sent them some questions. More than their answers, the result is this trialogue sustained over several weeks.
Cuba comes to Cambridge, or what is even more difficult, the history of Cuban literature comes to the Cambridge Press collection of literary histories. The last time I looked at the calendar, we were on the verge of reaching the first quarter of the 21st century. It has taken a while. How long did it take for this project to become a reality? Who first savored it, then aspired to it? How did it all happen? Among so many scholars of Cuban literature, how did you come to be the ones who have thrown yourselves into the endeavor and the ones who have succeeded?
Vicky Unruh and Jacqueline Loss. First of all, Roberto, we would like to thank you and No Country Magazine for the privilege of this interview and the excellent questions. We have reflected and consulted on them, some since the beginning of the project and to which we now return with fresh eyes, and others for the first time in this context.
VU. It all started with a surprise. An editorial director at Cambridge University Press, Ray Ryan, with great interest in Cuba, invited me in the fall of 2019 to submit a proposal for a history of Cuban literature in English with the title A History of Cuban Literature and with approximately 25 essays. A History of Mexican Literature, edited by Ignacio Sánchez Prado, Anna Nogar, and José Ramón Ruisánchez Serra, had appeared in 2016, and others on the literatures of individual Latin American countries (Chile, Argentina) were then in preparation for the same series entitled A History of… I saw it as a challenging opportunity to bring the very rich Cuban literary tradition to the attention of a wider readership. Since the most dynamic projects of this kind tend to be those with more than one editor, I immediately thought of Jacqueline Loss because of her impressive expertise in Cuban literary culture, both on the island and in the diaspora, her deep understanding of nuances and complexities, and her great intellectual creativity. Responding to the invitation, Jacqueline and I submitted an initial proposal to Cambridge in April 2020, and they immediately invited us to submit an alternative proposal for a book of up to 45-50 chapters in their series The Cambridge History of…, which would be the first in this series on an individual Latin American country. (Cambridge had already published The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature, three volumes [1996] and The Cambridge History of Latin American Women’s Literature [2016].) We submitted an extensive proposal to them toward the end of 2020, and with their quick approval and invitations to participate already accepted in the spring of 2021, the deadline for submission was the summer of 2022. Given that these were the most intense and volatile years of the pandemic, it was only thanks to the enormous efforts of our authors against all odds that we delivered the full manuscript to Cambridge in July 2023. With a rigorous production process, the book was expected to appear by June 2024, but the publisher sustained an enormous cyber-attack in May, which delayed the appearance until September 2024.
Despite our intense awareness of the daunting magnitude of what was proposed, one thing that greatly attracted us to the project was that, despite the apparent standardization of the books in this Cambridge series—with the predetermined covers and titles—we had almost total freedom and flexibility in the design, organization, content, and contributors to the book. The only limit was the word count. In addition, after reviewing other recent Cambridge volumes and in consultation with our editorial director, we realized that the books in this series are not encyclopedias, nor do they aspire to be. On the contrary, they tell the literary-cultural history of a country or region through a selection of critical essays, written by specialists versed in previous studies on the subject, and in full dialogue with contemporary theoretical currents and ways of knowing immersed in the epistemes, if you will, of their times. A unique element in the process of conceptualizing the book was our Cambridge editor’s suggestion that we write the initial versions of the abstracts for each chapter ourselves (with a few exceptions), to strengthen the coherence of that design; thus, each abstract would point not only to a certain designated topic (an author, group of authors, movement or cultural phenomenon, etc.) but also to the burning questions we hoped the chapter would address. At the same time, we asked each author to give their interpretation of the theme; it was up to them to choose the theoretical/conceptual approach that seemed pertinent to them, as well as the central idea or reading to defend and, of course, the very organization of the essay. In many cases, this produced a productive dialogue between the authors and us, a collaboration through which they arrived at highly original approaches. I also believe that another result of this process was the establishment of connections between different historical periods that may have gone unnoticed until now, and that we can see throughout the entire volume. For example, the theme of Cuban exceptionalism appears already in Chapter 2—where Mariselle Meléndez analyzes the detailed historical account of Havana written by José Martín Félix de Arrate, and it reappears noticeably in Chapter 38, where Emily Maguire explores detective fiction, speculative fiction and graphic novels that, as a whole, question that cultural trope.
