ABSTRACT
In Cuba, in the republican period, the equation was inverted; everything seemed to favor brevity. The short story was the dominant genre because a vehicle for its dissemination was in place—the literary journal—there was a guaranteed reading public and remuneration. Cuban poetry reflected the revolutionary epic as it was occurring; it has been the most contemporary of genres in its themes, drawing its raw material from the everyday life of Cubans and their articulation with the world, to the rhythm of history unfolding. The end of the nineteenth century, with the transition from Spanish colonial rule to the US sphere of influence, did not have a marked effect on print culture, at least not until 1906 and the first US intervention under the Platt Amendment. One novelist’s response to the dollarization of Cuban literary life has been to shop, on trips abroad, for desktop publishing software.
