This chapter will focus on the distinct contributions of El libro perdido de los origenistas to Cuba's post-Soviet cultural imaginary and on Antonio José Ponte's construction of the origenistas as both contemporary cultural phenomena and as actual historical authors. Of the texts examined in this study, only Ponte's conveys a strong sense of the historical circumstances, socioeconomic realities, aesthetic sensibilities and interpersonal dynamics of the literary group that figures so prominently in all five. And it is only in Ponte's text that an assiduous and sensitive reading of specific texts of various origenista authors manifestly informs the texture and substance of the writing. These writers, as historical subjects and objects of interpretation, are, after all, the focus of Ponte's book. The narrative and ideological functions that Orígenes performs in all five of the texts, however, will provide a useful point of departure.

In each of the texts examined in this study, the writers associated with the journal Orígenes of the 1940s and 1950s embody that quintessentially Cuban cultural expression that had been repressed, marginalized, systematically erased from the nation's cultural history, particularly in the 1970s. Although the official pardon and institutionalization of Lezama Lima were under way in the 1980s, it was in the 1990s that Cuban authors most openly and energetically reappropriated the legacy of Lezama and the origenistas, celebrating individual poets, playwrights and novelists and their censored or systematically neglected texts. Orígenes, in a word, went mainstream. An origenista aesthetic sensibility was reasserted; indeed, in these years the category of the aesthetic itself, so closely identified with this group – and understood as antithetical to the Cuban state's political priorities – underwent the paradigmatic return of the repressed.

The dethroned cultural aristocracy of the origenistas, then, resumes its proper place after the fall of the Berlin Wall. That is, with the crisis in the revolutionary paradigm, these literary figures in some sense no longer require the official pardon or rehabilitation extended years earlier; the literary or cultural aristocracy has been restored. And it is only through such a postrevolutionary or post-socialist restoration, ironically enough, that the protag onist featured in contemporary, post-Berlin Wall narrative achieves political and artistic liberation. This is not, of course, the collective, revolutionary liberation of socialism. Art is no longer a “weapon of the masses,” as per the prevalent revolutionary metaphor.