My dissertation studies the creative practices of citizens who use cultural resources to engage in political criticism in contemporary Cuba. I argue that, in order to make their demands public and to become visible as political subjects in the public sphere, these citizens appeal to cultural forms and narratives of self-representation that elucidate the struggles for recognition faced by emerging social actors. Following the trope of the amateur under revolutionary cultural politics, I also suggest that these contemporary voices have a contradictory genealogy in the cultural practices of the early decades of the Cuban Revolution and its utopian promises of cultural reform.