Cuban Studies [47]

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Editor’s Note/Nota del editor I write this editorial note in gloomy times, under the shadow of almost one year of the presidency of Donald Trump. It has been quite the year, rich in daily insults; a Goebbelian disregard for the truth; crass nepotism; vicious xenophobia; and a vulgar, exhibitionist racism of the white-supremacist, neo-Nazi, Ku Klux Klan kind. That is, of the worst possible kind. This is Trump’s America, where some people feel entitled to publicly spew anti-Semitic diatribes and where black bodies are frequently on the receiving end of police bullets. Bigotry now lives in the White House, basking in arrogance and ineptitude. As I have written elsewhere, the White House is now the Whites’ House. Make America great again. To the community of authors, editors, and readers of Cuban Studies, the Donald Trump presidency has been particularly harmful. Some of the administration’s new policies toward Cuba, particularly the drastic reduction of diplomatic personnel, has made it nearly impossible to do our work, which depends on frequent contacts, collaboration, and exchange. For our Cuba-based colleagues it is now extremely difficult, expensive, and cumbersome, to obtain a visa to attend academic events in the United States. To do so, they must travel to a third country to be interviewed and wait for the visa, which is not guaranteed. This has increased our operation costs exorbitantly and is having a rather negative effect on the sort of academic exchange and collaboration on which we all thrive. I sincerely hope that this policy is reversed soon and that the mystery surrounding the illness of several American and Canadian diplomats is promptly elucidated. Meanwhile, it is somewhat refreshing to reaffirm what we all know: that scholarship and academic production have their own spaces, their own rhythms, their own logic, which is thankfully independent from short term partisan agendas. This issue is a superb illustration of the relative autonomy of scholarly production, as several articles here connect with longstanding concerns and conversations in the field that have little to do with the current political climate. In the last few years, in particular, we have witnessed a growing scholarly attention to the impact of the Cuban Revolution on a variety of economic, social and political processes. This scholarship offers new and important clues about how to conceptualize “the” revolution by analyzing overlapping dynamics of persistence and change in previously unexplored areas of national life. The central dossier in this issue builds on and contributes to this conversation

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x : Editor’s Note by studying the revolution’s contradictory impact on cultural production. The theme is further contextualized by another article that studies the cultural policies of the Cuban state before 1959, a useful reminder that republican administrations also perceived national culture as an important site for state action. We also include a group of sources—personal correspondence of well-known Cuban visual artists Antonia Eiriz and Raul Martínez to Guido Llinás—that speak to some of the issues explored in the dossier on cultural politics and that we hope will be of interest to our readers. To end, a note to congratulate an admired artist and friend, Eduardo Roca Salazar, for his well-deserved Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas, 2017. This I have to say in Spanish: ¡Felicidades, Choco!

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M I C H A E L J . B U S TA M A N T E

Cultural Politics and Political Cultures of the Cuban Revolution: New Directions in Scholarship A B S T R AC T This essay introduces the dossier “Cultural Politics and Political Cultures of the Cuban Revolution,” with contributions from scholars Marysol Quevedo, Elizabeth Schwall, Elizabeth Mirabal, and Carlos Velazco. The dossier features new approaches to the intransigent inseparability between culture and political change in revolutionary Cuba. Why, the essays prompt us to ask, did “revolutionaries” seem to display such a concern with the ways “the Revolution” was represented in various cultural and artistic forms? How did cultural bureaucrats attempt to enforce these ground rules, and how did artists and creators themselves respond? In so doing, the contributors force us to come to terms with not only questions of aesthetic promotion and regulation, as the term política cultural, or cultural policy, would suggest, but also a wider cultural politics and political culture (cultura política) of revolutionary society. This introductory reflection also locates new work on this topic in the context of a larger history of scholarly engagement with such questions. It argues that the preeminent place of literary, art, and film criticism in existing scholarship deserves to be accompanied by greater attention to lesserstudied artistic and popular cultural forms.

RESUMEN Este ensayo sirve para presentar el dossier “Políticas culturales y culturas políticas de la Revolución Cubana,” con ensayos de Marysol Quevedo, Elizabeth Schwall, Elizabeth Mirabal, y Carlos Velazco. El dossier presenta cuatro nuevos enfoques sobre la intransigente inseparabilidad entre la cultura y el cambio político en la Cuba revolucionaria. ¿Por qué se mostraron tan preocupados los “revolucionarios” por las maneras en que “la Revolución” pudiera ser representada en distintos géneros culturales y artísticos? ¿Cómo intentaron los burócratas culturales que los artistas cumplieran con ciertas directrices, y cómo respondieron los artistas mismos? Los ensayos nos invitan a reflexionar no sólo sobre cuestiones de promoción y regulación estética (como sugeriría el término “política cultural”), sino también sobre la influencia en el mundo creativo de una “cultura política” más amplia en la sociedad cubana. Este ensayo introductorio ubica nuevos acercamientos a estas problemáticas dentro de una historia más larga de investigaciones sobre el tema. Propone que, mientras la crítica literaria, plástica, y de cine ya ocupa un lugar distinguido en la tradición académica, estos acercamientos deben ir

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4 : Michael J. Bustamante más y más acompañados de nuevos enfoques sobre géneros artísticos y elementos de la cultura popular menos estudiados.

“Inside the Revolution, all, outside of the Revolution, nothing.”1 These famous nine words have guided and haunted Cuban cultural politics ever since they were first uttered in June 1961. The unpredictable, often-fickle strategies for their implementation are with Cubans still. Who determines just what is within the Revolution? Where exactly are the fault lines for what falls without? Is to be outside, or fuera del juego (to riff on Heberto Padilla), to necessarily be against?2 The very capaciousness of the formula, its ability to be easily manipulated and instrumentalized, arguably accounts for its longevity. The pronouncement of Fidel Castro’s “Words to the Intellectuals” will forever be associated with revolutionary Cuba’s first act of artistic censorship: the confiscation of the short, neo-realist film about Havana nightlife, P.M.3 Even so, the push and pull that these words allowed, the ways that countless artists thereafter would test the limits of how “revolutionary culture” was defined, meant that literature and other creative expressions also served as an alternative public sphere. From the 1960s, to the 1980s, 1990s, and beyond, the arts— broadly conceived—have provided a significant, if delimited arena of critical consciousness in Cuban society. Especially in the absence of a more robust print media, artistic practices continue to serve as important, albeit indirect, means through which Cubans engage in political and social debate. Precisely for this reason, cultural life has always occupied a prominent place under the Cuban Revolution. It still does in an uncertain present that we might sarcastically call—quoting the main character from the 2011 film Juan de los muertos—“la cosa esta que vino después.”4 And yet, for all of the Cuban government’s efforts to expand arts education and reward “folklore” with patronage over the years, officials, bureaucrats, and often artists themselves have tended to preserve a rather elitist definition of la cultura, referring less to the grassroots or anthropological day-to-day than to an ideologically charged sphere of intellectual endeavor. Just think of terms like trabajadores de la cultura (a socialist spin on los letrados, or the lettered class), or la intelectualidad nacional, still widely in use.5 In the early 1960s, many artists embraced democratizing interpretations of such identifiers. They eagerly worked to celebrate, or recover, lo cubano in popular music, painting, writing, theater, dance, and/or film.6 But when authorities did promote local traditions and practices, or attempt to expose Cuban citizens to “universal” artistic forms, a paternalistic imperative of “uplift” often was not far behind. As a result, la cultura remained in many ways a cordoned-off sphere of highbrow creativity, commentary, and discussion. Paradoxically, then, despite their influence over reading and/or viewing

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publics, the arts became vested with a degree of political importance, or the potentiality of a threat, that probably outstripped their real potential to ever galvanize anything like broad action against the revolutionary state. Indeed, though many artists and intellectuals boldly took up the task of critically accompanying the Revolution’s course, they were also saddled with making a defensive case for their relevance. “Nosotros, los sobrevivientes, / ¿a quién debemos la sobrevida?” (“We, the survivors, / to whom do be owe our continued existence?”), famously wrote Roberto Fernández Retamar on January 1, 1959, prefiguring what Che Guevara would consecrate in 1965 as intellectuals’ “original sin”: not being “true revolutionaries,” or at least not having done enough to bring the Revolution to be.7 As laborers of the mind and not the guerilla (or the proverbial cane field), writers, painters, and other artists of the first revolutionary generation drew suspicion (particularly by the mid-1960s) even as they were enlisted to help cultivate national unity, elevate citizens’ minds, or transmit and translate the Revolution’s historic purpose. From this point of view, the idea that the cultural field could provide a flank of occasional dissent and perceived naysaying was not only a cause for exaggerated concern but also a confirmation of a first instinct. It is this intransigent, vital but in some ways inflated or forced inseparability between culture, art, and political change in revolutionary Cuba that this dossier explores. Why, these essays prompt us to ask, did “revolutionaries” seem to display such a strong preoccupation with the ways the nation or “the Revolution” was represented in artistic texts or which artists could speak in its name? How did cultural bureaucrats attempt to enforce these ground rules, and why did certain genres and individuals suffer disparate fates? In so doing, the contributors force us to come to terms with not only questions of aesthetic promotion and regulation, as one translation of the term política cultural (i.e., cultural policy) would suggest, but also a wider cultural politics and political culture (cultura política) of revolutionary society, with notable strains of antiintellectualism and homophobia occasionally rearing their heads. Especially in the 1960s and 1970s, this drive toward the creation of an all-encompassing ideological ethos, even in the absence of explicit state intervention, left few realms of Cuban life—the arts included—untouched. Yet at the same time, these papers illuminate how individual creators navigated the competing pressures and opportunities offered by, on the one hand, public artistic patronage, and on the other, bureaucratic disciplinary authority. As Jennifer Lambe and I have argued elsewhere, “few groups more vividly confronted the interplay between inclusive and exclusive state practices and discourses than those writers, artists, and creators who found themselves swept up in the new state’s embrace”—only in some cases to later be forcibly cut off or push themselves out of its way.8 Although many artists eagerly assumed new roles in government-linked cultural organizations, they were often conscripted

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6 : Michael J. Bustamante in time, directly and indirectly, to monitor their one-time compatriots on behalf of supposed moral codes. This was the allure and the danger of politicizing culture. For even as the Revolution offered new and increasingly prominent venues for artistic expression, it seemed to do so—at least from 1961 through the mid-1970s—by drawing its boundaries tighter, leaving a range of exiles (internal and external) in its wake. All the same, the power of individual artists to array cultural expression not necessarily against the government, but in parallel to its functioning, should not be discounted. Masters of “hidden transcripts,” long before US anthropologist James Scott coined the term, Cubans also proved savvy at dodging, manipulating, or strategically engaging cultural and political sponsorship offered in institutional form.9 Of course, the vacillating rhythm of cultural politics and policy in Cuba is not a new area of scholarly inquiry. Within the historiography on Cuba’s revolutionary era, literary and art history are among the branches that have been most thoroughly developed to date. From Seymour Menton and Terry Lee Palls’s pioneering work on revolutionary-era literature and theater, to Lourdes Casal’s seminal compilation of texts surrounding the infamous 1971 “Caso Padilla,” the intersection, or conflict, between art, ideas, and ideology during the Revolution’s early years has long been a subject of academic interest abroad.10 Simultaneously, on the island and in its diaspora (where, naturally, Casal also belongs), a rich tradition of intellectual history continues to unearth lesser-known entanglements between artistic, particularly literary, expressions and the shifting fortunes of the Revolution’s political project. Undoubtedly, this growing body of work constitutes one of Cuban Studies’ more dynamic subfields.11 This work has also been aided by historical events. Since at least the 1990s —or even the early 1980s in some arenas like theater—the rehabilitation (partial or otherwise) of previously nonconformist, though not necessarily antisocialist, writers and artists has allowed a gradual recovery of their experiences of intellectual marginalization, negotiation, and repression in the past—particularly leading up to and during the so-called Quinquenio Gris between 1971 and 1976.12 The publication of memoirs (on the island and abroad) played an important role in this process, but so did compilations of lost writings and correspondence, as well as new critical studies and forums less beholden to top-down political concerns.13 At the same time, the newly permissive cultural landscape of the 1990s itself—in which the grip of “the Revolution” on artistic form seem to loosen as much if not more than over Cuban life in general— spawned expansive reflections on the ways artists and writers contended with the ideological uncertainties of post-socialism.14 With varying combinations of frontal denunciation and misdirection, and with foreign publishers, producers, and audiences increasingly key actors in the equation, Cuban artists continue

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to walk a delicate line between advancing pressing social commentary and preserving their ability to speak.15 Nonetheless, genre-specific appraisals of these moves and legacies neglect the possibilities opened up by studying the intersection of politics and cultural production in multiple fields side by side. If in most studies of artistic politics in Cuba the trials and tribulations of writers have received primary attention, it is time that other realms of cultural life receive equal billing. The prominence of literary protagonists in existing reflections is understandable. The potential permanence of the published word, like the visual power of the painted image or celluloid frame, accounts for the intensity with which disputes, intellectual rivalries, and acts of censorship and self-censorship played out in that field. Still, we risk confusing the comparative availability of literary source material with the exclusivity of writers’ dilemmas. Whether in popular dance, ballet, or nueva trova, other creators—and their audiences—navigated similar, if less familiar or rigorously studied, concerns. Terminological and translation slippages invite further reflection. On the island, política cultural has tended to refer to cultural policy—that is, which artistic forms and artists received support, the institutional structures that channeled that support, and the explicit and implicit expectations and conditions that came along with it. In this framing, the “cultural policy of the Revolution” was variably closed or open, cash flush or resource poor. But it was fundamentally a matter of state, of citizen uplift (as noted previously), and of battles against “orthodoxy” won and lost. By contrast, an alternate translation of the term política cultural as cultural politics opens up traditional metrics of analysis to a deeper look at the ways ideas and discourses—along lines of ideology, gender, race, or sexuality, for example—infused the making of policy and artists’ individual creative choices and constraints. Studies of la política cultural in Cuba, in other words, must not be limited to inventories of initiatives undertaken or the number of plays performed or shelved. They must take into account a wider set of conditions, arguments, institutional arrangements, and normative assumptions that marked cultural policy making and artistic production in the first place. Scholars today thus have an opportunity to merge strains of scholarship that have previously been separate. As already mentioned, Cuban letters boasts a robust tradition of literary, film, theater, and art criticism, albeit one that at times treats the text, and not the context of its creation and reception, as primary. In another, older variation—represented in this journal’s pages in the past—scholars have focused on measuring the shifting boundaries where artistic creation and state suppression meet.16 But there is also a newer wave of cultural history that, using newly available government documents where available, seeks to explore the concrete, malleable interactions between individual

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8 : Michael J. Bustamante artists, state institutions, and the wider political and cultural conditions within which they worked (recognizing, indeed, that cultural bureaucrats were also often artists themselves). There are some models for this kind of approach. From opposite political perspectives, both Jorge Fornet and Duanel Díaz have creatively examined the forces linking diverse interventions across cultural, artistic, and political mediums in the 1960s and 70s.17 Reaching back before 1959, Cary Aileen García Yero has questioned whether cultural policies under governments of the late Republic were not as similar as different to those implemented by the revolutionary government later on.18 That said, students of cultural politics under Cuban socialism, including those represented in this dossier, are advancing new analytical frontiers—by focusing on previously unseen or underappreciated artistic and government sources, for instance, or by further bridging textual and contextual analysis.19 Their work joins a renewed wave of attention to the Cuban Revolution’s internal history writ large.20 This dossier, then, hopes to initiate a fresh, interdisciplinary dialogue about revolutionary Cuba’s longstanding culture wars. Its contents are hardly exhaustive—by genre, or time period. For the most part, the scholars gathered here focus on individuals and institutions in the Revolution’s first fifteen years, or various attempts to reflect on the legacies of that era at a later time. But while mostly hewing to genre-specific approaches, these articles do suggest that our studies stand to be enriched by considering a variety of venues and sources in tandem. And for all forms, they highlight the utility of moving beyond approaches limited to stylistic description, narrow textual analysis, or performance catalog. Artistic works and controversies, these authors agree, should be placed in rich conversation with the wider cultural, institutional, and political fields in which they emerged. We begin with an intriguing essay by ethnomusicologist Marysol Quevedo, exploring the unlikely revolutionary credentials of Cuba’s Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional (OSN). Classical music may seem a strange genre for performing socialist values. But Quevedo invites us to consider a dilemma that scholars thus far have discussed more in regards to Cuban ballet.21 Namely, how did artists and creators, composers in this case, make a style clearly bourgeois in origin relevant for the revolutionary era? This dilemma was not unique to the Cuban context. The cases of Soviet classical music and ballet are paradigmatic in this regard.22 Yet that Cuban composers “revolutionized” their work with any degree of success is as good evidence as any of just how mutable the framework “within the Revolution” really was. On the one hand, Quevedo details the explicit ways Cuban composers in the 1960s connected their work to “nationalist” traditions and repertoires. They mobilized affective sentiments in their audiences by linking classical compositions from Cuba’s independence era to more vanguardist and newer patriotic works in the present. Quevedo also makes clear, however, that the

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OSN benefitted from the possibility of serving as the Revolution’s ambassador to the world at large. Cuba’s primary battle against underdevelopment notwithstanding, Cuban revolutionary authorities were keen to become masters of sophistication and modernity. Cuba’s National Symphony Orchestra was expected to compete with the best of them in “universal arts.” This not only reveals the degree to which “elite” cultural standards continued to hold purchase in socialist corners; it also suggests that much more work on Cuba’s artistic and cultural diplomacy remains to be done. Indeed, most conversations about Cuban cultural politics and policy have remained focused on internal trends, pressures, and polemics. But the case of the OSN indicates how international exposure may have helped artists and particular genres over time, or could have been used by Cuban authorities for instrumental gain. Far afield from classical music, one thinks of other examples like the progressive fusion and “hipness” of the band Irakere in the 1970s—hardly in tune with the social realism or generally nationalist aesthetics in most Cuban art of the time, yet useful for the island’s international image all the same. Or we might recall an anecdote from Antón Arrufat, whose play Los siete contra Tebas had been condemned as counterrevolutionary in 1968 (alongside Padilla’s book of poetry Fuera del juego) and was published with a critical note, though reportedly only to be displayed as a sign of openness in Cuban embassies abroad, never in a bookstore back home.23 Foreign engagements aside, perhaps what stands out most about Quevedo’s essay is just how devoid the classical music scene in Cuba was of the grand ideological escaramuzas (or confrontations) that writers like Arrufat endured. As she points out, symphonic music, as a nontextual form, was perhaps not as well suited to political controversy. Key to its success, too, was the fact that major players in the orchestra all had links to the Partido Socialista Popular— Cuba’s traditional, pre-1959 Communist Party. Still, although sectors aligned to the PSP are often considered the drivers of orthodoxy in Cuban political and cultural life under the Revolution, PSP affiliates also occupied key positions in institutions where cultural conflict was rife.24 This suggests that political context mattered as much as content, and that as far as tensions between artists and “the state” were concerned, not all realms of revolutionary expression were created alike. Historian Elizabeth Schwall turns our attention to an opposite register— from “high” culture to what before the Revolution, and still in some ways after, many Cubans considered “low.” If Cuban revolutionary authorities remained interested in cultivating the “fine arts,” they also devoted resources, attention, and sponsorship to less formalized forms of popular cultural life. The renowned Conjunto Folklórico Nacional (CFN), dedicated to performing dances derived from syncretic Afro-Cuban religious traditions, serves as Schwall’s case study for exploring how the state’s nationalist promotion of lo autóctono worked.

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10 : Michael J. Bustamante The process, in short, was fraught. It may have been odd for a radical revolution to sponsor a symphony. But no less problematic was the effort to strip ritual dance from its lived religious context, staging it for domestic consumption or export (via foreign tours) as Cuban national tradition. “Folklore” was coded as black, a picturesque holdover from the past. Performers were expected by the largely white professional ethnologists and administrators leading the company to gradually “overcome” their past superstitions and religious beliefs. In these ways, the CFN provides a key venue for exploring the contours of revolutionary paternalism. For at the same time that cultural authorities went to unprecedented lengths to elevate grassroots traditions as art, they could still harbor disdain for what those traditions really meant. In this, the history of folkloric dance after 1959 mirrors the tensions involved in “nationalizing blackness” in the Cuban cultural field as far back as the 1920s and 1930s.25 And yet the real insight in Schwall’s piece comes not from her dwelling on the condescending valences of the state’s official support. Unlike some who have written on the CFN, she is most interested in exploring how, despite the obstacles, the company still allowed “organic intellectuals” like the Afro-Cuban “informant” and performer Nieves Fresneda to thrive. To do so, she draws on previously unseen internal documentation from state cultural authorities. These sources reveal the diverse forms of agency that its rank-and-file members exerted over the company’s operations and performance content. Admittedly, these actions did not fully neutralize the patronizing terms in which folkloric performance was often seen. Nor did they eliminate the tendency of the company to be looked down upon, and mistreated, by bureaucrats of the National Council of Culture. But through the lives and moving “steps” of a figure like Fresneda, we come to appreciate the subtle ways performers resisted, and ultimately superseded, the revolutionary state’s more limited, secular gaze. Though talking explicitly about forms of black consciousness in “raceless” revolutionary society had become in many ways taboo, folkloric dance in the 1960s and 1970s provided a language of cultural identification that exceeded efforts to domesticate its meaning. Of course, dancers were not the only Cuban artists skilled at deflection. Writers, too, long used metaphor to convey politically incorrect readings of contemporary island life. In her contribution, Elizabeth Mirabal links the work of writers across time who looked not to a particular cultural practice, but a “chronotope”—the nineteenth century—to talk in veiled ways about their presents. This work builds on Mirabal’s own trajectory (together with her collaborator and fellow dossier contributor Carlos Velazco) as a prominent, new voice revising Cuban literary and artistic canons.26 As she proves here, despite literary criticism’s already leading position in Cuban letters, there are plenty of stones left unturned. There is much to link the subject of Mirabal’s reflections with Quevedo’s

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contribution. Cuban classical musicians also looked to the nineteenth century to seek inspiration. But whereas the composers of Quevedo’s musical archive did so with fairly straightforward historical allegories in mind—think the cien años de lucha, in Fidel Castro’s 1968 formulation—Mirabal hones her attention on what Svetlana Boym might call “reflective nostalgics” at different points in Cuba’s post-1959 trajectory: the early 1960s, in the case of Calvert Casey; the “gray” 1970s, in the case of Abelardo Estorino; the 1980s, and from exile, in the case of Reinaldo Arenas; and the 1990s, in the case of Leonardo Padura.27 In the four texts she analyzes, the past of the nineteenth century—the font of Cuba’s nationalist tradition—serves less as fuel for patriotic boilerplate than as a metaphoric vehicle for exploring, meditating on, and even sharply criticizing aspects of the authors’ current realities. The elliptical nature of this move attests to both these artists’ creative genius and, possibly, their political failure. That is, from historical scenes, the authors artfully wrest commentary about present dilemmas in Cuban society not otherwise possible in the island’s public sphere. But they are also arguably complicit in simply not saying things about their presents in more direct, frank terms. That Arenas still deems this kind of elision necessary from exile in New York perhaps conveys something about the enduring imprint of a socialist habitus on his writer’s instincts, in addition to the inherent attractiveness of the artistic device. Yet, from the island context, it is Padura who tackles the writer’s dilemma most candidly, in the form of a fictional dialogue between his characters. One insists that recurring to the past to write about the present is simply “an artifice to evade current self-censorship.” This, in turn, raises a pressing question for the study of cultural politics and policy in revolutionary Cuba generally. Namely, is the much-vaunted agency of the artist or writer in adverse circumstances, or of the dancer or composer, to be celebrated or mourned? Were the roundabout, often-brilliant ways in which artists navigated ideological and political pressures ever enough? Or is this evasiveness, at home or abroad, a new post-1959 version of the Cuban intellectual’s “original sin” (pace Che Guevara) before the Revolution’s triumph? Does it replay, in other words, intellectuals’ alleged failure to occupy the truly important frontlines in pre-revolutionary Cuban political life?28 Mirabal’s appraisal is ultimately positive; these writers’ words did matter, she insists. Others might disagree. Last, Mirabal’s text unsettles classificatory schemes in interesting ways. She teases out a common thematic thread linking reflections across time (1960s to the 1990s), genre (novels, essay, and a play), and geographic space (the island and Cuba’s diaspora). Yet she also includes a text, Estorino’s, that in its own time was aggressively rehearsed but never staged, and thus was never widely seen or read. Arenas’s writing from exile in New York presents a similar dilemma, having circulated only circuitously, and furtively, on the island. This raises important questions about the place of creative products that, by virtue

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12 : Michael J. Bustamante of the ostracism an artist suffered at a given moment, or perceived aesthetic deficiencies, never earned an audience, or were only published abroad. Do such texts belong to the cultural politics and/or political culture of “the Revolution”? Are they better understood as something else? Should our measure of these writers’ success be whether their works were in fact seen and read on the island? Or should we care more that they articulated truths that never could circulate in Cuba’s limited public sphere? Finally, Carlos Velazco’s essay continues Mirabal’s mode of ethical reflection. Yet in his case, the focus is not on cultural products of the revolutionary era in real time, but rather the retrospective ruminations of some of Cuban cultural life’s most prominent, controversial protagonists: poet and novelist Heberto Padilla, novelist Reinaldo Arenas (once again), essayist Graziella Pogolotti, painter Raul Martínez, and the lesser known poet Antonio Desquirón. As Velazco says so aptly in his essay’s title, the memoirs published by each of these authors over the years (or, in Desquirón’s case, still awaiting publication) provide unparalleled looks into their “memories of the future.” That is, the authors reflect on the lost future to which each once lent the power of their pens and paintbrushes, but in which most no longer fully believe. Thus, the genre of the memoir not only allows us to revisit the creative maneuvers of writers steering their artistic ships through politicized waters; it permits artists themselves to meditate retrospectively on their own role in what, from subsequent exile, “insile,” or rehabilitated status, seems at times a sordid game. In some cases, like in Pogolotti’s or Martínez’s, by virtue of the books being published in Cuba, the memoirs form part of a shifting Cuban cultural politics of the now. As noted earlier, precisely through memoir it has become possible to talk about certain repressive incidents (like the discrimination against and silencing of gay writers), albeit in roundabout ways, and still perhaps with considerable prevarication. More trenchant exposés, like Padilla’s back in 1989, still largely find publishers and audiences only abroad. But in line with Leonardo Padura’s seeming reference to his own guilt for avoiding direct commentary via historical fiction, the testimony of Raúl Martínez stands out for its similarly forthright engagement with the question of the artist’s culpability. Martínez in 2007 does not play the victim. He sees his turn to revolutionary “pop art” in the late 1960s, the paintings for which he is still most wellknown, as a crass attempt to escape the ostracism with which his earlier work and homosexual identity had been met. As a result, Velazco writes, Martínez’s text contains a “velado desgarramiento, por el reconocimiento implícito de una idea de la que el autor es consciente: el haber claudicado frente al contexto.” The difference with a figure like dancer Nieves Fresneda—who found lasting validation and pride in her artistic work, despite being fully aware of the limitations under which folkloric dance operated—is both noteworthy and unsettling.

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It may also be a sign that the politics of race and sexuality in Cuban cultural production did not operate in the same ways, or impose equal constraints. Perhaps the most lasting, if indirect, contribution of Velazco’s essay is to prompt a reflection on the role and genre of Cuban memoir itself. A particular kind of memoir—the testimonio, forged in the fraught relationship between writer and informant, and at times with considerable creative license from the former—did enter the canon of Cuban revolutionary and, more widely, Latin American literature. By contrast, the personal reflections of Cuban artists and writers themselves, as nonpopular or non-“grassroots” subjects, generally did not. Texts like Miguel Barnet’s seminal Biografía de un cimarrón (1966) or Victor Casaus’s Girón en la memoria (1970) chronicled the life histories of everyday Cubans that foreshadowed, intersected with, or found their salvation in the revolutionary epic. Quickly, they were consecrated as classics.29 But in Cuba, the more strictly autobiographical voices of those who lived the Revolution after 1959 from the intellectual camp, and especially who found themselves falling afoul of its political or artistic norms, have largely not received the same critical appreciation or stature. It is this imbalance that Velazco’s essay begins the work of correcting, even as he points out pitfalls we will encounter along the way. In the absence of the insider primary source materials to which Schwall and Quevedo have secured rare access, we count on artists’ memoirs to not only recount their experiences but also recapture some of their concrete interactions with the bureaucracies of publishers, cultural institutions, and the ideological police—particularly in the case of writers. Nonetheless, Velazco is also attuned to the fruitlessness of this quest. As much as memoirs might reveal, they hardly allow us to understand a singular logic behind policies of cultural regulation that have been and remain quite fickle. Memoirs, Velazco argues, constitute a kind of performance in their own right, with different audiences and purposes in mind. They cannot act as the encyclopedias of history even if readers might want them to be. To even approach that goal, state archives, too, must fully open their doors. But even after they do, “truth” may elude us still. As these essays show, scholars are continuing to push reflections on revolutionary era cultural politics in new directions. Comparisons across genre and period are not only increasingly possible, but necessary to advancing the field. Still, at some point scholarship must also move further beyond the rarified realm of intellectual or artistic engagement. The widest meaning of the term cultural politics (as opposed to cultural policy)—that is, that which sees culture as a set of meanings and practices structuring everyday life—demands it. Elizabeth Schwall’s essay pushes us in promising directions in this regard. But popular culture more broadly, especially outside of organized and institutional contexts such as the CFN, remains a largely untapped field.30

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14 : Michael J. Bustamante Achieving this objective, of course, is not easy. Nuanced work on contemporary Cuban popular culture has emerged in recent years, but largely because participant observation by anthropologists and ethnographers has been possible on the island over the last two decades. Likewise, contemporary source material—like song tracks and video clips from the island’s music industry— is increasingly available via digital means.31 Rewinding the clock is not so straightforward. Archives (as already mentioned) and back catalogs remain difficult to access, and Cuban periodicals offer limited glimpses into Cubans’ daily routines during the Revolution’s early decades. Undoubtedly, many realms of cultural experience from the first three decades of Cuban socialism deserve to be more richly explored. Popular dance, music (including the presence of foreign imports), humor, material objects, fashion, the aficionados movement, religious practice, and recreational activities and spaces are just a few.32 But despite this limitation, the texts in this dossier also recall and strengthen a key insight that scholars have advanced about the Revolution’s history more broadly. Studies of revolutionary Cuba are impoverished to the degree that they overly recur to flattening terms like “the state” or “the regime,” as if to reference an abstract, always centrally controlled conspiracy. Perhaps it was in certain ways. The trick in a socialist country, however, is that at a certain point, the state becomes you and me. This was particularly true in the realms of culture and art, where dependence on public institutions was as crucial to productivity and performance as the creative freedoms that artists continued to claim at considerable pains. To reiterate a point made earlier, artists and writers themselves in many cases—mediocre ones maybe, but not simply no-name commissars—ended up occupying positions in various cultural bodies. In its repressive and more forgiving manifestations, then, the “cultural policy” of the Cuban Revolution, such as there was one, was not only the result of an anonymous plot; it counted on a cultural politics of selfpreservation and strategic participation, creativity, and even complicity among artists themselves.33 It is this interdependency that makes Cuban cultural politics a particularly germane subject for scholars of the Cuban Revolution’s history, whether looking at the arts or other subjects all together. Academics in the here and now may not face nearly the same kind of obstacles to their own intellectual production as Cuban artists and writers once did. Many, if by no means all, of the rules for what can and cannot be discussed on the island have changed. Still, histories of the Cuban Revolution’s cultural politics and political cultures should force all scholars to think self-critically about the private self-censors, tactical choices, and ideological frameworks with which we also contend. The persistent culpa original in Cuban intellectual life might be more widely shared. It may in part be our own.

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Cultural Politics and Political Cultures of the Cuban Revolution

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NOTES The contributors and I thank Lillian Manzor and an additional anonymous reviewer for their generative comments on this dossier. Jennifer Lambe also lent her critical eye to drafts of the introduction. First versions of these papers were presented at “New Directions in Cuban Studies,” University of Miami, October 21, 2016. 1. “Discurso pronunciado por el Comandante Fidel Castro Ruz, Primero Ministro del Gobierno Revolucionario y Secretario del PURSC, como conclusión de las reuniones con los intelectuales cubanos, efectuadas en la Biblioteca Nacional el 16, 13 y 30 de junio de 1961,” June 30, 1961, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1961/esp/f300661e.html. 2. Heberto Padilla, Fuera del juego (Havana: Casa de las Américas, 1968). 3. For more on the film, see Orlando Jiménez Leal and Manuel Zayas, El caso P.M.: Cine, poder, y censura (Madrid: Colibrí, 2012). 4. Alejandro Brugués, dir., Juan de los Muertos (Madrid: La Zafoña Producciones; Havana: 5ta Avenida, 2011). 5. See, for example, “Trabajadores de la cultura llaman a artistas de EEUU a unirse por libertad de Los Cinco,” Cubadebate, October 20, 2011, http://www.cubadebate.cu/noticias/2011/10/20/ trabajadores-de-la-cultura-llaman-a-artistas-e-intelectuales-norteamericanos-a-unirse-por-la -libertad-de-los-cinco-video/#.WXNIOxS9jzI. 6. For example, Lillian Manzor, “De homosexual marginado a ñángara,” in Celebrando a Virgilio Piñera, ed. Matías Montes Huidobro and Yara González Montes (Bal Harbour, FL: Plaza Editorial, 2013), 2:28–50. 7. Roberto Fernández Retamar, “El otro,” in Vuelta de la antigua esperanza (Havana: Imprenta Úcar García, 1959), 21; Ernesto “Che” Guevara, “Desde Argelia, para Marcha, la Revolución Cubana Hoy,” Marcha (Uruguay), March 12, 1965. The latter essay was more widely reprinted as “El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba.” The full, translated quote: “The fault of many of our artists and intellectuals lies in their original sin: they are not true revolutionaries.” 8. Jennifer L. Lambe and Michael J. Bustamante, “Cuba’s Revolution from Within: The Politics of Historical Paradigms,” in The Revolution from Within: Cuba, 1959–1980, ed. Michael J. Bustamante and Jennifer L. Lambe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming). 9. James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990). 10. Seymour Menton, Prose Fiction of the Cuban Revolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975); Terry Lee Palls, “The Theater in Revolutionary Cuba,” PhD diss., University of Kansas, 1974; Lourdes Casal, ed., El caso Padilla: Literatura y revolución en Cuba, documentos (Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1971). For more recent writing on the arts and intellectual life in pre-1989 Cuba, see the work of Michael Chanan, Ana Serra, Luis Camnitzer, John Loomis, Rachel Weiss, Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt, Alma Guillermoprieto, and Robin Moore, among others. 11. Cuban and Cuban diaspora scholarship on the subject is too extensive to list. For starters, see John M. Kirk and Leonardo Padura Fuentes, Culture and the Cuban Revolution: Conversations in Havana (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001); William Luis, Lunes de Revolución: Literatura y cultura en los primeros años de la Revolución Cubana (Madrid: Verbum, 2003); Rafael Rojas, Tumbas sin sosiego: Revolución, disidencia, y exilio del Intelectual Cubano (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2006); Graziella Pogolotti, Las polémicas culturales en los sesenta (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 2006); Alberto Abreu Arcia, Los juegos de la escritura o la reescritura de la historia (La Habana: Fondo Editorial Casa de las Américas, 2007); Emilio J. Gallardo Saborido, El martillo y el espejo: Directrices de la política cultural cubana, 1959–1976 (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2009); Juan Carlos Quintero Herencia, Fulguración del espacio: Letras e imaginario institucional de la Revolución Cubana, 1960–1971 (Rosario,

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16 : Michael J. Bustamante Argentina: Beatriz Viterbo, 2002). Work by Luciano Castillo, Juan Antonio García Borrero, Jorge Olivares, Humberto Manduley López, and Pedro Porbén is also a must. 12. Ambrosio Fornet, “El Quinquenio gris: Revisitando el término” (lecture, January 20, 2007, Casa de las Américas, Havana), as part of the lecture series “La política cultural del período revolucionario: Memoria y reflexión,” organized by Centro Teórico-Cultural Criterios. For a critical take on the partial recovery of intellectual and artistic legacies, see Rojas, Tumbas sin sosiego. 13. For example, Antón Arrufat, Virgilio Piñera: Entre él y yo (Havana: Ediciones Unión, 1995); Eliseo Alberto, Informe contra mi mismo (Madrid: Alfaguara, 2002); Virgilio Piñera, de vuelta y vuelta: Correspondencia, 1932–1978 (Havana: Ediciones Unión, 2011); or the recent “Coloquio: ‘Con arreglo a esta opinión trabajaremos . . .’ A 50 años de la revista Pensamiento crítico,” Casa del Alba Cultural, Havana, February 21, 2017. See Carlos Velazco’s contribution to this dossier for more on the function of memoir in recovering the experiences of marginalized writers and artists. 14. Again, the scholarship is too extensive to list. See publications by Esther Whitfield, Jacqueline Loss, Odette Casamayor-Cisneros, Laurie Aleen-Frederick, Sujatha Fernándes, Rachel Price, Tanya Saunders, Marta Hernández Salvan, James Buckwalter-Arias, Ambrosio Fornet, Antonio José Ponte, Fernando Martínez Heredia, Víctor Fowler, and Jorge Fornet, among many others. Also see the dossier “On Contemporary Writers” in Cuban Studies 32 (2001): 1–73. 15. For critical analysis of the interaction between Cuban literature and art and the international market in the 1990s and beyond, see Esther Whitfield, Cuban Currency: The Dollar and “Special Period” Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Rachel Weiss, To and from Utopia in the New Cuban Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Sergio Luis González-Morales, “Cine cubano: El camino de las coproducciones,” PhD diss., Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, 2007; Ariana Hernández-Reguant, “Copyrighting Che: Art and Authorship under Cuban Late Socialism,” Public Culture 16, no. 1 (2004): 1–29; José Quiroga, Cuban Palimpsests (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), particularly chap. 4, “Migrations of the Book.” In the wake of the (now jeopardized) normalization of relations between Cuba and the United States after 2014, these forces multiplied with the entry of conspicuously more US players. 16. See the Dossier “The Writer and the State,” Cuban Studies 19 (1989): 81–142. 17. Duanel Díaz Infante, Palabras del trasfondo: Intelectuales, literatura, e ideología en la Revolución Cubana (Madrid: Colibrí, 2009); Duanel Díaz Infante, La revolución congelada: Dialécticas del castrismo (Madrid: Verbum, 2014); Jorge Fornet, El 71: Anatomía de una crisis (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 2014). 18. Cary Aileen García Yero, “The State within the Arts: A Study of Cuba’s Cultural Policy, 1940–1958,” in this issue of Cuban Studies. 19. Elizabeth Schwall, “Dancing with the Revolution: Cuban Dance, State, and Nation” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2016); Marysol Quevedo, “Cubanness, Innovation, and Politics in Art Music in Cuba, 1942–1979” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 2016); Lester Tomé, “‘Music in the Blood’: Performance and Discourse of Musicality in Cuban Ballet Aesthetics,” Dance Chronicle 36, no. 2 (2013): 218–242; Lillian Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption, and Resistance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), especially chap. 10 dealing with Cuban documentary film. 20. See Bustamante and Lambe, The Revolution from Within. 21. Tomé, “Music in the Blood”; Schwall, “Dancing with the Revolution: Cabaret and Ballet Developments in 1960s Cuba,” in The Revolution from Within. 22. See Christina Ezrahi, Swans of the Kremlin: Ballet and Power in Soviet Russia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012); Simon Morrison, Bolshoi Confidential: Secrets of the Russian Ballet from the Rule of the Tsars to Today (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2016); Pauline Fairclough, Classics for the Masses: Shaping Soviet Musical Identity under Lenin and

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Stalin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016). My thanks to Elizabeth Schwall for suggesting these references. 23. See Jesus Barquet’s interview with Arrufat in Teatro y Revolución cubana: Subversión y utopía en Los siete contra Tebas de Antón Arrufat (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001), 142. 24. The role of Alfredo Guevara (also linked to the PSP) at Cuba’s film institute, ICAIC, is noteworthy in this regard. While he was behind the censorship of P.M., Guevara also resisted efforts from some corners to insist on an aesthetic criterion of social realism in film. See Pogolotti, Las polémicas culturales en los sesenta. On the PSP’s role in the revolutionary government more broadly, see Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba. 25. See Robin D. Moore, Nationalizing Blackness: Afrocubanismo and Artistic Revolution in Cuba, 1920–1940 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998). 26. For example: Carlos Velazco and Elizabeth Mirabal, Sobre los pasos del cronista: El quehacer intelectual de Guillermo Cabrera Infante en Cuba hasta 1965 (Havana: Ediciones Unión, 2010); Carlos Velazco and Elizabeth Mirabal, Hablar de Guillermo Rosales (Miami: Editorial Silueta, 2013); Carlos Velazco and Elizabeth Mirabal, Chakras: Historias de la Cuba dispersa (Madrid: Verbum, 2014). 27. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), xviii. 28. Guevara, “Desde Argelia, para Marcha.” 29. Miguel Barnet, Biografía de un cimarrón (Havana: Instituto de Etnología y Folklore, 1966); Victor Casaus, Girón en la memoria (Havana: Casa de las Américas, 1970). For a critical appraisal of the place of testimonio in Cuban cultural politics, see, for example, William Luis, “The Politics of Memory and Miguel Barnet’s The Autobiography of a Run Away Slave,” MLN 104, no. 2 (1989): 475–491. 30. Robin Moore’s Music and Revolution: Cultural Change in Socialist Cuba (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006) provides a vital, thorough survey of evolving popular music styles and players during the revolutionary period. However, it does not offer as full of a cultural history as it could of the place of distinct musical styles in Cuban life at particular junctures in the Revolution’s history. 31. See, for example, Isabel Holgado Fernández, ¡No es fácil! Mujeres cubanas y la crisis revolucionaria (Barcelona: Icaria, 2000); Ariana Hernández-Reguant, “Radio Taíno and the Globalization of the Cuban Culture Industries” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2002); Vincenzo Perna, Timba: The Sound of the Cuban Crisis (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005); Ariana HernándezReguant, “Havana’s Timba: A Macho Sound for Black Sex,” in Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness, ed. Kamari Maxine Clark and Deborah Thomas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 249–279; Carlos Nasatir, “El Hijo de Guillermo Tell: Carlos Varela Confronts the Special Period,” Cuban Studies 39 (2008): 44–59; Nora Gámez Torres, “Hearing the Change: Reggaetón and Emergent Values in Contemporary Cuba,” Latin American Music Review 33, no. 2 (Fall–Winter 2012): 227–260; Nicole M. Stout, After Love: Queer Intimacy and Erotic Economies in Post-Soviet Cuba (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); My Havana: The Musical City of Carlos Varela, ed. Maria Caridad Cumaná, Karen Dubinksy, and Xenia Reloba de la Cruz (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014); Marc Perry, Negro Soy Yo: Hip-Hop and Raced Citizenship in Neoliberal Cuba (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). 32. There are some exceptions. See Deborah Pacini Hernández and Reebee Garofalo, “Between Rock and a Hard Place: Negotiating Rock in Revolutionary Cuba,” in Rockin’ Las Américas: The Global Politics of Rock in Latina/o America, ed. Deborah Pacini Hernández, Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste, and Eric Zolov (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998), 43–67. Promising new work is also on the horizon. See Schwall, “Dancing with the Revolution,” in The Revolution from Within; María Antonia Cabrera Arús, “The Material Promise of Socialist Modernity: Fashion and

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18 : Michael J. Bustamante Domestic Space in the 1970s,” in The Revolution from Within; Alexis Baldacci, “The Expansion on Consumerism in Cuba and Its Ramifications, 1975–1980” (paper presented at the 131st Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, Denver, CO, January 7, 2017); Jennifer Lambe, “For Love of Michael Jackson: US Culture and Revolutionary Cuba, 1959–1989” (paper presented at Eleventh Conference on Cuban and Cuban-American Studies, Cuban Research Institute, Florida International University, February 23, 2017). 33. Antón Arrufat himself captured this sentiment eloquently in introductory remarks when his banned play Los siete contra Tebas from 1968 finally premiered in Cuba in 2007: “En ese largo y fructífero tiempo aprendimos que nuestra sociedad y nuestra vida forman una relación contradictoria, creadora entre todos, individuos y estado.” See “Los siete contra Tebas,” Cuban Theater Digital Archive, http://cubantheater.org. I am grateful to Lillian Manzor for the reference.