There is a Cuban tradition of its literary histories, engraved in grayscales, discolored, with its gaps, its well-known black holes through which authors and works have left and returned, mutilated, the fixed names that are repeated. I speak, of course, of that national literary historiography inside the island, of the projects that go from the Panorama histórico de la literatura cubana (1963), by Max Henríquez Ureña, or La literatura cubana. Esquema histórico desde sus orígenes hasta 1966, by Raimundo Lazo, to the most recent one (the last one was published in 2008), Historia de la literatura cubana in three volumes by the Instituto de Literatura y Lingüística de La Habana. Does this new history you are proposing look at them in any way, recognize them, question them?
VU. The book acknowledges on multiple levels its debt to previous historical works produced both on the island and elsewhere, many of which are mentioned in the introduction (“Other Histories”) and the even greater number of which appear in the individual “Works Cited” in each chapter or the final “Select Bibliography.” (Perhaps to avoid redundancy with those sections of the book, and due to space limitations, Cambridge, responsible for the final index, did not include the secondary references there.) To design the book and decide on the topics of the sections and individual essays, a process developed through multiple conversations via Zoom, we immersed ourselves for several months in the body of previous literary histories, those more comprehensive and those more selective, organized by genre or theme, both in Spanish and English, taking into account, in addition, the abundance of monographs on specific facets of Cuban literary culture that have appeared in the last twenty or thirty years. Two endeavors in particular probably had the greatest impact on this process. One was the pioneering case of Ambrosio Fornet’s El libro en Cuba: Siglos XVIII y XIX, from which we took the idea of beginning our Cambridge History… more or less following the advent of print culture in works written in or about Cuba. The other inspiration is more recent: the impressive three-volume Historia de la literatura cubana (2002, 2003, 2008), especially its invaluable sections on sociocultural contexts in each era. But every literary history somehow interpellates—whether to reinforce, expand, or reconstruct under new perspectives—previous versions of the same material, something we acknowledge in the introduction when unpacking the concept of “history.” Our book, which we characterize in the introduction as an “unfinished history,” is, by definition, less comprehensive than that three-volume history. But perhaps what most distinguishes ours from the former is the variety of voices that tell it from Cuba, the United States, Europe, and Latin America, demonstrating a greater diversity of intellectual positions, experiences, and professional backgrounds in relationship to Cuba or not. Likewise, the authors of our book generally participate in broader and more geographically and ideologically diverse critical dialogues.
When you started to conceive the volume, what were your intentions, what were the objectives, what were the urgencies? Did you think there were urgencies? Do you see the volume as a necessity, a manifest destiny, a debt to be paid off…?
JL. First I saw it as an opportunity to offer English-speaking readers, since we reside in the United States, a critical window into a literature and culture that is broad, diverse, and often intertwined with the literature and history of this country. And of course, a literature that I care deeply about. It seemed to me a unique opportunity to share a critical and political approach, highlighting the importance of dialogue and, using a New Age term, “holding space” for contrasting perspectives within and around literature. Unfortunately, this notion now appears increasingly detached from any reality that might be brought into existence.
VU. As Jacqueline says, an urgency she and I shared from the beginning was the commitment to inclusivity of perspectives in a story that would manifest the full complexity and nuances of the often conflicted Cuban literary-cultural field and the critical conversation surrounding it. In a way, this possibility simultaneously embodied the book’s great potential and its greatest challenge. Far from aiming for an ideological or conceptually homogeneous account, which, from our perspective, would have been a violation, we wanted to respect above all the patent disagreements, what we call in the introduction “the productive critical disharmony” that exists in Cuban studies. Closely linked to this, another urgency was to give voice in this account to as many Cubans as possible, from the island and multiple places in the vast multigenerational diaspora. We wanted to create a book that was conscious of its multifaceted interpretive character, not as a monument to establish a fixed literary heritage, but as what we called “a living performance of the act of remembering, collectively, but from different cultural spaces.” These goals were deeply rooted from the beginning in an intense awareness of our complex, and perhaps problematic, position: two non-Cubans putting together a project on Cuban literary history, from the American academy, but with a deep personal commitment to the future of both Cuba and the relationship between the two countries. I recognized during the process the idealistic, perhaps utopian character of those commitments, and I recognize it even more today in these dark moments being experienced both in the United States and Cuba. But it is worth remembering that we were putting together the initial project in 2020-2021, a time of the convergence of the pandemic quarantines with the U.S. demonstrations in the face of the assassination of George Floyd; the intensification of nationalist isolationism by a U.S. president incapable of the kind of international cooperation that the moment demanded; and the demonstrations of July 11, 2021 in Cuba, etc. In that area, the attraction of a collaborative project that crossed geographical, intellectual, and ideological borders was powerful. Now we find ourselves in an even worse moment. I cannot see a quick exit from our current shared nightmare, that of the United States and that of Cuba, not to mention the current state of relations between the two countries. Besides, a “flesh-and-blood” book like the Cambridge History of Cuban Literature rarely reaches the heights of an imagined project. Still, in my opinion, the critical circulation of ideas in a book such as this, which aspires to constitute an open cultural space, an implicit dialogue sometimes conflicting and even sometimes seemingly between deaf interlocutors, remains urgent, perhaps even more so today than yesterday.
