SOURCE: Luis, Julio Rodriguez. “Literary Production in the Hispanic Caribbean.” Callaloo 11, no. 1 (winter 1988): 132-46.

In the following essay, Luis provides an appraisal of the literary histories of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo.

Alejandro Losada in 1983 proposed a model for studying the development of literary production within the Latin American context which seems particularly useful, and which I intend to employ as a point of departure to draw my own conclusions regarding the literary histories of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo. These conclusions are of necessity very tentative at this stage and even more so with respect to Dominican literature, due to its near inaccessibility. Concerning literature produced in Cuba after 1960 the same reasons prevail, as they do on the subject of poetry in general, this being a genre whose overall process I feel neither academically nor “spiritually” well qualified to judge.¹

Losada begins by explaining how...