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M A RY S O L Q U E V E D O

The Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional de Cuba and Its Role in the Cuban Revolution’s Cultural Project A B S T R AC T This essay examines the conditions that led to the establishment of the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional de Cuba (Cuban National Symphony Orchestra, OSN) and its use by the Cuban state to promote socialist, nationalist Cuban values in the early years after the 1959 Revolution. After 1959, Cuban state funding and support for classical music institutions increased as cultural officials realized they could positively improve public perceptions of the state at home and help boost the reputation of the Cuban Revolution abroad. Thus, symphonic music—and the OSN—became a leading site in post-1959 Cuba for promoting political agendas through cultural diplomacy at both the national and international levels. On the one hand, the OSN strategically programmed symphonic music that reinforced local national pride, therefore legitimizing the revolutionary government among citizens and presenting a specific narrative of Cuban national identity. On the other, the OSN was also part of the Cuban government’s international diplomatic efforts and served to foster ties with foreign nations by programming symphonic music by composers from “friendly” countries. Symphonic music achieved renown with seemingly little intervention from, or conflict with, high ranking state officials. After 1959, the OSN would claim to democratize access to “high” cultural expressions while providing a symbol of Cuban achievement abroad.

RESUMEN Este ensayo examina las condiciones que facilitaron el establecimiento de la Orquesta Nacional Sinfónica de Cuba (OSN) y su uso por el gobierno cubano en la promoción de valores socialistas y nacionalistas en los primeros años después de la revolución del 1959. A partir del 1959, el apoyo económico del gobierno cubano a las instituciones de música clásica incrementó en la medida en que los oficiales culturales se daban cuenta de que dichas instituciones podían mejorar las percepciones públicas del estado cubano dentro y fuera de Cuba. Por ende, la OSN se convirtió en una de las organizaciones más importantes para la promoción de la agenda política del estado revolucionario a través de la diplomacia cultural a nivel nacional e internacional. Por un lado, la OSN programó de manera estratégica la música sinfónica que reforzaba orgullo en la producción nacional, así legitimando al gobierno revolucionario ante los ojos de sus ciudadanos y presentando narrativas muy específicas sobre la identidad nacional cubana. Por otro lado, la OSN

19

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20 : Marysol Quevedo formaba parte de los esfuerzos en la diplomacia cultural internacional del estado y ayudaba a fomentar las relaciones con otras naciones mediante la programación de música compuesta por compositores de países “amigos.” La música sinfónica obtuvo reconocimiento con relativamente poca intervención de o conflicto con líderes gubernamentales. A partir del 1959, la OSN reclamaba democratizar el acceso a la cultura “élite” a la vez que promovía una imagen de una Cuba moderna y civilizada en el exterior.

In the fall of 2012, the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional de Cuba (National Symphony Orchestra of Cuba, or OSN) traveled to the United States for the first time since its founding on October 7, 1959. The visit was a symbol, even a harbinger, of improving relations between Washington and Havana. Yet although the ensemble had never performed in the United States, their tour was just one of the more recent events in the OSN’s long history of involvement in Cuban cultural politics and diplomacy. After 1959, the Cuban revolutionary government often deployed cultural ambassadors as foreign diplomats. It likewise counted on cultural institutions to foster local pride in national arts as well as solidarity toward Cuba in foreign nations—particularly, but not exclusively, those countries belonging to the socialist bloc. In this essay, I examine the conditions that led to the establishment of the OSN and its use by the Cuban state to promote socialist, nationalist Cuban values in the early years after the 1959 Revolution. In many ways, the OSN’s mission fit a familiar pattern. During the first half of the twentieth century, symphony orchestras rose in prominence throughout the Western hemisphere, symbolizing the pinnacle of cultural advancement.1 After the Second World War, symphonic ensembles similarly proved crucial on both sides of the Iron Curtain in boasting the cultural and economic achievements of various states.2 Cuba was no exception to this trend. After 1959, Cuban state funding and support for classical music institutions increased as cultural officials realized they could positively improve public perceptions of the state at home and help boost the reputation of the Cuban Revolution abroad. Thus, symphonic music—and the OSN—became a leading site in post-1959 Cuba for promoting political agendas through cultural diplomacy. The OSN served Cuban revolutionary cultural policy at both the national and international levels. On the one hand, the OSN strategically programmed symphonic music that reinforced local national pride, therefore legitimizing the revolutionary government among citizens and presenting a specific narrative of Cuban national identity. On the other hand, the OSN was also part of the Cuban government’s international diplomatic efforts and served to foster ties with foreign nations by programming symphonic music by composers from “friendly” countries. Several players guided the programming decisions of the ensemble: the

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National Council of Culture (CNC), which sought to promote cultural ties with socialist nations and instill socialist and revolutionary values within Cuba through the arts; the orchestra’s conductors, who had to manage musicians’ and state officials’ expectations; and Cuban composers, who saw the OSN as a vehicle for promoting more contemporary compositions that were at times rather experimental and challenged audiences’ expectations. However, the lines between these three categories were often blurred, as certain individuals, such as Harold Gramatges, Juan Blanco, and Leo Brouwer, were not only active composers of new music but also held administrative and bureaucratic positions within the symphony orchestra and in other state institutions. For example, Harold Gramatges served as Cuba’s ambassador to France in the early years of the Revolution, and Leo Brouwer was appointed director of the music department at ICAIC (Cuban Institute of Cinematic Arts and Industry).3 Similarly, of the two principal conductors, Enrique González Mántici was also a composer who wrote works that were performed and recorded by the OSN. As noted, the Cuban state’s use of a symphonic ensemble in the name of cultural diplomacy was not unique to the island, as musicologists who have written about Cold War cultural diplomacy in East and West Germany and in the United States have demonstrated.4 Indeed, familiar with experiences in other countries, Cuban officials and cultural producers were aware of the symbolic capital a symphonic orchestra could accrue. The lengths to which the state supported and promoted what many considered “highbrow” or elitist culture may seem paradoxical in the context of a socialist, political, and economic system that strove to topple the old order dominated by bourgeois values and economic structures. But what is particular to the OSN is not its socialist repackaging of a previously “bourgeois” artistic form as a crowning achievement of the revolutionary state. (The well-known history of Cuban ballet, after all, follows a similar pattern.)5 Rather, especially when compared to other cultural manifestations such as literature, theater, or popular dance (as Elizabeth Schwall explores in this dossier), symphonic music achieved renown with seemingly little intervention from, or conflict with, high-ranking state and/or cultural officials. Before we delve into why this was the case, we must first examine the state of symphonic music in Cuba before 1959. In these pre-1959 political and cultural institutions and discourses we find the seeds for the subsequent culturalpolitical programs that the OSN would advance. After 1959, the OSN would claim, in socialist fashion, to democratize access to “high” cultural expressions while providing a symbol of Cuban achievement abroad. Ultimately, the ensemble’s efforts mapped fairly neatly onto the broader cultural and diplomatic agenda of the revolutionary state.

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22 : Marysol Quevedo Symphonic Music in Cuba before 1959 During the 1950s, the Orquesta Filarmónica de La Habana (OFH) and the government-financed Instituto Nacional de Cultura (INC) were the two primary organizations in Cuba responsible for promoting classical music and culture. However, prominent Cuban composers heavily criticized the INC and the OFH for not meeting the needs of “the people” and local contemporary artists, instead catering to the interests and demands of Cuba’s elite. The Sociedad Cultural Nuestro Tiempo (“Our Time” Cultural Society, SCNT), with composers Juan Blanco and Harold Gramatges as two of its founding members, was the most vocal critic of the INC and OFH’s failure to promote new music by Cuban composers. Because of the SNCT’s close ties to the Partido Socialista Popular (Popular Socialist Party, PSP—Cuba’s traditional communist party), Fulgencio Batista’s government targeted the group’s activities throughout the 1950s, raiding their editorial offices and arresting some of its members. (Some SCNT members were also PSP members, but the SCNT itself claimed to have no official political affiliations.) In response, the SCNT called for greater state support of the arts and accused Batista’s regime and the INC of promoting cultural imperialism. The group criticized the predominantly European music in the symphony hall and also saw the rise in mass consumption of US-produced pop music as a threat to local genres. SCNT members also organized art exhibits and concerts, not just of new Cuban artists but also from the international avant-garde. Although local in its impact, the SCNT viewed its efforts as part of an international cultural scene, publishing translations of poetry and essays by foreign writers.6 In terms of music, SCNT members valued both classical and vernacular genres and forms. The same individuals would organize concerts of new classical music as well as lectures on and performances of Afro-Cuban religious traditions. They saw a need to promote all local music production, both classical and traditional, because the INC failed to even recognize these. Still, composers Harold Gramatges and José Ardévol considered symphonic music the prime musical ensemble and genre for showcasing a nation’s cultural advancement and modernity. During the 1940s and 1950s, Ardévol and Gramatges, along with other composers not affiliated with the SCNT (including Julián Orbón, Edgardo Martín, Hilario González, and Gisela Hernández), were in continuous contact with composers in the United States and broader musical influences at a hemispheric level. Several of these Cuban composers studied in the United States with prominent composers such as Aaron Copland. They upheld symphonic ensembles in the United States and Europe as models to which the OFH should aspire, and when using those foreign ensembles as a yardstick of musical achievement, they felt that existing Cuban organizations did not measure up.7 In 1954 Gramatges penned an article for the magazine Nuestro tiempo, the

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mouthpiece of the SCNT, in which he heavily criticized the OFH for what he considered a steep decline in the quality of performances and content of concert programming. In the 1930s, the OFH had been at the vanguard, promoting works of Afro-Cuban inspiration by pioneering composers such as Amadeo Roldán (who also served as the orchestra’s conductor) and Alejandro García Caturla. But after Roldán’s death in 1939, Gramatges argued, the quantity and quality of Cuban works in the ensemble’s programming had declined: Erich Kleiber (1943–1944) arrived, with the undisputed capacity for the position of the main conductor, but affected, in his Germanic arrogance, by a certain contempt towards Latin American music and for national symphonic production. The orchestra, under his direction, reached unforeseen quality, but this was accompanied, unfortunately, by a traditionalist repertory, depriving the people of contact with good contemporary music and the symphonic scores of the country [Cuba].8

Gramatges also assigned blame for the lack of Latin American and Cuban works to the orchestra’s board (the patronato), which had very conservative or “traditionalist” tastes. But he placed the ultimate responsibility for the ensemble’s decline on the hands of the state. In his view, successive Cuban governments had failed to recognize the need for a high-quality symphonic ensemble to improve the country’s international reputation and local citizens’ morale: Because there hasn’t been a government capable of understanding that we cannot call ourselves a civilized people without the existence of a symphonic ensemble that keeps [the people] in touch with the great music of all time periods, and [provides] composers with an instrument that is the only medium to deliver to the people the efforts of their work.9

By advocating for state funding of a national symphonic ensemble, Gramatges tacitly pointed to his and SCNT members’ politically progressive leanings, foreshadowing the initiatives he later supported after the triumph of the Revolution. OSN’s Inception: Promoting a National Symphonic Tradition After 1959, the Sociedad Cultural Nuestro Tiempo provided the springboard from which many leading cultural officials and figures of the Revolution emerged. Members Alfredo Guevara and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea helped found and lead ICAIC, Cuba’s film institute. Fernando Alonso, along with wife Alicia, would reshape and newly institutionalize the practice and performance of Cuban ballet. Likewise, the founding conductors of the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional, Manuel Duchesne Cuzán and Enrique González Mántici, also had

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24 : Marysol Quevedo SCNT ties. Duchesne Cuzán in particular was involved in the organization throughout the 1950s, which, as mentioned above, had criticized the Orquesta Filarmónica de La Habana for its lack of inclusion of Cuban and contemporary music in its concert programming during the 1950s. From its inception, then, the OSN’s goal—akin to ICAIC’s in film—was to promote national music production in touch with the latest compositional approaches in international new music. In the ensemble’s first years, an advisory board that included composers Juan Blanco and Harold Gramatges made sure this mission was fulfilled. At the same time, as an official, state-sponsored cultural organization, the OSN was also charged with the task of serving as cultural ambassador. It was expected to advance the Cuban Revolution’s cultural and political ties by featuring guest conductors and soloists from Eastern European, Latin American, and Caribbean countries, and by performing new works by Cuban, Latin American, and international composers. Importantly, the orchestra also took on the task of bringing art music to the masses through televised and radio performances, as well as through massive events in public spaces. Musically, all of this meant performing pieces from diverse time periods, countries, and styles. The OSN programming committee developed several strategies to balance these imperatives and successfully shift the image of symphonic music from an art form associated with decadent bourgeois culture of the upper-middle class to one accessible to all. For starters, the orchestra offered numerous concerts in celebration of various workers organizations and groups. For example, in 1961 the OSN dedicated specific concerts to the círculos infantiles (day cares) organized by the Federation of Cuban Women; textile workers; barbers, hairdressers, and manicurists; “Los jóvenes rebeldes”; banking workers from Havana province; workers from the shoe and tannery industry in Havana province; the Federation of Commercial Workers of Havana; and the National Federation of Medical Workers.10 At the same time, the OSN also made symphonic music more relatable to Cuban audiences by programming works by Cuban composers that used rhythmic and melodic motifs derived from Cuban popular and folk music. These pieces included Tres toques (1931) by Amadeo Roldán, Divertimento para orquesta de cuerdas (1958) by Juan Blanco, Suite de La Rebambaramba (1928) by Amadeo Roldán, Tríptico de Santiago (1949) by José Ardévol, and Danza de los braceros (1944) by Gilberto Valdés. Indeed, after examining hundreds of OSN concert programs, a “formula” or pattern in concert programming emerges.11 Cuban works were usually included in concerts where the rest of the compositions were by classic European composers (most of the time, W. A. Mozart, Johannes Brahms, Robert Schumann, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Paul Hindemith, among others). This approach “elevated” the Cuban works to the same level as the European masters, instilling in the musicians and audiences national pride in local symphonic music production, while also literally and figuratively inserting Cuba into the

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Western music canon. Additionally, because the OSN was celebrated as a successful project of the revolutionary government, its performances of compositions by Cuban composers legitimized the state as not only revolutionary but Cuban. However, the OSN promoted a very specific version of Cubanness through the symphonic works it performed. Most of the Cuban pieces included in the OSN’s repertoire were Afro-Cuban compositions from the 1920 and 1930s by Amadeo Roldán and Alejandro García Caturla, along with a few more contemporary works built upon the symphonic nationalist tradition that these two composers had established.12 (Composers of these newer works included José Ardévol, Juan Blanco, Natalio Galán, Carlos Fariñas, and Leo Brouwer.) Through its concert programming, then, the OSN promoted both a sense of Cuban achievement vis-à-vis Europe and Cuban nationalist pride. In similar ways to how revolutionary historians, novelists, and politicians reached back to select prerevolutionary icons, heroes, and events to legitimize the Revolution as the culmination of a wider national quest (see Elizabeth Mirabal’s reflections in this regard in this dossier), the OSN’s concerts effectively connected the socialist and revolutionary present to a national musical tradition to which most Cubans could relate. The OSN revisited the Cuban musical past through the lens of the Revolution, imbuing earlier works with retrospective nationalist, revolutionary significance. And yet curiously, this type of concert, which became the standard, also reinforced the Western European classical music tradition, even as it positioned Cuban symphonic music within it. The OSN thus continued to face a tension that composers and orchestras from non-European countries had dealt with before. Since the mid-nineteenth century, classical music composers from “peripheral” nations had grappled with the question of how to write music that showed their mastery of genres that had been “perfected” by composers from mostly German and French speaking territories, while also showing originality. Responding to the broader rise in nationalist artistic production in the second half of the nineteenth century, many composers resorted to local vernacular music traditions for inspiration, creating compositions that differed from those of the Germanic and French models. Nonetheless, by using the local and creating music that reflected traditions of specific cultural groups considered to be representative of the nation, these composers struggled to be recognized as more than “peripheral,” rarely achieving the “universalist” status granted to the mainly Germanic “masters.”13 For the OSN after 1959, these problems remained unresolved. As “revolutionary” as the institution was, it did not propose a full break from European tradition. The OSN, in fact, continued to promote the “universal” classical canon—to buy into the premise, indeed, that there was such a canon—even while also performing more and more Cuban works. Still, the advisers and programming committee of the OSN also believed

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26 : Marysol Quevedo that all symphonic music transmitted universal values that could not only be appreciated by the “common” man, but also elevate his (or her) intellectual and ideological awareness in the context of socialism. Indeed, whether by national or foreign composers, the performance and consumption of symphonic music seemed to embody a wider revolutionary ethics. The very nature of the ensemble meant that a large group of individuals had to work together to perform music that required not only several hours of group rehearsals, but also individual practice time. Individual effort and collective enterprise, in other words, joined to create a shared result. Additionally, the performances took place in large concert halls for audiences of hundreds to thousands of individuals. Symphonic performances were thus not only acts of collective music making, but also of collective music listening, mirroring the relationship between political vanguard and mass participation in the Revolution writ large. Similarly, broad assertions could be made, of course, with respect to the political valences of other art forms. Theater, in particular, is one artistic realm in which forms of collective communion were also at stake. But by contrast to a play or a novel, classical music compositions remained more of a blank textual slate.14 The relative lack of closely prescribed interpretation or specificity in the music’s signifiers—beyond references to popular Cuban music traditions or patriotic motifs that the Revolution was happy to celebrate—shielded symphonic ensembles from the harsh censorship and scrutiny that Cuban artists in other fields faced. Historicizing the Revolution through Symphonic Music In truth, the OSN proved an eager partner in providing a soundtrack of sorts to the revolutionary state’s broader conception of Cuban history. Sometimes, it programmed concerts exclusively of Cuban works to celebrate or commemorate a particular event from the national past. In 1968, for example, the orchestra performed a concert to celebrate the Cien años de lucha, or the hundred years of struggle that, as Fidel Castro put it, linked the outbreak of Cuba’s first independence war to the end of the Revolution’s first decade in power. The program of the concert thus underscored connections between the nineteenth-century revolutions for independence and the socialist present by foregrounding music produced by Cuban composers of that earlier time period. The program consisted of Antonio Rodríguez Ferrer, Thematic Prelude for Orchestra from Ana Herminia (n.d., but probably end of nineteenth century); I. Cervantes, Scherzo capriccioso (second half of nineteenth century); G. Villate, Quartet of Act III of Zilia (1877); H. de Blanck, Canto fúnebre a la memoria de Antonio Maceo (turn of the century); and J. M. (Lico) Jiménez, Estudio sinfónico (second half of nineteenth century). Of the five works presented, the one with the most overt revolutionary

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connections was clearly Hubert de Blanck’s Canto fúnebre a la memoria de Antonio Maceo, dedicated to the memory of one of Cuba’s foremost independence heroes. The others in the program were concert pieces, such as tone poems or excerpts from larger works, which did not have direct connections to the independence movements as such. Even so, the program notes emphasized the revolutionary attitudes held by the nineteenth century composers by highlighting biographical facts that portrayed them as patriots in their times. Cervantes, for example, had donated the revenues from some of his US concert tours to the independence movement. The concert program notes also positioned the nineteenth-century composers as the forefathers of their contemporary counterparts. This particular view of Cuban musical historical past was reinforced through textbooks, monographs, and articles on Cuban music history written by composers that included Edgardo Martín and José Ardévol.15 In this way, Cuban composers of the post-1959 period presented their work as the fulfillment, like the Revolution more broadly, of a long-standing national struggle and previously aborted efforts at nationalist renewal—in this case, a musical tradition initiated by the likes of Cervantes, Jiménez, and de Blanck. Although the Revolution broke with the immediate past, it also relied on the symbolic power held by historical revolutionary figures to legitimize itself as the natural heir of the Cuban nation. Recasting Cuban music history through the new lens of revolutionary and socialist values and ideology became a powerful tool for legitimizing the nationalist credentials of symphonic music, and, by proxy, the state that supported it. Another similar concert took place on April 19, 1963, offered as an homage to the Victory of Playa Girón (i.e., the Bay of Pigs invasion). The concert included the participation of the Coro Nacional (National Choir), which performed several patriotic songs with orchestral accompaniment by the OSN. These included the national anthem La Bayamesa (1918) by Sindo Garay and Himno invasor (1895) by Enrique Loynaz del Castillo. Yet more recent, even popular compositions were also featured, including Patria liberada by Leonardo Timor (b. 1933), Desde Yara hasta la Sierra (published in 1977) by Tania Castellanos, and Juan Blanco’s Elegía (En memoria de los héroes del pueblo cubano caídos en la lucha por la libertad y la justicia, 1956). In addition to the choral works, the OSN performed Edgardo Martín’s “Allegro” from his Soneras para orquesta (1950–1951).16 The programs notes for this and many other OSN concerts provided audiences the missing links between the performers, composers, and revolutionary ideals. During the first seven to eight years after the OSN’s founding, Cuban composer and staunch revolutionary Edgardo Martín wrote all program notes. These texts introduced audiences to the composers and their works and provided biographical information of soloist performers and conductors. For instance,

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28 : Marysol Quevedo the biography of choral conductor Serafín Pro in March 1963 emphasized that although Pro developed as a musician under capitalism during the 1950s, he always disagreed with the social state of the country. The text added that the Revolution had finally allowed Pro to serve as a choral conductor, establishing the Coro del Ejército Rebelde, the Coro del Teatro Nacional, and finally the Coro Nacional, with which he had brought choral music to workplaces, hospitality centers, and farming co-ops, thus demonstrating its social function. The program notes began with an introduction of the choral pieces emphasizing that, thanks to the Socialist revolution, choral music production in Cuba was thriving not only through professional and semiprofessional choirs but also through the amateur choral movement.17 Martín added that the Revolution made it possible for national culture to triumph over “the cultural decadence that [we] suffered, that for decades threatened all of our traditional values almost to extinction, constantly attacked by bourgeois snobbery, violating our people’s morale by oppressive forces that tried to banish our best native sentiments, what [was] essential of our existence as a people.”18 In the same program, Martín also introduced Juan Blanco as one of the most successful Cuban composers of recent years, “one of the first and more convinced in uniting in the outcry for the country’s social regeneration.”19 Among his prerevolutionary activities, the notes highlighted Blanco’s Cantata a la Paz, his involvement in the Sociedad Cultural Nuestro Tiempo, and his role in the production of the underground film El mégano—an exposé of prerevolutionary poverty in the Bay of Pigs region and a predecessor for revolutionary film more broadly after 1959. Martín likewise reproduced a short commentary by Blanco about Elegía, in which Blanco noted that the work was composed in 1956 to pay homage to the heroes fallen in the ongoing Cuban revolutionary fight at the time, but also to remember the death of labor leader Jesús Menéndez.20 Blanco added that his piece was meant to communicate an expression of struggle and rebelliousness within the function of an elegy. In these ways, the concert’s programming, consisting of all Cuban works that served to boast patriotic sentiment, matched the event that it commemorated: the celebration of the military triumph of the Cuban rebel army over a US-backed invasion. The program notes, in turn, made overt connections between the music and the biographies of the conductors and composers and the nationalist spirit that the Bay of Pigs victory represented. Symphonic music, too, though bourgeois in origins, could be as “revolutionary” as any other art form. OSN as Cultural Ambassador: Fostering Foreign Relations In addition to boasting nationalist sentiment and the socialist revolution on a local level, the OSN’s concert programming supported the Cuban state’s desire

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to foster political and cultural ties with other socialist states and Latin American countries. This was achieved in a variety of ways. At times, the OSN would accompany a featured soloist from abroad, or a visiting conductor would lead the ensemble. To complement the foreign guest artists, the orchestra would also program one or more works by composers from the soloist’s or the conductor’s country. Together, these strategies made the OSN into an important vehicle for revolutionary cultural diplomacy. The examples are numerous. For instance, in a January 6, 1961, concert conducted by Mexican Luis Herrera de la Fuente, the OSN performed Mexican composer José Pablo Moncayo’s Huapango (1941).21 In March of that same year, Alexander Gauk, director of the Soviet Union’s state radio and television orchestra, led a concert that included works by Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich and nineteenth-century Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. In April of 1961, González Mántici conducted a concert featuring Soviet cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, which included Soviet composer Sergei Prokofiev’s Sinfonia Concertante for cello and orchestra, as well as late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Easter Overture. Rounding out the lineup was a Cuban work: Leo Brouwer’s Ritual.22 As the programming for this last performance shows, the inclusion of a Cuban composition in concerts that featured a foreign guest conductor or soloist and music from his or her country was another tactic the program committee employed to forge cultural ties between Cuba and its allies. This approach fulfilled several goals. It familiarized foreign musicians with Cuban national music production; it framed Cuban compositions alongside those by foreign composers, thus claiming a space for Cuba in the international music scene; and it served as proof to Cuban audiences that the Revolution had provided the right conditions for Cuban composers to achieve a level of artistic mastery and creativity on par with that of foreign colleagues. Yet at the same time, the OSN also sought to stake out a leadership position for Cuban symphonic music among Latin American counterparts, thus mirroring the Revolution’s broader claims to hemispheric leadership overall. On numerous occasions, the ensemble hosted guest conductors and soloists from Latin American countries, but it also organized special, multiconcert events to celebrate Latin American cultural and political unity through symphonic music.23 Program notes for concerts featuring music by contemporary composers from Latin America (or from Eastern Europe) likewise highlighted political conditions in the region as important elements informing composers’ aesthetic viewpoints and creative endeavors. On the surface, such efforts to place Cuban classical music on par with the European canon and to gain recognition from Latin American music circles may seem at odds with the goals of the Revolution’s nationalist project. However, when we examine this concern against the long history of musical

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30 : Marysol Quevedo nationalism, it becomes clear that the goals of nationalist music projects are rarely limited to the promotion of national music at the local level. By evoking the local in their work, composers strove to receive as much recognition and approval from foreign audiences as at home. But this was not new or unique to this time period or this generation of composers. Cuban composers from previous generations, such as Amadeo Roldán, Alejandro García Caturla, and José Ardévol, all engaged with composers and music circles outside of Cuba— mainly France and the United States prior to 1959.24 In post-1959 Cuba, the pursuit of external validation remained. What was different was the degree to which ties with musical traditions of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were also forged. But this should not prevent us from noting a fundamental continuity across time in Cuban musical nationalism’s goals. Conclusion The role of symphonic music as a symbol of cultural achievement was not unique to Cuba. In the context of Cold War cultural politics, the symphony orchestra became a vehicle for reinforcing musical standards and ideological positions. “The West” claimed capitalism held the higher moral ground because composers were not censored by the state; “the East” claimed that socialism provided conditions for everyone (the masses) to be able to enjoy all art, including symphonic music, which under capitalism had only been the purview of the bourgeoisie and the elite. In the “third world,” meanwhile, symphonic music served as a means to celebrate local particularity, but also stake a claim to first-world cultural sophistication. Regardless of location, major symphony orchestras around the globe invited composers and conductors from foreign nations to conduct and perform music by composers from their respective countries in order to forge diplomatic ties.25 In post-1959 Cuba, the establishment of the OSN similarly signaled the state’s acknowledgement of symphonic music’s soft power. As the examples discussed demonstrate, the OSN’s concert programming became a battleground for fighting imperialism and capitalism, promoting national music production (which was itself defined in varying ways depending on the individual), and demonstrating Cuba’s status as a modern nation. Yet equally important was the orchestra’s diplomatic function, as through its collaborations with foreign partners, the OSN helped cement cultural ties with foreign states. Gramatges’s original investment in the potential of symphonic music to embody a nationalist and wider moral vision was not new to the mid-twentieth century. Indeed, the use of symphonic music as a symbol of progress and modernity in the Cuban case dated back to the mid-nineteenth century—albeit under a much different political and ideological guise. At that time, the Louisiana native Louis Moreau Gottschalk traveled extensively through the Caribbean

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and Latin America, with particularly extended stays in Cuba during the 1850s. Best known for his compositions for the piano (many of which used rhythms and melodies from Cuban salon dances, including the habanera, tresillo and cinquillo), Gottschalk wrote one of his symphonies, Symphonie romantique: La nuit des tropiques (1859), for a special performance at the Teatro Tacón in Havana. Douglas Shadle has argued that Gottschalk wrote this grand symphonic piece, along with À Montevideo: 2me symphonie-romantique pour grand orchestre (1868), to promote a Pan-American republican ideal.26 According to Shadle, Gottschalk was also a staunch supporter of public education,27 and he shared the widely held nineteenth-century belief that “the artist is the privileged instrument of a moral and civilizing influence.”28 This ideal that art, and symphonic music in particular, had the power to civilize and improve the individual and society as a whole went on to be widely adopted by the twentiethcentury Cuban cultural elite. Although such presumptions were steeped in bourgeois cultural values, Cuban composers after 1959 did not abandon the view that symphonic music had the power to uplift audiences. On the contrary, individuals like Harold Gramatges and Juan Blanco argued that by reclaiming symphonic music (and classical music in general) from the social elites, symphonic music could inspire individuals, no longer in the Biedermeieresque,29 bourgeois sense of Bildung, but in the service of the socialist-revolutionary ideal of the “new man.” To do so, institutions like the OSN required full state support, their music needed to seek inspiration in local forms, and their performances had to be financially accessible to the masses. Only then, he and others argued, would the true enriching potential of symphonic music be unleashed. The relative success of the OSN and symphonic music in post-1959 Cuba was not only due to symphonic music’s elevating potential, however. Its prominence also owed much to the political commitment to the Revolution shown by its composers and musicians, many of whom hailed, as we have seen, from the Communist Party–linked SCNT, and who went on to serve in administrative and public positions of the state. (Other Cuban composers who opposed the radicalization of the Revolution, including Julián Orbón and Aurelio de la Vega, eventually left Cuba.) Also crucial, though, was the relative ease with which instrumental music could be reclaimed by socialism, or “rescued” from capitalism, thanks to its comparative lack of intrinsic meaning. Unlike other art forms, especially literature, instrumental music mostly lacked a literal text, aside from program notes. Outside of patriotic pieces with an obvious political import, compositions could be interpreted and reinterpreted to suit one’s point of view. State officials may not have liked how a piece of instrumental music sounded. But in the absence of a composer’s literal description (sometimes provided in its title or through program notes), or more prescriptive rules as to style and form, state officials had no solid grounds on which to censor,

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32 : Marysol Quevedo repress, or dismiss a symphonic work. Notably, this differed substantially from the experience of Soviet composers under Stalinism, where, during the height of so-called Zhdanovism in the 1940s, composers were censored and repressed based on strictly musical grounds.30 While more conservative Cuban composers looked down on some forms of experimentalism among their colleagues, Cuban composers generally did not face such intense obstacles—not even during the island’s otherwise repressive Quinquenio Gris (1971–1976).31 For these reasons, the OSN received ample support from the Cuban state in the 1960s and 70s and became a leading cultural institution that fulfilled several of the state’s political needs. It also allowed contemporary Cuban composers, musicians, and conductors to promote new music by Cuban and foreign creators.32 Its legacy, therefore—which continues today, despite a context of more limited financial resources—is one of artists and cultural officials who mutually benefited from the ensemble’s role as a cultural agent.33 In this sense, the OSN’s history demonstrates that not all cultural organizations or artistic realms were the subject of equal degrees of artistic conflict or distrust between the state and Cuban artists. When we look beyond more visible, albeit decisive, clashes between artists and the revolutionary state—especially those involving literary figures and film directors that have received the most scholarly attention—signs of significant, relatively seamless, but no less important collaborations also emerge. NOTES 1. Alan Street, “The Symphony, the Modern Orchestra and the Performing Canon,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Symphony, ed. Julian Horton (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 399. 2. Jonathan Rosenberg, “‘To Reach . . . into the Hearts and Minds of Our Friends’: The United States’ Symphonic Tours and the Cold War,” in Music and International History in the Twentieth Century. Series: Explorations in Culture and International History, ed. Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht (New York: Berghahn, 2015), 140. 3. Juan Blanco, in particular, served in several positions. He was in charge of music ensembles for the armed forces and was editor of the music section of Bohemia magazine. 4. Danielle Fosler-Lussier, Music in America’s Cold War Diplomacy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015); Elizabeth Janik, Recomposing German Music: Politics and Musical Tradition in Cold War Berlin (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2005); Jonathan L. Yaeger, “The Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in East Germany, 1970–1990” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 2013). 5. Lester Tomé, “Giselle in a Cuban Accent,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ballet, ed. Marion Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 270. 6. Ricardo Hernández Otero, Sociedad Cultural Nuestro Tiempo: Resistencia y acción (Havana: Letras Cubanas, 2002), 5–15. 7. Harold Gramatges, “Treinta años de la Orquesta Filarmónica de La Habana,” Nuestro tiempo 1, no. 2 (November 1954): 1, 14, reproduced in Hernández Otero, Sociedad Cultural Nuestro Tiempo, 32; and Argeliers León, “Instrumentos típicos cubanos [exposición en la Galería Nuestro Tiempo],” reproduced in Hernández Otero, Sociedad Cultural Nuestro Tiempo, 138.

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8. Harold Gramatges, “Treinta años,” reproduced in Hernández Otero, Sociedad Cultural Nuestro Tiempo, 32. 9. Hernández Otero, Sociedad Cultural Nuestro Tiempo, 33. 10. Various OSN concert programs, OSN Archive, Museo Nacional de la Música Cubana, Havana. 11. The concert programs are held at the archives of the Museo Nacional de la Música Cubana and the Centro de Investigación y Desarrollo de la Música Cubana, both in Havana. 12. It is beyond the scope of this present article to discuss the particular meaning or effect of the nearly exclusive programming of symphonic pieces based on Afro-Cuban music. For further discussion of the development of classical music in the afrocubanista movement, see Robin Moore, Nationalizing Blackness: Afrocubanismo and Artistic Revolution in Havana, 1920–1940 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997). 13. Benedikte Brincker, “The Role of Classical Music in the Construction of Nationalism: A Cross-National Perspective,” Nations and Nationalism: Journal of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism 20, no. 4 (2014): 664. 14. This, of course, is with the exception of programmatic music—that is, works for which a specific program, usually a narrative/story that the musical composition is supposed to reflect, imitate, or symbolize, has been provided by the composer as accompanying notes to the score (or in the concert program). The sources of these programmatic pieces are sometimes original creations by the composers, such as Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, and other times are inspired by existing literary works, such as Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote. 15. For example, José Ardévol, Introducción a Cuba: la música (Havana: Instituto del Libro, 1969); Edgardo Martín, Panorama histórico de la música en Cuba (Havana: Cuaderno CEU, Universidad de La Habana, 1971). 16. OSN Concert Program (April 19, 1963), OSN Archive, Museo Nacional de la Música Cubana, Havana. 17. OSN Concert Program (April 19, 1963). 18. OSN Concert Program (April 19, 1963). 19. OSN Concert Program (April 19, 1963). 20. Jesús Menéndez (1911–1948) was a Cuban sugar worker and workers rights activist. He was a member of the Cuban Socialist Party. He was murdered by Cpt. Joaquín Casillas for refusing his (illegal) arrest. 21. OSN Concert Program (January 1961), OSN Archive, Museo Nacional de la Música Cubana, Havana. 22. OSN Concert Program (April 1961), OSN Archive, Museo Nacional de la Música Cubana, Havana. 23. For example, in 1962 and 1972, the OSN was the leading organization of the Festival de Música Latinoamericana, in which the ensemble featured compositions, guest conductors, and guest soloists from several Latin American countries. 24. Marysol Quevedo, “Cubanness, Innovation, and Politics in Art Music in Cuba, 1942– 1979” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 2016), 78–79. 25. Fosler-Lussier, Music in America’s Cold War Diplomacy, 7. 26. Douglas Shadle, “Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s Pan-American Symphonic Ideal,” American Music 29, no. 4 (Winter 2011): 447. 27. Shadle, “Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s,” 448, 450. 28. Shadle, “Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s,” 453. 29. Many of the middle-class values infusing music production and consumption that carried into the first half of the twentieth century began to take shape during the Biedermeier period in the first half of the nineteenth century in Central Europe, when music publications catered to

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34 : Marysol Quevedo middle-class sensibilities and social aspirations. See Ruth A. Solie, “Biedermeier Domesticity and the Schubert Circle: A Rereading,” in Music in Other Words: Victorian Conversations, ed. Ruth A. Solie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 118. 30. Developed in 1946 by Andrei Zhdanov, the secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, “Zhdanovism” required complete compliance with state policies from the Soviet intelligentsia. Individuals who did not adhere to state cultural policies were at best blacklisted and at worst persecuted. See Leonid Maximenkov, “The Rise and Fall of the 1948 Central Committee Resolution on Music,” Three Oranges 16 (November 2008): 14–21. 31. Elsewhere, I have discussed the case of several experimental compositions by Leo Brouwer, Juan Blanco, and Carlos Fariñas that were performed by the OSN in 1969. There were, I argue, limits to the degree of experimentalism that cultural officials found acceptable. See Quevedo, “Cubanness, Innovation, and Politics,” 290–291. 32. It is worth emphasizing that the OSN’s repertoire overall—consistent with the practices of symphonic orchestras worldwide—featured less new music than tried-and-true works from the nineteenth-century European canon. Its Cuban repertoire, moreover, tended to focus on pieces by historic Cuban composers or those formed before 1959, including the OSN’s founders. That said, some Cuban composers formed in the post-1959 years did achieve high artistic recognition (and today hold prominent positions in cultural organizations in Cuba) by having their music performed by the OSN. These include Leo Brouwer, Roberto Valera, and Guido López-Gavilán. Nevertheless, Cuban composers did not rely solely on the OSN to gain recognition, despite its status as a symbol of cultural achievement. Many of the younger composers formed after 1959 created music for film, piano, guitar, chamber ensembles, and electroacoustic media. This reflects broader, global trends of new music composers who did not see symphonic music as the ultimate genre through which to achieve success and recognition. 33. In the post-Soviet decades, the OSN has faced financial hardships and resorted to programming more “conservative” symphonic works that will appeal to a wider audience.

