The Hispanic Caribbean is not easy to define or locate, and such processes of naming are necessarily fraught with tension: where is the Hispanic Caribbean? What is distinctive about this region? What challenges face those who attempt to define and locate it? The essays collected in this volume individually and collectivity expose some of these tensions. The use of the term "culture" in the plural is meant to register the dialectic of homogeneity and diversity which Antonio Benitez Rojo reminds us characterizes the Caribbean as a whole. These cultures do not only exist in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the half-island of the Dominican Republic but are also located in the coastal regions of continental Spanish America. Equally interestingly, they converge in particularly close ways in New York and to a lesser degree in Miami. The representation of nations which have common histories of colonialism, slavery, emancipation and rise of nationalisms, yet have very different contemporary political characteristics, is very complex indeed. How to reconcile revolutionary dictatorship in Cuba, democratic authoritarianism in the Dominican Republic, and the continuing colonization of Puerto Rico by the United States? What is the role of tradition within the modern Hispanic Caribbean? What is the function of the intellectual, wht writer or other cultural voices within these changing societies? How is the individual subject best positioned in relation to dominant conceptions of nationhood and identity? The chapters in this volume revolve around issues such as these.