Cuban artists have created a new kind of revolutionary landscape that reveals startling transformations in the social, political, cultural, and personal landscapes of present-day Cuba. This dissertation examines how contemporary Cuban artists have been successful agents in bringing cultural change. It provides in-depth analysis of the relations between Cuban art production and the island's culture industries from the Special Period of the 1990s through the resignation of Fidel Castro in 2008. This period is characterized as a skeptical era disinclined to romanticize national legacies. The dissertation also analyzes the role of artistic production in contemporary Cuba and examines the reconstruction of national consciousness and the creation of a new art market amidst a changed and evolved Revolution, and considers the ways in which these industries have diversified in the 1990s and 2000s, and the extent to which commercial imperatives have meant a revision and redefinition of the Cuban Revolution.

Scholars suggest that the reason the Cuban socialist state has endured more than seventeen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union is because of the increased repression exercised by the regime against its opponents. In contrast to these scholars, this dissertation argues that although the Cuban state does rely on coercion to some extent, it survives partly because it tolerates certain types of criticism, such as those generated by artists and their audiences. It also provides an account of how Cuban artists are rethinking political ideology in a post-Soviet context, and seeks to open up a theoretical space for understanding critical activity in one-party systems under late socialism, showing the multiple ways in which citizens of these regimes work within the limits of the system to make their voices heard. This is the first study to consider a broad range of Cuban artistic genres in the 1990s and 2000s in the context of globalization, definitions of cubanidad, and the creation of Cuba's new art market. It introduces a theoretical framework for assessing a body of artistic production largely unfamiliar outside of Cuba, and offers comparative perspectives on historic and cultural traditions as well as emerging trends in Cuban artistic production.