Eliseo Alberto's Informe contra mí mismo reinscribes in 1997 the by-then paradigmatic narrative of Cuban literature's triumph over socialist politics. The informe of the title – which provides the central conceit of Alberto's memoir – refers to the documentation that Cuban citizens, compelled by the socialist state, provided about their neighbors, co-workers and family members. By the 1990s, however, Alberto has transformed the informe from the state's repressive instrument into his own objet d’art. Domestic surveillance undergoes a metamorphosis and emerges as literary genre. That such a transformation should be realized by no less than Eliseo Alberto, son of the famous origenista poet Eliseo Diego, constitutes a significant socially symbolic event.

This redeployment of state document as literary text is not without precedent, of course, even in the Cuban context. Jesús Díaz's Las iniciales de la tierra, published in 1987 – though written in the 1970s – is the fictional Pérez Cifredo's response to a standard questionnaire that will assist his peers in determining whether he is fit to be a “militante” in the Communist Party. But the interpretive framework has shifted considerably from 1987 to 1997, from Iniciales to Informe, and Alberto's book is less the private story of an individual's struggle to define his role in a powerful political system he both admires and stridently critiques, than a spectacular public “confession” of complicity with a political system that is ostensibly on the way out. Informe is, at the same time, a declaration of loyalty to the literary ethos of his father's generation, which in the 1990s finds itself in ascendance.

The text has its origin or pre-text in the actual report that Cuban government officials ask the author to write about his own family in 1978. Alberto's family is politically suspect for a number of reasons: it once belonged to the “rancia aristocracia cubana” (15); the author's father, the famous Cuban poet Eliseo Diego, is associated with the Orígenes literary group, which in official circles in 1978 is still considered too bourgeois, too culturally elitist, too Catholic, and too conspicuously apolitical; and in the late 1970s Eliseo Diego begins receiving visits from foreign intellectuals – including Cuban exiles – who are perceived as potentially threatening to revolutionary political culture.