Cuban Literature

Extract

“We see generals of thirty, poet-swordsmen spending themselves equally on their battles and their verses,” the Peruvian García Calderón wrote of revolutionary, nineteenth-century Cuba, “indomitable guerrillas, orators brimming with tropical eloquence, passionate pilgrims roaming the Americas to proclaim the miseries of Spanish domination.” Those revolutionary years that burn like an ember in the long history of Cuba glow with equal brilliance in the Cuban literary chronicle. Juan J. Remos y Rubio, indeed, in the three-volume History of Cuban Literature under review, lays such stress upon these years as to make them dim all that came before and all that has come after.