The duality or tension between a literary culture such as Cuba’s and the attempt to apprehend it from the codes of the academic knowledge of the Anglo world demands a balance—one that acknowledges the plurality of origins as crucial to ensuring the plurality of perspectives. The authors hail from various countries. They are all Cubanists, of course—some of Cuban origin, others not—living on both sides of the ocean, and, in a few exceptional cases, even residing on the island itself. How could you describe the selection process of contributors? Did you set out to follow patterns of cultural representativeness? What were you trying to achieve?
JL. An excellent question. I feel very privileged to be part of a discipline in which I admire the abundant production of my peers and deeply value the people who carry it out. Of course, we considered the possibility of collaborating with them and their ability to listen to our criteria, but it was not a requirement, since we did not know all the collaborators beforehand. It has been quite a Pandora’s box, mostly positive, though extensive. The publisher emphasized the importance of global diversity among contributors, which led to the inclusion of scholars not only from Spain, Scotland, and England, but also from Canada, Brazil, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and various regions across the United States.The migration of outstanding thinkers born on the island has meant that several Cuban authors live in the diaspora. We invited scholars living on the island to collaborate, and we are happy some of them were able to do so; however, others, due to different factors—family problems, economic problems, access to research materials, “availability”—were unable to join us. This reflects not only the sociopolitical and economic situation in Cuba, but also part of the broader landscape of working on Cuba from within U.S. academia, where, for now, we still have certain resources to conduct research and express opinions—though today, we are increasingly witnessing the limits of that freedom up close. Historically, I have been critical of identity politics, but without a doubt, when making the selection of authors, we took into account several aspects, among them, the diversity of race, gender, and class. We believe that these criteria can enrich the very knowledge we are exploring.
VU. To add to what Jacqueline says, even taking into account the urgency of geographic and cultural diversity already mentioned, we were also looking for experts, authors highly skilled in the topics of their chapter, people currently working on that topic and involved in current critical conversations and/or who wanted to pick up the threads of previous work to create something new.
Each encyclopedia also reflects the zeitgeist, the prevailing epistemes, discourses, and codes of doing and knowing. How, in your opinion, is this reflected in the Cambridge History of Cuban Literature?
VU. It seems to us that we already commented on this relationship in the answers to other questions. But it is worth noting again here, perhaps, that this book is not an encyclopedia. The difference is important to us because encyclopedias, whose primary goals are to share basic information, usually follow certain patterns of rhetorical and stylistic conformity, a supposed “objectivity,” although, of course, notwithstanding the apparent neutrality, every informative exposition embodies an ideological position. However, in contrast to an encyclopedia, this book aspires to narrate Cuba’s literary-cultural history through critical essays that showcase their interpretative perspective, while participating in the critical conversations going on at the time they were written.
The back cover states that the volume is built around four axes, among them, two elements related to Cuban literary history: “its engagement with international networks; its key role in cultural identity debates throughout Latin America.” Did you arrive at these two axes inductively—that is, the nature of the culture in question demands it—or was it an ex partei advocacy according to editorial principles, the intended readership, or some other issue? How can these engagements be seen in the book?
