Cuban literature is the literature written in Cuba or outside the island by Cubans in Spanish language. It began to find its voice in the early 19th century. The major works published in Cuba during that time were of an abolitionist character. Notable writers of this genre include Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda and Cirilo Villaverde. Following the abolition of slavery in 1886, the focus of Cuban literature shifted. Dominant themes of independence and freedom were exemplified by José Martí, who led the modernista movement in Latin American literature. Writers such as the poet Nicolás Guillén focused on literature as social protest. Others, including Dulce María Loynaz, José Lezama Lima and Alejo Carpentier, dealt with more personal or universal issues. And a few more, such as Reinaldo Arenas and Guillermo Cabrera Infante, earned international recognition in the postrevolutionary era.
Most recently, there has been a so-called Cuban "boom" among authors born during the 1950s and '60s. Many writers of this younger generation have felt compelled to continue their work in exile due to perceived censorship by the Cuban authorities. Many of them fled abroad during the 1990s. Some well-known names include Daína Chaviano (USA), Zoé Valdés (France), Eliseo Alberto (Mexico), Pedro Juan Gutiérrez (Cuba), Antonio Orlando Rodríguez (Cuba) and Abilio Estévez (Spain).
Cuban literature is one of the most prolific, relevant and influential literatures in Latin America and all the Spanish-speaking world, with renowned writers including José Martí, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, José María Heredia, Nicolás Guillén (the National Poet of Cuba), José Lezama Lima, Alejo Carpentier (nominee for the Nobel Prize for Literature), Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Virgilio Piñera and Dulce María Loynaz, among many others. The culture of deep writing and memory in Cuba cultivated during the Spanish Empire. The Spanish brought with them cronistas who recorded and described all important events.The most important cronista to arrive in Cuba in the 16th century was Bartolomé de las Casas, a friar who authored, among other texts, the History of the Indies
History Spanish language literature began in the Cuban territory with the Spanish conquest and colonization. The conquistadors brought with them cronistas who recorded and described all important events, although they did so with the Spanish point of view and for the Spanish reading public. The most important cronista to arrive in Cuba in the 16th century was Bartolomé de las Casas, a friar who authored, among other texts, the History of the Indies.
The first literary work written on the island dates to the 17th century, when in 1608 Silvestre de Balboa y Troya de Quesada (1563–1647) published Espejo de paciencia, a historical epic poem in royal octavo that narrates the capture of the friar Juan de las Cabezas Altamirano by the pirate Gilberto Girón.
Cuban writing began with poetry, and there were few other significant works written in the 17th century.
18th century It was not until 1739 that the first play by a Cuban appeared in Sevilla under the title El príncipe jardinero y fingido Cloridano ("The Garden Prince and the Hypocritical Cloridano") by Santiago Pita. It is a comedy portraying the artificial expressions of the time, with occasional reminiscences of Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca and Augustín Moreto.
True Cuban poetic tradition began with Manuel de Zequeira y Arango and Manuel Justo de Rubalcava toward the end of the 18th century, despite the fact that Espejo de paciencia had been published a century and a half earlier. This can be affirmed not only by the quality of their respective works, but also by their typical Cuban style, which had already grown apart from that of Spain. The ode to indigenous nature became the tone and primary theme of Cuban poetry. Among the best inaugural poems are the ode "A la piña" by Zequeira and "Silva cubana" by Rubalcava.
19th century Cuban neoclassicism (ca. 1790–1820) was characterized by the use of classic forms similar to those of ancient Greece, with equaled invocations of Greco-Latin gods but with a singular prominence given to nature with the clear intention of distancing itself from Europe. Francisco Pobeda y Armenteros was a poet who can be placed midway between "high culture" and "popular culture" and whose style was one of the first to initiate the process of "Cubanization" in poetry. Soon afterward, Domingo del Monte attempted to do the same, proposing the "Cubanization" of romance. Del Monte also set himself apart by his fundamental work in the organizing and correspondence of literary circles.
Romanticism matured in Cuba due to one figure with continental status whose poetic works broke with Spanish-language tradition (including that of classical Greece), dominated then by varying levels of neoclassicism. José María Heredia was born in Santiago de Cuba in 1803 and died in Toluca, Mexico in 1839, and besides being the first great Romantic poet and Cuban exile, he was an essayist and dramaturge. He founded the critical and literary newspaper El Iris in 1826 together with the Italians Claudio Linati and Florencio Galli. He also founded two magazines: Miscelánea (1829–1832) and La Minerva (1834). Among his best known poems are two descriptive-narrative silvas: "En el teocalli de Cholula" (written between 1820 and 1832), which admires the great Aztec ruins of Cholula in Mesoamerica and reproves pre-Hispanic religion, and "Al Niágara" (1824), which covers the imposing and wild waterfalls of Niagara and develops a new voice: the romantic "I" attributed to nature.