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E L I Z A B E T H S C H WA L L

The Footsteps of Nieves Fresneda: Cuban Folkloric Dance and Cultural Policy, 1959–1979 A B S T R AC T This article examines the history of Cuban folkloric dance by following the footsteps of star dancer Nieves Fresneda from 1959 to her retirement in 1979. Fresneda was a founding member of the Havana-based national folkloric dance company, Conjunto Folklórico Nacional (CFN). Studies have charted the early history of the CFN but tend to portray the company as a state-led enterprise that sprang fully formed from political leaders. By contrast, this study asserts that the company was imagined and created by folkloric performers and collaborators who fought for a genre, admittedly built on the fraught foundations of racial inequality and paternalistic reform. In recounting this history, I regularly return to Fresneda, grounding the essay in a specific body and life that had particular importance to the CFN. Fresneda and her colleagues were expert cultural producers, known as “informants,” and provided the foundation and fount to folkloric performance. Although this has been mentioned in previous literature, I seek to underscore informants’ centrality to politics and theory making through performance. Borrowing from José Esteban Muñoz (who himself borrowed from Antonio Gramsci), I argue that these individuals were “organic intellectuals,” who celebrated Cuban blackness and promoted goals of racial justice through their folkloric arts.

RESUMEN Este artículo analiza la historia de la danza folklórica en Cuba, siguiendo los pasos de la bailarina estrella Nieves Fresneda desde 1959 hasta su jubilación en 1979. Fresneda fue miembro fundador del Conjunto Folklórico Nacional (CFN), ubicado en la Habana. Otros estudios han analizado la historia temprana del CFN, pero tienden a describir la compañía como una iniciativa del estado, formada en su totalidad por líderes políticos. Al contrario, este ensayo demuestra que la compañía fue imaginada y creada por artistas folklóricos y sus colaboradores, quienes lucharon por la sobrevivencia del género, aun cuando este fue construido sobre la base de persistentes desigualdades raciales y un acercamiento paternalista por parte del estado a cuestiones raciales. Retorno con regularidad a Fresneda, enfocando el ensayo en un cuerpo y una vida que tuvieron una importancia particular dentro del CFN. Fresneda y sus colegas fueron expertos de la producción cultural cubana, conocidos como “informantes,” y proporcionaron la base y la fuente de conocimiento para el performance folklórico en la Isla. Subrayo la

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36 : Elizabeth Schwall centralidad de estas figuras como activos agentes de política y teoría a través del performance. Usando un concepto de José Esteban Muñoz (quien basó sus ideas en las de Antonio Gramsci), afirmo que estos individuos eran “intelectuales orgánicos” quienes celebraban la afrocubanía y promovían la justicia racial a través de su arte.

The award-winning documentary Historia de un ballet (1962) records for posterity the light but decisive footsteps of Nieves Fresneda. A woman of African descent in her early sixties at the time of filming, she dances to honor the Santería orisha (divinity) Yemayá, as she is accompanied by the accomplished musicians Carlos Aldama, Lázaro Ros, and Trinidad Torregrosa.1 Narrator Luis Carbonell introduces Fresneda to the viewer by saluting her expertise: “Nobody performs the dances of Yemayá better than santera Nieves Fresneda.”2 Indeed, she delivers a powerful performance in the short, two-minute sequence. Her elbows and knees remain softly bent, and her gaze, down and inward, gives her a grounded delicacy. These choices vividly capture the elegant fluidness of Yemayá, who is associated with the sea in Yoruba cosmology. Onlookers encircle Fresneda as she shares a lifetime of knowledge and skill with each step. Despite being treated with reverence in the film, Fresneda gave this performance within a context that in many ways undermined her distinction. The documentary, for instance, dramatized the creative process of Havana-based modern dancers traveling to the town of Regla to research daily rituals for Suite Yoruba (1960), a twenty-one-minute production that explored Santería myths and culture.3 Although both the filmmakers and modern dancers featured in the documentary celebrated the practices under investigation, their projects enacted an underlying paternalism by suggesting that quotidian worship provided the “raw material” for enlightened artistic products.4 Before and after appearing in the film, Fresneda danced in a genre of productions that became known as “folkloric”—a loaded term with pejorative, classist undertones that denoted not only ostensibly authentic traditions, but also simplicity and backwardness.5 In Cuba, where class was racialized, folkloric music and dances that originated with the popular sectors of society became associated with blackness. Although Afro-Cuban cultural contributions gained greater recognition during the early revolutionary era, folkloric performers including Fresneda worked for years without adequate compensation. Furthermore, Fresneda and many fellow folkloric performers were active religious practitioners and faced discrimination based on faith, as well as class and race. These contradictions echo those found at the level of elite politics. Fidel Castro and members of the victorious 26th of July Movement initially celebrated black Cubans like Fresneda as the ultimate revolutionaries. In concert with an early campaign to eliminate vestiges of racial segregation on the island,

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The Footsteps of Nieves Fresneda : 37 authorities lauded African-descended Cubans’ resistance to slavery, imperialism, and racism over decades. However, after Castro declared the eradication of racial discrimination in 1962, discussions of race became taboo. In subsequent years, the socialist state policed black Cubans who continued to practice Afro-Cuban religions.6 In this context, governmental discourses framed the dances that Fresneda performed as quaint national entertainment in regulated settings but counterrevolutionary transgression outside of those arenas. Numerous studies have charted the prejudices that black artists like Fresneda faced after the 1959 Revolution, and most include at least some discussion of the Havana-based national folkloric dance company Conjunto Folklórico Nacional (CFN), founded in 1962.7 Scholars have noted both the significance of the company as the first of its kind to receive state funding as well as the problematic official presumptions that accompanied this support. Leading cultural officials believed that the African diasporic devotional practices that the CFN presented would disappear with revolutionary progress. In response, religious practitioners had to find ways to navigate their continued faith while participating in folkloric institutions that reworked the sacred for a theatrical setting.8 Scholars have argued convincingly that the government promoted secular renditions of ritual to discipline black bodies and divest them of their culture, appropriating elements of blackness to forge an invented national tradition that bolstered state power. Artists of color who attempted to perform outside of official venues or challenge racist cultural policies were harshly sanctioned.9 Importantly, the promise and limits of cultural policies that guided Cuban folkloric performance resonate with what transpired in other countries, including Haiti, East Germany, and Nicaragua.10 Nevertheless, existing studies have tended to portray the CFN as a stateled enterprise that sprang fully formed from political leaders. By contrast, I assert that the company was imagined and created by folkloric performers and collaborators who fought for a genre undeniably built on the fraught foundations of racial inequality and paternalistic reform. Thus, rather than political elites, I analyze the social histories of performers and their tactics for living with revolutionary governance, which meant publically innovating despite expressive strictures and privately adhering to a faith that had fallen out of official favor.11 In so doing, this article builds on Katherine Hagedorn’s seminal analysis of how religious CFN members succeeded in cultivating the sacred in secular folkloric performance through the 1990s.12 However, focusing on the foundational years of the company exclusively, I examine a broader repertoire of actions on and off stage that not only defended faith but also built professional performance careers and an artistic form that aspired to promote racial justice. Returning throughout to the actions of Fresneda grounds the essay in a specific body and life. Admittedly, biographical details about the star dancer are sparse and fall in and out of the historical narrative. Still, highlighting the

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38 : Elizabeth Schwall known and unknown of Fresneda’s artful life helps to counter tendencies not only to flatten the state, as Michael Bustamante describes in his introduction to this dossier, but also artists, particularly in existing scholarship on the CFN.13 Whether discussing Fresneda front and center or the elusive shadow she cast while off stage, this analysis endeavors to explore the contours of a threedimensional performer moving through space and time. The CFN, furthermore, provides an excellent case study for examining the frontiers of cultural agency under the Cuban Revolution, thanks to sources that detail how artists proactively pushed, as well as combatted, the priorities of the state. Unlike other cultural arenas examined in this dossier, where only final artistic products or retrospective testimonies indicate the cultural politics at play, here, previously unexamined archival materials offer more insights on the internal workings of the company and its relationship to national cultural authorities. Archival documentation on the CFN and its predecessors details quotidian negotiations and occasional conflicts. Interactions between performers, researchers, choreographers, administrators, and bureaucrats ranged from synergistic to antagonistic. Acknowledging the diversity of cultural workers involved, as well as the different tones and outcomes of their exchanges, steers the conversation away from depictions of artists simply fighting or succumbing to an all-powerful central authority. Outside of a few dramatic clashes, mundane discussions and performance choices more commonly fleshed out creative differences. Ultimately, performers skillfully maneuvered to internally influence revolutionary cultural institutions and their development. Like writers and musicians discussed elsewhere in this dossier, folkloric performers were not mere victims or colluders, but creators who made the most of limited resources and finite powers.14 Particularly revealing were the tactical decisions and actions of Fresneda and fellow expert cultural producers who served as “informants” to the CFN in the early decades of the company’s existence. Also referred to as bibliotecas vivientes (living libraries), they provided the foundation and fount for folkloric productions.15 Though mentioned in previous literature, I seek to underscore their centrality to politics and theory making through performance. Borrowing from performance studies scholar José Esteban Muñoz (who himself borrowed from Antonio Gramsci), I argue that these individuals were “organic intellectuals,” and as does Muñoz, I seek to emphasize their role in “ground-level politics of the self, while avoiding the fetishizing of the minoritarian intellectual.”16 The modifier organic nods to the living, performative nature of their knowledge production, and the term intellectual acknowledges the theorizing work of dances that celebrated blackness and promoted goals of racial justice, regardless of the “folkloric” trappings in which they were presented.17 By calling Fresneda and her fellow informants organic intellectuals, I seek to recognize their leadership, political strategies, and influence on fellow artists and audiences.

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The Footsteps of Nieves Fresneda : 39 This article thus attends to the steps, shuffles, stumbles, and stomps of Fresneda and her colleagues to highlight what they created despite considerable challenges. Doing so contributes to growing scholarship on the role of afrocubanas in Cuban history.18 In the case of Cuban folkloric performance, scholars have collected the biographies of male musicians in the CFN, but they have generally overlooked female artists with the company.19 Fresneda served as a model performer and teacher, who helped to develop a new performance genre that continues today. Her centrality to the field, eloquently captured in a headshot in which she stares into the camera with command and calm (fig. 1), deserves historical attention.20 In this article, I trace the achievements and pitfalls of folkloric performance from 1959 to Fresneda’s retirement in 1979 by following her footsteps.

FIGURE 1. Headshot of Nieves Fresneda, date and photographer unknown. Courtesy of Danza Contemporánea de Cuba, Havana, Cuba. Source: Image from Teatro Nacional de Cuba, Archivo de Danza Contemporánea de Cuba (TNCDCC), fondo Fotográfica.

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40 : Elizabeth Schwall Struggling to Survive, 1959–1969 Relatively little information exists about Fresneda, a woman of African descent from humble origins. She was born in 1900 in Havana to parents that she called aficionados (recreational performers and fans) of the popular dance danzón.21 By any measure, she had a difficult life. Her mother died young, and Fresneda had to care for her six younger siblings. She then married, had her own children, and later divorced, working “in anything honorable to survive.” She remarried, had more children, and experienced economic need once more after the death of her second husband. Nevertheless, hardship did not deter her from frequenting dances sponsored by black civic associations and participating annually in carnival.22 She also performed music and dance as part of her Santería faith.23 Only after the 1959 Revolution did she begin her professional performance career in her sixties. The first decade of professional folkloric performance, like Fresneda’s early life, consisted of an ongoing struggle to survive. The Department of Folklore at the Teatro Nacional de Cuba (TNC), under the leadership of musicologist Argeliers León, played an important role in the early history of post-1959 folkloric performance. Along with publishing a journal and teaching a research seminar, León staged folkloric spectacles. Fresneda started working with León while continuing her day job as a planchadora (a laundress, literally “one who uses an iron”).24 She later claimed that León had sought her out, “because they said that I had knowledge [conocimientos]. I explained things that our youth had not seen. . . . I told what was done at that time, what the orishas were, what the danzón was like, how they danced in the old days.”25 In actuality, León had less sanguine motives for working with informants. To cultural bureaucrats, he described taking a “scientific” approach and eventually breaking with “the religious practitioners and officiators, who . . . allow us to see their dances,” so that performers of the future would not consider folklore religious. León also targeted the beliefs of present day informants. As he asserted in 1961, “The work with these informants . . . will allow them to be brought closer to more materialistic attitudes and to separate them from metaphysic situations that their beliefs implicitly carry.” Toward this end, León recommended regrouping performers based on ability rather than cultural practices, and exposing them to the “careful work of revolutionary indoctrination.”26 Despite León’s intentions, performances had personal and collective meanings that defied his control. Fresneda recalled her first performance in a large theatre with breathless pride: “I was the demonstrator of the lucumí dances, in a cycle of conferences that were called Cantos y leyendas. There, in the small Covarrubias auditorium, I danced for the first time the afro dances

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The Footsteps of Nieves Fresneda : 41 on a stage.”27 The production premiered February 24, 1960, and repeated a month later and again in the fall.28 Isabel Monal, the director of the TNC at the time, claimed that more people showed up than could be accommodated, causing considerable commotion.29 The packed house for the first major staged production of folkloric dances and songs must have amounted to an exhilarating experience for Fresneda and her fellow performers. At the very least, it inspired her to continue performing on stage. She danced in Bembé (1960), sang in the chorus for the modern dance pieces Suite Yoruba (1960) and La rebambaramba (1961), and appeared in the documentary Historia de un ballet discussed earlier.30 Despite considerable success, Fresneda and her fellow folkloric contributors received little compensation. For two performances in November 1960, Fresneda earned 20 pesos (roughly equivalent to US$20 at the time) in a salary range of 16–30 pesos.31 A budget for July through December 1960 listed folkloric performers receiving between 14 and 34 pesos a month (Fresneda received the latter). This contrasted with the salary of modern dancers at the TNC, between 100 and 225 pesos a month.32 Although León recommended increasing salaries to 130 pesos in December, the change never came.33 In 1962, Fresneda left the TNC and became a soloist and informant for the newly founded CFN.34 The group came into existence after institutional changes removed folkloric research and performance from the TNC at the end of 1961. León, Monal, and theatrical artist Gilda Hernández had the “idea” for a new folkloric company. León enlisted Rogelio Martínez Furé, a young folklorist who had studied with him at the TNC, and Mexican choreographer Rodolfo Reyes to spearhead the new company.35 The founders aimed to create an institution “capable of collecting national dance expressions—disregarded by past regimes—and integrate them definitively into the new socialist culture.”36 In line with antiracist discourses at the time, which sublimated racial difference under the idea of national unity,37 the company’s foundational guiding philosophy held that “there is no white or black folklore, only Cuban folklore, with African roots in their majority, and then Spanish, Haitian, French, etc.”38 In April 1962, between four hundred and five hundred people showed up to the audition, and Martínez Furé and Reyes chose around fifty performers, including seven informants.39 Despite intentions to build a racially diverse company, an administrator acknowledged a few months later that, given limited teaching time and money, the company depended on “a majority of black personnel” who already had extensive knowledge of the music and dance practices to be performed.40 Company leaders did occasionally stage popular music and dance of different racial and ethnic origins, as corroborated in 1960s costume designs.41 But whatever its multiracial—or, indeed, deracialized—theoretical framing at the start, “folklore” as presented by the CFN soon became synonymous with “black,” given that the company was made up of African-descended

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42 : Elizabeth Schwall performers. It is important to note, however, that CFN administrators, choreographers, and costume designers were white with the exception of the AfroCuban cofounder and folkloric adviser Rogelio Martínez Furé. Despite the antiracist aspirations of the CFN, the organization generally reproduced social inequalities, giving the black majority limited access to power within the company. The CFN’s association with blackness made its future precarious as enduring racial prejudices compelled bureaucrats, administrators, and choreographers to question its merits. As founding costume designer María Elena Molinet claimed in one internal report, many cultural bureaucrats thought that the CFN “was a crazy idea.” She explained, “There was a little fear of both black dance and Santeros and of risking money and having no results, achieving only an exaltation of black rhythms.”42 As the company prepared for its first production, cultural bureaucrats carefully followed their progress by dropping in to observe rehearsals. On one occasion an official was “particularly disgusted,” suggesting to Molinet that the company should “make more white folklore.”43 Racially charged prejudices, especially against the Afro-Cuban religions that inspired folkloric music and dance, also existed within the company. Choreographer Rodolfo Reyes criticized “the magical-religious mentality” of company members, claiming it made them undisciplined and put their religious interests before revolutionary work.44 Company leaders like Reyes expected religious company members not only to create secular national traditions out of sacred practice but also to eventually abandon religious roots for new revolutionary creeds. As a CFN administrator put it to cultural officials, the company paradoxically aimed to “destroy religious myths” by staging theatricalized versions of dances from “Congo, Yoruba, Abacua [sic], etc.”45 These prejudices led to low salaries. Company members began with 40–50 pesos a month, and eventually received 80 pesos a month, yet this was still not a living wage. Rehearsals happened late at night after full days of work, as most company members labored as “masons, carpenters, shoemakers, stevedores, servants, actors, students, professionals, etc.,” according to informant and drummer Jesús Pérez.46 It is unclear when Fresneda stopped her day job. She described decades later that she was not the only planchadora to join the company, noting that the performers carried out manual labor “to make a living.”47 Unlike modern and ballet dancers of the period, folkloric dancers did not have the luxury of devoting themselves to their performance careers full-time.48 In fact, the future seemed bleak for the company in the first years of its existence. The original premiere month of October 1962 came and went. A misunderstanding with the Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba (UNEAC) propelled company members to create a union within the CFN, the Sección Sindical, an institutional manifestation of mounting tensions. Several informants, including Jesús Pérez and Lázaro Ros, held leadership positions. No-

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The Footsteps of Nieves Fresneda : 43 tably, Fresneda did not, likely as a result of traditional gender norms that informed Afro-Cuban religious authority structures.49 At the end of 1962 and beginning of 1963, rumors circulated about higher salaries, but pay increases never materialized. The impasse led to the conclusion that the CFN would dissolve after the premiere, now scheduled to coincide with July 26 celebrations in 1963. As the performance approached, Pérez recalled, “We were looking for solutions so that the Conjunto would continue.”50 Then, during rehearsal one day, commanders Raúl Castro and Juan Almeida appeared. Although available records do not clarify their motives, Castro and Almeida complimented the “power and vitality” of the CFN and deemed it “an authentic thing of the pueblo.” They concluded by telling the group not to worry: the Conjunto had a future.51 The company debuted in Havana’s Teatro Mella on July 25, 1963, to great acclaim, and the group extended its run until August 25, performing for an estimated seventeen thousand people.52 The program from the premiere lists Fresneda as an informant and a performer of several dances: Yemayá, pregones cubanos (the singing announcements of Cuban street vendors), rumba, and carnival.53 Fidel Castro attended on the last night, providing the imprimatur of the state.54 After the 1963 performance, Molinet and fellow designer Salvador Fernández recalled, “Salaries increased for the members and designers were contracted, making official their involvement in the group, which consolidated even more the organic artistic affinity that existed among the creators.”55 But even as certain things improved, the company suffered from internal turmoil caused by personality conflicts and power struggles, which magnified as the CFN prepared for its first international tour in 1964. Soon after the company began, Martínez Furé and Reyes butted heads over creative decisions. Hernández, Monal, and León intervened and hired the educator and cultural administrator Marta Blanco to adjudicate and serve as provisional director of the company. Still working two other jobs, Blanco reluctantly accepted her third position.56 However, Blanco often had commitments elsewhere and was conspicuously absent from daily operations of the CFN. Members took sides, supporting either Martínez Furé or Reyes, and the Sección Sindical seemed to govern informally.57 Perhaps partially because of the leadership chaos, Pérez claimed that the company was not “prepared politically or culturally to leave the country.”58 However, cultural bureaucrats brushed aside concerns, presumably because they did not want to turn down invitations from foreign impresarios. In a tense moment of uncertainty over tour details, Reyes publically denounced the directorship of the company, especially Blanco.59 This crisis culminated in a four-day assembly that convened all members of the company but dealt mostly with leadership drama. In fact, the transcript records moments of the bored “masses” of the company eating, conversing, and not paying attention to the passionate accusations, complaints, and tears. At one moment, Lázaro Ros implored his colleagues to listen for the sake of the “religion of

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44 : Elizabeth Schwall almost all who are [here] and for the Revolution, which allows you all to realize your folkloric and popular dances.” This dual religious and political plea worked.60 Although Fresneda’s voice is absent from the memos, reports, and minutes, she likely followed the action and discreetly facilitated the company’s survival. A photograph of a meeting between organic intellectuals Fresneda and Torregrosa and company leaders Martínez Furé, Reyes, and Molinet corroborates this presumption (fig. 2). Seated at the center, Fresneda listens quietly to Molinet as though carefully contemplating matters of the mind, body, and spirit inherent in the CFN’s work. Difficulties continued over the next several years. The 138-day tour to Europe earned the troupe praise as well as trouble after defections, a few incidents of robbery, and Blanco’s permanent separation from the group.61 Mexican modern dancer Elena Noriega served as interim director, and then León’s wife, musicologist María Teresa Linares, took the helm in April 1965.62 Linares advocated for higher pay and respect for CFN members, writing that they should be considered “equal to the artist of high cultures . . . and should be economically remunerated in accord with their quality and productivity.”63 However,

FIGURE 2. Left to right, Rogelio Martínez Furé (back of head), María Elena Molinet, Rodolfo Reyes (standing), Nieves Fresneda, and Trinidad Torregrosa, c. 1964. Photographed by “Studio Korda.” Courtesy of Biblioteca Juan Marinello, Archivo General del Ministerio de Cultura (BJ-AGMC, CNC, cajuela 302, folder Gira Internacional 1964).

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The Footsteps of Nieves Fresneda : 45 this statement also made an implicit value judgment by distinguishing folkloric performance from other, supposedly more sophisticated artistic forms. Additionally, Linares criticized company members as “poorly prepared politically,” urged the development of folklore outside of “dances of African origin, located in the vicinity of larger Havana,” and introduced three salary tiers that ultimately exacerbated tensions to the point of violent conflict.64 On February 13, 1966, after a heated discussion of salaries, company member Miguel Angel Valdés Bello pulled and fired a gun, injuring Reyes, Linares, and singer Silvina Fabars.65 In a 2016 interview, Reyes claimed that Valdés Bello had been a member of the much-mythologized, all-male Abakuá society and was upset over Reyes’s role in publicizing Abakuá rites in folkloric spectacles.66 Regardless of the catalyst, the tragic incident occurred after years of underpaying and prejudicially judging African-descended performers within the CFN. Although the incident led Reyes and Linares to permanently sever ties with the company, the CFN continued. Indeed, despite tensions over leadership and appropriation, members of the company remained committed to the project, performing throughout the country and working on productions that used folkloric performance to examine racial ideologies in Cuba. In 1967, the CFN performed widely with shows in Pinar del Rio, Matanzas, Oriente, Camagüey, Las Villas, Isla de Pinos, Varadero, Cienfuegos, and Havana. Company members also participated in the popular and controversial all-black theater production María Antonia.67 As articulated in the 1967 performance program, albeit with paternalistic overtones, the work explored the “world of misery” plagued with “violence, cruelty, [and] brutality” that Afro-Cubans inhabited in the Republican era. Yet the play also represented a frank, bold assertion of Afro-Cuban cultural consciousness in a way that was out of step with the norms of “racelessness” at the time. It depicted Santería religion not as a backward remnant waiting to be overcome, but as an important survival mechanism that imbued the most marginal members of society with dignity. Among the CFN members listed in the program, Martínez Furé contributed “ethnologic studies,” Molinet was listed under “costumes,” and performers from the CFN including Fresneda appeared in the chorus.68 Moreover, although the play purportedly depicted a bygone era, a program essay encouraged viewers to “reflect on . . . our problems in a profound way,” suggesting that its message was also meant to resonate in the present day.69 This evidently crossed a line. Despite high attendance numbers, the National Council of Culture suspended performances, a decision explained and defended in 1968.70 Nevertheless, CFN records note that María Antonia was revived for seventeen performances with the theatrical company Grupo Ocuje in late 1969.71 Negotiations over religious content within the CFN were often more internal and less dramatic than the shooting incident or the controversy about María Antonia. CFN drummer Carlos Aldama later claimed that he took elements

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46 : Elizabeth Schwall from worship (e.g., music, dance) to the stage but not his religion.72 Drummer Felipe García Villamil reflected on his role in not only sharing but also guarding secrets. He also noted matter-of-factly that his job at the CFN provided a salary and thus “a way to survive.”73 Drummer Alberto Villarreal described the leverage that religious adherents within the company exerted if a choreographer tried to alter timing in a way that would misrepresent practices. Musicians would unite and refuse to play: “When all is said and done, the choreographer, or whoever it might be, has to come to an agreement with the wishes of percussionists about religious issues.”74 Fresneda also mobilized her religious capital to shape theatrical content. One account describes her refusing to allow the company to stage a highly sacred Santería initiation ceremony. To stop the offending proposition, she threatened to leave the CFN and take her ahijados (godchildren of a Santería priest or priestess) in the company with her. Putting her foot down, she won the standoff.75 As these negotiations show, the first years of the CFN involved not just a struggle to survive, but also an effort to define an emerging performance genre. Fresneda and other organic intellectuals in the company shaped these developments in dialogue with a variety of administrators and bureaucrats. Fresneda, albeit absent from many written records about conflicts within the CFN, nevertheless exerted a powerful presence in meetings, rehearsals, and performances and helped to secure a place for black cultural and religious self-definition in the process. In so doing, Fresneda and her colleagues exerted agency over the secular displays inspired by sacred practices, taking ownership over their careers and a Revolution that hesitantly offered them a stage. Indisputable Talent, 1970–1979 In the 1970s, more official forms of acknowledgment eventually rewarded insistent efforts to establish folklore as revolutionary culture. Of course, structural impediments and vestiges of racism did not go away. The first half of the decade was a period of particularly intense cultural repression and state secularism.76 Moreover, although some Afro-Cuban religious ceremonies prohibited in the late 1960s were allowed again, the police still regulated faith practices and practitioners.77 Yet despite these tough realities, Fresneda and fellow folkloric performers became recognized as indisputable talents over the course of the decade.78 Salaries, for instance, increased. A 1970 budget revealed that Fresneda earned 207.05 pesos per month, the highest salary among informants and dancers, which ranged from 132.15 to 207.05 pesos.79 External factors likely contributed to the change. During the 1970s, Cuba became heavily involved in the Angolan struggle for independence, and the government and artists expanded the aficionados movement in which folkloric dance figured prominently. As US-born Cuban modern dancer Lorna Burdsall observed in

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The Footsteps of Nieves Fresneda : 47 1972, “Fidel is on a folklore kick these days.”80 However, Fresneda and her colleagues also played a crucial role in securing their elevated status through acclaimed performance and devoted teaching. As the CFN impressed audiences at home and abroad with their quality productions, company leaders began to see religious and revolutionary faith as not mutually exclusive, but able to coexist. In 1970, CFN director Gilberto González Castillo discussed this issue in a report. He marked eleven members, including Fresneda, with an asterisk and explained, “The colleagues signaled are those that we understand are believers of the different religious manifestations (Yoruba, Congo and Abakuá). Although it is good to clarify that these beliefs are not reflected in the work of the vast majority of them and do not clash with their attitude at work.” He continued: “The background of the group is mostly of humble origin and [includes] believers or practitioners of the diverse existing folkloric manifestations in the country; although already at the moment, many have managed to break from the environment in which they developed thanks to their work in the group and the political development that they have achieved.”81 This statement problematically characterized humble backgrounds and religion as obstacles to overcome. Revolutionary politics, the director’s memo suggests, had supposedly enlightened a few CFN members to dismantle past mentalities. Also striking, the director expected “informants,” who provided the CFN with cultural authenticity, to leave the religious meanings of dances behind and consider performances as purely revolutionary “work.” Still, the memo also signaled that company leaders recognized religious performers as diligent cultural producers who held “revolutionary ideas” without abandoning their faith.82 Given the broader climate of cultural and ideological orthodoxy of the early 1970s, particularly in other realms of the arts like literature, this rhetorical and political balancing act is all the more noteworthy. Also in 1970, the company went on its second international tour, which foreshadowed an active performance schedule for the decade. The 1970 tour consisted of forty-eight performances in East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Poland, and the Soviet Union for an estimated forty-seven thousand people.83 Subsequently, the CFN went abroad every year from 1972 to 1979.84 Notable performances were also staged domestically for diverse audiences. For instance, the CFN performed for Consuelo González de Velasco Alvarado, wife of Peru’s president, on February 21, 1973, and then for two hundred Cuban factory workers on March 7, 1973.85 While regular opportunities to perform at home and abroad indicated improvements in the CFN’s stature, the company still had to deal with bureaucratic mistreatment. As the company prepared for a tour in 1976, for example, the general director begged for more information on dates and the number of dancers allowed to travel.86 The company received those details only at 10:30 p.m., just hours before their

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48 : Elizabeth Schwall departure early the next morning. A representative from the Sección Sindical sent a letter complaining about the impossible sequence of events, saying that it demonstrated “a lack of respect for our collective.”87 Although still dealing with bureaucratic disorganization, neglect, or disrespect, the CFN enjoyed greatly increased performance opportunities in the 1970s. Along with performing, company members, Fresneda in particular, touched many lives through teaching. Fresneda worked not only with CFN professionals but also with modern dance and ballet company members, as well as students at the main national art school, the Escuela Nacional de Arte (ENA).88 In 1970, Mexican-born US dancer Alma Guillermoprieto observed Fresneda demonstrating Yemayá in a folkloric dance class at the ENA, and later described the unforgettable performance: Nieves Fresneda, a tall, angular old woman, also an informant, would show us the siren goddess’s steps. Nieves wore a circular skirt made of blue cotton that rippled out through the air around her, its four or five ruffles edged in white embroidery. She still had her blue jeans underneath, and she wore a bandana tied around her head and a shirt with the sleeves rolled up. . . . Dragging her rubber flip-flops in time to the beat, she moved forward until she was facing the drums. . . . At first her movements were regular and precise: her bony arms sliced through the air like scissors . . . with her feet, swaying softly, her face severe. But just as the tocadores began to mingle their voices . . . a gigantic wave seemed to swell through her solar plexus: crouching toward the floor as if a subterranean force had gripped her by the ankles, she began undulating her torso, moving her arms as if they were made of water, shaking the blue skirt in ever broader waves until she herself had become a sea.89

In casual wear and her seventh decade of life, Fresneda managed to become a siren of the sea. As such, she had a wide influence, or in her words, “There were so many that learned from me.” She continued, “Sometimes I feel bad because they greet me on the street, ‘Adios, Nievecita!’ and I do not remember them well.”90 Fresneda helped to secure the future of folkloric performance in Cuba by inspiring the countless students who saluted her while she walked. On May 21, 1979, the CFN presented a special program to honor Fresneda’s retirement from the stage and the seventeenth anniversary of the company. The results demonstrated the combination of official praise and patronizing treatment that folkloric dance professionals continued to receive. Minister of Culture Armando Hart presided over the evening, and the audience included León and members of the Communist Party central committee. Fresneda performed Yemayá.91 Writer and anthropologist Miguel Barnet took the opportunity to write an homage to Fresneda. He rhapsodized, “By way of her small body this septuagenarian woman, an anthropological symbol [signo antropológico] of our culture, is the owner of its uniqueness, its synthesis.”

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The Footsteps of Nieves Fresneda : 49 Fresneda, he concluded, could most rightfully proclaim, “I am folklore.”92 His essay has problematic valences. A white male, Barnet uses Fresneda’s dancing body as a receptacle for an essentialized notion of Cuban culture and nationhood. Folklore becomes feminized, and she stands in as its embodiment. Such discursive representations dated back to the company’s earliest years, as evidenced in a poster featuring the image of a woman, possibly inspired by Fresneda, to advertise the CFN in Madrid (fig. 3). But while suggestive of Fresneda’s significance to the CFN, Barnet’s move undermines her personhood and occupation, reconfiguring artist and art (as well as Afro-Cuban religious practice) into a collapsible nationalist sign. And yet Fresneda refused to let tropes define her. Reflecting on her life, she said, “I feel what I do, what I have lived, [and] I need to continue. I feel art because you have to feel it.”93 With passion and thought, she developed folkloric performance into a professional pursuit. In 1979, she pondered how she and her colleagues had gone from menial laborers to internationally recognized performers in the past twenty years. She said, “We learned to dance in parties in the slums or through familial tradition. . . . And now look at what el Folclórico [the CFN, or folkloric performance in general] has become!”94 Admittedly, the

FIGURE 3. CFN advertisement on the Teatro Calderón in Madrid, 1964. Photographer unknown. Photograph in BJ-AGMC, CNC, cajuela 302, folder Gira Internacional 1964. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Juan Marinello, Archivo General del Ministerio de Cultura.

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50 : Elizabeth Schwall statement appeared in the state-controlled press. However, it also accurately reflects what Fresneda and her colleagues claimed to have achieved. Their labors helped professionalize folkloric performance and assert its value, despite harsh prejudices. Furthermore, as a result of her persistence, Fresneda has provoked many (including myself) to think through folkloric dance history, the contradictions of revolutionary cultural policy, and how artists lived and worked with paradoxical realities. Aware of her present and future significance, she mused, “At least I know . . . that I have not lived in vain. That something of me remains in dance and in books.”95 Indeed, colleagues and students have often cited Fresneda’s profound influence. Dance scholar Yvonne Daniel, who worked with the CFN in the 1980s, recalls people invoking Fresneda and her performances of Yemayá. The sentiment was that while physically gone from this world, Fresneda continued to animate the steps and styles of her successors like Margarita Ugarte.96 What made Fresneda’s footsteps so compelling to follow? Though impossible to say absolutely, returning to her short sequence from Historia de un ballet provides some indication. As Fresneda takes hold of her skirt, bends at the waist, and traces the perimeter of her dance space, she does not exuberantly perform, but rather invites internal reflection on the divine. Seamlessly, she segues into sways, waving her skirt slightly up and down, generating a gentle, captivating tide. The camera often cuts away from her body or captures just her arm, torso, or head, distorting the true arc of her performance. Yet close-ups also offer an opportunity when the camera zooms in on her feet as she takes two steps to the left, swings her right foot back slightly and then scuffs her heel before repeating on the other side. As quickly as her feet filled the screen, they are gone. Though out of sight, however, they softly carry her through the rest of the dance.97 In kind, her steps were no doubt an absent presence—inspiring colleagues, students, and audiences long after they actually witnessed them in action. Fresneda and her feet became recognized as agents of change. The afrocubana poetess Nancy Morejón wrote a eulogy to Fresneda and her powerful footsteps: Like a flying fish: Nieves Fresneda. Ocean waves, galley slaves, blue petals of seaweed cover her days and hours, are reborn at her feet. .... Her maritime feet, after all,

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The Footsteps of Nieves Fresneda : 51 trunks of salt, everlasting feet of Nieves, uplifted like moons for Yemayá.98

Morejón posits the transformative power of Fresneda’s feet. The dancing organic intellectual used her body to theorize a new performance genre into existence—one that exceeded a politics of nationalist revolution in its diasporic valences. Fresneda’s steps through the first decades of professional folkloric performance echoed with exertion, hope, and frustration. Rather than ascertaining the success or failure of these enterprises, I conclude by taking my cue from Morejón and recognizing that Fresneda’s footsteps had enduring repercussions. Whatever the strictures of the cultural policies or political cultures in which she operated, her “everlasting feet” resound in the performances and cultural institutions that she helped to shape. NOTES 1. Santería is an Afro-Cuban religion derived from mostly West African, but also Spanish Catholic traditions. For more on the history of African diasporic religions in Cuba, see Christine Ayorinde, Afro-Cuban Religiosity, Revolution, and National Identity (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004), 7–24. For details about drummers, see Umi Vaughan and Carlos Aldama, Carlos Aldama’s Life in Batá: Cuba, Diaspora, and the Drum (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 76. 2. José Salvador Massip, dir., Historia de un ballet (Havana: ICAIC, 1962). 3. “Repertorio general ilustrado,” in DCCuba Histórico, Teatro Nacional de Cuba, Archivo de Danza Contemporánea de Cuba, Havana, Cuba (TNC-DCC). 4. Massip, Historia de un ballet. 5. For more on the problematic connotations of folk, see Anthea Kraut, Choreographing the Folk: The Dance Stagings of Zora Neale Hurston (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2008), 17–24. Despite its problems, I use folkloric throughout because historical protagonists, including Fresneda, employed the word to describe a theatrical version of vernacular cultural practices. 6. See Alejandro de la Fuente, A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in TwentiethCentury Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2001), 259–296; Lillian Guerra, “‘To Condemn the Revolution Is to Condemn Christ’: Radicalization, Moral Redemption, and the Sacrifice of Civil Society in Cuba, 1960,” Hispanic American Historical Review 89, no. 1 (2009): 94–101; Lillian Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption, and Resistance, 1959– 1971 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 256–264; Ayorinde, Afro-Cuban Religiosity, 90–107; Devyn Spence Benson, Antiracism in Cuba: The Unfinished Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). 7. Scholarship on the company includes Katherine Hagedorn, Divine Utterances: The Performance of Afro-Cuban Santería (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001); Robin Moore, “Black Music in a Raceless Society: Afrocuban Folklore and Socialism,” Cuban Studies 37 (2006): 1–32; Maya Berry, “From ‘Ritual’ to ‘Repertory’: Dancing to the Time of the Nation,” Afro-Hispanic Review 29, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 55–76; Yvonne Daniel, Rumba: Dance and Social Change in Contemporary Cuba (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). The abbreviation for the company name, Conjunto Folklórico Nacional de Cuba, is CFNC in some publications.

