Paper short abstract:

Fernando Ortiz, Alejo Carpentier and Jorge Mañach are well-know for their writings on Cuban identity and culture. This paper will explore some of the less-well known writings produced whilst on exilic escapes, literary tours or professional sojourns in New York, Paris and Madrid.

Paper long abstract:

Ortiz, Carpentier and Mañach are amongst the most notable Cuban writers of the twentieth-century. Between them they observed, analysed and enunciated Cuban identity and culture from the percipient perspectives of unorthodox ethnography, avant-garde literature and socio-cultural satire; to them is attributed much of the conceptual vocabulary that is still unavoidable when discussing the maravilloso, decadente and contrapuntístico Cuban condition, or cubanía, as Ortiz preferred.

Yet all three writers spent considerable amounts of time away from quotidian Cuba and immersed in other, even exotic, cultural and political milieux. This paper will read across the foreign correspondence and essayistic writings of Ortiz, Carpentier and Mañach whilst in New York, Paris and Madrid respectively, examining their reflections on home and on the 'unhomely' surroundings in which they found themselves. By doing so, the paper will attempt to trace lines of thought and deed between the writers' experiences in those far-off cities and the ambivalent borders all three charted around their island and its idiosyncrasies.