This chapter examines the configurations of Latin Americanism enacted by the renowned and enduring cultural organism Casa de las Américas, established shortly after the Cuban Revolution’s triumph in 1959. The chapter provides a detailed overview of the diverse thematics and functions in the purview of Casa, which positioned itself as a beacon for José Martí’s hemispheric vision of the Americas, encompassing the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America, and South America. The chapter examines Casa’s relationship to emancipatory thought in opposition to capitalist and imperialist visions, exploring its role as cultural producer and disseminator, with an emphasis on particular genres such as the testimonio and theater and through the prestigious Casa de las Américas awards for Latin American writers (1960–); a publishing house; theater festivals; the journals Casa de las Américas (1960–) and Conjunto (1964–); the organization of multiple international events focusing on literature, music, theater, and visual arts; and, toward the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, in new research centers related to cultural studies.

This chapter examines the tensions between the supporters of two modes of writing Latin America – magical realism and testimonial writing – under the lens of the figures of the falcon and the tortoise, a simile employed by one of Cuba’s first and most prominent theorists of testimonio, Miguel Barnet. It explores how the hybrid mode of testimonio was conceptualized in the first two decades of the 1959 Cuban Revolution and, more generally, in Latin America, and how these concepts presented a challenge to the literary establishment in Latin America and beyond. Through examining the key positioning of Cuban testimonio in the first two decades of the Cuban Revolution, the chapter argues that the role assigned to testimonio in these early conceptual formulations shared many commonalities with the aims of magical realism, but also some important differences based on positionality and power. As such, the schism of 1971 represented not only a political fracture between Cuba and some Latin American nations but also a tipping point, or moment of transition, in terms of Latin American literatures’ potential in the world.

This chapter examines the tensions between the supporters of two modes of writing Latin America – magical realism and testimonial writing – under the lens of the figures of the falcon and the tortoise, a simile employed by one of Cuba’s first and most prominent theorists of testimonio, Miguel Barnet. It explores how the hybrid mode of testimonio was conceptualized in the first two decades of the 1959 Cuban Revolution and, more generally, in Latin America, and how these concepts presented a challenge to the literary establishment in Latin America and beyond. Through examining the key positioning of Cuban testimonio in the first two decades of the Cuban Revolution, the chapter argues that the role assigned to testimonio in these early conceptual formulations shared many commonalities with the aims of magical realism, but also some important differences based on positionality and power. As such, the schism of 1971 represented not only a political fracture between Cuba and some Latin American nations but also a tipping point, or moment of transition, in terms of Latin American literatures’ potential in the world.

During the early twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of Anglo-Caribbean workers migrated to Spanish-speaking countries, but intellectual exchanges between the region’s anglophone and hispanophone writers remained few and far between. This situation changed above all as a result of the Cuban Revolution, which captured the imagination of a generation of writers and catalysed new networks through institutions like Casa de las Américas. These exchanges would be dominated by concerns with race and sovereignty, while sidestepping questions about Cuban communism and literary censorship. When Andrew Salkey attended the 1968 Cultural Congress in Havana with C. L. R. James and John La Rose, he portrayed Cuba as a symbol of regional anti-imperialism and interrogated the condition of Afro-Cubans, overlooking contemporary censorship scandals. The cross-Caribbean itineraries of Nicolás Guillén and Edward Kamau Brathwaite in the 1970s are emblematic of the cultural diplomacy of the time period. While Guillén’s reception foregrounded his writing on people of African descent and downplayed his commitment to communism, Brathwaite’s poetry was celebrated in Cuba but also subject to suspicion for its black radical content.