ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates that the narrative and political ambivalence of El reino de este mundo are inextricable from the contemporary Cuban and Latin American context and its contradictions – a central feature that has been scarcely addressed by critics. It demonstrates that the problem of assuming Vodou and Afro-Cubanism in El reino de este mundo and the Cuban contemporary context as totalizing emerges in the ambivalence that is intrinsic to the perspective of the “real maravilloso” when taken as the most effective representation of the criollo, of the genuine American. Arguably, the formulation of the “real maravilloso” is a cultural particularization of narrative perspective, using historical and cultural discourses to develop narrative technique. The “real maravilloso” as a narrative strategy enables Carpentier to look at the Haitian Revolution from within, from a Caribbean perspective of it in its most radical form, the slave point of view, claimed at some points to provide a genuine Caribbean point of view.
