Yoss, who remains on good terms with Cuban publishers despite some of the books he has presented in the past, is the country’s most recognizable science-fiction author, and he continues to publish widely in Cuba. (He has written more than 20 books.) But the genre is a small part of Cuban literature as a whole, said Ilan Stavans, a professor of Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College and the publisher of Restless Books. In general, works of science fiction are not as prevalent in Spanish as they are in English.

“We have a problem with the future,” Mr. Stavans said. “Latin America has been obsessed with the wounds of the conquest and colonization.” The region, he added, generally focuses on the present.

In Cuba, science fiction “is not used to grease discoveries in science and technology,” as it has been in the United States, Mr. Stavans said, nor is it generally dystopian (as it is in Mexico) or “bookish” (as it is in Argentina). Instead, science fiction for Cubans became a way, he said, “to escape, and sharply criticize the realities that they were living.”

Mr. Stavans founded Restless Books in 2013 as a digital-only enterprise, but in April it began printing some titles. “A Planet for Rent” and “A Legend of the Future,” among the first to be made into physical books, were chosen, he said, because they reflect the political reality of their times and the hodgepodge nature of Cuban culture, which has borrowed from Soviet, North American and European traditions.

While science fiction is growing in popularity in Cuba — Yoss said that more books in this genre are to be published this year than in years past and that attendance at sci-fi workshops and events is growing — it has been hobbled throughout its history. It blossomed in the 1960s with the works of writers like Ángel Arango, Oscar Hurtado and Miguel Collazo. But it all but disappeared for years after 1971. That year, Mr. Castro adopted the Soviet ideology of Socialist Realism, which required literature to glorify Communism with realistic, not fantastical, depictions.

“My generation lived in a time when science fiction and fantasy was forbidden,” said Daína Chaviano, 58, a prominent Cuban science-fiction and fantasy writer who lives in Miami. But because of Cuba’s close relationship with the Soviet Union, many works of prescreened Soviet science fiction were published. Much of it “was a little bit politically dangerous,” Ms. Chaviano said, because it dealt with forbidden subjects like the paranormal. Ms. Chaviano said the Soviet works taught her how to hide controversial political and social statements in her writing.