Governing Readability, OrHow to Read Césaire’s

Lydia Cabrera’s Cuentos negros de Cuba [Black Stories from Cuba] is a classic of Cuban literature whose trajectory reveals a complex, transnational cultural history. During the Cuban Revolution’s famous literacy campaign of 1961, when all Cuban schools were shut down until the entire nation had learned to read, the Cuban government sponsored a massive publishing binge of a selection of ‘must-read ’ books. Even though Cabrera had left Cuba the year before and was a known dissident of the Revolution, this book was one of those chosen to bestow upon the nation’s new and renewed readership en masse. The choice indicates the book’s prominence in Cuban literary history, even though it holds that promise in an odd way: it is lauded primarily for its ethnographic “value ” as opposed to its literary “value”; in other words, it is broadly assumed that the book contains a collection of Afro-Cuban folklore instead of a set of literary texts inspired by Afro-Cuban folklore. The reason for this widely-held view is that the book was characterized as a “translation of folklore ” in its preface by the most famous Cuban anthropologist, Fernand