This book is a study of imaginative literature (poetry, fiction, theatre) produced by the first generation of Black writers who came of age during the Cuban Revolution. Despite the increased scholarly interest in Afro-Cuban culture in the last decade or so, research on the literary production of Black Cubans remains relatively sparse. More importantly, existing scholarship on black Cuban literature tends to privilege national, political and economic discourses, often focusing solely on the dynamics of race in the Revolution and the place of the black writer/artist within the nation's cultural institutions. And while there is substantial engagement with feminist and queer articulations of desire within Cuban literary studies, there remains an urgent need for a sustained analysis of Black Cuban writing, investigating its preponderant concerns with themes of family, love and erotic politics. Filial Crisis and Erotic Politics in Black Cuban Literature: Daughters, Sons and Lovers addresses this critical lacuna. From its inception, the Revolution constituted a powerful stimulus to Black creativity. Paradoxically, it also actively suppressed Black subjectivity and stifled attempts to articulate an identity politics that privileged racial or sexual belonging over national belonging. The literature produced by the first generation of Black writers within the Revolution embodies this tension between creativity and containment. Operating within the established boundaries of cultural production, they nonetheless trouble and destabilize wider public agendas. In this book I argue that family, love, desire, sex and sexuality are the key constructs used by Black Cuban writers to highlight disquiet about the nation and thus pose serious challenges to homogenous conceptions of cubanidad.

Several of the writers discussed in this book (Excilia Saldaña, Eugenio Hernández Espinosa, Gerardo Fulleda León, Inés María Martiatu) were associated in one way or another with the ill-fated El Puente Publishing House which operated between 1961 and 1965 and was closed amid controversies relating variously to issues of race, homosexuality, homophobia and cultural decadence. Until recently, work on the El Puente generation has tended to focus on the intrigue surrounding the personal and political lives of the young artists who constituted the group, with very little attention placed on detailed textual exploration of what they actually produced. Linda Howe's Transgression and Conformity: Cuban Writers and Artists after the Revolution (2004) provides an excellent synthesis of the cultural and institutional processes which led to the demise of El Puente.