During the past two decades, scholars from diverse disciplines have published a remarkable amount of academic research on the Cuban diasporic subject and, by extension, on the sidebar issue of Cubanía, particularly as it impacts Cuban- American identity. When perusing even superficially the many articles, collections of essays and books centering on transnationalism, diasporic commonalities, and transculturation, I am invariably struck by the frequency with which authors explore their own Weltanschauung and life experiences in order to generalize about The Cuban Condition, to employ Gustavo Pérez Firmat‘s oft-quoted title. Since its appearance in 1989, this perceptive incursion into national idiosyncracies as well as the transcultural and translational nature of Cuban culture has become required reading for scholars who broach the topic of Cubanía as immanent identity marker. Despite the academic rigor evident in Pérez Firmat's monograph, like many other probers into the question, he posits premises in his introduction that underscore a subjective approach to the issue. He explains, for instance:

Delving into the works of Fernando Ortiz, Nicolás Guillén, Eugenio Florit, Carlos Loveira, Luis Felipe Rodríguez and Alejo Carpentier, Pérez Firmat initiates a quest to inscribe Cubans – and by extension himself as an individual born in Cuba though raised in the US – within more or less fixed, if quite peculiar, cultural paradigms.