This chapter examines the elaborate poetics set forth by Cuban poets on and off the island in the first three decades after the Cuban Revolution. Using the concept of “dramas of institutionalization,” the chapter traces the (sometimes extremely) divergent esthetic attitudes and geographical and political positioning by poets such as Roberto Fernández Retamar, Heberto Padilla, Eliana Rivero, Jesús Cos Causse, Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Soleida Ríos, Lourdes Gil, Reina María Rodríguez, Angel Escobar, Ramón Fernández-Larrea, and Rolando Prats, among others. The accounts and analyses of Cuba’s voluminous poetic production elucidate its uses of colloquialism, interdisciplinarity, and linguistic confluence, among many other strategies.

This chapter examines alternative cultural projects that emerged in Cuba from the 1980s into the new millennium: intellectual groupings, periodicals, and writing initiatives neither fully in the state’s purview nor fully outside of it. The chapter elucidates the national and international factors as well as intellectual and artistic goals marking such projects as Paideia (1989–1990), Diáspora(s) (1993–c.2002), Torre de Letras (2001–2016), OMNI Zona Franca (1995–?), and la noria (2009–) and notes their impact on the writers of Generation Zero, born in the late 1970s and early 1980s, who published some of their work in these venues. Although the chapter includes numerous writers, key figures addressed include Rolando Prats (Paideia); Reina María Rodríguez (Paideia and Torre de Letras); Rolando Sánchez Mejías, Carlos A. Aguilera, Ricardo Alberto Pérez, Pedro Marqués de Armas, and Rogelio Saunders (Diásporas); Juan Carlos Flores, Amaury Pacheco, David Escalona, Luis Eligio Pérez, Alina Guzmán, Nilo Julián González, Damián Valdés, and Jorge (Yoyi) Pérez (OMNI Zona Franca); and Oscar Cruz and José Ramón Sánchez (la noria).