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52 : Elizabeth Schwall I use the abbreviation CFN because it appears in archival documents and writings by founding members. See Rogelio Martínez Furé, Diálogos imaginarios (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1997), 248. 8. De la Fuente, A Nation for All, 288–291; Hagedorn, Divine Utterances, 65–69, 85–89; Berry, “From ‘Ritual’”; Moore, “Black Music.” 9. Berry, “From ‘Ritual’”; Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba, 265–278. 10. Kate Ramsey, “Without One Ritual Note: Folklore Performance and the Haitian State, 1935–1946,” Radical History Review 84 (Fall 2002): 7–42; Jens Richard Giersdorf, The Body of the People: East German Dance since 1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), 26–48; Katherine Borland, “Marimba: Dance of the Revolutionaries, Dance of the Folk,” Radical History Review 84 (Fall 2002): 77–107. 11. Examining how individuals “lived” with “governance” draws inspiration from Sherwin Bryant, Rivers of Gold, Lives of Bondage: Governing through Slavery in Colonial Quito (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). 12. Hagedorn, Divine Utterances. 13. Michael Bustamante, “Cultural Politics/Political Cultures of the Cuban Revolution: New Directions in Scholarship,” in this issue of Cuban Studies. 14. Again, my approach echoes that of Katherine Hagedorn in her book Divine Utterances. However, whereas Hagedorn uses the early years of the CFN’s history to contextualize her analysis of folkloric performance, race, and religion in the 1990s (when the acceleration of international tourism and the lifting of religious taboos made Santería a marketable commodity to visitors), here I focus on the 1960s and 1970s exclusively. Moreover, whereas Hagedorn based her discussion of the CFN’s history on interviews conducted in the 1990s, here I use archival sources to flesh out the day-to-day of the company’s existence, which involved not only the begrudging convergence of the secular and the religious but also the forging of professional artistic careers. 15. The seven informants at the company premiere were Nieves Fresneda, Trinidad Torregrosa, Jesús Pérez, José Oriol Bustamante, Manuela Alonso Valdés, Emilio O’Farril y Escoto, and Lázaro Ros. Martínez Furé, Diálogos imaginarios, 252. 16. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 110. 17. This resonates with recent efforts to reevaluate art and its role in activism, especially around issues of race and racism in the 1960s and 1970s. See Devyn Spence Benson, “Sara Gómez: Afrocubana (Afro-Cuban Women’s) Activism after 1961,” Cuban Studies 46 (2018): 134–158. 18. Daisy Rubiera Castillo and Inés María Martiatu Terry, ed., Afrocubanas: Historia, pensamiento y prácticas culturales (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 2011); Aisha K. Finch, “Scandalous Scarcities: Black Slave Women, Plantation Domesticity, and Travel Writing in Nineteenth Century Cuba,” Journal of Historical Sociology 23, no. 1 (March 2010): 101–143; Takkara Brunson, “‘Writing’ Black Womanhood in the Early Cuban Republic, 1904–16,” Gender & History 28, no. 2 (August 2016): 480–500; Melissa Blanco Borelli, She Is Cuba: A Genealogy of the Mulata Body (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Yesenia Fernandez Selier, “Ayabbas: Memory, Sacred Performance and the Restoration of Afro Cuban Women’s Subjectivity to the Cuban Trans/nation,” Black Diaspora Review 5, no. 2 (Spring 2016): 55–80; Gloria Rolando, dir., Diálogo con mi abuela (Havana: ICAIC, 2015); Devyn Spence Benson, “Representations of Black Women in Cuba,” Black Perspectives (blog), African American Intellectual History Society, May 4, 2017, http://www.aaihs.org/representations-of-black-women-in-cuba/; Benson, “Sara Gómez.” 19. Gloria Rolando, dir., Forever Present Oggún (Havana: Videoamérica, 1991); María Teresa Vélez, Drumming for the Gods: The Life and Times of Felipe García Villamil, Santero, Palero, and Abakuá (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000); Vaughan and Aldama, Carlos Aldama’s Life; Ivor Miller, “Jesús Pérez and the Transculturation of the Cuban Batá Drum,” Diálogo 7, no. 1

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The Footsteps of Nieves Fresneda : 53 (2003): 70–74, http://via.library.depaul.edu/dialogo/vol7/iss1/14; Hagedorn discusses the scarcity of female drummers in Cuban music in Divine Utterances, 20–21, 90–97. 20. Image from Teatro Nacional de Cuba, Archivo de Danza Contemporánea de Cuba (TNCDCC), fondo Fotográfica. 21. Nieves Fresneda, “Autobiografía,” Havana, May 19, 1975, Biblioteca Juan Marinello, Archivo General del Ministerio de Cultura, Havana, Cuba (BJ-AGMC), fondo Consejo Nacional de Cultura (CNC), cajuela 302, folder CFN Personal; parents mentioned in Evangelina Chió, “Nieves o el mito de la danza,” Revolución y cultura, no. 85 (September 1979): 47. 22. Chió, “Nieves,” 48. 23. Her faith became part of her public identity as indicated by archival documents, cultural producers, and records like Historia de un ballet labeling her a santera. 24. Chió, “Nieves,” 47. 25. Angel Rivero, “Conjunto Folclórico Nacional,” Revolución y cultura, no. 44 (April 1976): 49. 26. Argeliers León, “La danza folklórica cubana dentro de un proceso de estudio de la misma, informe presentado a Isabel Monal y a Mirta Aguirre,” Havana, BJ-AGMC, CNC, cajuela 300, folder CFN Informes 1961. 27. Olga Fernández, “Cara a cara con Nieves Fresneda,” Cuba internacional 13, no. 139 (June 1981): 52. The full performance title was Cantos, bailes y leyendas cubanas. Performance Program, Cantos, bailes y leyendas cubanas, October 1960, Archivo de Conjunto Folklórico Nacional, Havana, Cuba (ACFN). 28. Miguel Sánchez León, Esa huella olvidada: El Teatro Nacional de Cuba (1959–1961) (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 2001), 132, 135. 29. Sánchez León, Esa huella, 132. 30. Performance Program, Danza Nacional de Teatro Nacional, Sept. 1960, TNC-DCC, fondo Programas, folder 1959–1961; Performance Program, Danza Moderna en el natalicio de José Martí, Jan. 28 and 29, 1961, Teatro Nacional de Cuba, Centro de Documentación y Archivo Teatral (TNC-CDAT), folder Ballet-Danza 1961; Performance Program, Danza Moderna, Feb. 17, 1961, TNC-CDAT, folder Ballet-Danza 1961. Two other musicians, drummers Jesús Pérez and Trinidad Torregrosa, were part of modern dance productions (Pérez and Torregrosa in Suite Yoruba and Pérez in La rebambaramba), and later served as informants for the CFN. 31. Argeliers León, “Certifico,” Havana, BJ-AGMC, CNC, cajuela 306, folder Cantos, Bailes y Leyendas Cubanas. 32. Sánchez León, Esa huella, 366, 369. 33. Argeliers León to Dirección, Havana, December 21, 1960, BJ-AGMC, CNC, cajuela 303, folder CFN Personal 1964. 34. Nieves Fresneda, “Autobiografía,” Havana, May 19, 1975, BJ-AGMC, CNC, cajuela 302, folder CFN Personal. 35. Rogelio Martínez Furé recounted this version of the company’s origins in Untitled meeting transcript, March 6, 10, 11, 19, 1964, p. 8, BJ-AGMC, CNC, cajuela 300, folder CFN Informes 1964; also see Sánchez León, Esa huella, 100. 36. Marta Blanco, Rogelio Martínez Furé, and Rodolfo Reyes, “Informe del Conjunto Folklórico Nacional a la Comisión Nacional de Teatro,” Havana, September 28, 1962, BJ-AGMC, CNC, cajuela 300, folder CFN Informes 1962. 37. Benson, Antiracism in Cuba. 38. The document with this quote is unsigned but based on claims in the text the author was María Elena Molinet, the founding costume designer. It also has no date, but details events from the CFN’s 1964 international tour, so probably was written soon after. [María Elena Molinet], “Antecedentes,” BJ-AGMC, CNC, cajuela 300, folder CFN Informes 1961. 39. Martínez Furé, Diálogos imaginarios, 250–254.

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54 : Elizabeth Schwall 40. Tamara Satanowsky to Dirección del Teatro Nacional de Cuba, Havana, August 1, 1962, BJ-AGMC, CNC, cajuela 300, folder CFN Informes 1962. 41. See images of María Elena Molinet’s costume designs on the Cuban Theatre Digital Archive. See, for instance, the costume sketches for Ciclo de música popular at Cuban Theater Digital Archive, University of Miami, http://cubantheater.org/digitalobject/16847 and http:// cubantheater.org/digitalobject/16850. 42. [Molinet], “Antecedentes.” 43. [Molinet], “Antecedentes.” 44. Rodolfo Reyes to José Llanusa Gobel, Havana, February 1967, BJ-AGMC, CNC, cajuela 300, folder Presidencia Conjunto Folklórico Nacional, 1960/76. 45. Tamara Satanowsky to Dirección del Teatro Nacional de Cuba, Havana, August 1, 1962, BJ-AGMC, CNC, cajuela 300, folder CFN Informes 1962. 46. Jesús Pérez to Dirección de Teatro y Danza, Havana, December 14, 1965, BJ-AGMC, CNC, cajuela 300, folder CFN Informes 1965. 47. Chió, “Nieves,” 47. 48. Salary differentials discussed further in Elizabeth Schwall, “Dancing with the Revolution: Cuban Dance, State, and Nation, 1930–1990” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2016), 144–145. 49. This is a complex and debated issue through the present. For more see Aisha M. BelisoDe Jesús, “Contentious Diasporas: Gender, Sexuality, and Heteronationalisms in the Cuban Iyanifa Debate,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 40, no. 4 (2015): 817–840. 50. Pérez to Dirección de Teatro y Danza, Havana, December 14, 1965. 51. Pérez to Dirección de Teatro y Danza, Havana, December 14, 1965. 52. “Primer Semestre,” BJ-AGMC, CNC, cajuela 300, folder CFN Informes 1963. 53. Rogelio Martínez Furé, Conjunto Folklórico Nacional (Havana: Consejo Nacional de Cultura, 1963). 54. [Molinet], “Antecedentes.” 55. María E. Molinet and Salvador Fernández to Joaquin Torres, Havana, April 16, 1964, BJAGMC, CNC, cajuela 300, folder Presidencia Conjunto Folklorico Nacional, 1960/76. 56. [Molinet], “Antecedentes.” 57. Untitled meeting transcript from March 6, 10, 11, 19, 1964, pp. 1, 3, 30, BJ-AGMC, CNC, cajuela 300, folder CFN Informes 1964. 58. Pérez to Dirección de Teatro y Danza, Havana, December 14, 1965. 59. Marta Blanco, “Informe a la Secretaria de Actividades sobre la situación actual del Conjunto Folklórico Nacional,” Havana, Mar. 23, 1964, BJ-AGMC, CNC, cajuela 300, folder CFN Informes 1964. 60. Untitled meeting transcript from March 6, 10, 11, 19, 1964, p. 21, BJ-AGMC, CNC, cajuela 300, folder CFN Informes 1964. 61. Pérez to Dirección General de Teatro y Danza, Havana, December 14, 1965; Marta Blanco to Marina Eneriz, Madrid, June 26, 1964, BJ-AGMC, CNC, cajuela 302, folder CFN Relaciones Internacionales Giras 1964; Marta Blanco to Secretaria de Actividades Culturales, July 22, 1964, BJ-AGMC, CNC, cajuela 302, folder CFN Relaciones Internacionales Giras 1964. 62. “Relación de directores que ha tenido el Conjunto Folklórico Nacional desde su fundación,” BJ-AGMC, CNC, cajuela 303, folder CFN Historiografía. 63. María Teresa Linares, “Informe a la Dirección de Teatro y Danza,” Havana, October 13, 1965, BJ-AGMC, CNC, cajuela 300, folder CFN Informes 1965. 64. Linares, “Informe.” 65. Rodolfo Reyes to José Llanusa Gobel, Havana, February 1967, BJ-AGMC, CNC, cajuela 300, folder Presidencia Conjunto Folklórico Nacional, 1960/76; Fabars discusses how the incident ended her vocal career; however, she then worked to become a soloist dancer with the company.

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The Footsteps of Nieves Fresneda : 55 See Marilyn Bobes, “Silvina en la danza,” Revolución y cultura, no. 3 (March 1986): 2–10; incident also discussed in Hagedorn, Divine Utterances, 159–165. 66. Rodolfo Reyes interviewed by Elizabeth Schwall, Mexico City, Mexico, July 12, 2016. 67. “Actividades realizadas por el Conjunto Folklórico Nacional desde enero al 12 de diciembre de 1967,” BJ-AGMC, CNC, cajuela 300, folder CFN Informes 1967; Conjunto Folklórico Nacional to Departamento de Estadística, “Actividades realizadas por el Conjunto Folklórico Nacional desde Noviembre de 1967 a 9 de enero de 1968,” Havana, February 6, 1968, BJ-AGMC, CNC, cajuela 300, folder CFN Informes 1968. 68. Performance Program, María Antonia, TNC-CDAT, folder 1967A. 69. Performance Program, María Antonia, TNC-CDAT, folder 1967A. 70. Lisandro Otero, “Del otro lado del Atlántico: Una actitud,” El caimán barbudo 21 (June 1968): 7; Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba, 273. 71. Georgina Hung Vargas, “De administrador del Conjunto Folklórico Nacional a Departamento de Estadística: Relación de funciones que ha tenido el Conjunto Folklórico Nacional en el trimestre de julio a septiembre 69,” November 11, 1969, BJ-AGMC, CNC, cajuela 300, folder Conjunto Folklórico Nacional Mensuales de Actividades 1969; “Grupo ‘Conjunto Folklórico Nacional’ resumen actividades 1969,” March 11, 1970, BJ-AGMC, CNC, cajuela 303, folder CFN Informes 1969. For more on CFN participation in María Antonia, see Schwall, “Dancing with the Revolution,” 169–171. 72. Vaughan and Aldama, Carlos Aldama’s Life, 78. 73. Vélez, Drumming for the Gods, 81. 74. Villarreal qtd. in Hagedorn, Divine Utterances, 98. 75. Hagedorn, Divine Utterances, 160. 76. Scholars have called the early 1970s a “gray period.” See, for instance, Georgina Dopico Black, “The Limits of Expression: Intellectual Freedom in Postrevolutionary Cuba,” Cuban Studies 19 (1989): 107–142; for more on religion and official Marxism, see Margaret E. Crahan, “Catholicism in Cuba,” Cuban Studies 19 (1989): 15–19. 77. De la Fuente, A Nation for All, 294–296. 78. Chió, “Nieves,” 49. 79. “Resumen Grupo de Danza Folklórica,” Havana, BJ-AGMC, CNC, cajuela 303, folder CFN Personal 1970. 80. Lorna Burdsall to E. S. Burdsall, June 10, 1972, Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries, Miami, Burdsall Family Papers, box 1, folder 3. 81. Gilberto González Castillo to Comp. Emilio, Havana, August 6, 1970, BJ-AGMC, CNC, cajuela 305, folder CFN Relaciones Internacionales Jiras [sic] 1970. 82. González Castillo to Comp. Emilio, Havana, August 6, 1970. 83. “Una criatura de solo doce años de edad, ‘Conjunto Folklórico Nacional de Cuba,’” BJAGMC, CNC, cajuela 303, folder CFN Historiografía. 84. Performance Program, Conjunto Folklórico Nacional, 1990, ACFN. 85. Georgina Hung to Manolo Fernández, Havana, March 29, 1973, BJ-AGMC, CNC, cajuela 303, folder CFN Informes 1973. 86. Marcos Portal to Armando Aguiar, Havana, July 1, 1976, BJ-AGMC, CNC, cajuela 302, folder CFN Relaciones Internacionales Giras 1976. 87. Humberto Vazquez Moreno to Miranda, Havana, September 17, 1976, BJ-AGMC, CNC, cajuela 300, folder CFN Informes 1976. 88. Fernández, “Cara a cara,” 53. 89. Alma Guillermoprieto, Dancing with Cuba: A Memoir of the Revolution, trans. Esther Allen (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004), 57. 90. Chió, “Nieves,” 49. 91. “Nieves Fresneda,” Cuba en el ballet 10, no. 3 (September–December 1979): 33.

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56 : Elizabeth Schwall 92. Miguel Barnet, “Nieves Fresneda: Los pies en la tierra,” Cuba en el Ballet 10, no. 3 (September–December 1979): 34–35. 93. Fresneda in Rivero, “Conjunto,” 49. 94. Chió, “Nieves,” 47. 95. Fernández, “Cara a cara,” 53. 96. Yvonne Daniel interviewed by Elizabeth Schwall, Castro Valley, California, November 13, 2017. 97. Massip, Historia de un ballet. 98. Nancy Morejón, “In Praise of Nieves Fresneda,” trans. David Frye, in Looking Within: Selected Poems/Mirar adentro: Poemas escogidos, 1954–2000, ed. Juanamaría Cordones-Cook (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003), 170–171.

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ELIZABETH MIRABAL

El simbólico siglo XIX en la literatura cubana posterior a 1959 RESUMEN Desde los inicios de la Revolución cubana, la revisión del siglo XIX ha sido para muchos artistas cubanos el modo de abordar y enjuiciar su presente. La mirada sobre ese período dotaba a los escritores de una libertad de maniobra, tanto en el campo de las ideas como en el estético, del que no hubiesen gozado de internarse en la etapa revolucionaria. De ello son muestra “Diálogos de vida y muerte” (1961), ensayo de Calvert Casey; La dolorosa historia del amor secreto de don José Jacinto Milanés (1973), pieza teatral de Abelardo Estorino; y las novelas La Loma del Ángel (1987) de Reinaldo Arenas y La novela de mi vida (2002) de Leonardo Padura. A través de estas obras, este ensayo examina cómo los autores referidos no renunciaban a la voluntad de enjuiciamiento, pero dejaban abierta una puerta de escape para protegerse de las lecturas demasiado directas y literales.

A B S T R AC T From the beginning of the Cuban Revolution, revisiting the nineteenth century provided many Cuban artists with a way to address and judge their present. Focusing on this period gave writers the freedom to maneuver—as much on the battlefield of ideas as that of aesthetics—which they would not have enjoyed had they set their works in the revolutionary era itself. Examples of this trend include “Dialogues of Life and Death” (1961), an essay by Calvert Casey; The Painful History of the Secret Love of Don José Jacinto Milanés (1973), a play by Abelardo Estorino; and the novels Graveyard of the Angels (1987), by Reinaldo Arenas, and The Novel of My Life (2002), by Leonardo Padura. Through an analysis of these works, this essay examines how the referenced authors did not renounce their willingness to judge their present but left open an escape hatch to protect themselves from too literal or direct readings of their work.

La Revolución cubana supuso desde su génesis una revisión del entramado de tradiciones, procesos, hechos y figuras anteriores a ese 1959 establecido como parteaguas. La dicotomía entre un nuevo tipo de identidad y su opuesto —los incompatibles con el diseño social en configuración y los que debían cumplir ciertas exigencias para integrarse— no sólo se aplicó al presente. Esa batalla simbólica se desplazaría a otras áreas y períodos históricos, siendo el siglo XIX uno de ellos. La reinterpretación también se extendería a casi cualquier tópico

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58 : Elizabeth Mirabal concerniente a los campos culturales. La Revolución cubana, a pesar de su propia indefinición y tanteos iniciales, se prefiguraba como un prisma particular con el que mirar hacia la danza, la música, el cine, el teatro y la literatura. Ya se aspiraba a las nuevas generaciones, a los hijos de la revolución, que marcarían distancia de sus predecesores. Pocas herencias merecían ser salvaguardadas. A partir de cuatro obras —el ensayo “Diálogos de vida y muerte” (1961) de Calvert Casey, la pieza La dolorosa historia del amor secreto de don José Jacinto Milanés (1973) de Abelardo Estorino y las novelas La Loma del Ángel (1987) de Reinaldo Arenas y La novela de mi vida (2002) de Leonardo Padura—, me propongo analizar cómo la etapa decimonónica fue convirtiéndose en cronotopo desde el cual podrían parapetarse los escritores para analizar y cuestionar conflictos del ahora con una autonomía cuasi imposible de estar situados en el escenario de la revolución. La revisión del siglo XIX se convirtió para muchos artistas cubanos en una estrategia para abordar y enjuiciar su presente. La mirada sobre ese período dotaba a los escritores de una libertad de maniobra tanto en el campo de las ideas como en el estético, de una posibilidad de juego y riesgo, incluso cuando la libertad del destierro habría eliminado la necesidad de cualquier evasiva. Tales elaboraciones partían además desde la confianza en la colaboración activa y la complicidad de los lectores, que sabrían reconocer los mensajes velados por el aparente sudario del XIX. El entierro de lo cuestionador y el descenso en la cronología, dejaba impresas en el cuerpo de las obras, marcas reconocibles que aseguraban su desciframiento. Los escritores cubanos habían aprendido, tras las consecuencias demoledoras de los más sonados conflictos con representantes del poder político y cultural, a manejar y cargar de sentido simbólico sus propuestas creativas. No renunciaban a la voluntad de enjuiciamiento pero, al mismo tiempo, dejaban abierta —desde la isla y, a veces, también desde el exilio— una puerta de escape para protegerse de las lecturas demasiado directas y literales. Siempre quedaría una opción de refugio en el siglo XIX. Partían de sus agendas y dinámicas empleando caminos más sinuosos y, por tanto, más difíciles de intervenir, atacar, tronchar y castigar.1 Resulta imprescindible enunciar algunas razones de la importancia del siglo XIX en la historia, la cultura, la ciencia y la política en Cuba. Es en esta centuria cuando se inicia una preocupación en torno al espacio que representa la isla; surgen las primeras corrientes de pensamiento y las diferentes posturas en un intento por buscar una solución a las contradicciones con la metrópoli española; en el arte se intensifica el vínculo con una naturaleza distinta que debe ser nombrada; emergen los estereotipos de la cubanidad, ya sea en las polémicas visiones del pintor y dibujante costumbrista español Landaluze o en la esencial Cecilia Valdés de Cirilo Villaverde; se afianza el llamado miedo al negro y su potencial rebelión, así como su carácter de fuente de riqueza frenta los movimientos separatistas; se valora la unión a Estados Unidos como alter-

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nativa en tanto los estados sureños garantizarían la continuidad de la esclavitud en Cuba; las guerras de independencia dan paso al llamado “crisol de una nacionalidad” gracias a los complejas dinámicas de la vida compartida en la manigua entre negros y blancos; se manifiesta la disyuntiva entre el poder militar y el civil; José Martí se convierte en nazareno cubano, pensador y precursor del modernismo. Es casi imposible adentrarse en el estudio de una circunstancia cubana sin volver a este siglo fundamental. Así fue tras la llegada de la revolución al poder, dentro y fuera del mundo de las letras. Al evocar la pugna en los inicios de la época revolucionaria entre el comunista Partido Socialista Popular (PSP) y el grupo nucleado alrededor del diario Revolución y su magazine Lunes, Edith García Buchaca, dirigente del PSP y hasta 1964 secretaria del Consejo Nacional de Cultura, recordaba como uno de los focos de enfrentamiento la subvaloración del siglo XIX por parte del suplemento.2 No obstante, en la colección de Lunes hallamos el número titulado “Los estudiantes del 71 y su época,” a cargo de Lisandro Otero. Un rápido repaso de esta edición revela la pluralidad de miradas en los acercamientos generales como “Hacia una comprensión total del siglo XIX,” de Calvert Casey, hasta los escrutinios sobre “La poesía” de Virgilio Piñera; el teatro en “Nueva mirada hacia el pasado” de Matías Montes Huidobro y la música en “La contradanza” de Natalio Galán. Se incluía también un texto en el cual Ambrosio Fornet planteaba que la llegada de Martí había sorprendido a los pensadores del siglo XIX cubano en un “rincón de la historia.”3 Otras expresiones como “hombres de su tiempo” o actitud “comprometida,” tan en boga tras la influencia sartreana, remarcaban que se buscaba un paralelo justificativo a esa presunta culpa de los intelectuales por haber permanecido al margen de la lucha antibatistiana, confesada por tantos artistas, entre ellos Virgilio Piñera: “Si a alguien la Revolución encontró ‘fuera de base’ ha sido al escritor. Por esto entiendo un desconocimiento profundo de los problemas sociales tanto en el plano nacional como en el internacional. Y más que eso, la actitud evasiva, es decir, no mezclarse para nada en la ‘res pública.’”4 Sin embargo, la presunta actitud evasiva no fue privativa de los escritores o artistas. Reconocidos intelectuales de militancia más comprometida y con planes de afiliación al nuevo statu quo, recurrían y de cierto modo se amparaban en el siglo XIX para justificar posiciones y actitudes del pasado reciente por las cuales podrían ser colocados en tela de juicio. Dos miembros del PSP fueron invitados a colaborar en este número: Carlos Rafael Rodríguez y Sergio Aguirre. Al final de su texto, Carlos Rafael afirmaba: “El movimiento reformista fue, pues–es válido decirlo–un fermento revolucionario, y sus hombres nos dieron una enseñanza política muy aprovechable, de cómo sirve la legalidad para convencer a los pueblos de la idea revolucionaria, cuando la paz se hace imposible.”5

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60 : Elizabeth Mirabal El significado de esta aseveración rápidamente se deduce del contexto político de la época. A inicios de septiembre de 1959, se había suscitado una polémica entre el subdirector Revolución, Euclides Vázquez Candela, y Carlos Rafael Rodríguez desde el periódico Hoy. Vázquez Candela hacía evidentes las diferencias entre el Movimiento 26 de Julio y el PSP, entre ellas no sólo la alianza del segundo con Fulgencio Batista a finales de los años treinta, en el auge de los frentes populares en la lucha contra el fascismo, sino el que desde el golpe de estado del 10 de marzo de 1952, los dirigentes del PSP habían adoptado como línea fundamental la unidad y la lucha de masas, considerando que debía acudirse a todas las variantes de la vía parlamentaria antes de apelar a la armada. De modo que, al Carlos Rafael Rodríguez ponderar la lección del reformismo del XIX en cuanto al uso de los canales legales, en realidad defendía esa conducta de su partido que había sido tan atacada. El siglo XIX se perfilaba como un pretexto para continuar las contiendas del aquí y ahora que enfrentaban las diferentes fuerzas en pugna por el poder.6 Para Calvert Casey, Abelardo Estorino, Reinaldo Arenas y Leonardo Padura, el dotar a sus textos con el envés del XIX, les permitía manejarlo y voltearlo a voluntad en caso de encontrarse con un interlocutor más o menos peligroso, más o menos confiable —en casos como el de Casey, en el trasiego con una materia heroica altamente sensible en el corpus cubano como Martí, aún sin una conciencia absoluta del peso de una intervención institucional en génesis; y en el caso de Estorino, Arenas o Padura, tras atravesar el limbo de márgenes de la creación que se habían transformado de involuntarios a obligatorios. El debate público, la inmediatez de las declaraciones en los grandes espacios oficiales culturales, se trastrocaba por un tête à tête individual donde toda la confianza se depositaba en la capacidad cuestionadora del lector/espectador que consumiría la obra desde el recodo del silencio y la individualidad, y que acaso luego colocaría esa lectura en perspectiva con otras afines. El ensayo de Calvert Casey “Diálogos de vida y muerte” apareció en el número monográfico de Lunes “Todo Martí.” La transgresión de Casey es mejor apreciada cuando se contrasta su propuesta con el debate en torno al significado del apóstol que tenía lugar hacia el interior de esta entrega. El magazine abría con el texto del argentino Ezequiel Martínez Estrada “Martí revolucionario” —título que luego reciclaría para su libro de 1967—, en medio de la efervescencia de una revolución que lo había amparado.7 Establecido en Cuba desde 1960, fue nombrado director del Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos de Casa de las Américas. Apenas manifestó interés en investigar la figura de Martí, de quien hasta entonces conocía poco, pudo disponer de toda la papelería y documentación que reclamaba. A Martínez Estrada no le interesaba Martí en sus facetas de poeta o intelectual, sino en aquella que según él revestía actualidad tras 1959. Sus páginas predilectas correspondían al Diario de campaña, en tanto los apuntes de un

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peleador. Admiraba todo lo que lo convertía en animal político. Los infortunios familiares de Martí los presentaba como una opción consciente: “Se fue despojando de cuanto le estorbaba hasta quedar libre y sin impedimenta. [ . . . ] Pues también hizo el holocausto de sus padres, de su mujer y de su hijo para servir a su ideal humanitario.”8 Si resumimos, el Martí que le atañe, es el que es nombrado Mayor General en los momentos finales de su vida; el hombre para el cual escribir es un mero oficio; y la lucha, su misión más alta. Consciente del peligro que arriesgaba tal posición para el sector de la intelectualidad, Roberto Fernández Retamar aludía al planteamiento de Martínez Estrada al inicio de su colaboración, y lo matizaba al anotar que Martí había escogido la palabra para sus propósitos independentistas, y que no resultaba extraño que “nuestro gran revolucionario” fuera al mismo tiempo “nuestro escritor mayor.”9 En medio de una disputa por la memoria martiana dividida entre su dualidad de hombre de letras o acción, Calvert Casey aparecía con un análisis sobre la obsesión de José Martí con la muerte. Para él no había escisión entre el escritor y el político, la coherencia de sus textos desde México hasta el diario final, se encontraba hilvanada por la contradicción entre su amor por la vida y su fascinación por el fin de los seres humanos. Casey se decantaba por el misterio, la opacidad e incluso la morbosidad martiana, frente a la heroicidad a toda prueba que enarbolaba Martínez Estrada. La oposición de las visiones no puede estar mejor expresada que en los referentes de comparación: mientras para el argentino las páginas del diario le recuerdan a Jenofonte, la narración militar por antonomasia, para Casey ese último viaje de Martí a Cuba era “fiesta dionisíaca:” éxtasis y goce. Casey enfatizaba lo que Martínez Estrada había desechado: la oscuridad de Martí. Su zona menos luminosa, capaz de concebir la muerte como júbilo y vuelta al gozo perdido; la sangre como un elemento no horrible en las batallas y el deleite en el retrato verbal del exánime patriota independentista Flor Crombet. Casey rozaba además su interés por un Martí en el que la idea del suicidio no era descabellada, sobre todo, cuando recupera la pavorosa cita de los Versos sencillos donde confiesa que su paje es un esqueleto. Casey intuye en Martí una de las órbitas más inquietantes de su propia narrativa. La focalización en su deslumbramiento hacia la muerte hace que su análisis no se nutra de las grandes anécdotas o del hombre público, sino del apuntador de notas marginales, de la literatura entendida como espacio para la confesión personal. Esta perspectiva transversal y hasta oblicua inauguraba el conflicto respecto al héroe-padrefundador como ente impoluto que impactaría décadas posteriores. La atmósfera de entusiasmo que entre los intelectuales de su grupo imperaba en los sesenta, se habría extinguido para la década siguiente. Antón Arrufat recrea en Virgilio Piñera: entre él y yo el refugio en que se convirtió la casa en El Vedado que compartían Abelardo Estorino y el pintor Raúl Martínez,

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62 : Elizabeth Mirabal al caer todos los de su grupo en lo que Piñera bautizó como “muerte civil.”10 Ese fue el espacio elegido para la lectura de las piezas teatrales que escribían con la incertidumbre de si algún día conocerían la imprenta. Las noches de tertulias representaban el único espacio y público para el cual producían. Es entonces cuando Abelardo Estorino inicia la investigación que concluiría en la escritura de su pieza La dolorosa historia del amor secreto de José Jacinto Milanés. Hay todo un significado implícito en que los personajes deban ser desperezados de la muerte en la que están sumidos y en que la primera acotación subraye que el diseño de vestuario debe dar la idea de algo que está desintegrándose.11 Estorino crea una metáfora entre su ostracismo y esos personajes de ultratumba que reflexionan sobre la relación del escritor y su contexto político, en medio de cuyo horror el creador colapsa.12 Milanés está muerto y un personaje imaginario, un hombre de las sombras y el bajo mundo, un mendigo, lo interroga en un esfuerzo por encontrar la razón de su locura durante casi dos décadas.13 Montes Huidobro ha señalado la marginación arquetípica del Milanés real, al que denomina un dramaturgo sin escenario. Estorino encontró en esta condición un reflejo: ellos eran autores sin libros, teatristas sin tablas. No por gusto su Milanés responde que se fracasa siempre cuando el Mendigo le insiste en el éxito. Estorino se inspira además en el derrumbe de Milanés, quien ante su primera crisis nerviosa dejó de asistir al estreno de El conde Alarcos, una obra en la que, para burlar la censura, situó su escenario en Francia, y que tuvo una interpretación política entre los jóvenes de su tiempo.14 Los mismos malabares a los que acudía Estorino al situar sus acciones en la Matanzas y La Habana del XIX. La Editorial Arte y Literatura ya había publicado en 1968 Shakespeare, nuestro contemporáneo de Jan Kott, con traducción y prólogo de Jaime Sarusky.15 Kott proponía una lectura de las obras de William Shakespeare a partir de los sucesos políticos de la realidad polaca, como en el caso de Hamlet tras el XX Congreso del Partido Comunista soviético. Para el profesor de la Universidad de Varsovia, sólo importaba alcanzar a través de Shakespeare los temas y la sensibilidad de la época a la que se pertenecía, e insistía en que cada período histórico encontraba en la obra del dramaturgo inglés lo que buscaba o quería hallar, por lo que asistir a la representación de Ricardo III sustrayéndose de las experiencias propias era, a su criterio, imposible. En la biblioteca de Estorino este volumen mostraba las marcas de un cuidadoso proceso de estudio. El largo título del Milanés de Estorino evidencia la genealogía que quería tender con Marat/Sade de Peter Weiss,16 representada por el inglés Peter Brook, director influenciado por la lectura de Kott. Desde las primeras entradas, los personajes que rodean a Milanés están obcecados con la pureza: la tía Pastora quiere limpiar la casa para expulsar todo lo nauseabundo, Milanés pide a su padre ser castigado, el sacerdote ase-

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gura que la ciudad está perdida y que parece desierta. Milanés no quiere tener nada que ver con la muerte, pero el Mendigo le advierte que está rodeado de cadáveres. Cuando expresa su deseo de huir, se le recuerda: “Toda la Isla está infestada.”17 Estorino construye una prisión panóptica, de la cual no parece haber escapatoria. Hay una conciencia de la amenaza de un censor que se describe como un sabueso: “Registra por todos los rincones buscando un manuscrito para llenarlo de marcas rojas.”18 A lo que el personaje de Domingo del Monte (escritor, mecenas y animador cultural cubano; 1804–1853) contrapondrá que siempre hay un juego, una argucia, un traspié para burlar la censura. El parlamento: “Algunos dejaron de visitar a sus amigos para no comprometerse,”19 alude a las disoluciones de viejas alianzas, y a la soledad y el aislamiento en que estaban sumidos Estorino y su grupo. La opresión con la que ha crecido Milanés es cuestionada tras su madurez. Pregunta, como dirigiéndose a un ente omnipresente, por las credenciales que lo erigen en juez: “¿Dónde está mi mancha? Y ellos . . . ¿De dónde viene su linaje? ¿Dónde están los títulos, los caballos, dónde están los escudos y los pergaminos?”20 Para el escritor que sucumbe a humillarse y rendir homenaje al poder hay una condena: Milanés desprecia al poeta Plácido (Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés; 1809–1844) por corromper sus versos. Quiere saber cómo podía escribir aquellas odas laudatorias, a lo que Plácido replica: “Es muy simple. Tenía nudos en la barriga y había que llenarla, si no el estruendo cubriría toda la Isla. Y podían acusarme de subversivo. Infidencia, es la palabra exacta.”21 Plácido termina siendo fusilado, acusado dentro del frenesí de la Conspiración de La Escalera. Estorino defiende el disfraz y la máscara para sobrevivir en tiempos de turbulencia. El diálogo que Milanés sostiene con Domingo del Monte es el de la decepción ante el agitador que se marcha: “Estar aquí. Atemorizado, pero estar aquí.”22 Estorino volvió los ojos hacia Milanés para reproducir la operación que Kott describía con respecto a Shakespeare: buscar lo que quería hallar, en este caso, la exploración de las posibles posiciones del escritor frente al hecho político inquisitorial. La ingenua y honrada de Milanés, que es tragado por su medio presa de sus convicciones; la taimada de Plácido, que sólo quiere sobrevivir los embates, y la hipócrita de Domingo del Monte, que los convida a todos a inmolarse por una causa para él luego evadirse y renegar de ella.23 Mientras que a Abelardo Estorino le interesa la inmersión meticulosa en el contexto histórico que rodea a su héroe Milanés en busca de un sino de enfrentamiento con su circunstancia, Reinaldo Arenas con La Loma del Ángel reescribe Cecilia Valdés de Cirilo Villaverde, una ficción canónica y emblemática del XIX, para exponerla a una explosión estructural tras la cual recibimos una auténtica pittura infamante.24Arenas vuelve a una de sus constantes al trastrocar las fuentes y reinterpretar a los personajes y las situaciones de Cecilia Valdés, en aras de devolverlos transfigurados en una mascarada carnavalesca.

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64 : Elizabeth Mirabal Elige a Villaverde, quien como él fue un autor exiliado que vivió, escribió y terminó muriendo en Nueva York. De este modo, el hecho de encontrarse fuera de la isla no reduce lo atrayente del siglo XIX como cronotopo; para Arenas, lo refuerza. Trasciende las coincidencias biográficas para sumergir en la posmodernidad, lo grotesco y la parodia, una novela clave para entender la identidad cubana, pero, sobre todo, que rezuma realismo, dos condiciones que la convierten en materia ideal para su subversión. Desde el acápite “Sobre la obra,” Arenas rehúye de la interpretación historicista y de aliento sociológico del original. Su lectura transcurre en un plano existencial: Tal vez el enigma y la inmortalidad de esta obra radiquen en que al Villaverde presentarnos una serie de relaciones incestuosas, consumadas o insinuadas, nos muestra la eterna tragedia del hombre, esto es, su soledad, su incomunicación, su intransferible desasosiego, y, por lo tanto, la búsqueda de un amante ideal que por ello solo puede ser ejemplo —o reflejo— de nosotros mismos.25

Reedita lo que desde su ópera prima Celestino antes del alba,26 constituyó uno de sus blasones literarios: la bifurcación de sus personajes, quienes cual Narciso, sólo hallan plena identificación amorosa con un desprendimiento de sí mismos, ya sea un doble real o imaginario. Su regreso al XIX pasa por la mediación de otra construcción literaria que, por demás, va a invertir. La conciencia de intrusión en un texto que no le pertenece se alude en varias ocasiones. Los personajes se rebelan contra Villaverde, a quien van a pedir cuentas e incluso castigar en un momento de la obra, pero también contra Arenas, protestando por sus procedimientos y recreaciones, lo cual remarca la infidelidad, la sensación de copia intervenida que leemos. La verdadera transgresión de Arenas radica en su voluntad experimental, en apartarse de lo que calificaba como “literatura de mensaje.”27 Al desacralizar una piedra angular de la literatura cubana, afirma y, al mismo tiempo, niega una tradición. Ya en una crítica a La Odilea de Francisco Chofre, Arenas elogiaba la soltura y la desfachatez de la obra y conceptualizaba sus claves para operar con un mito: Por otra parte, el mito no puede revitalizarse, puesto que el mito es la culminación de un personaje literario, de una obra. La única manera de “revitalizar” al mito es destruyéndolo, es decir, creando otro mito [ . . . ]. La única forma de destruir (no “revitalizar”) un mito legendario en nuestra época es haciendo otro mito: el mito del hombre contemporáneo, su angustia, sus inquietudes inaplazables, sus entusiasmos verdaderos. ¿Habrá que citar, de todos modos, al mitológico (o “mitolicida”) Joyce, a su nueva Odisea?28

Las leyes y convenciones de las que libera a los personajes de Villaverde, son un desprendimiento de la resistencia y, al final, renacimiento, que le ha

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concedido a Cecilia Valdés, embistiendo lo que parecía intocable. Su libertad creativa no radica, como en Estorino, en la inmersión en una época remota para explorar una relación angustiosa entre el escritor y el Estado, sino en dinamitar un mito nacional y dar lugar a una literatura cuyo único compromiso es hacia el interior de sí y, por tanto, endógeno. La novela de mi vida de Leonardo Padura ve la luz cuando acaba de finalizar la década de los noventa y la fisonomía del mapa social de Cuba lidia con los efectos sin precedentes de una crisis política y económica tras la cual ha emergido otro país. En tres estaciones narrativas paralelas asistimos a la lectura de unas memorias desconocidas del poeta cubano José María Heredia que el resto de los personajes se desvelan en proteger o hallar, los días finales del hijo menor de Heredia en su angustia por salvar esos papeles y, por último, a la investigación detectivesca tras este documento de Fernando Terry, marielito exiliado en breve visita a la isla, otrora prometedor escritor y profesor en la Escuela de Letras, defenestrado tras un oscuro proceso que cree producto de una delación. Padura concibe su novela en torno a Heredia sobre tres pilares: su condición de desterrado por excelencia, de cincelador de la nostalgia con respecto a la isla de la que ha sido forzado a partir y de primer cantor al sueño de la libertad de Cuba.29 El grupo de Los Socarrones, integrado por Terry y sus amigos, cuyas aspiraciones individuales confluían en el deseo por insuflar un nuevo impulso a la literatura cubana en los setenta del siglo XX, es de alguna manera un heredero de la prístina tertulia de Domingo del Monte y Heredia, fundadora de revistas, con la que pretendieron cambiar la faz de las letras de su época. De modo que el péndulo oscila entre lo que Padura llama “un país no escrito hasta entonces” y el presente. En un momento en que Cuba intenta volver a definirse, en que el panorama nacional resulta irreconocible para quienes la habitan y para los que regresan, Padura necesita retornar a una génesis. Tanto Heredia como Terry van tras el feroz intento por desovillar una traición que les ha truncado la vida dentro de su país. El Milanés de Estorino aniquilado por la historia y el Martí de Casey que le mesa los cabellos a la muerte por su entrega a un destino, coinciden con la propuesta paduriana de un Heredia que ve en la política el cáncer de la poesía. En la asfixia y el acoso que la gran historia le ha impuesto a la literatura cubana, lo que pudiéramos llamar su sino trágico —y sobre los que estas tres piezas reflexionan usando como puente el siglo XIX—, sólo irrumpe el desacato de Arenas, pero únicamente para disfrazar el horror de disparate. A pesar de que casi al final de La novela de mi vida, la viuda de Heredia declara y atestigua que lo que hemos estado leyendo es el manuscrito de su esposo, Padura siembra a lo largo del texto señales que indican que podríamos también estar leyendo una novela que Fernando Terry ha escrito, tras nunca haber encontrado la autobiografía de Heredia. Es algo que incluso le incita a

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66 : Elizabeth Mirabal hacer uno de sus amigos. Por otra parte, la novela abre con el cruce de miradas entre Terry y un hombre desconocido subido a un barco que se marcha de la bahía, y con el cual establece una misteriosa conexión, tal como le ocurre a Heredia cuando en su partida en 1837, descubre en los arrecifes de la costa a un hombre en cuyos ojos advierte “una tristeza gemela.”30 Es esta la única irrupción en el relato de Padura de una muda fantasiosa que afianza la sospecha de que todo el libro puede haber sido la invención de un personaje. En uno de los encuentros de Los Socarrones, se produce un debate significativo. Miguel Ángel manifiesta su deseo de escribir una novela sobre el siglo XIX, convencido de que “cuando hay tiempo de por medio, el escritor es más libre” y “tiene menos compromisos con la realidad.”31 Enrique acusa a esto de “escapismo,” a lo que Miguel Ángel responde que lo que no tendría sentido sería escribir sobre el XIX como un escritor del XIX: “Hay que ver la historia desde ahora.”32 Los otros insisten en que es un artificio para evadir la censura actual, hasta que Álvaro concluye: “Me gusta eso: nosotros escribimos sobre el XIX y les dejamos lo que pasa ahora a unos Socarrones del 2074 y ellos les dejan sus líos a los del 2174 y así todo el mundo vive en paz y escribe sus novelas sin autocensurarse.”33 En esta conversación se condensa la motivación profunda de una novela que trata el XIX con el privilegio de una mirada actual, y sin evadir su contexto, al dar fe del padecer de una generación. No por gusto el abanico de personajes que rodea a Terry, y Terry mismo, repasan de forma hiperbólica casi todos los destinos posibles: el exiliado por el puerto del Mariel que ha debido reinventarse tras el fin de sus opciones, el muerto en la inutilidad de las aventuras bélicas de la revolución en países africanos, el hombre de izquierda por procedencia y convicción traicionado en sus propios ideales, el alcoholizado como enajenación y acto de libertad, el homosexual convertido en no persona, el escalador oportunista que ha aprendido a vivir mutando, el escritor que le ha sacado ventaja a su obra sin estridencias. Al crear los vasos comunicantes entre la vida de Heredia y la de su estudioso en los noventa, Padura vuelve a la tesis de que la historia literaria cubana y su vida más íntima ha estado signada por los mismos males antes y ahora, siendo la sospecha, la traición y el exilio, los más atroces. No en balde en la línea narrativa de Heredia, este se pregunta de forma retórica si en el futuro otros hombres sufrirán igual condena que la suya.34 En la búsqueda del delator que Terry despliega, van derribándose cada una de las posibilidades, quedando como únicos culpables, la desidia, el oportunismo, el miedo y el marasmo. La banalidad del mal que definiera Hannah Arendt. En el caso de Heredia, Domingo del Monte se perfila como el ejecutor de un complejo entramado para deslegitimar al hombre que él quisiera ser en lo civil y lo literario. Su traición, animada por razones personales, encuentra en el ambiente despótico y corrompido del XIX el escenario ideal. El Capitán General Miguel Tacón, con su carta donde puntualmente reproduce su infinita lista de cargos y nombramientos,

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El simbólico siglo XIX en la literatura cubana

: 67

y su resistencia a desprenderse de sus uniformes y distinciones, sostiene con Heredia un diálogo que es en realidad un pulso improbable entre el escritor y el poder absoluto, en que Padura retoma la certeza de que la obra creativa auténtica prevalece sobre la gloria política. Por medio del ensayo, el teatro o la ficción, los autores Calvert Casey, Abelardo Estorino, Reinaldo Arenas y Leonardo Padura generan su obra para reinterpretar un mito y apropiárselo. Vuelven a un instante fundacional como el siglo XIX, en aras de desentrañar pistas con las cuales entender un presente complejo. Ese regreso es usualmente a figuras paradigmáticas en la historia cultural hacia las que profesan una comunión por razones diversas, que van desde coincidencias biográficas hasta espirituales. La inmersión profunda que suelen hacer en la época, parte del interés por descubrir y confirmar aquello que los iguala y, una vez establecido el nexo, el proceso a través del que solapan su agón con la fibra sentimental del contexto remoto, abre las puertas hacia la interpelación de su presente. No es casual que ese retorno sea al período decimonónico cubano, densa centuria en la que surge más de una constante de la nacionalidad. Estos escritores parecen decir que, si ese es el inicio de una identidad que los surca y por la que padecen, pues entonces hay que mirar atrás, no para volverse sal como la esposa de Lot, sino para desde la comodidad del cerco de lo histórico, asaltar algunas atalayas. N O TA S 1. Para otros análisis sobre la relevancia del siglo XIX en las artes cubanas del período revolucionario, particularmente en el teatro, véase: Beatriz J. Rizk, “History as a Recurrent Rhythm in Late Twentieth-Century Cuban Theater,” Ollantay Theater Magazine 6, no. 11 (1998): 122–131; Katherine Ford, The Theater of Revisions in the Hispanic Caribbean (Nueva York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 2. Elizabeth Mirabal y Carlos Velazco, Buscando a Caín (La Habana: ICAIC, 2012), 138. 3. Ambrosio Fornet, “Bosquejo de un nacimiento cultural,” Lunes de Revolución 84, 28 noviembre 1960, 14. 4. Manuel Díaz Martínez, “Los escritores y la Revolución” (entrevistas a José Antonio Portuondo, Roberto Branly, Virgilio Piñera y Gregorio Ortega), Hoy Domingo 1 (1959), 3. 5. Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, “El movimiento reformista,” Lunes de Revolución 84, 28 noviembre 1960, 16. 6. Entre los ejemplos destacados de la recuperación y la jerarquización literaria de dicho período a lo largo de la década del sesenta, se encuentran los tomos de Poesías y Prosas de Julián del Casal, con motivo de su centenario; los números de la revista Cuba en la Unesco dedicados a Casal y a Mi tío el empleado de Ramón Meza; y la Antología de la poesía cubana (siglos XVII–XIX), en tres volúmenes, preparada por José Lezama Lima. 7. Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, Martí revolucionario (La Habana: Casa de las Américas, 1967). 8. Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, “Martí revolucionario,” Lunes de Revolución 93, 30 enero 1961, 4. 9. Roberto Fernández Retamar, “Lectura de José Martí,” Lunes de Revolución 93, 30 enero 1961, 57.

