This chapter examines the literary representation of Afro-Cuban orality by three major Cuban literary figures of the twentieth century: Fernando Ortiz, Lydia Cabrera, and Nicolás Guillén. Their writing is considered in the context of wider debates about the representational value of Latin American literary portrayals of the Other and the question of the subaltern speaking, thus linking them with the late 1980s body of criticism known as postmodern ethnography. In this sense, critics tend to favor Cabrera’s self-reflective innovative representation over Ortiz’s supposedly objective detachment as traditional anthropologist. However, this chapter draws attention to the fact that both Ortiz’s and Cabrera’s studies were forms of salvage ethnography, an approach based on the erroneous belief that oral traditions need to be preserved or rescued through writing. The chapter then addresses the son poetry of Nicolás Guillén as a contrasting representation of Afro-Cuban orality in the realm of written poetry that circumvents Ortiz’s and Cabrera’s reifying approaches by drawing on the lyrics of Afro-Cuban music son. Thus, the poem "Secuestro de la mujer de Antonio" achieves an openly subjective literary reworking of an Afro-Cuban son text while recognizing its parallel existence as a legitimate Afro-Cuban literary form and foregrounding its own status as copy.

This chapter examines the literary representation of Afro-Cuban orality by three major Cuban literary figures of the twentieth century: Fernando Ortiz, Lydia Cabrera, and Nicolás Guillén. Their writing is considered in the context of wider debates about the representational value of Latin American literary portrayals of the Other and the question of the subaltern speaking, thus linking them with the late 1980s body of criticism known as postmodern ethnography. In this sense, critics tend to favor Cabrera’s self-reflective innovative representation over Ortiz’s supposedly objective detachment as traditional anthropologist. However, this chapter draws attention to the fact that both Ortiz’s and Cabrera’s studies were forms of salvage ethnography, an approach based on the erroneous belief that oral traditions need to be preserved or rescued through writing. The chapter then addresses the son poetry of Nicolás Guillén as a contrasting representation of Afro-Cuban orality in the realm of written poetry that circumvents Ortiz’s and Cabrera’s reifying approaches by drawing on the lyrics of Afro-Cuban music son. Thus, the poem "Secuestro de la mujer de Antonio" achieves an openly subjective literary reworking of an Afro-Cuban son text while recognizing its parallel existence as a legitimate Afro-Cuban literary form and foregrounding its own status as copy.

Hughes did not travel in South America, and his contacts with fellow writers from the southern part of the hemisphere all began elsewhere, notably in Mexico, Spain, and Cuba. This chapter focuses on the circulation of the Spanish translations of Hughes’s poetry in the Hispanic Americas and on the different literary and political personae that Spanish-language translators and journalists constructed for him. For some, Hughes was the race-man celebrated as the purported progenitor of black poetry in the Hispanic world. For others, he was the black Marxist who wrote poetry in the service of global revolutionary politics. While Hughes played both roles at different times in his career, his dedication to black internationalism would eventually prove untenable in the Hispanic Americas.

Afro-Latin American newspapers included extensive coverage of Black populations in other countries.Articles on Black populations and race relations in Latin America, the United States, and Europe and Africa are examples of “practices of diaspora,” international communication and engagement among Black peoples that grew out of, and helped to forge, feelings of connectedness and racial solidarity.The Black press also reported on, or offered commentary on, more formal political movements promoting Black internationalism, such as Garveyism.Black papers in Argentina and Uruguay reported regularly on their northern neighbor, Brazil. Cuban papers included Puerto Rican and Dominican writers and discussions of Haiti. Throughout Latin America, writers and intellectuals of all races watched with mixed horror and fascination the workings of racial segregation and anti-Blackness in the United States.Diasporic ties were further thickened by travel, migration, and personal connections and friendships among African American and Afro-Latin American writers and intellectuals.

Latin America’s Black newspapers and magazines were sites for both dissemination and extensive discussion of literature and the arts.Culture was no less important to Black editors and writers than politics or social commentary. The papers published numerous stories, poems, and serializations of novels. They included profiles of important Black artists, writers, and musicians and debated the quality of their work.Their efforts to alert readers to the existence and the achievements of Black cultural creators simultaneously created space for the development of Black cultural theory and arts criticism. This chapter includes several creative works, an extended review of a long-form poem, reporting on the lives and deaths of individual authors, and an account of a female cook whose aspirations to become a writer were never realized.Other articles provide probing reflections on the relationship of Blackness to artistic expression, and on what it meant to be a Black artist.

During the early twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of Anglo-Caribbean workers migrated to Spanish-speaking countries, but intellectual exchanges between the region’s anglophone and hispanophone writers remained few and far between. This situation changed above all as a result of the Cuban Revolution, which captured the imagination of a generation of writers and catalysed new networks through institutions like Casa de las Américas. These exchanges would be dominated by concerns with race and sovereignty, while sidestepping questions about Cuban communism and literary censorship. When Andrew Salkey attended the 1968 Cultural Congress in Havana with C. L. R. James and John La Rose, he portrayed Cuba as a symbol of regional anti-imperialism and interrogated the condition of Afro-Cubans, overlooking contemporary censorship scandals. The cross-Caribbean itineraries of Nicolás Guillén and Edward Kamau Brathwaite in the 1970s are emblematic of the cultural diplomacy of the time period. While Guillén’s reception foregrounded his writing on people of African descent and downplayed his commitment to communism, Brathwaite’s poetry was celebrated in Cuba but also subject to suspicion for its black radical content.