90 STEPHEN WILKINSON

 The critic Imeldo Alvarez states 11 years later in the introduction to his
 anthology of detective writing, Narraciones policiales:

 Antes de la Revoluci6n, la presencia del g6nero policial en Cuba fue disfrute
 de los receptores, y no cultivo del los creadores, aunque se produjeron
 algunas sefiales que hoy constituyen huellas arqueol6gicas. (1993:6)

 Similarly, Armando Crist6bal Perez, writing in 1981, dismisses the pre-
 revolutionary genre as insignificant and in the main overly inflected with a
 colonial subservience to the dominance of European and U.S. tastes.
 Commenting on the fact that the post-revolutionary boom in detective writing
 had aroused an interest in what had been produced before 1959, he writes
 that the genre 'no tuvo al parecer cultivadores.' There were occasional
 attempts by a few authors, but in the main these texts were imitations of the
 classics and manipulated by commercial interests which transplanted foreign
 situations and characters into Cuban settings. The absence of a peculiarly
 Cuban detective narrative was indisputable:

 En cualquier caso, la ausencia de obras literarias de autores reconocidos y
 de prestigio, dedicadas sistemAticamente al empefio conciente de creaci6n
 alrededor del tema policiaco en Cuba, es un hecho indiscutible. (1981: 123)

 Perez suggests that this absence was due to economic, political and social
conditions that impeded the development of the genre prior to 1959. He is correct
in the sense that social and economic conditions in pre-revolutionary Cuba were
not conducive to the cultivation of a mass literature. The low literacy rate,
immense poverty and a smaller population, all limited the market for books and
the demand for literature.' The Revolution created the market for a popular
genre such as detective fiction for the first time. However, in their dismissal
of pre-revolutionary detective fiction, Nogueras, Crist6bal Perez and Alvarez
might also be guilty of overemphasising its insignificance in order to make
the post-revolutionary genre appear even more impressive by comparison.
For although the quantity of output does not compare with the post-1971
boom, it is not true to say that pre-revolutionary detective fiction was
insignificant or that it was wholly characterized by being an imitation of the
classics or by the importation of foreign features.
 If only printed literature is taken into account, it is fair to say that the
genre was not cultivated to a large extent but if, in addition, radio and film

' Lisandro Otero in Dissenters and Supporters in Cuba (1987: 72): 'In 1958, book sales
amounted to 0.2 per inhabitant, in the 1976-1980 period, sales were 5 to 6 books per
inhabitant... 1200 titles with 42 million copies were published in Cuba in 1980.'
According to Armando Hart DAvalos (1983: 24-25) the former Minister of Culture,
less than one million books per year were printed prior to 1959 and by 1983 they
were producing 50 million. In 1959 there were 17,000 university students, by 1983
this figure had risen to 200,000.