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68 : Elizabeth Mirabal 10. Antón Arrufat, Virgilio Piñera: entre él y yo (La Habana: Ediciones Unión, 1994). 11. Elementos del vestuario diseñado por Jesús Ruiz pueden ser consultados en el Centro de Estudios de Diseño Escénico, en La Habana. 12. Otras circunstancias enlazaban a Abelardo Estorino con el poeta y dramaturgo decimonónico (1814–1863): ambos nacidos en Matanzas, enfrentados al dilema de marchar hacia La Habana, la gran ciudad, en busca de la libertad negada en la provincia natal, angustia ya evidente en la obra La casa vieja (1964). 13. Armando Ponce: “El teatro de la realidad” (entrevista a Abelardo Estorino), Proceso, diciembre 2002, 65. 14. Ver Matías Montes Huidobro, “El teatro de Milanés y la formación de la conciencia cubana,” Del areito a la independencia: Claves literarias de las letras cubanas (Miami: Persona, 2015) 369–398. 15. Este volumen de ensayos omitía capítulos del original, pero agregó varios apéndices, entre ellos un texto de Boris Pasternak. 16. Carlos Velazco, “Revelaciones,” en Teatro selecto, por Abilio Estévez (Madrid: Verbum, 2015), 9–10. 17. Abelardo Estorino, “La dolorosa historia del amor secreto de José Jacinto Milanés,” Teatro completo (La Habana: Alarcos, 2006), 2: 23. 18. Ibíd., 28. 19. Ibíd., 64. 20. Ibíd., 51. 21. Ibíd., 55. 22. Ibíd., 63. 23. La dolorosa historia del amor secreto de José Jacinto Milanés debió llevarse a escena en 1975. Bajo la dirección de Vicente Revuelta, se preparó por varios meses, organizándose incluso ensayos generales con público. Entre las versiones de por qué nunca se estrenó, la oficial, lo explica en la inconformidad del teatrista con el montaje final; mientras la extraoficial, plantea que su hermana, Raquel Revuelta, actriz y directora de Teatro Estudio (compañía que asumió la puesta), vetó el proyecto por temor a que la obra fuera acusada de “diversionismo ideológico.” Véase “La dolorosa historia del amor secreto de Don José Jacinto Milanés,” en Cuban Theater Digital Archive, disponible en http://cubantheater.org. Por su parte, Abelardo Estorino —que trabajaba en Teatro Estudio— no asociaba la cancelación a su ostracismo, como sí atribuía a censura la interrupción de su pieza Los mangos de Caín, dirigida por Magali Alabau a mediados de los sesenta. 24. Es curioso que Estorino, a inicios de los noventa, pocos años después de Arenas, también retomaría la teatralización de la misma novela en su pieza Parece blanca, haciendo particular énfasis en el metateatro. 25. Reinaldo Arenas, La Loma del Ángel (Miami: Mariel Press, 1987), 9. 26. Reinaldo Arenas, Celestino antes del alba (La Habana: Ediciones Unión, 1967). 27. Ver Francisco de Soto, “Conversación con Reinaldo Arenas,” Pentagonía (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994). 28. Reinaldo Arenas, “Odisea y Odilea,” La Gaceta de Cuba 69, noviembre–diciembre 1968, 28. 29. Leonardo Padura, La novela de mi vida (Barcelona: Tusquets, 2002), 260. 30. Ibíd., 332. 31. Ibíd., 165. 32. Ibíd. 33. Ibíd. 34. Ibíd., 260.

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CARLOS VELAZCO

Cinco recuerdos del porvenir RESUMEN ¿Cómo ha sido reflejada la política cultural cubana posterior a 1959 en el género confesional de la literatura cubana? A partir de una muestra de cinco obras autobiográficas: La mala memoria (1989) del poeta Heberto Padilla, Antes que anochezca (1992) del novelista Reinaldo Arenas, Yo Publio (2007) del pintor Raúl Martínez, Dinosauria soy (2011) de la ensayista Graziella Pogolotti y de las inéditas “Memorias” (2012) del poeta Antonio Desquirón, se analiza la manera en que autores de diferentes posiciones estéticas y políticas han reflejado las tensiones entre intelectualidad y poder en el contexto de la Revolución cubana; pero, sobre todo, se identifican las estrategias desde las que estos han plasmado su perspectiva en materia literaria.

A B S T R AC T How have the vicissitudes of Cuban cultural politics after 1959 been reflected in the genre of testimony within Cuban literature? Through an examination of five autobiographical works—Self Portrait of the Other (1989), by the poet Heberto Padilla; Before Night Falls (1992), by the novelist Reinaldo Arenas; I Publio (2007), by the painter Raúl Martínez; I Am a Dinosaur (2011), by the essayist Graziella Pogolotti; and the unpublished “Memoirs” (2012) of poet Antonio Desquirón—this essay analyzes how authors of different aesthetic and political positions have reflected upon the tensions between intellectual life and power in the context of the Cuban Revolution. Above all, this analysis identifies the strategies these authors used to document their perspectives in a literary form.

Pocas temáticas tan áridas como la política cultural cubana a partir de esa década del sesenta que comenzó en 1959. El extendido interés que genera hace suponer que su conocimiento pueda resarcir o ayudar a comprender algo. Si el dossier Cultural Politics and Political Cultures of the Cuban Revolution incluye estudios a partir de fuentes documentales, como tal deben figurar también variantes testimoniales, aun cuando la selección, la convicción, la percepción de quien narra, serían excusas suficientes para asumir cualquier primera persona del relato como ente ficcionalizado y ficcionalizador: personaje. En un país en el que se ha ejecutado un sucesivo control de la memoria por casi sesenta años, disimulándose incluso el ejercicio de la censura, la literatura testimonial contribuye como —a veces único— registro o archivo.1

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70 : Carlos Velazco Marcel Proust en Por el camino de Swann esbozaba un componente para la ficción: la supresión de la persona o situación real por otros ficticios que consiguieran representar el sentimiento a compartir. Dicha fórmula es reconocible en La mala memoria (1989), de Heberto Padilla; Antes que anochezca (1992), de Reinaldo Arenas; Yo Publio (2007), de Raúl Martínez; Dinosauria soy (2011), de Graziella Pogolotti; y “Memorias” (2012) de Antonio Desquirón, volúmenes en los que, al abordar mediante estrategias narrativas las tensiones entre intelectualidad y poder político en Cuba,2 los autores consiguen expresar literariamente su testimonio.3 La resonancia internacional del poeta Heberto Padilla tras la condena oficial a su libro Fuera del juego en 1968 y su encarcelamiento y forzada autoinculpación en 1971, hace a muchos exigirle en La mala memoria un tratado voluminoso, detallado en anécdotas y cronologías, acerca de la interacción entre el escritor y la censura, la creación y la opresión, o sea, entre el artista y la tiranía. Más ante un título en el que el adjetivo no significa defectuosa, sino lo opuesto: la memoria puede ser malvada porque nada olvida. En el 1989 de su publicación, Padilla evocaba que el ensayo de reivindicaciones sociales, proyectos románticos de despegue económico, protagonismo de los intelectuales en la sociedad, apoyo gubernamental a la cultura y proyección continental de esta, era un riesgo que todavía en 1963 él estaba dispuesto a asumir, pese al simultáneo establecimiento de límites que menoscababan la libertad del artista y, a la larga, repercutían en detrimento de la creación: Por las monstruosidades de la historia inmediata del comunismo soviético y de los demás países socialistas, resultaba imposible ser comunista; y por no aceptar la historia sombría del colonialismo occidental no se podía ser anticomunista. Mientras tanto, era nuestro deber impedir que la revolución cubana repitiera los mismos errores de los soviéticos; pero nuestra crítica debía ser interior.4

Heberto Padilla terminaría encarnando la imposibilidad de este equilibrio. Cuando en la autoinculpación pública del martes 27 de abril de 1971 en la sede de la Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba (UNEAC), afirmó: “Si no ha habido más detenciones hasta ahora es por la generosidad de la Revolución,” evidenciaba que su apresamiento y exhibición sobrepasaban el escarmiento puntual al poeta y su núcleo de amigos: se trataba de una advertencia para el medio cultural cubano. Su caso —ejemplarizante— permitió a Padilla la contemplación de un amplio espectro de reacciones, hasta el esfuerzo poético del uruguayo Mario Benedetti por restablecer el crédito de la revolución: “El procedimiento en sí de la autocrítica implica una dosis de modestia que (caso Padilla aparte) fastidia a muchos intelectuales, a quienes sobre todo alarma un eventual contagio de ese prurito. [ . . . ] Así que no jeringuen más con el estalinismo habanero.”5 Un control de daños semejante a la ficción del nicaragüense

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Cinco recuerdos del porvenir : 71 Ernesto Cardenal en la ficha de Padilla para la antología Poesía cubana de la Revolución: Su libro de poemas El justo tiempo humano ha tenido dos ediciones. Otro libro suyo conteniendo poemas bastante críticos a la Revolución, Fuera del juego, fue premiado por el jurado de la Unión de Escritores, y la Unión le otorgó el premio pero se pronunció en contra de la obra por considerarla injusta para la Revolución. Más tarde tuvo un conflicto con el estado que en Cuba fue considerado de menor trascendencia, pero la prensa capitalista le dio al poeta notoriedad mundial con lo que llamó “caso Padilla.” Después de una breve prisión, en la que según él fue bien tratado, y de una vehemente rectificación, que también él asegura fue espontánea, el poeta se ha reintegrado a la militancia revolucionaria.6

En La mala memoria, Padilla recoge el consejo que le brindara Ilya Ehrenburg: “Para él los libros de memorias tenían que ser libros ríos, que fuesen creciendo con los años. Solo en la vejez podía uno recordar perfiles, rasgos de personas, años, gente que antes no alcanza a cobrar una dimensión verdadera.”7 Y debe atenderse en alguien acostumbrado a fijar sus hallazgos en tramos de palabras cortos. El más logrado balance de las consecuencias de un control absoluto del arte, y por extensión, de todos los aspectos de la sociedad, lo encontramos en imágenes: el defenestrado líder comunista Aníbal Escalante encogiéndose dentro de su abrigo negro entre la vejez y el frío de la Plaza Pushkin en pleno invierno moscovita; fiestas clandestinas donde se escuchaba música prohibida grabada en placas plásticas recicladas de radiografías; el desplante de Fidel Castro a los poetas Padilla y Yevgeny Yevtushenko en el salón principal de un hotel, en el mismo encuentro informal en el que el gobernante manifestara gran interés por conocer al militante comunista norteamericano Henry Winston, al punto de ser el anciano despertado y traído en pijamas, para dejar de atenderlo enseguida que lo incorporó a su auditorio. Pero si Heberto Padilla aparece en un segundo plano de la fotografía política cubana, Reinaldo Arenas es el testigo distanciado fuera del encuadre. Que el novelista de El mundo alucinante, Viaje a La Habana y El portero definiera como autobiografía su proyectado último libro, fue su manera de insistir en la unidad de sus ciclos vital y literario. Antes que anochezca simula la estructura de una típica conversación cubana. Encontramos imprecisiones de fechas, nombres, parentescos: “El director del curso era Pedro Marinello, creo que sobrino o hermano de Juan Marinello.”8 En esta oralidad estilizada, Reinaldo Arenas opera con el lenguaje, desarticulando la neolengua de rigor en Cuba; por ejemplo, rememorando su labor como contador agrícola: “Nosotros seríamos los encargados de llevar la contabilidad y la administración en las granjas del pueblo; es decir, las granjas estatales, porque jamás pertenecieron al pueblo.”9

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72 : Carlos Velazco Tanto la lejanía de la isla como la cercanía de la muerte, hacen a Reinaldo Arenas obviar las consecuencias de sus palabras, que deben leerse bajo la advertencia de Jorge Luis Borges: “Y, sin embargo, si hoy se recuerdan nombres como Palmerín de Inglaterra, Tirante el Blanco, Amadís de Gaula y otros, es porque Cervantes se burló de ellos. Y de algún modo esos nombres son inmortales ahora. Entonces uno no debe quejarse si la gente se ríe de nosotros, porque por lo que sabemos, esa gente puede inmortalizarnos con su risa.”10 Recorre Antes que anochezca un lamento por el destino maldito de una generación, a la que el autor califica de “perdida,” “destruida,” y en la que destaca, entre otros, a Delfín Prats, René Ariza, José Mario, Luis Rogelio Nogueras y Guillermo Rosales. Interesa más a Arenas compartir la esencia que los pormenores. Enfatiza la tragedia colectiva al escindir a una persona real —el escritor Miguel Barnet— en dos personajes: el joven amante Miguel, que maneja un auto y gracias al cual el protagonista se acerca a la farándula habanera a inicios de los sesenta, y Miguel Barniz, pareja también, pero exponente de mediocre y oportunista. De Miguel, Arenas evoca: “Él terminó arrestado y llevado a uno de los campos de concentración de la UMAP. No lo volví a ver nunca más, ni siquiera en el exilio he vuelto a saber de él. A veces pienso que lo mataron en el campo de concentración; era colérico, indisciplinado y amante de la vida.”11 Es decir, la única manera en que un artista cubano puede preservar su rebeldía a través del tiempo, para mayor maldición, es muriendo oportunamente: “Los dictadores y los regímenes autoritarios pueden destruir a los escritores de dos modos: persiguiéndolos o colmándolos de prebendas oficiales.”12 Si la regla básica de las editoriales cubanas ha sido la imposibilidad de publicar siquiera un cuestionamiento directo a la persona de Fidel Castro, la mayor o menor exposición de funcionarios intermedios o ejecutores depende de la cantidad de poder que estos conserven o hayan perdido. Por ello, ante la amenaza de un inédito “demasiado sincero” del —para más, fallecido— pintor y diseñador Raúl Martínez, representante de la abstracción y el pop cubano, siempre aparecía otra instancia no implicada en el proceso editorial, que debía ser consultada. El escándalo por el anecdotario homosexual de la inconclusa Yo Publio desvió la atención en Cuba de esos pasajes en los que se relataba la intervención de la política revolucionaria en la creación. Del artista Servando Cabrera Moreno, quien en 1961 iniciara su período de temática épica, poblando su plástica de milicianos, campesinos y heroísmo, Raúl Martínez cuenta: Entre nosotros se ha comentado en varias ocasiones qué sucedió para que Servando dejara tan bruscamente el tema épico por el erótico. Yo mismo le pregunté en una ocasión y él no quiso hablar de esto, pero sí era cierto que algo había sucedido. [ . . . ] La pintura que Servando estaba haciendo pudo haber sido criticada por algún funcionario o

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Cinco recuerdos del porvenir : 73 dirigente que se preguntara —como sucedió conmigo más tarde—, ¿quién es el maricón este que se cree que puede pintar la Revolución? Y entonces hablaron con Marta Arjona —gran amiga de Servando— para que lo alertara sobre lo inútil de un empeño tan noble. Y quizás, ¿por qué no?, hasta lo amenazaran sabe Dios con qué castigos.13

Coincidiendo con la instauración de las Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción (UMAP), Raúl Martínez vería interrumpida su labor como maestro: separado de la Universidad de La Habana por una “disposición superior,” obligado a renunciar en la Escuela de Arquitectura, e imposibilitado de renovar su contrato en la Escuela Nacional de Arte. Uno de los capítulos en que enumera estos avatares, lo tituló “El martirio de San Sebastián.” Y de Sebastián sabía bastante, por lo menos desde que en 1963 diseñó para Ediciones R la segunda novela de Virgilio Piñera. Si Sebastián fracasa en tanto esa flecha escurridiza de la cubierta de Pequeñas maniobras, en la devoción popular se le recuerda cubierto de dardos: Fui eliminado como jurado en certámenes, concursos y otras actividades en las que antes había participado. En la UNEAC, la dirección de los plásticos decidió que yo no era la persona idónea para representar a Cuba en el extranjero. [ . . . ] También la Casa de las Américas dejó de invitarnos a [Abelardo] Estorino y a mí como lo hacían antes. [ . . . ] Dejamos de vernos con Julio Cortázar, con Antonio Saura, quienes venían a menudo a La Habana, de cuyas visitas nos enterábamos por el periódico o por amigos comunes.14

El recuento del ostracismo en Yo Publio se contrapone a la posterior relevancia del universo visual de Raúl Martínez en el ámbito público cubano; en especial su etapa pop, en la que mezclaba figuras históricas y sujetos anónimos, con frecuentes representaciones de José Martí y Ernesto Guevara. Sobre este aspecto, el relato de la visita al pintor Raúl Milián (pareja del afamado artista René Portocarrero), convaleciente en el hospital Calixto García, supone un velado desgarramiento, por el reconocimiento implícito de una idea de la que Raúl Martínez es consciente: el haber claudicado frente al contexto: Me senté en una silla y, al preguntarle cómo se sentía, se incorporó en la cama y, con una furia que no le conocía, comenzó a injuriarme en alta voz. Me acusaba de ser el responsable de la mediocridad de la pintura que había en este país; de la falta de perspectiva que tenían los jóvenes por culpa de mi talento malogrado desde el momento en que dejé la abstracción y me puse a pintar a Martí y aquellos otros mamarrachos. Siguió acusándome de oportunista con epítetos cada vez más hirientes, a la vez que aumentaba su cólera. No salía de mi asombro. René trató de controlar a Milián: —¿Cómo puedes tratar a Raulito, a quien quieres tanto, de esa manera? —Es un traidor, un jodido traidor, ¿no te das cuenta?15

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74 : Carlos Velazco Dicha noción se subraya en el capítulo dedicado a otro escritor que fuera su amante, el cual comienza: “Dicen que Reinaldo Arenas escribió sus memorias y que estoy mencionado en ellas.” En este fragmento excluido de la edición cubana de Yo Publio, el autor reconoce: “No, no era Reinaldo Arenas un ser humano fácil de tratar. No era como aquel otro artista, Raúl Martínez, que mantenía sus ‘vicios’ dentro de la mayor discreción.”16 Frente a esas “confesiones” en las que Raúl Martínez buscaba recobrar un tiempo y un esplendor personal que sentía haber extraviado en algún punto —y que le angustiaba completar y publicar en un circuito editorial de sobra conocido por él—, la ensayista Graziella Pogolotti repasa los accidentes de la política cultural de la revolución en las sintéticas revelaciones de Dinosauria soy que se expanden tras la declarada herencia de Proust. Así como el personaje-narrador de En busca del tiempo perdido proporciona su interpretación de los hechos que han determinado su vida, pero también otra comprensión que escapa a él, o a la que no se atreve, pero que el lector sí capta. En “Giaveno no es Combray,” nombre del primer capítulo, se prefigura: “El pasado no se recupera. Se restaura. Los muros del pasado enmascaran la realidad presente.”17 Su comienzo rememora el encuentro familiar de tres generaciones: “El diálogo fluye sin esfuerzos, sin silencios embarazosos. Pero está lleno de precauciones, de vericuetos que se recorren cuidadosamente. María Luisa es transparente. Mary guarda su reserva.”18 De la tercera mujer, apenas se acota: “Yo, Graziella, de vuelta al cabo de tantos años, apenas me reconozco.”19 A lo largo del libro, el personaje que es reflejo de la autora, oscilará entre las características de esas otras dos entre las que permanece sentada: la “transparencia” y la “reserva.” Dinosauria soy recorre la manifestación del sectarismo en la Biblioteca Nacional, las depuraciones universitarias a inicios de la revolución, la constitución del núcleo del Partido Comunista en la Facultad de Humanidades, con una comisión evaluadora que insistía más en conocer los criterios de sus interrogados sobre el presente y el porvenir. También como a Heberto Padilla —corresponsal de prensa en la Unión Soviética y representante de Comercio Exterior en los países socialistas— en La mala memoria, un desplazamiento geográfico permitirá a Graziella Pogolotti experimentar el futuro no muy distante que le aguarda a su regreso a su Samara casi natal: La Habana. Como curadora, junto a Servando Cabrera Moreno y Raúl Oliva, acompañó una exposición de pintura cubana que recorrió en 1962 una Europa del Este todavía abatida por el realismo socialista. El que la muestra incluyera arte abstracto, con herencia de expresionismo y surrealismo, condicionó la recepción Checoslovaquia, Hungría, Bulgaria, Rumanía, Unión Soviética y Polonia: “En cada país los funcionarios elaboraron una táctica diferente. Casi todos optaron por evitar la confrontación y cumplir con los compromisos acordados, imprimir un catálogo y organizar la ceremonia de inauguración, aunque esta última tuviera un perfil bajo en la jerarquía

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Cinco recuerdos del porvenir : 75 de la representatividad oficial. También fue atemperada la resonancia en la prensa.”20 La de Pogolotti es una historia de continuos repliegues. De la Biblioteca Nacional, cuando a fines de los sesenta es expulsada su directora María Teresa Freyre de Andrade. Y de esa Escuela de Letras de la Universidad de La Habana, donde enseñaba a Rimbaud, introducía la perspectiva de la carnavalización de Batjin y analizaba a Racine desde la contraposición de Goldmann, Barthes y Picard, tras una reunión en la Escuela del Partido Comunista presidida por Fidel Castro y los funcionarios Belarmino Castilla, Carlos Rafael Rodríguez y Jorge Serguera: La política cultural se sometía a debate. En su mayoría, los participantes procedían de la Juventud y de los órganos de prensa. Era el último coletazo del caso Padilla, colocado ahora en un plano internacional. El ambiente estaba caldeado y los pronunciamientos adquirían carácter virulento. Cobraban vigencia prejuicios soterrados, antiintelectualismo, homofobia, desconfianza respecto a muchos escritores y artistas latinoamericanos. [ . . . ] Voz casi solitaria, intervine en varias ocasiones en un esfuerzo por contrarrestar las tendencias más peligrosas. Tomada por sorpresa, mi palabra escueta poco pudo hacer ante una avalancha de discursos estructurados de antemano con vistas al inminente Congreso de Educación y Cultura.21

Al pasar la página de Dinosauria soy, se inicia el segmento “La utopía del Escambray.” Pogolotti permanecería involucrada, entre 1971 y 1976, en las investigaciones socioculturales que tributaban al proyecto teatral desarrollado en la región que había vivido una situación de guerra civil, y de la cual comunidades enteras habían sido forzadas a desplazarse hasta el extremo occidental del país. Una fecha podría ser coincidencia; dos (1971 y 1976), no. El Primer Congreso Nacional de Educación y Cultura, efectuado en La Habana del 26 al 30 de abril de 1971, había acordado: “El Congreso estima que en la selección de los trabajadores de las instituciones supraestructurales, tales como universidades, medios masivos de comunicación, instituciones literarias y artísticas, etc., se tomen en cuenta sus condiciones políticas e ideológicas, ya que su labor influye directamente en la aplicación de la política cultural de la revolución.”22 De esta manera, el retiro de Pogolotti a esa apartada zona montañosa corresponde al quinquenio más álgido de la implementación de una concepción reducida, utilitaria y politizada de la cultura, que matrimoniaba a líderes divergentes de la revolución como Fidel Castro, quien desde Palabras a los intelectuales advirtiera: “Y el artista más revolucionario sería aquel que estuviera dispuesto a sacrificar hasta su propia vocación artística por la Revolución,”23 y Ernesto Guevara, cuyos partidarios recordaban el diagnóstico de su cartamanifiesto El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba: “Resumiendo, la culpabilidad de muchos de nuestros intelectuales y artistas reside en su pecado original; no

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76 : Carlos Velazco son auténticamente revolucionarios. [ . . . ] Nuestra tarea consiste en impedir que la generación actual, dislocada por sus conflictos, se pervierta y pervierta a las nuevas.”24 La convicción que Heberto Padilla sostuvo hasta fines de la década del sesenta, Graziella Pogolotti la ha preservado hasta el presente, con su contribución en los momentos de relativo deshielo cubano. A fines de los setenta, decana de la Facultad de Teatro del Instituto Superior de Arte y presidenta del Consejo Asesor del ministro de Cultura Armando Hart, en una etapa en que se atenuaron los mecanismos represivos de años anteriores: “Me sumergía de lleno en el complejo universo del teatro, tan necesitado de cicatrizar las heridas recientes.”25 Y a finales de los ochenta —durante el proceso de rectificación, versión cubana de una perestroika atemperada—, como vicepresidenta de una UNEAC encabezada por Abel Prieto, institución que en los noventa se vería obligada a renovar sus estrategias de política cultural en un mundo sin Campo Socialista: “Había llegado la hora de rectificar errores, de barrer prejuicios, de encontrar formulas inéditas para el ejercicio de una democracia socialista participativa.”26 Ocupa la cubierta de Dinosauria soy una pieza de la serie Aguas territoriales de Luis Martínez Pedro, donde tanto mar en realidad afirma aquello que limita: la isla. Por lo que en su introspección, Pogolotti aspira a compartirnos su definición del país.27 Numerosos textos vetados de impublicables alcanzan la edición cubana una vez que el tiempo amortigua su impacto. Igual, las autoridades culturales conocen de recursos como el control de tiradas, distribución y comercialización. Quizás por eso el poeta Antonio Desquirón avanzaba sus “Memorias” —título provisional— sin preocuparle su destino inmediato. No había conseguido editar un libro en Cuba hasta la edad de cuarenta y cinco años, y sus siguientes cuatro cuadernos aparecieron en un lapso de dos décadas. Más cercano en el tono narrativo a Reinaldo Arenas que a Heberto Padilla, Raúl Martínez y Graziella Pogolotti, Desquirón acude a un componente inusual en el enfoque intelectual de la historia cubana: el sentido común: “Las ideas políticas se parecen al amor: si estás enamorado de verdad, todo te parece bueno y lo demás importa poco.”28 Pero si Pogolotti ofrece el panorama de la Universidad de La Habana de finales de los sesenta e inicios de los setenta desde el punto de vista de un profesor, Desquirón propone el del alumno. El suyo es un muestrario de la juventud cubana de la época, de la bohemia universitaria y la variante cubana del hipismo: la onda. Un ambiente al que han vuelto en sus novelas sus antiguos condiscípulos Carlos Victoria (en La travesía secreta) y Abel Prieto (en El vuelo del gato): En realidad la política apenas ocupaba sitio en nuestras conversaciones: quizás un instante para relatar un hecho o una ley. No había gente pro ni contra; sencillamente la

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Cinco recuerdos del porvenir : 77 política no existía. Creo que el franco rechazo que sentía el Régimen por la Onda se debía a eso mismo: a que lo ignoraba. Las razones que esgrimió para combatirla eran consecuencia de realidades más profundas. La “vagancia,” las “desviaciones” y las extravagancias atribuidas a la Onda, en realidad expresaban la brecha existente entre lo que esa juventud esperaba y lo que el Régimen era capaz de dar. La Onda ignoraba al Régimen porque lo sabía incapaz de responderle.29

Antonio Desquirón fue de los alumnos expulsados de la Escuela de Letras en 1971 —al igual que Carlos Victoria y Rogelio Quintana—. Responder desenfadadamente sobre su vida amorosa a un test de otra estudiante, acarreó a Desquirón que el director de la Escuela de Psicología, Juan Guevara Valdés —hermano del presidente del ICAIC Alfredo Guevara— iniciara una serie de interrogatorios y —nombrado decano de la Facultad de Humanidades— terminara echándolo de la Universidad. Un hecho que muchos jóvenes profesores y compañeros de curso de Desquirón —luego reconocidos profesionales en Cuba— cubrieron de silencio y todavía contrarrestan deslegitimándolo a él como creador. “En la Historia de mi país,” plantea Desquirón, “la adhesión al prejuicio ha sido una de las papeletas ganadoras más socorridas de todo el que ha querido trepar en la escala política, económica o social.”30 En el mismo 1971 de la encarcelación de Padilla, del memorable discurso de Fidel Castro en la clausura del Primer Congreso de Educación y Cultura, el adolescente Desquirón empezó a experimentar la trama de La broma de Milan Kundera. Años más tarde, se referiría a su conocimiento de “una historia plagada de hechos y procesos que tienden a disminuirnos e incluso a borrarnos como personas.”31 Su relato se extiende plasmando los dilemas y tribulaciones de un escritor cubano con “su expediente” —en el sentido perjudicial del término en la isla—, o los requisitos en un escenario cambiante, lo mismo para conseguir publicar un libro que para crear una fundación no gubernamental. Similar a Reinaldo Arenas, Desquirón ve su destino personal ligado al de su generación: “La promoción a la que pertenezco está formada por escritores que son más hombres de acción que literatos. Ciertamente, nuestra prioridad es sobrevivir. Lo que no empleamos en aclarar nuestras almas, vivir y escribir, lo gastamos chocando contra el medio hostil, chato e indiferente. En Cuba o Afuera.”32 En el poema “En la cuerda,” de su cuaderno Vista aérea, declararía: “Ni primero, ni segundo ni tercero: / en los files. / Como todo en la vida: nunca los planos / estelares, / Solo estar.”33 Heberto Padilla, Reinaldo Arenas, Raúl Martínez, Graziella Pogolotti y Antonio Desquirón entienden la literatura como voyerismo y no como exhibicionismo personal. Su interés oscila entre el contexto que evocan y el texto que perfilan. En Los pasos perdidos, Alejo Carpentier no se conformó en narrar exteriormente el esfuerzo de un músico por crear una pieza, sino focalizó desde

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78 : Carlos Velazco éste el proceso de composición de su Treno en la progresiva reflexión de La Odisea. En un momento de su viaje por la selva, el protagonista tropieza con una taberna llamada Los Recuerdos del Porvenir. Padilla, Arenas, Martínez, Pogolotti y Desquirón bebieron a pulso la época en que en Cuba el porvenir era el pretexto político para todo. Ese ensayo acelerado fue exitoso: conocimos una versión de segunda mano del futuro. Por tanto, como nos enseña la novela de Carpentier, porvenir sirve sólo de absurdo nombre para un bar. N O TA S 1. Textos de carácter testimonial como autobiografías, memorias, diarios y epistolarios —particularmente los publicados en años recientes— han terminado asistiendo a los análisis cuestionadores de la política cultural de la revolución. Pero a inicios de la década del setenta —momento en el que variaron los términos amables de la relación entre Fidel Castro y la mayoría de los intelectuales cubanos y foráneos—, el testimonio fue un género impulsado desde la institucionalidad. Tanto Casa de las Américas y la Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba (UNEAC) lo promovieron para diluir la noción de autor y, a la vez, legitimar como literatura los textos de numerosos sujetos discursivos implicados en la épica revolucionaria y en los movimientos guerrilleros latinoamericanos. Ver, por ejemplo, Goffredo Diana, “Testimonio in Cuba: Limits and Possibilities,” tesis de PhD, University of Pittsburgh, 1997. 2. La importancia de relatos personales como estos se incrementa en la medida en que los archivos de distintos órganos del Estado relacionados con la cultura sigan, con pocas excepciones, cerrados al público. Sobre el tema, ver Jorge Macle Cruz, “Writing the Revolution’s History out of Closed Archives? Cuban Archival Laws and Access to Information,” in The Revolution from Within: Cuba, 1959–1980, ed. Michael J. Bustamante y Jennifer L. Lambe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, de próxima publicación en 2019). 3. Para reflexiones más abarcadoras sobre el lugar del testimonio y la autobiografía en las letras y la política latinoamericanas del siglo XX, ver Jean Franco, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); y John Beverley, Testimonio: On the Politics of Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). 4. Heberto Padilla, La mala memoria (Barcelona: Plaza & Janés, 1989), 107. 5. Mario Benedetti, “Las prioridades del escritor,” Casa de las Américas 68 (septiembre– octubre 1971): 74. 6. Ernesto Cardenal (selección, presentación y notas), Poesía cubana de la Revolución (México, DF: Extemporáneos, 1976), 28. 7. Padilla, La mala memoria, 78. 8. Reinaldo Arenas, Antes que anochezca (Barcelona: Tusquets: 1992), 92. 9. Ibíd., 73. 10. Jorge Luis Borges, “Una conferencia recobrada sobre Don Quijote” (1968), Casa de las Américas 265 (octubre–diciembre 2011): 134. 11. Arenas, Antes que anochezca, 96. 12. Ibíd., 116. 13. Raúl Martínez, Yo Publio: Confesiones de Raúl Martínez (La Habana: Artecubano, 2007), 327. 14. Ibíd., 386. 15. Ibíd., 256–257. 16. Raúl Martínez, “Reinaldo: Se repite el mundo alucinante” (archivo del autor).

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Cinco recuerdos del porvenir : 79 17. Graziella Pogolotti, Dinosauria soy: Memorias (La Habana: Unión, 2011), 7. 18. Ibíd., 6. 19. Ibíd., 7. 20. Ibíd., 131–132. 21. Ibíd., 179–180. 22. Ver “La actividad cultural”, en “Declaración del Primer Congreso Nacional de Educación y Cultura (fragmento),” Unión 1–2 (marzo–junio 1971): 6–13. 23. Fidel Castro Ruz, Palabras a los intelectuales (Departamento de Versiones Taquigráficas del Gobierno Revolucionario), 30 de junio de 1961, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1961/ esp/f300661e.html. 24. Ernesto Che Guevara, El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba, 1965, https://www.marxists. org/espanol/guevara/65-socyh.htm. 25. Pogolotti, Dinosauria soy, 211. 26. Ibíd., 248. 27. Durante años, el título de trabajo de Dinosauria soy fue “La bulla,” que en la versión final encabeza el segundo capítulo. A su arribo a Cuba en 1939, huyendo de la guerra europea, la noche en que la embarcación permaneció al pairo, el bullicio fue el primer elemento de La Habana que le llegó al pintor Marcelo Pogolotti (cubano), a su esposa Sonia Jacobson (rusa) y a la niña de ambos, Graziella (criada entre Italia y Francia). A Marcelo, por su precipitada pérdida de la visión; a las dos mujeres, por cuestiones de idioma. 28. Antonio Desquirón, “Memorias” (2012), inédito. Nunca nos vimos personalmente. Él permanecía en Cuabitas, Santiago de Cuba, y entre nuestra primera conversación telefónica en 2011 y su muerte en 2014, nunca viajó a La Habana. Después de varias llamadas en las que eran muchas mis preguntas sobre Carlos Victoria —no me atrevía a solicitarle una entrevista—, soltó: “A ver, ¿cuándo me vas a enviar el cuestionario sobre Carlos?” Al respondernos a Elizabeth Mirabal y a mí, nos decía en un e-mail el 31 de mayo de 2011: “Las preguntas de ustedes me hicieron [sic] y me revolvieron mucho.” La entrevista terminó recogida en Chakras: Historias de la Cuba dispersa (Madrid: Verbum, 2014). Fue ese trabajo el que lo impulsó a enviarme sus “Memorias” en el mismo año que las terminó. 29. “Desquirón, “Memorias.” 30. Ibíd. 31. Antonio Desquirón, “Carlos Victoria, una travesía de 40 años,” SiC 42 (Santiago de Cuba, abril–junio 2009): 31. 32. Desquirón, “Memorias.” 33. Antonio Desquirón, “En la cuerda,” en Vista aérea (Santiago de Cuba: Oriente, 2010), 69.

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C A RY A I L E E N G A R C Í A Y E RO

The State within the Arts: A Study of Cuba’s Cultural Policy, 1940–1958 A B S T R AC T This article illustrates the vibrancy of Cuba’s cultural policy during the governments of Fulgencio Batista, Ramón Grau San Martín, and Carlos Prío Socarrás, from 1940 to 1958. It analyzes comparatively four areas of cultural policy to highlight the consistent institutional work done by the state: art education, art and government legitimacy, artiststate labor relations, and censorship of the arts. It explains how these administrations aimed to regulate arts education by controlling its content, its academic structure, the art personnel, and student financial aid. The state also regulated artists’ labor by mediating between performers and entertainment businessmen. The Partido Socialista Popular and its links to artists’ federations was a major influence in the positive support of the state for cultural workers during the first Batista government and during Grau’s administration. In addition, all the governments used cultural policy to promote the image of a modern and progressive Cuba to bring legitimacy to their rule. However, as Batista’s need for legitimacy after 1952 was greater than that of his democratically elected predecessors, his cultural policies were larger in scope, reach, and size. My work aims to clarify the origins, causes, and implementation of censorship and the repression of artists during this time.

