There is a story in Senel Paz's 1980 collection of stories, El niño aquel, in which a meal in a well-to-do household constitutes the narrative mechanism for an acerbic denunciation of class inequalities. This story, “Almuerzo,” appears about ten years before the now much better-known “El lobo, el bosque y el hombre nuevo,” another Paz story featuring a class-defining meal. In the later story, the fictional character Diego re-enacts Paradiso's scene of the lavish “almerzo lezamiano,” reciting passages from Chapter VII of Lezama Lima's novel and serving the dishes precisely as described – in exquisite detail – in those pages. In spite of numerous and obvious differences between the earlier and the later scenes of meals, in each the meal is a signifier of privilege, and, specifically, the privilege of a pre-revolutionary bourgeoisie. It is significant, then, that these scenes constitute the vehicle, in these stories, for such different and utlimately incompatible ideologies.

In “Almuerzo” we have a straightforward indictment of pre-revolutionary class structure and a snapshot of a particularly callous member of that class. After school one day a boy visits his mother in the house where she works as a maid. The lady of the house asks him to play the part of a hungry dog in order to incite her petulant three-year-old to eat his own meal. The ruse fails. The three-year-old refuses to eat – even when his mother threatens to give his food to the agitated boy-dog – and, his performance unsuccessful, the child protagonist is dismissed without a bite. In “El lobo, el bosque y el hombre nuevo,” in contrast, we have an homage to the cultura criolla whose signifiers of privilege had been anathema ten years earlier, an homage to a culture that no is no longer imagined lording it over the masses, in fact, but that now represents a subaltern culture that has managed to survive the Revolution's efforts to eradicate it.

For various reasons, the later story probably could not have been published in Cuba in 1980. It is probably also true, however, that “El lobo, el bosque y el hombre nuevo” would have been difficult if not impossible even to imagine ten years earlier. It is not that any intervening historical events are represented in the later narrative.