This epilogue chapter draws on metaphors of opera to offer a layered meditation on recurrent themes, teleologies, and tropes of identity, exceptionalism, and authenticity – stated, reworked, subverted, abandoned, and resurrected in Cuban literary culture from the end of the nineteenth century into the third decade of the twenty-first. Revisiting such figures as José Martí, Julián del Casal, Alejo Carpentier, Nicolás Guillén, José Lezama Lima, Lorenzo García Vega, Virgilio Piñera, Reinaldo Arenas, Roberto Fernández Retamar, and Antonio José Ponte, among others, and noting the writing of numerous literary women and men of different postrevolutionary generations who echo, mythologize, undermine, or shift directions from these legacies, the chapter asks that readers of Cuba’s cumulative literary history attune themselves to the performative voices through which this operatic literary history unfolds.