RESUMEN Este artículo ilustra la vitalidad de la política cultural cubana durante los gobiernos de Fulgencio Batista, Ramón Grau San Martín y Carlos Prío Socarrás, en el período 1940–1958. Analiza comparativamente cuatro áreas de la política cultural para resaltar el consistente trabajo institucional realizado por el estado: educación artística, arte y legitimidad gubernamental, relaciones laborales artista-estado y censura de las artes. El ensayo explica cómo estas administraciones reglamentaron la educación artística al controlar su contenido y estructura, el personal de arte y la ayuda financiera. El estado también reglamentó el trabajo de los artistas mediante la mediación entre artistas y empresarios de entretenimiento. En específico, el Partido Socialista Popular influenció el apoyo positivo del estado a los trabajadores culturales durante el primer gobierno de Batista y el de Grau San Martín. Además, todos los gobiernos utilizaron la política cultural para legitimar sus gobiernos. Sin embargo, como la necesidad de legitimidad de Batista después de 1952 fue mayor que la de sus predecesores elegidos democráticamente, sus políticas culturales fueron más amplias en alcance y tamaño. Además, este trabajo aclara los orígenes, las causas y la implementación de la censura y la represión de los artistas durante este tiempo.

83

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84 : Cary Aileen García Yero It was on the evening of December 21, 1956, that a group of Cuban visual artists gathered in Old Havana’s Zulueta Street, next to the Palacio de Bellas Artes, to protest the cultural policies of Fulgencio Batista’s government. The intention of these leading artists, such as Marcelo Pogolotti, Victor Manuel, and Hugo Consuegra, was to boycott the VIII Salón Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Cerámica, summoned by the Ministerio de Educación’s Instituto Nacional de Cultura (INC). They not only refused to participate but also organized their own “Contrasalón”—the Exposición de Pintura y Escultura Contemporánea— to encourage Cuban artists to “keep away” from the government-led Salones Nacionales. Included in their exhibit’s catalog was the Declaration of Principles of the Visual Artists Who Agreed Not to Participate in the VIII Salón de Pintura, Escultura y Cerámica Summoned by the Instituto Nacional de Cultura. In this document, the Contrasalón artists denounced the VIII Salón Nacional for “admitting in its halls, through amiguismos and politics, negative elements for the projection of national plastic arts.” They considered it “an obligation of the state to elaborate a program capable of fully spreading Cuban visual arts inside and outside of the national territory, and with it, to produce an economy for the artist (el artista) . . . that allow[s] him to sustain artistic dignity with the aesthetic freedom of expression required by art.” Between the lines, one can feel their indignation at the “rachitic and arbitrarily assigned scholarships” and the “exhibitions performed, one after the other, without a program or orientation to point to the goals and ends of promoting our plastic art.”1 On the one hand, this declaration tells us about some of the issues that, in the artists’ opinion, afflicted the cultural policies of the Batista administration: corruption, lack of a clear vision for the development of national arts, and poor economic support for artists. On the other hand, the declaration illustrates that the government’s cultural policies were important enough to raise the concern of its citizens and spark their political activism. Historian Jorgelina Guzmán Moré has already pointed out that there is an erroneous, yet widely shared, understanding that before 1959 “Cuba had no cultural policy.”2 This assumption is grounded on previous notions of republican Cuba as “constrained and truncated,” often understood “in terms of failure, discontinuity, deformation, and illegitimacy,” in contrast to the dynamism of the revolutionary regime.3 Consequently, while there is an abundance of works on the cultural politics of the post-1959 revolutionary government, little has been written about cultural policy in the republican decades.4 It is only recently that some scholars have shed light on the vibrancy of Cuba’s cultural politics during the first part of the twentieth century, showing that the cultural policies of the republican governments mattered.5 A pioneer work is Guzmán Moré’s De Dirección de Cultura a Instituto Nacional de Cultura, which explores the important role of the Instituto Nacional de Cultura (INC) in shaping national culture. She argues: “The INC emerged as the result

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The State within the Arts : 85 of political conjuncture caused by the March 10th, 1952, coup d’état, when Batista took control of the country; therefore, his regime used the INC as an instrument of domination and legitimation.” She also suggests that the INC reflected the cultural preferences of the “bourgeoisie who directed it” prioritizing their interests over the educational and artistic needs of the popular sectors.6 My work builds on Guzmán Moré’s seminal study to explore state action more broadly—not just the work of the Ministerio de Educación’s DNC and the INC but also the role of the Ministerios de Trabajo, Communicación, and Estado on the arts. I look comparatively to the cultural policies of the governments of Fulgencio Batista (October 10, 1940–October 10, 1944), Ramón Grau San Martín (October 10, 1944–October 10, 1948), Carlos Prío Socarrás (October 10, 1948–March 10, 1952), and Fulgencio Batista (provisional president March 10, 1952–February 24, 1955; in power through the Progressive Action Party, February 24, 1955–January 1, 1959). I question whether there were cultural policy differences between the political regimes of 1940–1952 and 1952–1959, or whether there were significant changes in 1944 and 1952, in each case with a presidential turnover from incumbent to opposition. Similarly, I explore whether the cultural policies of the Auténtico governments (1944–1952) differed from those of the 1940–1944 Batista coalition.7 I study four specific areas of cultural policy: art education, the use of cultural policy to build government legitimacy, artist-state labor relations, and censorship of the arts. I move beyond the role of personalities and point to consistent institutional work done by the state through its different ministries,8 such as the Ministerio de Educación, Ministerio de Trabajo, and the Ministerio de Estado, among others. Specifically, I argue that these four administrations aimed to regulate arts education by controlling its content, its academic structure, the art personnel, and student financial aid.9 Each government built on the works of its predecessor to further expand and consolidate music and a visual arts education. These continuities were embedded in institutional structures that lasted past specific directors and governments. In addition, all the governments understood and used the power of the arts in similar ways to bring legitimacy to the state by promoting the image of a modern and progressive Cuba. However, as Batista’s need for legitimacy after 1952 was greater than that of his democratically elected predecessors, the cultural policies and projects of his authoritarian government were larger in scope, reach, and size. The need for governmental legitimacy at home and abroad marked a difference between the cultural policies of 1940–1952 and the 1952–1959 political regimes.10 As such, cultural policy became a measuring stick to judge government performance. Each administration claimed it had done more and better work than its antecessor through official speeches and written reports.

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86 : Cary Aileen García Yero State legitimacy was also built through state support given to artists and cultural workers. The Ministerio de Trabajo mediated between artists and entertainment business relations. It regulated artists’ salaries, their right to work, retirement, and paid holidays. However, the governments of Batista and Grau San Martín (1940–1948) were more receptive to and supportive of artists’ labor concerns than those of Prío Socarrás and Batista during his second presidency (1948–1959). Furthermore, my research suggests that the artist labor policies produced by the 1940–1944 Batista coalition did not differ much from those of the Auténticos during the first years of Grau’s presidency. There is no clear change in 1944 with the presidential turnover from incumbent to opposition. The Partido Socialista Popular (PSP) and its links to artists’ unions and federations was a major influence in the positive legislations of both governments.11 The repression of the PSP as part of the Cold War environment after World War II, together with the demise of Cuba’s fragile democracy after Batista’s coup d’état in 1952, affected the freedom of Cuban arts deeply. It produced an environment of increased repression that justified the state’s censorship of culture under the claim of fighting communism. Another issue that led to censorship of cultural expression during this time was the state’s claimed duty to maintain public morality and decency. Scholars have already pointed out the repressive nature of the Batista regime.12 My work aims to clarify the origins, causes, and implementation of censorship and the repression of artists during this time. Ultimately, these governments nurtured their citizens’ belief that the state needed to guarantee the welfare of its artists and shape national culture constructively. This was not just political rhetoric—these governments often acted upon many of the issues they cared about. Paradoxically, even though they did much to develop and support Cuban fine arts, public opinion was often critical of the government’s performance.13 As mentioned previously, cultural policies were affected by issues of corruption, the politicization of art, and poor economic support for some artists.14 This led to public dissatisfaction despite the state’s active involvement in the arts. Even though this article does not focus on the implementation or the consequences of the state cultural policies—future works should study its outcomes as well as citizens’ responses to them—it does demonstrate that these administrations worked to contribute to the development of Cuban arts. In doing so, they created a solid institutional foundation for the post-1959 development of cultural policy. As in other areas of government policy,15 my research suggests there are important links between republican and revolutionary cultural policy.16 By exploring governmental action on culture prior to the revolution and pointing out continuous threads, my work enables future analyses to “problematize persistence” and challenge arguments that apply a “linear logic of changes and continuities.”17

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The State within the Arts : 87 Building Art Education through Cultural Policy The Dirección General de Cultura (DGC) of the Ministerio of Educación, and later its INC, were the main vehicles through which the state made art its “primordial interest,” as Guzmán Moré has pointed out.18 The Dirección de Cultura, created in 1934, was organized in two sections: the Sección de Bellas Artes and the Sección de Cultura General. The Sección de Bellas Artes was divided into the Negociado de Enseñanza y Divulgación Artística and the Negociado de Registro de la Propiedad Artística y Literaria; the Sección de Cultura General was composed of the Negociados de Extensión Educacional and the Negociado de Relaciones Culturales, Bibliotecas, Academias, Museos, Archivos y Monumentos.19 The Dirección de Cultura was first under the umbrella of the Secretaría de Educación. However, Prío Socarrás’s government rearranged the structure of the Ministerio de Educación and created a new Subsecretaría Técnica to which the Dirección de Cultura was transferred.20 The internal structure and functioning of the Dirección de Cultura changed little, however. It continued to be the main state organ for controlling and developing Cuban culture. In 1955, Batista’s government created the INC with the objective of increasing the reach and magnitude of governmental cultural activities. Like the Dirección de Cultura, it was formed by a Sección de Bellas Artes with a Negociado de Divulgación Artística y Cultural and a Negociado de Registro de la Propiedad Intelectual and by a Sección de Cultura General with a Negociado de Extensión Educacional y Fomento Cultural and a Negociado de Relaciones Culturales.21 The state regulated art education through the DNC’s and the INC’s Secciones de Bellas Artes. On August 26, 1939, the Ministerio de Educación issued a Reglamento that legitimized music schools by listing them in the ministry’s registry, which then sanctioned their ability to grant titles and certificates. To guarantee that the Reglamento was followed, “all the musical institutions authorized by the Secretaría de Educación will be subjected to official inspection, carried by the Inspector General de Música of the Secretaría de Educación and his auxiliaries.”22 The system for official inspections was further developed in 1943, when Batista’s government implemented a “useful and convenient” Modelo Standard to oversee the practices of music conservatories.23 The 1939 Reglamento continued to guide the ways the state dealt with music education in all consecutive republican governments. No change in political regime, presidential turnover, or directorship of the DGC and later the INC altered the content or regulatory regime of music education.24 The inspection of art institutions was not limited to music learning centers; the teaching of visual art academies was also scrutinized and legitimized through governmental evaluation. In fact, during Grau San Martín’s government, the state determined that the Escuela Provincial de Artes Plásticas

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88 : Cary Aileen García Yero Tarasco in Matanzas met the teaching and content requirements of the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes “San Alejandro.” Therefore, the diplomas of Tarasco should have the same academic validity as the latter institution.25 That same year, in 1945, the government granted the Escuela Provincial de Artes Plásticas de Santiago de Cuba the power to issue degrees equivalent with those of San Alejandro.26 In 1953, the Batista government extended a similar privilege to the Escuela Provincial de Artes Plásticas de Camagüey.27 To justify these decisions, the state declared that it was “the duty of the government to guard the progress and dissemination of culture and art in all its manifestation.”28 The Escuelas Provinciales de Artes Plásticas were supervised by the Ministerio de Educación and attended and sponsored by patronatos. These patronatos functioned as autonomous and financially independent organizations that sponsored and led the development of the schools. Nevertheless, in late 1952 the Batista government tightened its control over the patronatos by dictating more precise norms for their functioning and integration into this ministry. With the new legislation, the patronatos were to be formed by ten local members, selected by five prestigious institutions chosen by the Ministerio de Educación; the patronatos would solely look after the economic activities of the art centers, mainly looking after the monthly payments of its academic and administrative staff and rent, and develop new sources of income. They were required to report to the ministry regularly.29 The governments also regulated the disbursement of scholarships to study abroad and in Cuba through the Dirección de Cultura’s Negociado de Enseñanza y Divulgación Artística.30 The lives of Alejandro Enrique Camara Formosa and Francisco Kessell Vergara were most likely changed when they were granted a bolsa de viaje in 1944 to study painting and sculpture abroad.31 The same scholarship was granted to Jorge García Napoles and Eberto Escobedo Lazo when Grau was in office.32 A year later, the government organized selection committees to grant international scholarships to students who had the “required qualifications” to make the process more competitive.33 Federico Pedrosa Morkousky, one of the successful competitors, was supported to study piano abroad in 1950.34 Some of the most important visual artists of the time such as Agustín Cárdenas were beneficiaries of these programs during the 1950s.35 Governments also regulated the subsidy of Cubans’ art learning at home. For instance, San Alejandro’s registration was free. Students only needed to pay an inscription and carnet-issuing quota, which, under Grau San Martín’s government, was raised to five pesos for the first year and three pesos for the remaining years.36 In 1953, the Batista’s Ministerio de Educación adjusted the rules regulating the scholarships for Escuelas de Artes Plásticas. It clarified that scholarship receivers had the right to enjoy their financial support until the

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The State within the Arts : 89 termination of their studies. However, if the student failed a class during two semesters, he or she also lost the right to the scholarship.37 In addition to regulating the content of education and students’ financial aid, governments also supervised its art teaching personnel. It was the responsibility of the minister of education to sanction all the new hires from top to bottom. For instance, Señorita Silvia Fernandez Arrojo was probably delighted when Batista’s minister of education Anselmo Alliegro appointed her as the profesora auxiliar de las Asignaturas Prácticas de la Sección de Dibujo y Pintura of San Alejandro.38 On issues of the election of the institutional leadership, the relationship between the government and the professorship body was based, to some extent, on dialogue and negotiation. For instance, the Grau San Martín government decided in 1945 to change the procedures for the election of the director, vice director, secretaries, and vice secretaries of San Alejandro. “The government had received several complaints . . . from faculty regarding the reelection of the leaders of the Planteles de Enseñanza Especiales.” It was “the duty of the Executive to guard the normal functioning of the Planteles de Enseñanza Especiales.” Therefore, the government decided that these centers’ leadership “be assigned by the President of the Republic based on a proposal made by the Ministerio of Educación, chosen from a list raised by Faculty, to exercise their duties for a period of two years without the possibility of reelection.”39 Consequently, when new minister of education Diego Vicente Tejera named Domingo Ramos Enríquez for the position of director of San Alejandro and its annexed elementary,40 he could serve in the position for only two years.41 The Ministerio of Educación also supported the professional development of its cultural workers with engagements abroad during the two decades. For instance, the first Batista government allowed Enrique Bryon y Morejón, inspector auxiliar de Música del Distrito de la Habana, to go to the United States and Mexico in 1944 to study the organization of rhythmic bands.42 Similarly, Grau San Martín’s government granted Raimunda González permission to travel abroad in 1947 to study pedagogy and organización de la enseñanza.43 Through the Ministerio de Estado, the government of Prío Socarrás processed training scholarships granted to Cubans by the Programa de Cooperación Científica y Cultural del Gobierno de los Estados Unidos.44 Some visual arts teachers, such as Emilio Rivero Merlín, received a full salary during their time abroad in 1953.45 In short, the Ministerio de Educación of the governments of the Second Republic kept a close eye on the country’s learning of the arts. By deciding on matters of educational content, academic structure, art personnel, and student financial aid, among others, these governments reached widely into Cuban art education.

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90 : Cary Aileen García Yero Cultural Policy, National Image, and Governmental Legitimacy The proper functioning of and support for Cuba’s artistic culture was closely related to the interests of policy makers to situate Cuba internationally as a “civilized” and “modern” nation. Art was an important ingredient of diplomatic relations with other countries; these governments placed substantial efforts to bridge Cuba’s insularity through art. The Consejo Nacional de Educación y Cultura (CNEC) and the Dirección de Relaciones Culturales from the Ministerio de Estado were founded to promote Cuban arts abroad. In the “solemn inauguration” of the works of the CNEC in March 1941, President Batista exhorted its workers to “make viable the endeavors of the nation to overcome the conditions of man [las condiciones del hombre] in the fight for progress.” Progress would be achieved by “foment[ing] the spiritual connection between countries united through culture rather than race, because since childhood, consciousness of the necessary interrelationship between nations needs to be forged, so that these do not perish consumed by isolation and incomprehension.”46 Similarly, the Dirección de Relaciones Culturales was dedicated to “projecting Cuba’s cultural movement abroad”: its “razón de ser” was to develop “cultural policy at the level of international relations.”47 These institutions promoted the image of a progressive Cuba abroad. They created publicity material such as cultural magazines that “could be distributed profusely in all the national and international cultural centers as a means of promoting our cultural movement.”48 As the Grau San Martín government explained, these publications would “collect, for promotion inside and outside of the country, all the cultural activities produced in Cuba.”49 Examples of these cultural magazines were Mensuario de literatura y arte, Informaciones culturales, Revista cubana, and Cuadernos de Cuba, among others.50 The governments also promoted awareness of Cuban arts abroad by supporting Cuban artists’ international tours and exhibitions. For instance, the Batista government facilitated the touring engagements of Guillermina Foyo and her feminine orchestra through several countries in 1941. It did so because it was “the duty of the government to stimulate all private efforts that lead to the development of our culture and its exchange with other people of our continent, promoting this way the strength of the spiritual ties that unite all American countries.”51 Under the same reasoning, the government supported the presentation in Cuba of the poster competition “Un hemisferio unido” organized in 1943 by New York’s Museum of Modern Art.52 Among other examples, Batista’s Ministerio de Estado gave maestro Moisés Simón two thousand pesos to support his tour of different countries “since it will have very favorable consequences for the dissemination of our musical art.”53 Grau San Martín’s Ministerio de Educación also supported the trip of Raquel Lázaro

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The State within the Arts : 91 Suárez to attend the Exposición de Pintura Cubana celebrated in Mexico City in 1946.54 In 1948, the Prío government organized an Exposición de Pinturas Cubanas at the National Museum in Washington. It also created the Primer Salón Internacional de Fotografías Artísticas.55 In addition, the second Batista government supported Juan Miguel Segismundo Pons Cuesta’s trip to Italy as a representative of the Cuban government in the Primera Exposición Europea de Plásticos.56 As the governments of the Second Republic used art for international relations, they created institutional bases to establish international cultural exchanges. Examples include the increased number of cultural attachés during Batista’s first government,57 along with the signings of cultural relations contracts during Grau San Martín’s term.58 Furthermore, the Comisión Nacional Cubana de Cooperación con la UNESCO was established the following year under Prío’s rule,59 and domestic delegations attended annual UNESCO general meetings thereafter.60 The government’s proposal to have the UNESCO regional center headquarters established in Havana was approved in 1949. The government labeled it “the most significant cultural event [of 1949],” with “full knowledge of the high prestige and significance [this would bring] to Cuba, both in the national as in the international order.”61 Governmental support for the arts became a source of legitimacy, and cultural policies were used to evaluate government performance and effectiveness. Contemporary writings demonstrate this claim. Writing in support of Fulgencio Batista, for instance, Jose Cabús argued in 1944 that the country had “advanced very much” and mentioned the administration’s cultural policies to support his statement. Specifically, he praised the increase of registrations at music education centers, and the improvements done to the institutional organization of San Alejandro.62 In the Historia de la nación cubana (1952), the leading historians of the time, including Ramiro Guerra y Sánchez, Josá Ma. Pérez Cabrera, Juan Remos, and Emeterio Santovenia, evaluated the governments of the Second Republic through their promotion and support for the arts. They wrote that artistic studies “have notably progressed, not only regarding the core curricula, but also the multiplicity of [art] educational centers.”63 Similarly, Ulpiano Vegas legitimized Batista’s second time in power, wondering at Batista’s achievements in cultural policy. He celebrated Batista’s inauguration of the Palacio de Bellas Artes and the national museums, as well as Batista’s Plaza de la República project, “with the adjacent buildings, among them the National Theater.”64 These governments understood the relevance of their cultural policies for building governmental legitimacy and gaining public support; they made sure citizens were well informed of the state’s involvement in the arts. In addition to the cultural magazines and cuadernos mentioned earlier, the state also promoted its cultural policies through official speeches and written reports to highlight the

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92 : Cary Aileen García Yero president’s involvement in Cuba’s cultural development. For instance, Ministro de Educación Juan Remos gave Batista full credit for the creation of the CNEC in his 1941 CNEC inauguration speech. He first lamented that “for a long time the Consejo Nacional de Educación y Cultura had been a longing of those who understood the importance and need of its creation.” He then rejoiced and thanked Batista, because finally “the Honorable Mr. President of the Republic had organized it and made it a reality.”65 Similarly, the government of Prío Socarrás deemed it necessary to publish an inventory of the cultural achievements of his government. The Ministerio de Educación published in 1951 Actividades Culturales del Gobierno de Carlos Prío, with forewords by Aureliano Sánchez Arango, then minister of education. Here, Sánchez Arango situated Prío Socarrás and his government historically, arguing that during colonial times the Cuban people had been “indifferent” to culture and that only “during these last years,” that is, under Prío’s government, had cultural growth “been substantial.” The Dirección de Cultura under previous administrations had been “timid,” but President Prío had allegedly come to office with “an effective and realistic plan to end this situation.”66 The document continues then to make reference to all the achievements of Prío’s government in relation to cultural activities. The need to bring governmental legitimacy through the performance of national culture sometimes led government officials to state false information. For instance, the director of the DGC, Raul Roa, argued in 1950 that “the Misiones Culturales constitute the first effort carried on in Cuba to bring culture to the lower social sectors of the population.”67 In fact, the Misiones Culturales were the continuation of previous governmental efforts to bring art to Cuba’s countryside.68 During Batista’s first term in power, the Ministerio de Educación ran a rural program called Teatro—Biblioteca del Pueblo, with the goals of “bringing to the people, there where it had never reached, ‘the pleasure and benefit of arts and spiritual solidarity: the book and the stage put to the service of the people freely, to spread knowledge of human values and the study of Cubanidad.’”69 “Educate and entertain” were the raison d’être of these troupes. They moved in a bus that had a stage and a library of more than eight hundred volumes attached to it and performed in the central plazas of the rural towns they visited, introducing the play with an educational talk. The artists performed theater plays such as Abdala by José Martí and La nube gris by Eugenio Florit to promote national sentiments through art.70 The teatro was suspended in August 1942 after performing 161 shows of thirteen plays.71 It was resumed shortly during the government of Grau San Martín. During the summer of 1948, the teatro performed in small towns such as Campo Florido, Arroyo Arenas, and Guira de Melena. It was interrupted again because of transportation issues and because of the government’s intentions to reorganize it into what became the Misiones Culturales.72 As of October 1950, the Misiones Culturales had “traveled six thousand kilometers through the island, visiting 40

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The State within the Arts : 93 towns, from bateyes of sugar ingenios to provincial capitals, benefiting around 16,000 people.” The misiones showed movies, educational documentaries, nationalist theater, folkloric dances from Poland, Hungary, Norway, Mexico, and Cuba, classic ballet, and piano and violin concerts. They also carried a small pre-Columbian art museum and paintings by Cuban artists.73 These efforts did not stop with the Prío government but were expanded during Batista’s second government. In 1954, the state created the program Organización Nacional de Bibliotecas Ambulantes y Populares (ONBAP). Like their antecessors, the ONBAP’s goal was to establish a net of “popular movable libraries” and to celebrate competitions, fairs, exhibits, “and all acts that stimulates and protects the book and its producers.”74 It is easy to connect these Teatros or Bibliotecas Ambulantes of the republic with the ones organized after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution: the Teatro Escambray of the late 1960s, and its most recent incarnation, the Teatro Comunitario. Like its republican predecessors, they brought theatre and literature to Cuba’s rural areas to educate, cultivate, and “civilize.” However, Batista’s need for legitimacy after 1952 became greater than that of his democratically elected predecessors. Therefore, the cultural projects of his authoritarian government were designed to be larger in scope, reach, and size. As Guzmán Moré and Alonso González have mentioned, cultural policy was an important instrument of legitimation of the Batista regime.75 His interventions on national culture were dynamic and grandiose: His government created the INC in an effort to overhaul and expand the work previously done by the DGC; he pursued the completion of massive construction projects for cultural institutions such as the Museo National de Bellas Artes, the Teatro Nacional, the Biblioteca Nacional, and the Plaza Cívica. This was accompanied by the creation of supporting institutions, such as the Patronato de Bellas Artes y Museos Nacionales.76 Similarly the Patronato del Teatro Nacional was restructured in April 1952 to support building the new Teatro Nacional.77 Furthermore, Batista aimed to develop the largest to date system of public libraries, the ONBAP.78 In short, support for the arts was a source of government legitimacy during the Second Republic. Conversely, governmental legitimacy built through cultural policies promoted citizens’ expectations of state involvement in and support for national arts and developed ties between the arts, the artists, and the state. Policy makers used a recurrent official discourse that made clear it was “the duty of the government to propitiate all that broadens and improves the culture of the country, facilitating and sponsoring all acts that contribute to the promotion of fine arts.”79 Moreover, the different nature of the pre- and post1952 regimes of governance were reflected in the cultural policies that were produced—there was a correlation between governmental legitimacy and the size and scope of state cultural policies.

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94 : Cary Aileen García Yero Cultural Policy and Government-Artists Relations It was the government’s business not only to regulate the education and the development of the arts but also to be involved in the welfare of Cuban artists and cultural workers. The 1940 Constitution stated that the right to work was an “inalienable right of the individual” and the “maintenance of full employment [was] a national responsibility.”80 Moreover, since 1935, the Nationalization of Work Law mandated that all business and corporations had to have at least a 50 percent Cuban work force. Both the state and the artists used their constitutional rights and the law: the artists to press labor claims, and the state to regulate the cultural workers’ social conditions, such as guaranteed employment, better wages, pensions, and paid holidays, among others. The governmental support given to artists and cultural workers by the governments of Batista and Grau San Martín (1940–1948) through the Ministerio de Trabajo was more substantial than the support given during Prío Socarrás’s and Batista’s second presidency (1948–1959). Moreover, the labor policies toward artists of the 1940–1944 Batista coalition were not very different from those of the Auténticos under Grau. There seems to be no significant change in 1944 with the presidential turnover from incumbent to opposition. As in other areas of cultural policy, the Grau government continued Batista’s support for cultural workers. This is explained by the influence of the Partido Socialista Popular and its links to artists’ unions and federations during these administrations. The Ministerio de Trabajo ruled on matters of the artists’ right to work and mediated between their interests and those of the music businessmen who hired them. The Batista government regularized the rentals and exhibition of movies and theater shows in 1941. It resolved with Decree No. 604 that theater managers in Havana, in the capitals of the provinces, and in towns of more than ten thousand inhabitants be obliged to offer shows whose programs included Cuban artists no less than twice per month. This decree was not properly enforced and in July 1943 the Federación Nacional de Músicos (FNM) demanded that the Batista government improve the surveillance of its implementation. The government resolved in their favor to “avoid abusive practices that impinge against the high interests of the national defense” and because “the current circumstances that affect the normal development of national activities have originated serious disorders to the artistic workers’ sector, making it necessary to strengthen those national measurements dedicated to the protection of a class so deserving of such tutelage.” It extended article 8 of the decree to require businessmen of cinematographic shows as well as theater shows to offer at least twice monthly shows interpreted by Cuban artists. This obligation was not to be met through means such as recorded music or film; the programs had to present Cuban artists personally, and their compensation could not be

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The State within the Arts : 95 inferior to the one established by the Comisión Nacional de Salarios Mínimos. To make sure the decree was fulfilled, the government created a Comisión Coordinadora de la Industria Cinematográfica y Teatral in charge of all that was related to the fulfillment of the decree.81 Grau San Martín’s government expanded this legislation in favor of musicians in August 1945 by requiring all first-category cinemas and theaters to include shows interpreted by professional Cuban artists and musicians in their daily programs. Invoking constitutional principles concerning employment, the decree deemed it necessary to “protect Cuban artists and musicians by providing them with work adequate to their capacity.”82 Artists continued to claim their right to work in subsequent years. They demanded that the Ministerio de Trabajo clarify the way in which the 1935 law for the nationalization of labor should be implemented with regard to ensembles working in entertainment shows in cabarets and similar venues. In 1949, the Prío Socarrás government legislated that entertainment establishments should use at least an equal number of Cuban and foreign artists.83 Artists’ organizations were often successful in their labor demands during the Second World War. Claiming their right to work, they secured governmental authorization for the continuation of dances and verbenas, Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays, from 10:30 p.m. to 3:00 a.m., despite restrictions in electricity consumption as a result of the war. Artists’ activism also achieved the modification of Resolution 86 of the Oficina Reguladora de Precios y Abastecimiento (OPRA), which established the rationing of gasoline as a war measure. Because “this almost prohibited using cars to attend clubs, cabarets, and other entertainment venues,” it increased the threat of unemployment for musicians.84 Similarly, the Ministerio de Gobernación prohibited the functioning of music machines such as vitrolas in 1945, “as long as it was in the detriment of the musicians.”85 The governments also mediated on issues of salary between cabaret owners, show agencies, and the Unión Sindical de Músicos de Cuba (USMC). The first Batista government standardized the remuneration of cabaret orchestras. The USMC complained that musicians were not paid in accordance with the rank of the club and argued that performers working in first-category clubs (the high-end, fanciest clubs) should be paid higher salaries. Therefore, in March 1944 the Ministerio de Trabajo ordered first-category clubs (Montmartre and Tropicana) to raise salaries by 30 percent, and second-category clubs (Casablanca, Zombie, Faraón, and Kursal) to do so by 25 percent.86 The Grau state continued to play this intermediary role, resolving in 1944 that “musicians, like all other workers offering their services in this Republic, have the right to paid rest, as it is written in Article 67 of the Constitution.”87 Further legislation was passed in October 1948 to regularize the salaries of artists. The Grau government required managers of theater, radio, or sport shows to keep written

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96 : Cary Aileen García Yero records of all work contracts and file them in the Registro del Negociado de Pactos y Convenios del Ministerio de Trabajo.88 The state was also involved in artists’ labor organizing activities. In 1946 the Grau government created a Registro de Organizaciones Profesionales “No Universitarias” in each Oficina Provincial del Trabajo to register all local labor organizations, including those of artists.89 It also legalized and legitimized workers organizations by registering them in its Registro de Organizaciones Obreras and approving their statutes. Some of these organizations were the Unión de Empleados de Espectáculos Cinematográficos de Cuba, Asociación Cubana de Artístas Teatrales Cinematográficos Radiofónicos y de Circo, and Federación Nacional de Trabajadores del Teatro, Radio y Similares, among many others.90 Furthermore, in 1947, Grau’s government established the Colegio de Compositores y Autores Dramáticos Musicales de la Habana, an official organization to facilitate the collection of composers’ rights, “defend the rights of all members,” and “promote the highest prestige of dramatic and musical authors and composers in Cuba and abroad.”91 With similar purposes, the same year the government instituted the Colegio Nacional de Profesores de Dibujo y Pintura y de Dibujo y Modelado.92 Artists presented their grievances and articulated their interests through their unions and federations, shaping the making of regulations with their activism. Alicia Valdés Cantero has explained that artists’ organizations during the 1940s worked closely with the Central de Trabajadores de Cuba (CTC) and the Partido Socialista Popular, the political institutions that mediated between artists’ organizations and the state. For instance, Valdés explains that as a result of “the efforts of the CTC and of the Comité Conjunto para la Abolición de Vitrolas—formed by representatives from USMC and the Unión de Trovadores del Son—the enactment of Decree 2307 was successful, through which musicians received their deserved protection.” Through Decree 2307 of January 5, 1945, Grau San Martín’s government prohibited the functioning of music machines such as vitrolas in bars and other social establishments to protect musicians’ right to work.93 Similarly, in 1943 the CTC Executive Committee presented a memorandum to President Batista with the demands of workers. This document included a musicians’ petition for paid rest and holidays and demanded enforcement of the presidential decree that required movie theater owners to give jobs to musicians.94 The ties among the CTC, PSP, and USMC strengthened through the celebrations of four Congresos Nacionales de Músicos between 1940 and 1946. Through these events, musicians demanded their inclusion in the law of retirement, as well as pay increases for the musicians of municipal bands. The fourth Congreso was attended by CTC and PSP leader Lazaro Peña between October 2 and October 4, 1946. Newspapers even announced that President Grau San Martín and then Minister of Labor Prío Socarrás were going to participate in the closing event of the Congreso. It

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The State within the Arts : 97 seems that they did not, however, as newspapers during the following days did not mention it.95 The PSP’s power began to diminish in 1948 and the party was eventually banned in 1953.96 As its influence on government diminished, progressive legislation in favor of artists’ working rights decreased.97 Cultural Policy and Governmental Repression The fall of the PSP not only influenced labor policy for cultural workers. The Cold War environment that emerged after World War II, together with the demise of Cuba’s fragile democracy after Batista’s coup d’état in 1952, affected the creative freedom of Cuban artists. While the state policies explored here were not all cultural policies per se, they affected culture deeply. Overt repression of communism and its related cultural activity started in 1947 with the government of Grau San Martín when the Auténticos moved against the PSP. During Prío Socarrás’s time in office, the government began to conflate policing communism with the repression of political opposition. The state’s alleged duty to maintain public morality and decency also led to censorship. The 1947 Commission for Radio Ethics (CRE), of which the Ministerio de Comunicaciones was member, allowed the government to censor culture to “protect” public morality and decency. Repression and censorship rapidly increased after Batista’s coup d’état, affecting the work of artists deeply. By creating new rules and institutions, the Batista administration used cultural policy to coerce artists in ways that, to my knowledge, had not been used by previous governments. Moreover, Batista used censorship against “indecent” content and communism to repress and control its opponents. As Rivero has explained, censoring public morality became an outlet for the government to police communist ideology and political opposition.98 Repression reached its climax in 1957–1958, when the Batista regime reached its harsher authoritarian moment. Early governmental censorship during these two decades can be traced back to legislation produced during World War II, which aimed at preventing the diffusion of Nazi ideology through radio. The 1942 Reglamento General de Radio-Difusiones Comerciales argued that the state had to protect the public from the fascist “enemies of democracy” and from “political manipulation, espionage, and indoctrination.” Radio stations were required to submit all their programming for approval to the government radio office at least five days in advance of its transmission.99 This allowed the government to control all radio content before it was broadcast, including art-related programs. With the emergence of Cold War politics, government censorship centered on real or alleged communist activities. As early as May 1948, the Grau San Martín government closed the PSP’s radio station Mil Diez because it used

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98 : Cary Aileen García Yero “its daily transmissions to incite class hatred, divide the Cuban family, and infiltrate totalitarian ideas, contraries to our democratic regime, in the mind of the national proletariat.”100 In so doing, the government barred one of the most popular Cuban radio stations, which based its programming largely on cultural and educational content. With its motto “¡Everything good to the service of the best: the people!” Mil Diez aimed to “elevate” the cultural level of the people through entertainment programing. Its music shows included some of the best Cuban orchestras and renowned Cuban and international soloists. It also performed theater plays, such as Los forjadores de la Victoria and Desfile de titanes by Félix Pita Rodríguez and El fantasma by Juan Herbello, among others.101 In 1950 the Prío government continued censoring communist ideology in radio and other media with Decreto No. 2273, known as Ley Mordaza, which limited freedom of speech in newspapers and radio. With this decree, the government conflated its “duty” to protect the people against communism with the repression of some of its opposition. The law was highly criticized by communist leaders such as Aníbal Escalante, who stated the law targeted those who “critique government functionaries through the radio.” He demanded that attacks against the PSP’s newspaper Hoy stop and that the Mil Diez radio station open.102 Hoy was an important daily that gave information on Cuban and international art life, among many other things. As director of the DGC, Raul Roa also criticized the government’s Decreto 2273. He argued that the decree “limits freedom of expression, affects private property, and transfers the qualification of offenses [calificación de ofensas] to an administrative office, when they are of the exclusive discernment of the courts of justice.”103 Additionally, the Auténtico governments used concerns over morality and decency to implement censorship over cultural content. In 1947, the radio industry created the Comisión de Ética Radial (CRE), a self-regulatory private organization composed of delegates from the Asociación de Anunciantes, the Federación de Radiodifusores Cubanos, the Asociación de Autores de Cuba, y el Ministerio de Comunicaciones. Through this ministry, the Auténtico government participated in controlling cultural content that shaped Cuban ideas of race and gender, often targeting Afro-Cuban cultural expression.104 With Batista’s coup d’état in 1952, censorship reached new levels of repression through the creation of new legislation and institutions such as the BRAC (1955) and the INC (1955), among others. As Rivero explains, even though after the 1952 coup “commercial television would continue the flow of programs, advertisements, and schedules, government censorship would frame a new style of television production.”105 In 1953, the government issued Law Decree No. 653, which gave itself the power to regulate all private and public broadcasting services and channels. Article 2 of this legislation claimed that

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The State within the Arts : 99 “the sovereignty and full dominion of the State over the channels designated for broadcasting services are inalienable and essential.” Article 3 stated that “it corresponds to the State to regulate the broadcasting services and assign any channel destined to its use, as well as to arrange international treaties to stimulate and normalize this service and to reduce interference.”106 The government tightened its control over not only radio and TV but also cinematographic broadcasting. Because it was “the mission of the State to regulate culture in all its manifestations, public morality, especially the coordination of propaganda mediums,” the government created the Comisión Ejecutiva Revisora de Películas, housed at the Ministerio de Gobernación. The job of this commission was to “revise, classify, dictate, and inspect all imported or home cinematographic movies intended for public viewing . . . authorizing or prohibiting their exhibition in the national territory.” The comisión would examine the arguments, publicity material, photography, and other documents related to the movies.107 However, beyond protecting public morality, this legislation allowed the state to filter communist information (including artistic content) and political opposition from public forms of media.108 As Rivero explains, “policing decency” became a productive platform to repress communism and political dissent.109 This same year, Batista outlawed the PSP and all their cultural activities. In January 1955, Law Decree No. 1975 ordered the suspension of all communist activities and organizations.110 To prevent communist ideology from infiltrating schools, the government dictated Law Decree No. 1976, by which all books or any other teaching material used in schools—including art schools— were to be scrutinized and authorized by the Ministerio de Educación.111 A few months later, the government created the Buró de Represión de Actividades Comunistas (BRAC) in May 1955.112 During the following years the government increased BRAC’s funds and activities.113 It prohibited the hiring of personnel who had a past history of communist involvement in any public service position in March 1957.114 In 1955 Batista also created the Instituto Nacional de Cultura. Batista used this institution to coerce and control artists through cultural policy. As Guzmán and others explain, Batista used state scholarships to coerce and silence opposition artists such as those of the Grupo Los Once. Artists who dared criticize the government were harassed and persecuted. Reputable organizations such as the Ballet de Alicia Alonso were denied government subsidy in 1956 by refusing to cooperate with the government. Members of the Sociedad Cultural Nuestro Tiempo, one of the vanguard artistic organizations of the 1950s, were constantly surveilled.115 Pianist Huberal Herrera remembers how he was taken to a police station during these years to be interrogated about his relationship to Nuestro Tiempo and was “advised” to stop any kind of involvement with this sociedad cultural.116 Guzmán Moré presents a long list of important artists, such as Harold Gramatges, who were harassed and persecuted

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100 : Cary Aileen García Yero by the government. Sometimes artists were disappeared, such as sculptor J. M. Fidalgo, who was taken by the police after they raided his studio and destroyed many of his works, including fifty statues of Jose Martí named “Para la Cuba que sufre.”117 The government began to suspend constitutional guarantees (rights 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 36, and 37) throughout the national territory for periods of forty-five consecutive days toward the end of 1956. Together with the suspension of constitutional rights, the government established “the censorship of all newspapers and magazines published in the national territory.” Important cultural magazines such as Carteles and Bohemia were censured intermittently, along with Prensa libre, Cine-periódico, El cisol, Mañana, Avance, Información, El mundo, and Tiempo en Cuba, among others.118 The Sociedad Cultural Nuestro Tiempo had to decrease its activities during 1957 and 1958 as many of their members were detained, went underground, or exiled.119 Conclusion The governments of the Second Republic had a strong presence in the cultural life of the nation. They aimed to further the development of art education, regulated the labor of cultural workers, and promoted cultural activity at home and abroad through state institutions. Governmental involvement on culture created the conditions for revolutionary policy makers after 1959 to imagine—and for the citizenry to desire and expect—cultural policies that provided art for the people, as well as regulated artistic activity from the local to the national level. For instance, supervision of art education continued to be an important concern of the revolutionary state, administering old schools such as San Alejandro and creating new ones such as the Escuelas Nacionales de Artes. Many of the ways in which the revolutionary government reached the population through art were grounded in republican programs such as the rural art project Teatro Comunitario, or the Misiones Culturales, which under the revolutionary leadership became the Teatro Escambray. Similarly, the republican local centers for popular culture required by the 1940 Constitution reincarnated after 1959 as the Casas de la Cultura in many municipalities of the country. The revolutionary government continued to use culture to build state legitimacy. Like its predecessors, it produced texts that distinguished revolutionary governmental action on culture compared to the “backwardness” of the past. For instance, a document prepared by Jaime Saruski and Gerardo Mosquera for UNESCO in 1979 describes the republican governments as puppets of the United States, characterized by inadequacies in all areas, including culture. They argue that the revolution’s “basic objective was to develop culture”; Cuban culture needed “far-reaching changes, which were indispensable for the cultural transformation called for by the new historical reality.”120 The government also main-

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The State within the Arts : 101 tained and increased the control of artists’ labor, creating institutions such as the Unión Nacional de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba, the Centro Nacional de la Música de Concierto, and the Instituto de la Música, among others. Censorship and repression of cultural production was also part of revolutionary rule, beginning with the censorship of the documentary PM and culminating in the 1970s with the Quinquenio Gris. How republican cultural policies “persisted” in revolutionary contingencies needs further investigation. Future studies could deepen our understanding of how the effectiveness and power of post-1959 cultural policy was facilitated by the availability of an experienced body of state cultural officials and by an already-existing republican institutional infrastructure in place.121 Future works could move beyond state discourse to explore governmental implementation of cultural policies, as well as citizens’ responses to them. One wonders how corruption affected the cultural policies of the Ministerio de Educación. On issues of government policy and art education, the relation between art schools and the state, mediated by the system of inspectorships, could shed light on the quality of Cuban music and visual arts education. Nevertheless, a culturally vibrant and politically active republican Cuba emerges through these pages. The efforts of the contrasalón artists and other citizens to demand state action to develop national culture inspires further inquiries into the ways in which state cultural policies shaped republican Cuba in unexpected ways.

