This book begins with the premise that a materialist, unapologetically leftist reading of contemporary Cuban culture and a corresponding critique of the global capitalist culture industry became most urgent, and most full of possibility, precisely at the moment of Marxist criticism's lowest prestige in Cuban literary and cultural criticism and, more broadly, in that historical moment in which Marxism itself was “proved wrong” by such events as the demolition of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent disintegration of the Socialist bloc. Marxism's privileging of history as the ultimate interpretive framework appeared, almost paradoxically, as self-indictment in a moment in which history had shown Marx to be spectacularly wide of the mark.

In the 1990s, the reabsorption of Cuban culture by the international market was under way, and numerous journalists and literary critics described the surging interest in Cuban literature as the result of a “boom” – that is, in the characteristically Anglo-American parlance of financial speculation that had branded Latin American literature so successfully in the 1960s and 1970s. To add insult to injury, this boom in Cuban literature was brokered for the most part in Spain, the former metrópoli. Neocolonial economic and cultural patterns had re-emerged with a vengeance.

For various reasons, then, this might have been the moment for scholars of Cuban culture to re-energize the critique of imperialism, the globalization of capital and the ideology of the newly commodified cultural artifact. Marxist literary criticism was poised, certainly, to recuperate a hermeneutic function scarcely afforded by the state-sponsored literature of socialist apology whose message hardly required the elucidation of experts. In the 1990s, however, the longstanding saturation of political and cultural discourse on the island with a state-sponsored Marxismo-Leninismo typically had the opposite effect – at least off the island, and especially, perhaps, among Cuban émigré scholars and journalists. Insofar as anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist critique had for so long been monopolized in Cuban intellectual discourse by the socialist state, there were few strong and sustained independent efforts to adapt it, in the 1990s, to contemporaneous historical developments.

An energetically anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist cultural critique independent of the Cuban state did not materialize in any sustained, collaborative way, for example, in exile journals, Cuban studies conferences, or in the Spanish publishing industry – an industry that, significantly, embraced not only the new Cuban novel, but also the political essay.