VU. We arrive inductively at the four coordinates of the book that come up again and again, connecting different eras, not linearly or systematically, but as palimpsestic coexistences (to recall José Quiroga, to whom this book owes a great deal) or presences that ripple through the book again and again. We identified the two you mention in addition to the other two—the formative role of the racial imaginary, interwoven with social class and sexual gender in Cuban literature, and the movement, whether voluntary, exploratory, enslaved, migratory, or exilic that have always marked that literature—in our extensive conversations based on that immersion in reading material already mentioned, and after we had decided which individual chapters would be included in the book. The “engagements with international networks” are manifested in multiple essays, for example, in the chapters on the exchanges between Humboldt and intellectuals in colonial Cuba and on Martí as a “hemispheric” figure based on his appeal through journalistic chronicles and lectures to audiences in the United States and multiple Latin American countries. The participation of Cuban writers in international networks is highlighted in almost all the essays on the Republican era, for example, or in those devoted to Casa de las Americas and the alternative cultural projects arising from the Special Period, among others. Cuba’s key role in Latin American debates on cultural identity is particularly evident in the essays that delve into the 20th century and confront concepts of national, regional, or cultural identity. Think, for example, of those chapters that examine the “invention” of the black Cuban, or those that return to Carpentier and the marvelous real, Lydia Cabrera and the Caribbean concepts of “the black,” or Lezama Lima and the “Latin American baroque,” just to mention a few.
Rafael Rojas has spoken of the problem of Cuban exceptionality. In the volume, this word/condition appears already in the second chapter, dedicated to the 18th century thought of Félix de Arrate, undoubtedly in a distinct sense. Then, another chapter talks about anti-exceptionalism in marginalized genres such as detective and science fiction. How do you deal with the different variants/manifestations of Cuban exceptionalism, mostly associated with the fact of the Revolution or, better—to recall Agamben and Duanel Díaz (who appears not to have included in the book, by the way)—to that frozen revolution that casts that aura over the island for all those who do not inhabit it and see it from afar, in passing or from the past.
VU. We have commented on the trope of Cuban “exceptionality” in the context of the first question precisely in those two essays you mention, and it is explicitly or implicitly interwoven in many more, for example in the essays on Gómez de Avellaneda, Lezama and Orígenes (debates with Vitier), Casal, the post-1989 poetic imaginary, cinema and diaspora, Cuban-American narrative prose, and, extensively, in the epilogue essay that surveys a variety of tropes of 20th and 21st century exceptionalism. As I see it, what stands out in the book’s overall approach to the subject is that it is examined as an ideological concept or proposal that emerges strongly at some moments and is questioned, criticized, or undone at others. As for the critic Duanel Díaz, the book dialogues with his ideas on several issues, for example, in the essays on the avant-gardes of the republican era, the post-1989 poetic imaginary, and the aforementioned chapter-epilogue on the multiple tropes of exceptionalism. Several of Díaz’s works also appear in the “Works Cited” of the aforementioned chapters and the final bibliography of the book. Perhaps his presence in the book was not immediately apparent due to the fact that Cambridge University Press made the decision not to include secondary references in the final index, and, therefore, his name must be sought in the “Works Cited” of particular chapters or in the final bibliography. Another limitation of the index, for example, in the appearance of some references to “exceptionalism” and the absence of others, is the probable use of artificial intelligence in its preparation by Cambridge, resulting in a document that we had to correct and expand extensively. Unfortunately, our requests for correction in this context were not always followed.
One aspect addressed throughout the volume is that of translation. Some believe that the dislocation involved in such a shift is a useful strategy for distancing and rupture—one that helps shake off the burdens of proximity and perceive new areas of a culture that are often closed off within their own linguistic and cultural shell. How do you work with this in the book? What do you think translation projects contribute to the knowledge of Cuban literary culture?
JL. Five and a half chapters in our volume were originally in Spanish, and thanks to the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut and the support of World Poetry Books, we could subsidize their translation into English. However, it is well known that the translation process is not only literal but contextual, and translating the Cuban language and its nuances into English in different historical periods was not easy. As Lawrence Venuti has aptly put it, translating is an arduous process of reconstructing a domestic world into another universe of meanings in which those values may not correlate. As editors, we had to supervise this process quite closely, taking into account the context of the story being told through the volume. We did not aim for neutrality and generally left it to the contributors to decide on their use of words such as dictatorship, regime, authoritarianism, black, Black, Latinx, latino, latine, among many others. On the other hand, translation is not only from one language to another but also intralinguistic. We recognize that some approaches to talking about the 1959 revolution, in particular, will not resonate in the same way with everyone; maintaining tensions between perspectives is part of our role. This freedom extends to style as well, as long as the integrity of the volume is not sacrificed; that is, the reader will find chapters that conform to a traditional scholarly work alongside more characteristically Latin American essays written in the first-person singular. That’s why our introduction, “Unfinished Histories,” seeks to explain our, let me say, “ideological” approach—something that some might perceive as tendentious.
