Premises and vicissitudes of the testimony novel: Miguel Barnet

The extra-official and intra-historical vision offered by the testimony novel about different social and historical periods in Cuba demand a revision of the literary canon, as much for its particular inception as for the hybrid character of its textual features. Starting from diverse attestations made by Miguel Barnet, founder of this narrative mode, the slippery concept of novel-testimony is cleared up, as well as its polemical insertion between the real and the fictitious, and the controversy on the question of gender which it raised is duly discussed.