Other notable romantic authors were Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés ("Plácido") and Juan Francisco Manzano. Among the adherents to American regionalism was José Jacinto Milanés, while Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, a distinguished figure of Hispanic American Romanticism, triumphed on foreign soil and was criticized by the orthodoxy of Cintio Vitier in the 20th century.
The next milestone of Cuban poetry came with the rise of two poets: Juan Clemente Zenea (1832–1871) and Luisa Pérez de Zambrana (1837–1922), who, like Merecedes Matamoros, achieved high literary qualities in their works. Therefore, when the Modernist generation erupted on stage, there already existed a Cuban poetic tradition, but one that could be said to lack the degree of universality that was brilliantly reached by José Martí (1853–1895).
Foreign influences, French above all, came together in another essential poet: Julián del Casal. Most notable in his work was the cognitive, artistic production of word as art, not exempt from emotions, from tragedy or from the vision of death.
The 19th century saw Cuban philosophers and historians such as Félix Varela, José Antonio Saco and José de la Luz y Caballero paving the way for the period of independence. Cirilo Villaverde, Ramón de Palma and José Ramón Betancourt wrote abolitionist literature. Meanwhile, a national literature flourished with José Victoriano Betancourt and José Cárdenas Rodríguez and a late Romanticism with the so-called "reacción del buen gusto" ("reaction of good taste") of , Joaquín Lorenzo Luaces and José Fornaris. Noteworthy as a literary criticism was Enrique José Varona.
20th century The 20th century opened with an independent republic mediated by U.S. occupation that, with the repeal of the Platt Amendment in 1933, began to create its own institutions. Cuba had finished a bloody war of independence from Spain with the help of the United States, by which Cuban literature in the first half of the century continued to be marked, not only with the influx of great writers such as Julián del Casal and José Martí, the first Cuban modernists, but also with a contradictory consolidation of Spanish culture with national identity. The American government had a positive in influence in Cuba as it helped the Cubans with the task of building a new nation.
Poetry Above all, Casal was the great canonic figure of Cuban poetry at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. "His energy, apart from that which he had in late-19th century modernism, which was decisive, reached to the level of Regino Boti and, above all, José Manuel Poveda – the latter dedicated his ‘Canto élego’ to him" – and even to the level of Rúben Martínez Villena and José Zacarías Tallet. "How would the lyrical exoticism of Regino Pedroso, the symbolist intimacy of Dulce María Loynaz, the poetic sentimentality of Eugenio Florit, the refined and solitary purism of Mariano Brull [...] or the neo-Romanticism of Emilio Ballagas and the part-romantic, part-modernist vein in some of Nicolás Guillén’s poetry be understood without an antecedent like Casal?"Jorge Luis Arcos, Prologue to Las palabras son Islas. Introducción a la poesía cubana del siglo XX. Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1999.
Before the definitive arrival of the vanguards, the 1920s brought the development of a kind of poetry that anticipated the social and human unrest of the next decade. In this category, Agustín Acosta, José Zacarías Tallet and Rubén Martínez Villena stand out.
Acosta was the most relevant of these poets, primarily for his work La zafra (1926), which poeticizes in pastoral verse the reality of working in the fields. Acosta furthered himself from Modernism with this poem, yet he still did not enter into the radicalism of some vanguards.
Modernism is considered to have ended with Poemas en menguante (1928) by Mariano Brull, one of the principal representatives of pure poetry in Cuba. Two nearly divergent lines developed in the course of the avant-garde: 1) the realist line of African, social and political themes in which Nicolás Guillén excelled and 2) the introspective and abstract line that had its most recognized representatives in Dulce María Loynaz and Eugenio Florit. Midway between both tendencies lies the work of Emilio Ballagas, the poet who, according to Luis Alvarez, caused the neo-Baroque of José Lezama Lima.
In 1940, the magazine Revista Orígenes, which concentrated on both Cuban and universal topics, was launched by a group led by Lezama Lima (1910–1976) that included Ángel Gaztelu, Gastón Baquero, Octavio Smith, Cintio Vitier, Fina García Marruz and Eliseo Diego.
Other distinguished poets of this generation were Lorenzo García Vega, Samuel Feijóo, Mary Stanley Low and Félix Pita Rodríguez, but Lezama Lima was by far the central figure of Cuban poetry by mid-century. Dense metaphors, complex syntax and conceptual obscurity define the Baroque poetic environment, which consisted in a struggle to reach a vision through which life would not continue seeming like "a yawning succession, a silent tear". Lezama Lima's work spans various volumes of poetry, including Muerte de Narciso (1937), Enemigo rumor (1947), Fijeza (1949) and Dador (1960).
The so-called "Generation of the Fifty" (authors born between 1925 and 1945) looked to master poets "del patio", such as Lezama Lima and Florit, although they broke off in different currents, including neo-Romanticism, in order to cultivate what would by the 1960s be the last current of the 20th century, as clearly accepted by numerous poets: colloquialism.