NOTES 1. Asociación Cubana por la Libertad de la Cultura, Exposición de pintura y escultura contemporánea, Catalog, December 21, 1956, and January 3, 1957. Personal Archive of José Veigas, Folder Year 1956. This archive changed owners in 2014–2015. It is now the property of Ella Cisneros. The organization of this archive might have changed. 2. Jorgelina Guzmán Moré, “El Instituto nacional de cultura, organismo estatal para la cultura cubana (1955–1959),” Caliban Revista cubana de pensamiento e historia 9 (October 2010–March 2011), http://www.revistacaliban.cult.cu/articulo.php?numero=9&article_id=100. 3. Steven Palmier, Antonio Piqueras, and Amparo Sánchez Cobos, eds., State of Ambiguity: Civic Life and Culture in Cuba’s First Republic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 6–7. This article contributes to recent scholarship that highlights the vibrancy of the Republican period and its importance to Cuban history. A seminal work is Jorge Domínguez, Cuba: Order and Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978). For more recent works, see Alejandro de la Fuente, A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Lambe, Madhouse; Kelly Lauren Urban, “The Sick Republic: Tuberculosis, Public Health, and Politics in Cuba, 1925–1965” (PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2017); Jesse Lewis Horst, “Sleeping on the Aches: Slum Clearance in Havana in an Age of Revolution, 1930–1965” (PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2016). 4. Most scholarly works are interested in the development of revolutionary cultural institutions and their role in shaping national life: Roger Reed, “The Evolution of Cultural Policy in Cuba: From the Fall of Batista to the Padilla Case” (PhD diss., Université de Genéve, 1989); Par

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102 : Cary Aileen García Yero Kumaraswami, Rethinking the Cuban Revolution Nationally and Regionally: Politics, Culture and Identity (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012); Robin Moore, Music and Revolution: Cultural Change in Socialist Cuba (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). Other works have studied the connection between post-1959 cultural policy and the construction of political ideology: Ariana Hernandez-Reguant, Cuba in the Special Period: Culture and Ideology in the 1990s (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Peter Manuel, “Music and Ideology in Contemporary Cuba,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 3, no. 3 (Spring 1990): 297–313; Angela T. Puentes, “The Politics of Music and Film: The Validity of a Local Government’s Cultural Embargo on Cuba,” University of Miami Inter-American Law Review 31, no. 2 (Spring–Summer 2000): 253–285. Scholars have also studied the relationship between socialist state cultural policy and citizens’ reactions and responses to it: Linda S. Howe, Transgression and Conformity: Cuban Writers and Artists after the Revolution (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004); Rafael Rojas, El estante vacío: Literatura y política en Cuba (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2009). In a collection of essays organized by Mildred de la Torre Molina, two essays cover the republican period. However, they focus more on private institutional initiative rather than on state action and cover the decade of 1950. Mildred de la Torre, La cultura por los caminos de la nueva sociedad cubana (1952–1992) (Havana: Editorial de ciencias sociales, 2011). 5. For instance, see Ana Suárez Díaz, ed., Cuba: Iniciativas, proyectos, y políticas de cultura (1899–1958) (Havana: Editorial Camino, 2016). The works of Hilda María Alonso González, who studies the emergence of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, and Yeidy Rivero, who studies the development of Cuban TV, during the 1950s, show the importance of state cultural policies during the Second Republic through the histories of these institutions: Hilda María Alonso González, El Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes en la politica cultural del Estado cubano (Havana: Editorial Ciencias Sociales, 2016); Yeidy Rivero, Broadcasting Modernity: Cuban Commercial Television, 1950–60 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). Some scholars have also contributed studies on the influence of personalities such as Raúl Roa on republican cultural politics. See Ana Cairo Ballester, Raúl Roa: Imaginarios (Havana: Editorial Ciencias Sociales, 2008). Guzmán Moré has published the first book that focuses solely on governmental cultural policy during the second republic. She analyzes the origins of the INC (1955) and offers background on the governmental work done during the previous decades. Jorgelina Guzmán Moré, De Dirección de Cultura a Instituto Nacional de Cultura (Havana: Editorial Historia, 2014). 6. Guzmán Moré, De Dirección de Cultura, 15–17. 7. The comparison between these four governments is limited by the availability of sources, which makes it difficult to assess comparatively the work of these administrations, especially quantitatively. For instance, I have not been able to consistently track the yearly budgets of these governments, nor the changes in the finances allocated to the DGC. Guzmán Moré (33–35) mentions that the Prío government increased the funding for this institution by 400 percent. However, the source used, a Bohemia article that quoted Ministro Sánchez Arango, needs to be corroborated by official state documentation and from data from previous years. Nevertheless, the sources do allow for an analysis of the goals and challenges, discursive strategies, and general action of these governments on cultural policy. 8. Guzmán suggests that two directors of the DGC, José Ma. Chacón y Clavo and Raúl Roa, were mainly responsible for the development of Cuban cultural policy before the creation of the INC. Guzmán Moré, De Dirección de Cultura, 27. 9. Cuba, like other Latin American countries, managed its cultural affairs related to fine arts through the Ministerio de Educación during this time. Cultural affairs in the region were linked to state policies on public education during the decades studied. It is not until the 1970s that the first Ministerios de Cultura are created, the first one in Costa Rica in 1971, and the Cuban Ministerio de Cultura in 1976. Harvey, Políticas culturales, 90–91, 146, 286. 10. The development of the international institutionalization of culture began in the Latin

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The State within the Arts : 103 American region in the 1930s with organizations such as the Unión Panamericana and the Instituto Internacional de Cooperación Intelectual. The Conferencia Interamericana de Consolidación de la Paz in Buenos Aires in 1936 generated several inter-American agreements such as the Convención para el Fomento de las Relaciones Culturales Interamericanas, the Convención sobre Intercambio de Publicaciones, and the Convención de Facilidades a Exposiciones Artísticas. Harvey, Políticas culturales, 168–169. Regional cooperation grew in the 1940s and after with the creation of institutions such as the Organization of American States and UNESCO. 11. This is not surprising, as communist parties have usually assigned a prominent role to culture. Communist parties in socialist states provide greater support for the arts than do capitalist states. Moore, Music and Revolution, 1–9. 12. See the work of Guzmán Moré, Alonso González, Yeidy Rivero, and Marysol Quevedo, “Cubanness, Innovation, and Politics in Art Music in Cuba, 1942–1979” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 2016). 13. There were similar dynamics between state performance and public expectations in the areas of housing and health care. See Urban, “Sick Republic”; Horts, “Sleeping on the Aches.” 14. Even though we read that the DGC should have enjoyed wide economic support, we are reminded that “the generous financial provisions for education in the Constitution made the Ministerio de Educación a center of wholesale graft which, by 1948, had become a national scandal” (Macgaffey and Barnett, Twentieth-Century Cuba, 191). Even though art should be free, government officials used their power in coercive and arbitrary ways, suppressing subsidies to deserving organizations, forcing cultural workers to accept the state’s hegemony (Guzmán Moré, De Dirección de Cultura, 47–49). While the government took culture to “the people” through initiatives such as the Teatro and Bibliotecas Ambulantes, we read that “despite its good reception from all the towns it went to, neither its elements were sufficient, nor the periodicity of its presentations were enough to make a change in the taste of the public” (Ramiro Guerra y Sánchez et al., Historia de la nación cubana, 310). Even though the government invested funds in sustaining institutions such as the Havana Philharmonic Orchestra, these sometimes functioned in unsatisfying ways, offering a “traditional repertory, depriving the people of having contact with good contemporary music . . . negating the inclusion of Cuban works in its regular programs” (Harold Gramatges, “Treinta años de la Orquesta filarmónica de La Habana,” Revista nuestro tiempo 1, no. 2 [November 1954]: 14). In Cuba Literaria, Sociedad Nuestro Tiempo, http://www.cubaliteraria. cu/monografia/sociedad_nuestro_tiempo/articulos1.html#manifiesto. For further discussion on the frustrations about government performance of musicians such as José Ardévol, Juan Blanco, Argeliers León, and others, see Quevedo, “Cubanness, Innovation, and Politics.” 15. For instance, Horts argues that “the [housing] policies of the early Revolution evolved from the republican state itself.” Horts, “Sleeping on the Aches,” 16. 16. My work contributes to a new wave of revisionist scholarship that interrogates 1959 as a historiographical landmark to better understand the meanings of this “great divide” (Marifely Perez-Spable, The Cuban Revolution: Origins, Course, and Legacy, 2nd ed. [New York: Oxford University Press, 1999], xi). “This new historiography explicitly challenges the narrative that the revolution was just a process of ‘true rupture’ with a clearly demarcated past, or that the revolution defined a before and an after in every area of the country’s life.” For an insightful examination of this new historiographical turn, see Alejandro de la Fuente, “La ventolera: Ruptures, Persistence and the Historiography of the Cuban Revolution,” in The Revolution from Within: Cuba, 1959–1980, ed. Jennifer Lambe and Michael J. Bustamante (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming in 2019). Examples include the work of Jennifer Lambe, Kelly Urban, Jesse Horts, and Marysol Quevedo, among others. 17. See de la Fuente, “La ventolera,” 2. 18. The creation of Cuba’s Dirección de Cultura coincides with the creation of similar institutions in the region during the 1930s, charged with the public administration of culture. For

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104 : Cary Aileen García Yero instance, Venezuela’s Oficina de Cultura y Bellas Artes was created in 1936 under Rómulo Gallegos and developed as Dirección de Cultura in 1939; Argentina’s 1933 Comisión Nacional de Cultura; Brazil’s 1938 Consejo Nacional de Cultura under Vargas, among others. Harvey, Políticas culturales, 180–192. Harvey (15–16) periodizes the development of the governmental institutionalization of culture in Latin America, pointing to the 1930s as the seminal decade for the creation of modern cultural policy there. 19. Félix Lizaso, Memorandum sobre la Dirección de Cultura, Ministerio de Educación, 1934. Archivo del Ministerio de Cultura, cajuela 80, carpeta 5. 20. Ministerio de Educación, Decreto (unnumbered, undated) and Decreto No. 3373, Archivo del Ministerio de Cultura, cajuela 6, carpeta 5, carpetilla 26. 21. Edición Extraordinaria Especial, Gaceta Oficial, 30 de junio de 1956, no. 2, Ley No. 7 de 1956, Presupuestos Ordinario y Extraordinario Año Fiscal 1956–1957. 22. Gaceta Oficial, viernes 8 de septiembre de 1939, año XXXVII, tomo III, no. 158, p. 4741, Decreto No. 2094. The decree reads: “The Secretario de Educación will sanction, recognize, and grant academic validity to the titles of professor of music in its different disciplines, or of professor of instrument, and to the certificates of elementary teaching issued by the planteles de música in all the territory of the Republic of Cuba, as long as the requirements of this Reglamento have been met. With their municipal, provincial or private character, they [the registered music institutions] will function under the protection of the Municipality or the Province.” 23. Ministerio de Educación. Resolución (unnumbered, dated May 27, 1943, signed by Anselmo Alliegro, Ministro de Educación), Archivo del Ministerio de Cultura, cajuela 1, carpeta 2, carpetilla 2.8 K. 24. Music School documents 1939–1958, Archivo del Ministerio de Cultura, cajuela 50. 25. Gaceta Oficial, viernes 22 de junio de 1945, año XLIII, tomo XII, no. 218, p. 12289, Decreto No. 1670, pp. 12299–12300. 26. Gaceta Oficial, viernes 22 de junio de 1945, año XLIII, tomo XII, no. 218, p. 12289, Decreto No. 1671, p. 12301. These patronatos were autonomous organizations that sponsored and led the functioning and development of the schools. They were financially independent. The functioning of these autarchic organizations in the realm of cultural development has been common within the regional context. Harvey, Políticas culturales, 95–97. 27. Gaceta Oficial, sábado 25 de abril de 1953, año LI, tomo VIII, no. 96, p. 7169. Decreto No. 804, pp. 7170–7171. Like the two previous ones, the Escuela Provincial de Artes Plásticas de Camagüey would be under the financial and economic purview of a patronato and its titles, certificates, and diplomas would have legal academic validity. 28. Gaceta Oficial, sábado 25 de abril de 1953, año LI, tomo VIII, no. 96, p. 7169, Decreto No. 804, pp. 7170–7171. Having an Escuela de Bellas Artes in other provinces alleviated San Alejandro’s burden and distributed visual arts education throughout the country. Nevertheless, it seems studying in San Alejandro retained its reputation and appeal within the student body. In 1956, the directors of the provincial Escuelas de Arte asked the Ministerio de Educación to produce new legislation to regulate scholarships for the study of visual arts. They insisted that scholarship recipients should remain studying at their respective provincial schools instead of attending San Alejandro. That same year the government resolved in their favor. (Gaceta Oficial, martes 30 de octubre de 1956, año LIV, tomo XX, no. 211, p. 21113, Decreto No. 260, p. 21117). Gaceta Oficial, martes 30 de diciembre de 1952, año L, tomo XXIV, no. 305, p. 25241, Decreto No. 4417, pp. 25243–25244. 29. Gaceta Oficial, martes 30 de diciembre de 1952, año L, tomo XXIV, no. 305, p. 25241, Decreto No. 4417, pp. 25243–25244. 30. Lizaso, Memorandum sobre la Dirección de Cultura. 31. Gaceta Oficial, martes 22 de febrero de 1944, año XLII, tomo IV, no. 95, p. 2785, Decreto No. 3916, p. 2788. In April 1944, two more scholarships were added to those already as-

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The State within the Arts : 105 signed to San Alejandro and its equivalent school in Oriente (Gaceta Oficial, jueves 20 de abril de 1944, año XLII, tomo VIII, no. 217, p. 6369, Decreto No. 989, p. 6369). 32. Gaceta Oficial, jueves 8 de febrero de 1945, año XLIII, tomo III, no. 92, p. 2849, Decreto No. 355, p. 2853. 33. Gaceta Oficial, martes 16 de abril de 1946, año XLIV, tomo VIII, no. 15, p. 1. 34. Gaceta Oficial, martes 15 de agosto de 1950, año XLVIII, tomo Quincenal Numero XV, Annual No. 189, p. 16289, Decreto No. 2405, p. 16301. The decrees usually did not specify where abroad. 35. Jorgelina Guzmán Moré, “Actores gubernamentales de la política cultural cubana (1949– 1961),” Revista latinoamericana de ciencias sociales, niñez y juventud 10, no. 1 (2012): 261. 36. Gaceta Oficial, miércoles 25 de agosto de 1948, año XLVI, tomo XVI, no. 198, p. 18369, Decreto No. 2763, p. 18896. 37. Gaceta Oficial, miércoles 30 de diciembre de 1953, año LI, tomo XXVI, no. 101 p. 1, Decreto No. 3265, p. 27. 38. Gaceta Oficial, miércoles 6 de septiembre de 1944, año XLII, tomo XVII, no. 497, p. 14563, Decreto No. 2763, p. 14565. 39. Gaceta Oficial, sábado 28 de abril de 1945, año XLIII, tomo VIII, no. 173, p. 8481, Decreto No. 1190, p. 8488. 40. The previous minister, Luis Felipe Pérez Espinos, renounced in late October 1945. (Gaceta Oficial, lunes 29 de octubre de 1945, año XLIII, tomo XX, no. 327, p. 21537, Decreto No. 3265, p. 21538). See also Escuela Elemental de Artes Plásticas y Aplicadas Anexa a “San Alejandro.” 41. Gaceta Oficial, martes 22 de enero de 1946, año XLIV, tomo II, no. 18, p. 1285, Decreto No. 4178, p. 1298. 42. Gaceta Oficial, sábado 23 de septiembre de 1944, año XLII, tomo XVIII, no. 533, p. 15683. Decreto No. 3008. 43. Gaceta Oficial, 24 de julio de 1947, año XLV, tomo XIV, No 171, p. 17409, Decreto No. 2138. 44. Gaceta Oficial, 1 de octubre de 1949, año XLVII, tomo XIX, no. 26, p. 20 45. Gaceta Oficial, jueves 15 de enero de 1953, año LI, tomo I, no. 12, p. 897, Decreto No. 4682, p. 915. 46. Ministerio de Educación, Discursos del Honorable Sr. Presidente de la República Coronel Fulgencio Batista y Zaldivas y del Sr. Ministro de Educación, Dr. Juan J Remos, en la sesión solemne de inauguración de los trabajos del Consejo Nacional de Educación y Cultura, celebrada la noche del 10 de Marzo de 1941, en el hemiciclo del Ministerio de Educación (Havana: Cardenas y Cía, 1941), 5. 47. Gaceta Oficial, 16 de junio de 1948, año XLV, tomo XII, no. 20, p. 1. 48. Ministerio de Educación, untitled document (unnumbered, dated August 24, 1949), Archivo del Ministerio de Cultura, cajuela 1, carpeta 3, carpetilla 3.2 M. 49. Gaceta Oficial, 16 de junio de 1948, año XLV, tomo XII, no. 20, p. 1. 50. Ministerio de Educación, untitled document (unnumbered, dated August 24, 1949), Archivo del Ministerio de Cultura, cajuela 1, carpeta 3, carpetilla 3.2 M; Gaceta de Cuba, sábado 9 de octubre de 1948, año XLVI, tomo XIX, no. 31, p. 1, Message to Congress of the Republic with information about the activities carried out by the different ministries, p. 59. 51. Ministerio de Educación, Resolución (unnumbered, dated January 31, 1941), Archivo del Ministerio de Cultura, cajuela 1, carpeta 2, carpetilla 2.10 E. 52. Ministerio de Educación, Resolución (unnumbered, dated November 4, 1943), Archivo del Ministerio de Cultura, cajuela 1, carpeta 2, carpetilla 2.8 T.

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106 : Cary Aileen García Yero 53. Gaceta Oficial, 11 de agosto de 1944, año XLII, tomo XV, no. 441, p. 12968, Decreto No. 2389, p.12988. 54. Gaceta Oficial, jueves 13 de junio de 1946, año XLIV, tomo XI, no. 135, p. 11365, Decreto No. 1323. 55. Gaceta Oficial, 16 de junio de 1948, año XLV, tomo XII, no. 20, p. 1. 56. Gaceta Oficial, lunes 11 de octubre de 1954, año LII, tomo XIX, no. 237, p. 19111, Decreto No. 2965, pp. 19111–19112. 57. Ministerio de Estado, Dirección General de Relaciones Culturales, Anuario cultural. The document does not specify how significant the increase of cultural attachés was nor how many there were. 58. Gaceta Oficial, lunes 20 de ocubre de 1947, año XLV, tomo XIX, no. 55, p. 1. 59. Gaceta Oficial, viernes 5 de diciembre de 1948, año XLVI, tomo XIX, no. 233, p. 21343, Decreto No. 3107, p. 21343. 60. Gaceta Oficial, martes 5 de abril de 1949, año XLVII, tomo VII, no. 3, p. 1; Gaceta Oficial, martes 14 de noviembre de 1950, año XLVIII, tomo XXI, no. 266, p. 24161; Gaceta Oficial, martes 26 de junio de 1951, año XLIX, tomo XII, no. 147, p. 12801; Gaceta Oficial, viernes 26 de diciembre 1952, año L, tomo XXIV, no. 302, p. 25025; Gaceta Oficial, jueves 4 de junio de 1953, año LX, tomo XI, no. 128, p. 9601; Gaceta Oficial, martes 9 de noviembre de 1954, año LII, tomo XXI, no. 260; Gaceta Oficial, jueves 24 de octubre de 1957, año LX, tomo XX, no. 207, p. 20533, Gaceta Oficial, viernes 28 de noviembre de 1958, año LVI, tomo XXII, no. 230, p. 23085. 61. Gaceta Oficial, 1 de octubre de 1949, año XLVII, tomo XIX, no. 26 p 1. The government promised to contribute ten thousand dollars annually for the establishment of the Centro Regional de la UNESCO in Havana. It would also facilitate a building in Calle Cuba No. 52 at no cost and grant diplomatic recognition to the officials working there. 62. Jose D. Cabús, Batista: Pensamiento y acción, reportaje histórico, 1933–1944 (Havana: Prensa Judoamericana, 1944, 353–360). Cabús explains how on the records of the Registro de Profesores de Música and of Conservatories dating from 1935 until 1944, the Dirección de Cultura had expedited 5,945 degrees in different musical disciplines, mainly piano, sol-fa, and theory, as well as 101 certificates of professional competence. By June 1944, seventeen academies and forty private conservatories had been incorporated into the Ministerio de Educación. Cabús also praises Batista by elaborating on how, through Presidential Decree No. 2860 of October 11, 1940 (the next day after Batista took power), his government improved the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes “San Alejandro” by dividing it into two sections, painting and sculpture. He also adds that in the year 1943–1944 San Alejandro had registered 348 students and employed fourteen professors. 63. Ramiro Guerra y Sánchez, José Pérez Cabrera, Juan J. Remos, and Emeterio Santovenia, Historia de la nación cubana (Havana: Editorial Historia de la Nación Cubana, 1952), 10:302. Specifically, Remos praised the functioning of the Dirección de Cultura at the state and municipal levels. “Through its offices much positive work has been done to expand cultural activity . . . through the publication of works, cultural magazines and cuadernos, and the organization of visual art exhibits, concerts, theater representations, etc., and calls for literary and artistic competitions.” As much as Remos praised, he also critiqued that “it is true that music, in its educational aspects, has not enjoyed the official support it deserves. We can still perceive the absence of a national school of music; the same thing occurs with the ballet and theater art.” 64. Ulpiano Vega Cobiellas, Batista y Cuba: Crónicas políticas y realizaciones (Havana: Publicaciones Cultural, 1955), 140–141. 65. Ministerio de Educación, Discursos del Honorable Sr. Presidente de la República Coronel Fulgencio Batista y Zaldivas y del Sr. Ministro de Educación, Dr. Juan J. Remos, en la sesión solemne de inauguración de los trabajos del Consejo Nacional de Educación y Cultura, 9.

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The State within the Arts : 107 66. República de Cuba, Ministerio de Educación, Actividades culturales del gobierno de Carlos Prío, con prólogo de Aureliano Sánchez Arango (Havana: Talleres Tipográficos ALFA, 1951), prólogo (unpaginated). 67. “Misiones Culturales en Cuba,” Orientación 3, núm. 3 (September 1950): 15–16 (Cairo, Raúl Roa, 40). 68. Similar efforts were done in other Latin American countries to bring bibliotecas populares to the rural and the poor. For instance, the early Ley 419 of 1870 was created in Argentina to foment art and culture in the illiterate and poorer sectors. In Colombia the Decreto 533 of 1881 created bibliotecas populares in all educational institutions run by the state, and in 1948 a system of bibliotecas populares circulantes in all municipalities. In Uruguay, a 1940 decree ruled that the government support the creation of libraries in the interior of the country at the request of the rural municipalities. Harvey, Políticas Culturales, 152–157. 69. Cabús, Batista: Pensamiento y acción, 355. 70. Jorge Domingo Cuadriello, Una mirada a la vida intelectual cubana, 1940–50 (Seville, Spain: Editorial Renacimiento, 2007), 55. 71. Cabús, Batista: Pensamiento y acción, 355. 72. Ministerio de Educación, Teatro y biblioteca del pueblo (undated, signed by Octavio S. Martínez, Jefe del Negociado de Extensión Educacional), Archivo del Ministerio de Cultura, cajuela 82, carpeta 3. 73. Gaceta Oficial, lunes 9 de octubre de 1950, año XLVIII, tomo XIX, no. 40, p. 1, Message to Congress of the Republic with information about the activities carried out by the different ministries, pp. 76–77. 74. Gaceta Oficial, viernes 26 de noviembre de 1954, año LII, tomo XXII, no. 275, p. 22231, Decreto No. 1810, p. 22234. 75. Guzmán Moré, De Dirección General, 55; Alonso González, El museo, 60–61. 76. Gaceta Oficial, 10 de marzo de 1954, año LII, tomo Quincenal No. V, Annual 57, p. 4509. Ley Decreto No. 1317, p. 4509. Creado para “ejercer el gobierno del Palacio de Bellas Artes y Museos Nacionales, a administrar sus fondos de toda clase, a vigilar las entrads y salidas en el territorio nacional de piezas calificadas de museo.” The patronato had “autonomous character and its own legal personality.” 77. Gaceta Oficial, viernes 23 Oct 1953 año LI, tomo II, No 19, p. 1505; Decreto No. 1341 de 29 de abril de 1952. 78. Gaceta Oficial, viernes 26 de noviembre de 1954, año LII, tomo XXII, no. 275, p. 22231, Ley Decreto No. 1810, p. 22234. 79. Ministerio de Educación, Resolución (unnumbered, dated November 4, 1943), Archivo del Ministerio de Cultura, cajuela 1, carpeta 2, carpetilla 2.8 T. 80. Macgaffey and Barnett, Twentieth-Century Cuba, 130. 81. Ministerio de Trabajo, Decreto Presidencial No. 2051 (dated July 10, 1943), Archivo del Ministerio de Cultura, cajuela 6, carpeta 5, carpetilla 23. 82. Gaceta Oficial, 7 de agosto de 1945, año XLIII, tomo XV, no. 257, p. 15585, Decreto No. 2100, p. 15588. 83. Gaceta Oficial, lunes 5 de septiembre de 1949, año XLVII, tomo XVII, no. 208, p. 18187. Resolución No. 1695. 84. Alicia Valdés Cantero, El músico en Cuba (Havana: Editorial Pueblo y Educación, 1988), 58. 85. Valdés Cantero, El músico, 67; Decree No. 2307 of January 5, 1945. 86. Valdés Cantero, El músico en Cuba, 47–48. Resolution No. 755 of March 9, 1944. The raise in salary excluded the amount paid to the band/orchestra director, who was usually paid double or more of the salary of the ensemble musicians.

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108 : Cary Aileen García Yero 87. Gaceta Oficial, martes 14 de noviembre de 1944, año XLII, tomo XXI, no. 630, p. 18689, Resolución No. 797, p. 18697. 88. Gaceta Oficial, sábado 9 de octubre de 1948, año XLVI, tomo XIX, no. 237, p. 21727, Decreto No. 3216. 89. Gaceta Oficial, jueves 17 de enero de 1946, año XLIV, tomo II, no. 14, p. 965. 90. Gaceta Oficial, lunes 18 de marzo de 1946, año XLIV, tomo VI, no. 64, p. 5221 (p. 5236); Gaceta Oficial, lunes 17 de junio de 1946, año XLIV, tomo XII, no. 138 p.11589 (p. 11607); Gaceta Oficial, jueves 5 de junio de 1947, año XLV, tomo XI, no. 129, p. 12769 (p. 12771). 91. Gaceta Oficial, miércoles 12 de marzo de 1947, año XLV, tomo V, no. 59, p. 5217. 92. Gaceta Oficial, martes 1 de abril de 1947, año XLV, tomo VII, no. 76, p. 6977. 93. Valdés Cantero, El músico, 66–67. 94. Valdés Cantero, El músico, 63. 95. Valdés Cantero, El músico, 64–65. 96. Even though some of the cultural work of the PSP was continued in the Sociedad Cultural Nuestro Tiempo (as several of its members belonged to the party), the influence of Nuestro Tiempo on state action on behalf of popular musicians and entertainers does not seem substantial. This is perhaps because Nuestro Tiempo was first and foremost an art organization, not an official political organ. Its relationship with the state was always convoluted, as it was known for its communist orientation. In addition, its members were most interested in elite art forms. However, more research needs to be done on these considerations. 97. Legislations on the rights and benefits of cultural workers featured less after 1949 in the state’s Gaceta Oficial, where all decrees and resolutions were recorded. A list of regulations found post-1948 in the Gaceta Oficial: the Prío Socarrás government passed legislation so that cabarets and other entertainment establishments used an equal number of Cuban and international artists in their coro sections (Gaceta Oficial, lunes 5 de septiembre de 1949, año XLVII, tomo XVII, No 208, p. 18187. Resolución No. 1695.) In 1951, the state passed legislation to create pensions (retiro) for broadcasters, artists, and cultural workers of the national radio industry (Ley No. 4 del 22 de mayo de 1951, Gaceta Oficial Extraordinaria No. 20 del 24 de mayo de 1951). See Mariano Suárez Roca and Juan Armona Pérez, Compilación ordenada y completa de la legislación cubana de 1951 a 1958 (Continuación de la misma obra del mismo título del Dr. Melo A. Borges, que comprende desde 1899 a 1950), vol. 4, 1951 a 1958 (Havana: Editorial Lex, 1960). It also clarified the definition of artist to guarantee the implementation of previously established labor laws related to the work of artists (Decreto No. 380 del 5 de febrero de 1949. “By which establishes which are the people who when working as artists in shows of various kinds should be considered as such, as well as what are their employers, for the purposes of applying to such artists the corresponding requirements of Decree 798 of 1938.” Gaceta Oficial, 17 de febrero de 1949, p. 3402. See Milo Borges, Compilación ordenada y completa de la legislación cubana de 1899 a 1950, ambos inclusive (Havana: Editorial Lex, 1952). During Batista’s second term in power, the government created the Sociedad Nacional de Autores de Cuba through the 1955 Law Decree No. 1918. The sociedad would be an autonomous organism formed by music composers and dramatic authors, to protect and enforce the authorial rights of composers in Cuba and abroad (Edición extraordinaria, Gaceta Oficial, jueves 20 de enero de 1955, año LIII, tomo II, no. 2, p. 1). Also during 1955 the government instituted retirement and pension rights for all private teachers (including private art teachers) (Gaceta Oficial, viernes 23 de diciembre de 1955, año LIII, tomo XXIV, no. 294, p. 22945, Ley 10, p. 22945). In 1957, the Ministerio de Trabajo dictated rules for the right of unemployed workers of the cinematographic industry to seniority (derecho de antiguedad) and to be hired (cubrir plazas). Resolución de 18 de enero de 1957, Gaceta Oficial 13 de septiembre de 1957, pág. 17741. See Suárez Roca and Juan Armona Pérez, Compilación ordenada y complete). The government also continued to register Colegios de Profesionales de Música such as the ones in Unión de Reyes,

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The State within the Arts : 109 Mavarí, Las Tunas, and Santiago de Cuba, among others (Gaceta Oficial, jueves 16 de julio de 1953, año LI, tomo IV, no. 164, p. 12353 (p. 12361); Gaceta Oficial, miércoles 15 de diciembre de 1954, año LII, tomo XXIII, no. 290. Gaceta Oficial, martes 22 de marzo de 1955, año LIII, tomo VI, no. 67, p. 4485 (p. 4496); Gaceta Oficial, lunes 21 de marzo de 1955, año LIII, tomo VI, no. 66, p. 4389 (p. 4401). It also continued to control the use of vitrolas and mechanic music (e.g., Resolución No. 430 de 31 de marzo de 1953, Gaceta Oficial, 11 de abril 1953, p. 6241, in Suárez Roca and Juan Armona Pérez, Compilación ordenada y completa). 98. Rivero, Broadcasting Modernity, 6. 99. Rivero, Broadcasting Modernity, 36. 100. Gaceta Oficial, jueves 6 de mayo de 1948, año XLVI, tomo IX, no. 17 p.1, Decreto No. 1485, p. 1. 101. Ricardo Luis Hernández Otero and Enrique Saínz, “Proyecciones e iniciativas culturales de los comunistas cubanos (1936–1958),” Revista temas, No. 22–23 (julio–diciembre 2000): 94. 102. Diario de Sesiones de la Camara de Representantes del Congreso de la República de Cuba, Sesión ordinaria del 25 de octubre de 1950. pp. 8–9 University of Florida Digital Collections, http://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00015180/01759/9j. 103. Cairo, Raúl Roa, 43. 104. Rivero, Broadcasting Modernity, 38–39. 105. Rivero, Broadcasting Modernity, 66. 106. Edición extraordinaria, Gaceta Oficial, lunes 26 de enero de 1953, año LI, tomo II, no. 6, p. 1. 107. Gaceta Oficial, lunes 7 de febrero de 1955, año LIII, tomo III, no. 18, p. 1. 108. EcuRed, “Buró para la represión de las actividades comunistas.” 109. Rivero, Broadcasting Modernity, 100–111. 110. Gaceta Oficial, sábado 29 de enero de 1955, año LIII, tomo II, no. 24, p. 1761, Ley Decreto No. 1975, pp. 1761–1762. 111. Gaceta Oficial, sábado 29 de enero de 1955, año LIII, tomo II, no. 24, p. 1761, Ley Decreto No. 1976. 112. EcuRed, “Buró para la represión de las actividades comunistas,” Ley Decreto No. 1456, http://www.ecured.cu/index.php/Buró_para_la_Represión_de_las_Actividades_Comunistas. 113. Gaceta Oficial, martes 31 de enero de 1956, año LIV, tomo XXII, no. 22, p. 2115, Decreto No. 126. BRAC is given a credit of 78,000 pesos. Gaceta Oficial, viernes 15 de marzo de 1957, año LV, tomo V, no. 52, p. 5201, Decreto No. 573, p. 5207. BRAC is given an extra fortytwo thousand pesos. 114. Gaceta Oficial, miércoles 13 de marzo de 1957, año LV, tomo V, no. 50, p. 5073, Decreto No. 538, p. 5083. 115. Guzman Moré, De Dirección de Cultural, 47–49; Hugo Consuegra, Elapso Tempore (Miami: Ediciones Universal, 2001), 145; Raúl Martínez, Yo Publio (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 2007), 282–285. 116. Personal interview with Huberal Herrera, June 15, 2013, Havana. 117. Guzmán Moré, De Dirección de Cultural, 47–49. 118. Gaceta Oficial, martes 15 de enero de 1957, año LV, tomo I, no. 10, p. 961, Decreto No. 78, p. 962; Gaceta Oficial, miércoles 16 de enero de 1957, año LV, tomo II, no. 11, p. 1089. Resolución 84, p. 1090; Gaceta Oficial, sábado 2 de marzo de 1957, año LV, tomo V, no. 2, p. 1, Decreto No. 463, p. 1; Gaceta Oficial, viernes 2 de agosto de 1957, año LX, tomo XV, no. 150, p. 14909; Gaceta Oficial, jueves 1 de agosto de 1957, año LX, tomo XV, No 4, p. 1, Decreto No. 2111; Gaceta Oficial, 14 de septiembre de 1957, año LX, tomo XVII, no. 6, p. 1, Decreto No. 2513, p. 1; Gaceta Oficial, miércoles 30 de octubre. de 1957, año LX, tomo XX, no. 211, p. 21045.

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110 : Cary Aileen García Yero 119. Cuba Literaria, “Cronología,” in Sociedad Nuestro Tiempo, http://www.cubaliteraria.cu/ monografia/sociedad_nuestro_tiempo/cronologia.html. 120. Jaime Saruski and Gerardo Mosquera, The Cultural Policy of Cuba (Paris: UNESCO, 1979), 11–13. 121. Quevedo’s work has already shown how certain 1950s composers were crucial to the development of revolutionary music institutions and policy. Quevedo, “Cubanness, Innovation, and Politics.”

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LILLIAN GUERRA

“Feeling Like Fidel”: Scholarly Meditations on History, Memory, and the Legacies of Fidel Castro A B S T R AC T In the wake of Fidel Castro’s death in late November 2016, the Cuban state inaugurated a nine-day period of national mourning and commemoration focused on the official theme, Yo soy Fidel (I am Fidel). Like the slogan Yo soy Fidel, the events organized to honor Fidel glossed over the impact of his authoritarian rule on the evolving nature of citizens’ agency and participation in the communist state as wholly positive and exceptionally empowering. One of Fidel’s greatest legacies, the enforcement of a “patriot or traitor” binary and the creation of an everyday culture of siege amidst the Cold War remained as undiscussed as citizens’ personal experiences and controversial views of Fidel Castro. Particularly inconvenient memories of Cuba’s “high Soviet Age,” the period of the 1970s and 1980s when Fidel reached a zenith of authority, seemed not just out of place but taboo. This essay responds to these deliberate acts of silencing by excavating the origins of Cuban officials’ idea that the Revolution had groomed every citizen to become future embodiments of Fidel. To understand this process and its meaning for foundational generations of Cubans raised under and by the Revolution, I examine state educational programs, especially their stated goals, methods, curriculum, and affective outcomes after Cuba adopted an officially communist pedagogy upon integration with the Soviet bloc in 1972. Cuba’s schools were responsible not only for the near perfect literacy rates achieved in the 1970s; however, they were also responsible for deploying and instilling a sense of siege and a drive for communist perfection that overtly subsumed individual identity, choice, and agency to ensure compliance with the primary duty that the party allocated to citizens: political obedience before the party and Fidel. Looking carefully at the affective nature of average citizens’ experience, this work explores what life “on the binary” of patriot or traitor was like, particularly during the height of the fidelista-Soviet alliance when foundational generations of Cubans charged with crafting a pure ideological and revolutionary identity emerged. That revolutionary identity hinged on the willingness of citizens to substitute genuine, structural power over the state with the feeling of holding power through Fidel.

RESUMEN Cuando Fidel Castro murió en los últimos días de noviembre 2016, el Estado cubano inauguró un periodo de nueve días de luto oficial y conmemoración nacional bajo el lema Yo soy Fidel. Al igual que el lema, los eventos organizados para honrar a Fidel

111

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112 : Lillian Guerra evitaron toda discusión sobre el impacto de su mando autoritario en el carácter evolutivo del poder y la participación del ciudadano en el estado comunista, presumiendo un saldo totalmente positivo y excepcionalmente inspirador. Uno de los legados indiscutibles de Fidel, la consolidación del concepto binario de “patriota o traídor” en la vida del pueblo y la creación de una cultura cotidiana basada en la plaza sitiada durante la Guerra Fría, resultó tan ausente como las experiencias personales y las visiones controversiales de Fidel Castro. Memorias especialmente inconvenientes de la época de alta compenetración soviética, las décadas de los setenta y ochenta cuando Fidel llegó a la cúspide de su autoridad política, parecían no solamente fuera de lugar sino tabú. Este ensayo responde a estos silencios deliberados, excavando los orígenes de la idea de que el estado preparó a los ciudadanos para que fuesen futuras encarnaciones de Fidel. Para entender este proceso y su relevancia para generaciones seminales criadas bajo y por la Revolución, examino programas educacionales del estado, particularmente sus declarados propósitos, métodos, currícula y resultados afectivos luego de que Cuba adoptara una nueva pedagogía oficialmente comunista como resultado de su integración al bloque soviético en 1972. Las escuelas cubanas no fueron solamente responsables por lograr un alfabetismo universal en Cuba en los setenta sino por desplegar y cultivar la sensación de vivir en una plaza sitiada y una vocación por perfeccionar el comunismo que sublimara la identidad individual, la posibilidad de escoger, y la autonomía personal para asegurar la complicidad con la mayor responsabilidad que el partido asignara al ciudadano: obediencia política frente al partido y Fidel. Mirando detenidamente la naturaleza afectiva de la experiencia del ciudadano común, este trabajo explora lo que era vivir bajo el signo constante de “patriota contra traídor,” precisamente durante los años cuando la alianza cubana-soviética predominara la escena en que se suponía que nuevas generaciones se encargaran de asumir una identidad revolucionaria auténtica e ideológicamente pura. Argumento que esa identidad revolucionara requería que cada ciudadano supliera el poder estructural y genuina sobre las decisiones, actuaciones y políticas del estado con la sensación afectiva de ejercer el poder a través de Fidel.

