This chapter examines the pioneering role of Getrudis Gómez de Avellaneda as a transatlantic intellectual; as the initiator of what became the long-lasting trope among Cuban writers of lejanía [distance] or imagining Cuba from afar; and as a precursor of modern feminism whose persistent interweaving of race and gender, the chapter argues, constitutes the writer’s signature contribution to Cuban literature. Devoting much of the essay to Gómez de Avellaneda’s fiction, including Sab, Dos mujeres, Guatimozín, and El artista barquero o los cuatro cinco de junio, the chapter teases out this body of work’s exemplification of both early abolitionism and a feminist consciousness, tracing the latter to Gómez de Avellaneda’s essay on Mercedes Merlin, which established the first female genealogy of Cuban literature.

This chapter addresses the bountiful field of nineteenth-century Cuban poets, highlighting their transatlantic interactions with global Romanticism in creating a corpus of self-consciously “Cuban” literature that forged many of the foundational themes in Cuban political culture and rhetoric, including exile and an “amorous cathexis” to the island, all against the backdrop of racialized slavery and colonialism. Focusing on work by José María Heredia, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés (Plácido), José Jacinto Milanés, Juan Francisco Manzano, Juan Clemente Zenea, and Luisa Pérez de Zambrana, and noting the embrace by Cuban poets of European poetry and lyric conventions, the chapter underscores in Cuban Romanticism the cultural role of the local tertulias of Domingo del Monte and Nicolás Azcárate; the vernacular contexts permeated by slavery and decrying its atrocities; the drive to alter Cuba’s colonial status; early reactions to European extractivism of New World resources; and racial and gender hierarchies, further complicated by the writing and reception of poetry by people of color and by women.