Transculturación in Alejo Carpentier's El siglo de las luces

Up to now, the novel El siglo de las luces has most often been interpreted from a political perspective in the context of the Cuban revolution – which seems justified by the fact that Carpentier started writing it when Fidel Castro was already engaged in a guerrilla war against the dictator Batista. However, the novel also contains an important description of the birth of a Cuban identity on the verge of the 19th century. In this essay I try to show that this identity is a transcultural one and that Carpentier conceived it in terms that owe much to the ideas of Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz