Through musical analysis, reception history, and historical contextualization, various case studies demonstrate that, due to music's polyvalent capacities, composers were able to experiment aesthetically with a much higher degree of freedom than their Cuban counterparts in other artistic fields--such as literature and visual arts--as well as their counterparts in other socialist countries, such as East Germany and the Soviet Union. Three key terms--innovation, revolution, and vanguardia--serve as anchors for exploring how composers tied the post-revolutionary present and future to the pre-revolutionary past. The aesthetic and political concepts of cubanía (Cubanness), national identity versus cosmopolitanism and universalism, modernism, Pan-Americanism, internationalism, socialism, and the revolution, guide our understandings of how Cuban composers created meaning and connected their work to vast local and global networks of art music production. This book sheds light not only on the classical music scene in Cuba, but also the international classical music network with which Cuban composers engaged during this time.