In addition to the traditionally known literary genres (literary and political essays, poetry, narrative, theater), the volume also deals with other parallel arts that coexist with literature. I am not only referring to music and cinema, which are included, but even others that literary historiography until recently ignored or neglected, such as performance art, opera or graphic novels. How much does this expansion of the generic spectrum contribute to the Cuban literary culture proposed in this volume?
JL. You don’t have to look very far to find definitions of literature that seek to transcend the limits of tradition, that is, those canons established by a few untouchable figures in each generation within the margins of the nation. The idea that oral storytelling, song, and music nourish the written word has been explored by critics as diverse as Mikhail Bakhtin, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and Ángel Rama. Our purpose is not only limited to mapping the literary imaginary through poetry, theater, and prose, but also to understand its points of contact with the geographical, political, and demographic reports of the Enlightenment; philosophical inquiry; journalistic chronicles; gatherings; artistic pedagogies and literacy campaigns; literary-critical essays; experimental magazines; cinema; music; artistic object-books, and performance art.
At the same time, our approach responds to our positioning within the discipline, not only as literary critics, but also as practitioners of cultural studies, interested in understanding how these genres intertwine and dialogue with each other. As we noted in the introduction, this literary history acknowledges the flexibility and shifting categories that have characterized human creative expression since long before the rise of print culture and up to the present, in which this book is composed. That said, this book is not intended to be infinite or to function as an encyclopedia, as we have noted on other occasions, and today there are multiple tools available to obtain a more complete picture. We are aware that this decision exposes us to possible criticism, such as the omission of certain literary expressions in favor of, say, attention to cinema. However, from the outset, we have aimed to explore the interconnection between the various cultural spheres.
VU. In addition to what Jacqueline points out, during its unfolding, I always imagined the book itself as a narration by multiple voices and from various perspectives of a long story, in the sense of storytelling in English. Since ancient times, narration or storytelling, especially in the hands of an ingenious storyteller, has incorporated many creative elements and artifacts—visual, sonorous, performative—to body forth a story in both its pedagogical and affective dimensions. This image of the project accompanied me every time we turned to resources beyond simple verbal art to tell the rich and creative literary-cultural history of Cuba.
Throughout the volume, there are some monographic articles. Martí, Casal, La Avellaneda dominate the 19th century, while the Countess of Merlin gains space by joining them. Lydia Cabrera, José Lezama Lima, Alejo Carpentier, and Virgilio Piñera are confirmed in the first half of the century, while Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Reinaldo Arenas take that role in the second half. Could this list of chosen ones be considered a veiled proposal of a canon cubensis in the book? Or do you think a volume like this simply avoids the idea of a literary canon?
VU. The list of authors that appears in the descriptive paragraph on the very first page of the book, also included in the promotional flyers created by Cambridge, is a response to the publisher’s request that we name some of the most important individual authors in the volume. This perhaps reflects the traditional tendency to think of literary history in terms of “major figures” and the academic librarian norm of providing such tables of contents when cataloging books. However, the inclusion of “theater and performance groups; film; postrevolutionary projects; post-1989 Special Period writers; and literature of Cuba’s diasporas” on that list signals our explicit intention to place greater emphasis on the patterns of literary-cultural studies. We were both formed intellectually in these modes of knowledge (still incipient in my own graduate studies), and they have long shaped our own scholarly paths. This orientation manifests our adoption of an “anti-monumentalist” stance, detailed in the introduction to the book, which could be associated with a tendency to eschew the canonical or, at least, to swim against the current. Only a little more than 25% of the essays are devoted to a single figure. However, we acknowledge that certain writers, artists, or intellectuals, beyond their strong impact or individual creativity, project a literary-cultural trajectory that embodies the debates, directions, and structures of feeling and emotions of a key historical moment or literary-cultural sphere. This was one of the requirements we considered for a figure to receive their own chapter, and under that criterion, with more space available, we would have loved to include individual chapters on, for example, Jose Antonio Aponte (1760?-1812), whose “Libro de Pinturas” imagined a global historical cartography of the black diaspora, or the complex republican intellectual Jorge Mañach. The other criterion for a monographic chapter was that the work of that figure had resonated through multiple interpretations over time, with indications that this would continue. This criterion explains the absence of chapters devoted to individual living writers, since this is, after all, a history, and it is not yet known which ones will have this kind of resonance. I believe that this approach to individual writers, moreover, far from elevating them as monuments, places them on the same level as the complex cultural fields they inhabit. The fact that most of the chapters focus on a range of literary-cultural activities, groups, genres, and cultural phenomena suggests that any canon cubensis implicit in the unfinished history this book offers is dynamic and open to change and reinterpretation.
A friend told me one day, apropos of reading in a class “My Race” by José Martí, that in Cuba the Revolution’s appropriation of Martí’s anti-racist discourse (namely, the non-existence of races) might have cancelled the discussion about racial identities, but also about racialization and discrimination based on skin color. I don’t know if she said that exactly, but in any case, what she said led me to think of it this way now that I’m trying to remember it. In this volume, the approach to black identities and cultures in Cuban literature is something already consolidated, even extending the book’s gaze to the connections with Haiti. What do these new perspectives or approaches bring to other, more traditional anthropological and ethnographic approaches already existing in Cuban studies inside the island?
JL. This issue cannot be addressed within one or two disciplines; rather, it is necessary to recognize the extent to which literary canons are constructed through racialized tropes. Undoubtedly, great Cuban thinkers on Cuban culture, race, and racism have left their mark on this volume. For example, Walterio Carbonell is an essential reference to rethink this link, as evidenced in Paloma Duong’s analysis in chapter 24 on the democratizing policies of the revolution and its selection criteria. Then, the ethnological thought of Joel James Figuerola reappears in the vision of Elzbieta Sklodowska in chapter 36 on the impact of the imaginary on Haiti in Cuban literature. The intellectual genealogy of these thoughts on race is something the contributors have made explicit through the dialogues they sustain and the critical references they make, not only to Martí, Ortiz, or Mañach, but to these and other contact zones.
But Vicky and I started from the idea that it is impossible to separate the racial question from virtually all the issues explored in the volume, that race cannot be isolated from any aspect of cultural production in a country like Cuba (or in a country like the United States). It is not just about race within one discipline or another, but about a literature whose principles have been shaped by intersectional visions—race, gender, class—that impact aesthetics, representation, and taste. One could argue that this strategy is forced and reproduces an almost flawed, even imperial, vision of U.S. American origin. There will be blind spots, for sure.
Time is always unfavorable to the present. Did the book run out of space for the phenomenon of digital media and the explosion of journalism and independent media of that Cuba in splinters (as the title of the anthology of short stories edited by Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo would say) of the new millennium? What else was left out that you would have liked to include?
JL. We exceeded the word limit established by the publisher. Reviewing the initial table of contents, it is clear that we dedicated 33 chapters to the 20th and 21st centuries, which placed us in a complex position. Our goal was to remind contributors of the importance of being inclusive with their critical references, so that our readers could better understand the vast field and the perspectives expressed in each chapter. One detail I would like to point out is that Cambridge did not include secondary sources in the final index, so although many are present throughout the volume, they are not easily found in the list. On the other hand, several writers are mentioned, but not addressed in a sustained manner. Our goal was, at least, to record their importance; Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo is in the book, along with many other authors of the 21st century. Unfortunately, however, we were unable to expand the book due to space constraints. I am not sure how productive it would be to list first and last names now, because I fear it would end up reproducing certain patterns. I confess that for every list in the book, there are at least two chapters left to write, and for each one, there is a history of the enormous anxiety that the fear of having left someone valuable out produced in me. It has certainly happened, and I regret it.
On the other hand, as you rightly point out, digital media has transformed our way of approaching a part of Cuban literature. In fact, the works cited by the authors are populated by references to several of them, including Rialta. It is a universe that has greatly enriched Cuban literary and theoretical production. We allude to the current stratosphere in our introduction precisely because there is much more to say about the present, and we hope it will be considered in a future history. The topic is also addressed, in part, in our introduction, in Walfrido Dorta’s chapter on alternative cultural projects and Iraida López’s chapter on narrative written by Cubans and Cuban-Americans in the United States.
VU. I would just like to add that the fact that the book devotes 33 of its 46 chapters to the 20th and 21st centuries is due to some marked historical differences between Cuba and most Latin American countries, some of them pointed out by Ambrosio Fornet in his study on the printed word in Cuba: the late arrival of the printing press and an extensive “lettered city,” the extended period as a Spanish colony, and the emergence of a republican era only at the beginning of the 20th century.