In November 2016, when the Cuban government opened the National Mausoleum honoring José Martí in the Plaza of the Revolution three days after the death of Fidel Castro, foreign journalists seemed flabbergasted: expecting to file past an urn containing Fidel’s ashes, they found instead only a large box of medals surrounded by heavy, velvet purple curtains and an honor guard. “Where is Fidel?” they asked themselves. Out on the street, some Cubans speculated that perhaps the government had refused to put Fidel’s remains on display to prevent (or impede) mourners from venting their frustrations by desecrating them in some way. Deftly aided by the alternative press known on the island as radio bemba (lip radio), other Cubans joked, “El que se creía el Mesías en el ‘59 ahora se ha convertido en Espiritu Santo. ¡Por eso no se deja ver!” (He who was deemed the Messiah in 1959 has transformed into the Holy Spirit. That’s why he won’t let himself be seen!).

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By contrast, surely no one in the upper echelons of Cuba’s Communist Party found the occasion of Fidel’s death a laughing matter. While twentyfour-hour-long celebrations exploded among Cubans of all generations across South Florida, the Cuban state’s nine-day-long, meticulously orchestrated plan of national mourning presented a striking contrast. Police cordons, prohibitions on gatherings of any kind and bans on alcohol sales demonstrated that Cubans in Cuba were clearly not free to react spontaneously to Fidel Castro’s death— whatever form that might take—because such reactions would have implied uncensored (and potentially uncontrollable) interpretations of his life. Four days into island commemorations, YouTube revealed the extremes to which Cuban officials would go in managing citizen discourse: anonymous sources posted a brief video clip of Cuban government TV reporters on a “hot mike.” Confident they were off camera and not being recorded, news anchors Froilán Arencibia and Mariuska Díaz discussed the absurdity of secret government orders that they not address viewers with the traditional phrase buenos días (good morning or good day), an order that both anchors passionately rebuked. Apparently, state officials gave the order because absolutely nothing good could be said or even implied about Fidel Castro’s death: the word saludos (greetings), remarked the disgusted anchors, had to be used instead.1 The government’s censoring of “good morning” for nine days also implied a secondary, equally important lesson: if nothing good could be associated with Fidel’s death—not even “morning”—nothing “bad” could be associated with his life. Now the all-or-nothing, with-us-or-against-us boundaries in which Fidel Castro had confined the process of the Cuban Revolution for decades suddenly defined not only his life but also his death. Moreover, the state’s commemoration of Fidel was oddly reduced to a ritual reversal of his triumphant caravan’s January 1959 march from Santiago to Havana. What happened to everything else? Wasn’t there more to discuss? After all, Cuban officials had nearly six decades of rule from which to draw a more complex narrative. In this context, inconvenient memories and legacies of Fidel Castro’s life appeared as elusive as his urn, giving way to a highly staged performance of official forgetting. Through displays of discursive amnesia, leaders signaled that the role of Fidel at every stage of Cuba’s Revolution could only be revered, not assessed. To the question of ¿dónde está Fidel? (where is Fidel?) a funeral procession to Santiago and state-organized mass mourning ritual supplied a strictly scripted answer. Yo soy Fidel (I am Fidel) was the official slogan of the Communist Party’s period of mourning for the death of Fidel, a phrase apparently meant to evoke a linear history of the Revolution’s continual triumphs in capsule form. Splashed across handheld signs and mouthed by weeping citizens dutifully recorded by the state and international media, the governmentauthored declaration served as a personal pledge. Long prophesied in school

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114 : Lillian Guerra curriculum, state media, and commemorative enactments of loyalty oaths since the 1960s and 1970s, the fundamental idea of becoming like and feeling like Fidel had allegedly reached its climax. Given that most citizens invited to file past Fidel’s box of medals in the National Mausoleum to José Martí were reportedly Communist Party militants, many mourners were likely hard pressed to forget how Fidel had once recast Martí’s role in Cuba and Cuban history itself when he claimed the mantle of the Russian Revolution and presided over annual Soviet-style military parades in that very spot for years. “Who doubts that one day the ties of all true revolutionaries and all liberated peoples will be as fraternal as those that today unite Cuba and the Soviet Union?” Fidel Castro had asked of crowds and Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev from a platform at the base of Martí’s National Mausoleum in 1974.2 Although foreign journalists may have wondered “where is Fidel?” in 2016 as they filed past an invisible urn, the more valuable question remained unasked: Where is history itself? Of course, to islanders who survived the ideological whiplash of the early 1990s when the Cuban Communist Party overturned its most “sacred” tenets in the name of economic and therefore political survival, official amnesia came as no surprise. History could be found everywhere despite its denial precisely because memories of Fidel, especially his words, were indelibly inscribed in the identities of vast numbers of Cubans. Whereas Fidel surely spent the last thirty years of his life justifying and glossing over the communist state’s embrace of capitalism, religion, and, as Cubans say, cualquier otra cosa que le daba la gana (whatever else he wanted), Raúl has shown no such compunction. In fact, with the exception of biennial speeches and those made every five years at the congress of the Communist Party, Raúl rarely speaks. However, Raúl’s silence and Fidel’s attempts to speak the state back into ideological coherence along an unswerving historical path have failed to cover up fidelismo’s greatest visible legacy: the construction and consolidation of a security state so culturally embedded that, until the crisis of the 1990s forced some changes, virtually the only role it left open for citizen political agency was deputization: the defense of Communism and the policing of dissent. Today, aside from the occasion of Fidel’s death itself, nothing better represents the marginality of citizens from state power than Fidel’s transfer of rule to Raúl in 2006 and Raúl’s 2013 promise to pass the baton to his handpicked successor in 2018, Miguel Díaz-Canel, one he fulfilled this April. A Communist Party bureaucrat, Díaz-Canel’s presidency still leaves Raúl, as head of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias (FAR, the Revolutionary Armed Forces) and chairman of the party, calling the shots. On all three occasions, island Cubans’ reactions evinced shock, dread, and then, inevitably, apparent compliance. Although many factors explain this, behind the seeming absence of public debate

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about the memory and legacies of Fidel is a multilayered paradox that lies at the heart of who Cubans of all generations are today. That paradox is what the great Cuban playwright René Ariza brilliantly described in 1983 after years of “political rehabilitation” in labor camps and jails for charges of homosexuality, ideological subversion, and related crimes of “social dangerousness.” The willingness to tolerate, even support, such policies had seeped into “the character of the Cuban a long time ago,” attested Ariza, “which is not something specific to Castro. There are a lot of Castros and one has to surveil the Castro that every one of us [Cubans] carries inside.”3 Ostensibly, the propensity to dismiss Ariza’s warning lies deep in all Cubans, regardless of who we are, because the alternative—to recognize our complicity with repressive states whether we reside in Cuba or the United States— continues to be as painful as recognizing the role of repression in ensuring both Fidel’s rule in Cuba and US policies abroad. However, the communist state’s discursive resurrection of Fidel in every island Cuban ensured that no one could look away from the evidence of their complicity with its endurance. If the Revolution’s liberating potential had been undermined, distorted, or betrayed in the previous six decades, it was not Fidel’s fault, commemoration organizers implied, anymore than the fault of all Cuban citizens. In this sense, island commemorations of Fidel’s death were strangely reminiscent of earlier moments in the Revolution when the stakes for silencing history in the name of stabilizing the political present were similarly high, such as the early 1970s when leaders surrendered to Soviet planners, fully joined the Soviet bloc, and returned Cuba to imperial dependence, albeit in socialist form. Determined to put behind them lingering memories of the complex struggle against Batista, promises of a return to democracy and state-induced economic strife culminating in the disastrous Ten Million Ton Harvest of 1970, the government inaugurated the “high Soviet Age” of the next two decades. It held the First Communist Party Congress in 1975 and then issued a new constitution that ended all pretenses of protecting freedom of expression, assembly, and association. Echoing his legendary defense speech after the 1953 assault on the Moncada barracks, leaders also declared the infallibility of Fidel and his closest associates with the slogan absueltos por la historia (absolved by history) and the refrain “The Cuban people will live with their Revolution or every last woman or man will die along with it.”4 Although hardly part of public discourse anymore, particularly as outrage over the Communist Party’s adoption of corporate capitalism in the early 1990s gave way to conformity, the memories and legacies of Fidel Castro’s all-or-nothing mandates remain silently resilient among older generations of Cubans. Gradually and some would say mercilessly, Cubans raised under Fidel’s rule were not simply charged with dying for the patria as the chorus to Cuba’s national anthem had once charged

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116 : Lillian Guerra their ancestors—morir por la patria es vivir. From the 1960s through the 1990s, the Revolution engulfed and then replaced patria. Fidel argued that the Revolution’s razón de ser (reason for being) was these generations as much as their razón de ser was the Revolution.5 There was no escape; political existence was the only one allowed. During much of this period, it was an internationalist revolution more than a nationalist one, allegedly born as much of Martí and Maceo as of Marx, Lenin, and, of course, Fidel. Undoubtedly, the paradigm of the Cold War seemed to justify fidelismo’s demand that Cubans happily follow Fidel’s orders, a rule enshrined in the once omnipresent slogan, Comandante en Jefe, ordene (Commander in Chief, order us). Living within and believing in the endless binary of patriots or traitors was the standard-bearer of identity for three decades. Because this binary first emerged between 1960 and 1961 when US policies stopped at nothing to overthrow the revolutionary government in Cuba, it is tempting to conclude that the greatest legacy of Fidel Castro’s rule is precisely the fact that he got away with it. That the US government and its greatest allies, US corporations, were not present in Cuba for most of the past sixty years (nor were they wanted) remains an astounding achievement.6 It clearly transformed people’s aspirations to sovereignty and raised the stakes for those who opposed political, cultural, and economic decolonization worldwide. Nonetheless, the liberation from US power that the Cuban example evoked came with conditions for Cubans, not just unexpected concessions such as the loss of all citizens’ economic autonomy from the state and the elimination of a civil society outside the political reach and control of the state. As I and others have shown elsewhere, those conditions quickly came to include the need to ignore and deny revolutionary forms of racism, the repression of all “doubt,” and critiques of state policies as divisive conduits of counterrevolution.7 Indeed, while the 1975 Constitution left out average citizens’ rights to criticize, the statutes of the First Party Congress reserved the right to criticize for party members, including the right to express one’s opinion in the party press and to “criticize any Communist, whether he holds a leadership position or not, individually or at Party meetings.”8 The fact that Cuba’s Communist Party was the smallest ruling party in the socialist world should not be lost on us; until the early 1990s when it expanded exponentially in order to shore up collapsing state authority, Cuba’s Communist Party numbered only 55,000 in 1969, increasing fourfold to 202,000 in the 1970s in a population that hovered around ten million.9 Moreover, party members enjoyed no oversight outside their own ranks; they controlled all sanctioning and promotion of their own members, free of citizen control.10 Thus, once institutionalized in the 1970s using such Soviet legal models, liberation through the dictatorship of a miniscule vanguard party strove to liquidate individuality and raise young Cubans, especially students, to new

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standards of sacrifice. Indoctrination campaigns aimed at recruiting parents to the task were overt on this point. Dating from the 1960s, one common poster featured a black boy and white boy standing side-by-side under the heading: “These children will be patriots or traitors. That depends on you. Teach them the work of the Revolution” (fig. 1).11 One could either be a patriot or traitor

FIGURE 1. Emblematic of Cubans’ national condition after standoffs with the United States in the early 1960s left both countries in a permanent state of war with each other, this poster posits Cuban citizenship as an all-or-nothing proposition: to belong and be Cuban, one had to offer unconditional support for the Revolution. It also reveals the early politicization of life and identity for Cuban youth.

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118 : Lillian Guerra in revolutionary Cuba; additional dimensions of the individual Self were either inconsequential or extensions of this primary condition. Soviet-style and Soviet-led communism, now firmly enmeshed with the messianic leadership and discourses of fidelismo, however, undoubtedly made the emotional mechanisms for enforcing the obliteration of citizen autonomy and the sanctioning of political diversity far worse. Beginning in 1972, state efforts to stamp out “ideological diversionism” surged, now broadly defined as differences of opinion, particularly among revolutionaries who studied and debated an emerging, global spectrum of Marxist and radical thought.12 Concluding that the “ideological poison” of “false ‘leftism’” most commonly took the form of “criticism,” the party attacked “ideologically colonized” critics who “could be nothing other than agents, through their work and their deeds” of imperialism.13 Cuba then plunged into a dark period of purges, intimidation, and repression that only waned in the mid-1980s when cracks in Soviet power began to undermine the Cuban state’s traditional methods for harnessing popular complicity. The abuses and tragic lifelong consequences of that period for its victims, especially intellectuals and artists, are largely undisputed, thanks to a 2006 protest staged in Cuba’s cultural field.14 While memory in these cases still mostly awaits archival documentation, most of us take the memories of average Cubans, especially the first and second generation of youth raised in the Revolution, for granted. Most often glossed in idealistic, wholesome, and even utopic terms are Cuba’s state schools. They have arguably become enduring symbols of socialist liberation from capitalist underdevelopment. However, as this essay contends, the deepest roots of Fidel Castro’s authoritarianism, the making of the little Fidel in each citizen that the state celebrated in the wake of his death, and literally at his wake in 2016, can be found there. Education, the very site of the Revolution’s greatest triumph, Cuba’s legendarily near perfect literacy rates, was also a battleground in which only one side, the Communist Party, could win. Thus, as millions of Cubans repeated the slogan “I am Fidel” after Fidel’s death in 2016, the obliteration of the individual for the sake of the survival and power of the state appeared, to remaining leaders at least, symbolically complete. Yet this essay contends that it is precisely in light of the state’s contention that every citizen, upon Fidel’s death, had become Fidel, that Fidel’s greatest legacy can be found. The conclusion that Fidel Castro overturned the structures of US imperialism to build the prosperity and empowerment of Cuban citizens on its ashes is ahistorical and flawed. On the contrary, whereas billions of dollars in Soviet subsidies and annual aid built the now financially devastated health-care, transportation and school systems, Fidel mostly built a towering surveillance state that endured and survived because it thrived, as he himself demanded, in the soul of every citizen. The siege reality of the Cuban Revolution’s first decade did not simply give way to a siege mentality on the

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part of Cuba’s self-appointed head of state, Fidel Castro; it gave birth to a siege culture, meticulously crafted by Fidel as he institutionalized the uncontestability of communist rule in the beliefs and identity of the Cuban people. How do we excavate these beliefs and assess the imbrication of a one-party state in the identity of citizens? How do we understand the meaning and impact of communist leaders’ ascription of Fidel’s resurrection in average Cubans? History calls us to look carefully at the affective nature of citizens’ experience in order to examine, even feel, what life “on the binary” of patriot or traitor was like, particularly during the height of the fidelista-Soviet alliance when foundational generations of Cubans charged with crafting a “revolutionary identity” emerged. That revolutionary identity hinged on the willingness of citizens to substitute genuine power over the state with the feeling of holding power through Fidel. Life at Siege: Cuban Identity and the Binary of Patriot and Traitor The binary of patriot versus traitor stood at the heart of Fidel Castro’s greatest legacy: the transformation of a vast “people’s revolution” seeking radical social reforms into a national security state, which in most ways continues to police possible alternative destinies by requiring and celebrating the notion that Cubans police themselves. By the late 1960s, the will to police oneself and others served as the primary marker of revolutionary citizenship. More than ever, citizens understood that cultivating certain attitudes was essential to being seen not just as revolutionary but, in the emerging political parlance, simply “Cuban.”15 In some ways, this was far from new. Since the heady early years of the Revolution when Fidel Castro called on unconditional support (apoyo absoluto) to defeat US imperialism, sincerity and near euphoric expressions of excitement for any task or policy were primary to belonging.16 However, after 1965, state institutions established paradoxical principles to define the New Man: the will to criticize was considered as integral as total loyalty and service to the state. Quickly the question became: Could one be both loyal and critical of the state? During a long fifteen-year period stretching from 1965 to 1980, workplace purges, internment in labor camps for political crimes such as “laziness,” and nocturnal, government-organized shunnings of individuals by neighbors known as mítines de repudio became commonplace. Knowing how to be a patriot without morphing into a traitor was essential. If the need for such strategies explains why generations of Cubans born and raised after the 1959 Revolution left Cuba, how and why did so many others not only stay, but integrarse (join in)? From the mid-1960s through the mid-1980s, the state achieved much of its legitimacy among citizens by creating and controlling citizens’ morale through powerful emotional means that made them feel as important to the continua-

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120 : Lillian Guerra tion of the Revolution as Fidel Castro himself. These included a general understanding of daily life and mass labor mobilizations as a process of national reeducation in the proper ways of being revolutionary. Fidel Castro and his supporters envisioned this process as making Cuba into “one enormous school, with Fidel as chief pedagogue,” what less charitable observers called “[one] vast reformatory.”17 Fidel repeatedly characterized Cuba as one gigantic classroom in which all citizens were being reeducated out of the ways and values of the past to become the “new man.”18 In fact, Fidel gave so much attention to Cuba’s future in virtually every speech that many Cubans joked that if the future tense did not exist, Fidel would have gone mute.19 Yet it was Fidel’s very focus on the future that inspired José Llanusa, Cuba’s minister of education from 1965 to 1970, to define Fidel as the embodiment of revolutionary pedagogy—the new man—and the citizenry incarnate: the people were as much Fidel as Fidel was the people, argued Llanusa.20 Communist Party founder and elder statesman Fabio Grobart later echoed Llanusa at the First Party Congress in 1975, extending the characterization of Fidel as principal pedagogue of the Cuban people to all party militants themselves and, by extension, the global communist movement: He has known how to forge the profound and unbreakable friendship between Cuba and the fraternal Soviet Union, between Cuba and all other socialist countries. . . . He has raised up the honor and prestige of our patria to never-before-seen heights in our history. . . . Over all of these years, educating and stimulating us with his example, he has participated personally in all our battles, all our work. . . . He has educated us in the example of his self-abnegation, tenacity, firmness and capacity, with his intransigent and consequential application of Marxist-Leninist principles . . . He has been and is the teacher; he is a constant educator of cadres and militants of our Party and the Union of Young Communists. He has taught us how to be a truly revolutionary party, a truly Marxist-Leninist party. . . .21

Implicit in Grobart’s excessive sycophancy was the elevation of Fidel above all other living men, an endorsement that he was not only the genuine new man in socialism all should emulate, but the long-awaited communist messiah. Despite Fidel’s official exceptionality and his ideological perfection, the state entrusted its interests to the masses, or so officials repeatedly argued, revealing an equality between leader and citizen that no other political system could rival. Political loyalty was often the primary qualification for promotion to positions of authority and, in the absence of material incentives, a sense of power was its only reward. This proved the system’s legitimacy, or so the Communist Party contended. Citizens quoted in the media echoed the party’s view. “Now when I walk down the street,” attested a CDR activist in 1968, “I feel as if I were Fidel! . . . Yes, I feel as if I were Fidel!”22 With this in mind, emerging state educational programs of subsequent de-

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cades impressed on citizens the idea that Cuba’s Revolution represented an opportunity to transform themselves into a higher form of humanity, a kind of suprademocracy and superdemocracy at the same time. To feel like Fidel was to incarnate the state, to be both the people and their leader—to embody a collective and an individual—simultaneously. This was particularly true of state pedagogy from the 1970s forward when agencies of the Ministry of Education worked to permeate all dimensions of the individual’s perspective with Marxist-Leninist principles through the creation of new curricula and texts. While teachers relied regularly on rote memorization and reading Fidel’s speeches instead of novels or social science textbooks, the walls of classrooms, workplace bulletins, and billboards immortalized Fidel’s utterances to render a constant echo effect.23 By the early 1980s, the burden had not lessened but seemingly increased. Fidel called for total surrender to the will of the state: “All the attention paid to the Party and to the [Communist] Youth can never be considered excessive.”24 The degree to which ideology drove instructional materials was truly unprecedented by the early 1970s, even when compared to the unabashedly politicized instructional manuals used in the Revolution’s early literacy campaigns and adult education programs.25 As of 1971, Cuba’s officials and pedagogues recognized that the “political education” of the past fell short and “communist education” was the goal. No aspect of a child’s cultural and ideological evolution could be left up to chance.26 “The Communist education of the students is the goal that Cuban educational system seeks” (la educación comunista de los estudiantes es el fin que persigue el sistema educacional cubano), contended the Ministry of Education in a new journal targeting pedagogical workers.27 Moreover, schools steeped adolescents in “moral-ideological education” as morality could not be separate from ideology. Target themes under this rubric included “formation of students in a classist concept of the world,” “development of Communist morality,” “development of socialist patriotism and proletarian internationalism,” and the capacity to defend their communist beliefs from attack.28 To achieve “education in Communist morality,” each child or adolescent “ought to participate consciously in [agricultural] activities not mechanically.”29 Because Soviet subsidies in the 1970s and 1980s ensured that Cuba no longer relied on voluntary labor to reach national production goals as it had in the 1960s, voluntary work in agriculture shed much of its economic urgency to take on an even more intense political role. In the Revolution’s second and third decades, the massive expansion of secondary schools entailed integrating hard agricultural labor into the curriculum. Through country schools built permanently amidst large state farms as well as urban schools that required months-long stays on collective farms, leaders sought to catalyze a proletarian outlook and mold an uncomplaining, disciplined personality best summarized in the slogan of the Communist Youth: Hacer de cada joven un estudiante, de cada estudiante un Comunista y de cada Comunista un soldado

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122 : Lillian Guerra de la Patria (To make of every young person a student, of every student a communist, of every communist a soldier of the Fatherland).30 As the head of a country school explained to visiting New York pedagogue and researcher Marvin Leiner, the “political work” of constantly explaining communist values like self-discipline was “even more basic in the escuela al campo [school in the countryside]” because students had to act alone in the fields: “[The student] must meet certain goals, and so he must be convinced of the necessity of fulfilling these goals, and of fulfilling them enthusiastically.”31 Achieving personal happiness through collective compliance thus formed the essence of a communist personality. When officials launched the new Marxist-Leninist curricula, the primary task of the teacher was to guide each student in “the development of a Communist personality in a precise and objective way” (el desarrollo de la personalidad comunista de forma precisa y objetiva).32 Directing teachers to incite emotional responses, particularly through the study of highly hagiographic histories focusing on Fidel or revolutionary martyrs, the Ministry of Education sought to embed ideological principles in primary schoolers’ sense of self and progressively personalize students’ resulting sense of duty as they entered middle school through Marxist-Leninist rules of etiquette and social behavior. These rules covered everything from how students dressed to how they ate and how the interacted with adults, peers, neighbors, and family. The overarching mandate was to “never defraud the confidence that the Revolution and most especially Comrade Fidel has deposited in the youth” (no defraudar jamás la confianza que ha depositado la Revolución y especialmente el compañero Fidel en la juventud).33 Because such ideas might have seemed outlandishly ambitious, government publicists decided to root such concepts in the legitimate discourses of the past, particularly in nineteenth-century nationalist José Martí’s famous statement, Patria es humanidad (the fatherland is all humanity). Although today the slogan is better known for gracing the exterior wall of the international airport terminal in Havana exclusively reserved for flights to and from Miami, Patria es humanidad once headlined graduation ceremonies for the children of peasants educated in Havana’s top boarding schools. Patria es humanidad was supposed to form the core logic guiding early childhood education and the often incomprehensibly altruistic pledges that Cuba’s youngest revolutionaries made.34 According to Fidel Castro, the new revolutionary pedagogy had one broad ideological objective: to strip Cubans of their culturally ingrained “selfishness,” thereby clearing the way for a true communist society. In the past, schools and society had only taught children to “fool others, to be crooks, to live without working and become exploiters,” contended Fidel. “This was their moral education.”35 To combat such cultural legacies as well as “loafing, laziness, lies,

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parasitism, lack of loyalty or lack of solidarity with others in the society of the future,” the state developed specific school curricula meant to reconfigure emotional experiences in new ideological ways.36 In this regard, preschools, first established in 1960 and radically expanded after 1967 to enroll nearly fifty thousand children, were considered ground zero for the formation of the new man. Preschool day care centers, called círculos infantiles, were even more fundamental than primary or secondary schools in creating “collectivist consciousness.”37 Exemplifying their importance, national day-care director Clementina Serra explained in an internal government report “how we form collective consciousness” and “how we form national consciousness” among preschoolers. Collective consciousness was achieved through such moral instruction as correcting egoism as well as directed activities like group birthday parties and the collective act of throwing flowers into the ocean in order to commemorate the October 1959 disappearance of beloved revolutionary hero Camilo Cienfuegos.38 Methods to form national consciousness evinced little variety. They included activities such as reciting poetry to Camilo, painting pictures of him, singing songs such as the “Hymn to Che,” or learning about revolutionaries, dead or alive, including José Martí, Antonio Maceo, and Fidel Castro. Cultivating national consciousness also came through interacting, whenever possible, with still-suffering victims of imperialism who attested, simply through their existence, to the greater already-established triumph of Cubans. Preschool curriculum planners singled out Vietnamese residents of Cuba as ideal visitors to círculos: their presence taught children gratitude toward their own revolutionary Patria and a desire to “help” the oppressed of other countries in its name.39 Moreover, preschool curricula normalized the honoring of revolutionary martyrs and overt political indoctrination by making such themes part of regular scholastic instruction, happening as often as once every four to six weeks rather than only on historic anniversaries or at certain times of the year. For example, third-semester language arts classes for preschoolers listed the following instructional themes for a two-week course unit that could take place whenever teachers felt inspired: 3.1.6: Our friends, the guerrillas. 3.1.7: Animals who drink mothers’ milk when they are born. 3.1.8: Mother hen and her chicks. 3.1.9: Flowers for Camilo [Cienfuegos].40

Subsequent themes for other weeks included “Let’s learn to cross the street. Who cures us [when we’re ill]? How to remember our martyrs. . . . Our favorite toys. Martí, friend of children . . . Our friend, the miliciano.” In addition, activities meant to form proper “mental attitudes” among three-to-four-year

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124 : Lillian Guerra olds such as love of unpaid manual labor included pulling weeds in the yard of the círculo and taking them to the countryside where they could witness adults doing voluntary labor.41 Published by the state’s new children’s publishers and distributed by the Unión de Jóvenes Comunistas (Union of Young Communists), books for Cuban children regularly centered on Fidel, Cuba’s ideal teacher and the Revolution’s first new man. Primers for teaching Cuban history to three- to fiveyear-olds featured such titles as Con Fidel y con la historia. This book offered a nonchronological account of Cuba’s triumphs against US imperialism reenacted through a bearded child, or mini-Fidel, as well as other secondary cartoon characters.42 Illustrated with childlike drawings of a mini-Fidel, the book showed him engaged in such activities as handing out land titles to black and white campesinos; holding CIA-trained mercenaries at gunpoint; “vanquishing” the rebellious peasants of El Escambray single-handedly; riding an elephant alongside a black, presumably Angolan, freedom fighter who drags a chained-up Uncle Sam behind them; and kicking Uncle Sam off the Cuban island while declaring the end “of all exploitation.”43 Although the success of this style of revolutionary pedagogy on the formation of toddlers’ and preschoolers’ individual consciousness may remain incalculable, emotional experiences creatively inspired citizens to personify the Revolution. This led them to see individual sacrifice in service to the state as necessary and pledges to blind faith in its policies as natural, unquestionable, even innate extensions of their own identity as Cubans, revolutionaries, human beings, and potential Fidels. Books intended for preadolescent readers exemplified the role of these emotions in creating an internal dialogue with the state through Fidel. For example, Hay que pensar en el futuro, titled after a quote from a speech Fidel made to elementary schoolchildren, included illustrations made to look as if they were made by children (although they were not) and photographs of Fidel talking to them, as well as the entire speech he delivered at morning assembly.44 Other books, targeting parents and adults, resembled the photographic collections typical of US coffee-table books. In La educación en revolución, Fidel’s visit to Havana’s Lenin School referenced or quoted Fidel Castro on every page of Juan Marinello’s introductory essay and emblazoned the image of him surrounded by kids in the uniform of La Lenin on both its wraparound jacket and internal cover. While also highlighting Fidel’s visits to schools and quotes from his speeches to kids, two books with large print runs exhibited children’s drawings and photographs of uniformed, obedient child-patriots. Their images served, in the words of one book, as “graphic testimony” of the successful revolutionary transformation of Cuban kids. Perhaps the most dramatic example of such testimony was Imágenes infantiles de Cuba revolucionaria, 1970–75. Editors of this book claimed to

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have reviewed ten thousand children’s drawings to determine schools’ success in implementing new programs of “political integration.”45 The book typified the implicit notion that not all kids’ expressions of political consciousness were equally valuable, probably because party pedagogues did not deem them ideologically correct. Demonstrating this was the monothematic measures by which editors selected images. By far the most redundant were kids’ drawings of kids picking or tossing flowers into the ocean to commemorate Camilo Cienfuegos, a ritual they had presumably learned in day care; military parades on El Día de las FAR; the Granma; Moncada; and above all, watercolor images of Fidel Castro speaking to flag-waving boys and girls at the Plaza of the Revolution.46 Ironically, however, few of the drawings that Cuba’s most powerful government publishing house selected to illustrate the successful “political integration” of children were actually made by different kids. The majority of the drawings were made by a select handful of the same kids. While most kids saw at least two paintings published, some, like nine-year-old Estrella Gómez, had four of her works selected, and eleven-year-old Berta Iraola had no fewer than five. Indeed, with more than ten thousand images from which to choose, the lack of diversity in subject matter and authorship leave one to wonder just how successful new ideological training programs were in recasting the creative imagination of Cuba’s kids. Nonetheless, the state’s concerted documentation of children’s precise reproduction of communist-defined values, images, words, and beliefs in books like these reveal the inescapability of coercive complicity. Cuban educators turned Fidel into an everyday protagonist of leisure time and rewarded those who converted the private spaces that Cuban families otherwise might protect against political intrusions into extensions of Fidel’s “giant classroom.” As the local library, children’s book fairs and living room reading selections came to reflect the needs and presence of the state, so officials hoped that one’s character, family life, and emotional outlook might do the same. In this and other ways, the most intense forms of human affect among younger generations of Cubans thus became political instruments for consolidating state power, particularly through the feelings communist officials hoped citizens would develop toward Fidel and the Revolution. Like a father and a mother, Fidel and the Revolution were not only the primary protagonists of Cuba’s political life but the primary advisers of Cubans’ personal lives. Shame over not doing enough to fulfill the limitless goals set by the Revolution, hope in the possibility of fulfilling these goals, and love for those who assigned one to the task as well as the task itself—these were the feelings that together underpinned the process and prospect of developing the educational system’s stated goal: to develop a communist personality in every child and thereby create legions of kids who would literally “be like el Che”; that is, they would live up to Fidel’s call for total sacrifice to the cause.

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126 : Lillian Guerra Living Up to Fidel: Everyday Heroes, the Goal of Perfection, and the Pedagogy of Love In the 1970s, omnipresent messaging through revolutionary curriculum spread to encompass the visual landscape of schools and neighborhood murals maintained by the CDRs. Through such messaging, the state taught citizens that they should feel love toward the revolutionary reality they were constantly building; shame over not feeling love went hand in hand with failing to build the Revolution and vice versa. At the center of this triangle was none other than the individual him- or herself. The mass printing of propaganda posters specifically geared at young people proved central to this process. First printed as an official slogan of the 1971 Congress of Education and Culture, the phrase “The Revolution has placed its most profound hopes in the youth and confides the future in it” (la Revolución ha puesto en la juventud sus más profundas esperanzas y confía a ella su future) appeared repeatedly on posters featuring smiling, studying, and saluting children dressed in the uniform of the Communist Pioneers, especially from the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s. Through other posters, students learned that studying, particularly in the science and technical fields (as opposed to the humanities and social sciences) “propelled the Revolution forward” and represented a daily tribute to dead revolutionaries Camilo and Che, the two martyrs emphasized across curricula for children as young as three in government day cares all the way through teenagers in high school. To study in socialist Cuba was as much a historical extension of Cuba’s victory over imperialism as proof of the Revolution’s future triumph over underdevelopment, the primary legacy of imperialism. Thus, according to Fidel, the task for students was sacred: “This generation must consecrate its efforts to [the goal of economic] development.”47 Students also were subject to a higher standard than any other Cuban, literally called by Fidel and the Unión de Jóvenes Comunistas “everyday heroes” not “heroes for a day.”48 Indeed, argued Fidel, even the standard of perfection was never too high for Cuban youth. “The cleanest, the purest, the most honest must be the student, because they are the workers of tomorrow,” entreated Fidel in a popular poster series used in virtually all schools in the 1970s. “They are called to develop, to a maximum point of perfection, socialist society and advance deliberately along the paths of communism” (fig. 2).49 Permanent signage in some schools included the striking statement Donde nace un comunista mueren las dificultades (Where a communist is born, all difficulties die).50 Surely, raising kids who would assume the principles of perfectionism required starting young. It entailed embedding society’s desires deeply in the fabric of one’s self, even if that fabric remained far from complete. A little known and previously unused collection of hundreds of essays gathered by

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FIGURE 2. Used in schools across Cuba in the 1970s and 1980s, this poster echoes many others of varying design from the same period. They reminded students, through Fidel’s voice, that they were not only responsible for the future of communist society but for achieving a “maximum” degree of “perfection” in themselves, their attitudes, and their behavior to do so.

Marvin Leiner in the 1970s reveals how deeply embedded such lessons were in their political souls. A US pedagogue, brother-in-law to longtime state filmmaker Estela Bravo, and “unconditional” supporter of the Revolution at the time, Leiner asked fifth and sixth graders in schools across Cuba to write essays titled “Five Wishes.” The resulting handwritten children’s essays speak to the conviction that their primary purpose in life was “to be useful to the fatherland.” Leiner’s mostly eleven- to twelve-year-old informants also punctuated their five wishes with plans to “fight and die for the Revolution.”51 As one girl explained, saying that one wanted to be like El Che (or his fellow martyr “Tania la Guerrillera” Bunke) was far from original: after all, every kid knew she or he was supposed to be like Che or his Soviet-trained, guerrilla girlfriend Tania la Guerrillera.52 Because everyone apparently wanted to die for the Revolution, she and other essay writers realized, their list of five wishes needed to prove something more. This explains why across hundreds of these children’s essays one pattern is clear: no child wished for merely one career, with most wishing for three or as many as six careers. Topping the list in almost every case was the goal of becoming a teacher to form the new man, to be sent to the far reaches (rincones

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128 : Lillian Guerra más apartados) of the island to teach the lowliest of the low and once triumphant, to be sent abroad in a never-ending search to vanquish illiteracy in the name of the Revolution. However, a near majority, including girls, wished to be militia members, army officers, ship captains, and air force pilots so they could “exterminate [US] imperialism,” turn enemy aircraft “into dust,” and fill “the sky with blood and fire” in case of an attack by “esbirros [goons] from the United States.”53 Those who wished for purely civilian careers similarly couched their purposes in heroic or patriotic terms. One girl wanted to be a seamstress—but only, she was careful to say, to “help the Revolution make clothes” for its citizens and thereby take advantage of her own naturally good fashion sense.54 Another girl wished to be a flight attendant, but only if she could “fly in rough weather” when danger was at its peak and others might refuse; she also wanted to be an artist, but only if she could paint the portraits of great martyred revolutionaries.55 “I wish to be a doctor,” wrote twelve-year-old Ernesto Aguilar García of the rural school in Uvero, Oriente, “just in case someone gets sick, I can cure him so he can keep battling Yankee barbarism.”56 Kids who wished for nontraditional, civilian career paths were equally aware that the legitimacy of their dreams rested on a direct connection to serving the Revolution. Thus, Rolando Mustelier Castillo dreamed of being a chess champion “because this way we could show the North Americans that they are not the only ones who know but rather that the Cuban knows as much as anyone from anywhere.”57 One child, José Julián Cala Saqué, chronically ill from a heart condition, wished to be cured of his illness so that he could first, be a cardiologist to cure other kids; second, enroll at the Antonio Maceo School of Cadets and learn to use antiaircraft weapons; third, combat US imperialism; and fourth, fight “racism in the United States and worldwide.”58 Notably, José Julián was no more ambitious than any of his peers. One girl wanted to meet the president of Vietnam so she could offer her condolences and services to that country. A boy wished to become a communist cadre so that “when the old jefes die, I can take their place . . . to defend Cuba.”59 In short, these children clearly “felt like Fidel.” The empowerment they confessed stood alongside its principal emotional vehicles of shame, hope, and love—a point most evident in the myriad justifications for choosing one career over the other and the concern every writer expressed in declaring his or her wishes’ direct connection to “the needs” of the Revolution. Such was the case of 270 graduating high school seniors who hiked twenty-six kilometers to the historic campsite of Che Guevara’s column in the mountains of Las Villas for what must have been—given the site’s isolation—a mostly private graduation ceremony. There, standing on politically sacred ground where Che and others might have died when they first pledged their lives to Cuba, the graduates professed: “We swear to direct our future activities as university students to-

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ward attainment of the Communist society, sparing no physical or intellectual effort . . . to find the essential motivation for our work and future plans in love of mankind, the dream of developing the man of the 21st century . . . with a profound international spirit, depending on neither moral nor material incentives.”60 Of course, the idea that one should not be inspired by either moral or material incentives is paradoxical: if one cannot find a reward in the social or economic world, where could it be found? The answer apparently lay in the mystical realm, defined by the absence of all other motivations and elevation to a genuinely altered “state”—akin to embodying the spirit of Fidel Castro, the incarnate nation and still living incomparable new man. In other words, like Leiner’s elementary school students who dreamed of fighting a war against the Yankee invader, the value of these graduates’ future lives derived from the consciousness that they had not yet died: that is, implicitly, they knew that living for the Revolution had to mean as much as dying. Having been too young or simply not alive at the time of the movement against the dictator Fulgencio Batista, young Cubans grew up during the first decade of the Revolution hearing that hard work, voluntary labor, and devoted study were the means by which they “made up” for a destiny lost to younger generations by accident of birth.61 The same guiding logic extended to even the youngest of Cubans, so Inés, the director of a Havana day care, explained. Three- and four-year-olds had to learn about revolutionary martyrs: “We speak about the dead and not about the living because those who are living have still not given their all, and the highest praise that can be given here is when that person has given his/her life. One who hasn’t given one’s life yet has not done all that one has to do.”62 For Inés, the moral to live by was clear: the highest form of love was found only in the political realm, not the personal. Love for the Revolution was therefore not simply the most authentic form of love but the most rational: death on its behalf spoke to the unconditionality of perfect love and by extension, the Revolution’s perfect rationality. The principle pedagogue, as always, in this process was none other than Fidel Castro himself. Importantly, Fidel had long promoted “love” for the Cuban Revolution as a primary factor propelling unity and belief in its boundless potential for doing unprecedented good in the world. On December 31, 1960, the eve of the Revolution’s pivotal Year of Education and only weeks after nationalization of most private enterprise left 80 percent of the economy in state hands, Fidel Castro promised that Cuba would show America “what it is possible to achieve with effort, sacrifice and love for one another, with love for the Fatherland . . . [a]nd in this way, we shall achieve something great, without hurting absolutely anyone, doing good for our people and at the same time, for the whole world.” The net result of so much love, predicted Fidel, was to inspire hope among Latin America’s oppressed nations to imitate the increasing perfection of revolutionary Cuba.63 Over the next two decades, love would not only become an

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130 : Lillian Guerra inescapable point of reference in Cuba’s public discourse but nearly as inescapable as references to Fidel Castro himself. In the 1970s and 1980s, commemorations of Cuba’s massive national Literacy Campaign of 1961 and subsequent achievement of a nearly 100 percent literacy rate inspired many influential US academics to revisit Cuba’s school system. Many of them published highly popular, virtually uncritical, congratulatory books and admiring memoirs of officially guided experiences in Cuba. Several of these works enjoyed long shelf lives as academic institutions adopted them in college classes, and global fascination with romantic understandings of the Cuban Revolution deepened amidst intensifying US support for traditional, rightwing dictatorships around the globe.64 Examinations of its long-term success in reducing illiteracy rates to First World levels necessarily entailed debunking the idea that the yearlong Literacy Campaign was primarily responsible; as the Cuban government itself admitted, it was seguimiento, the follow-up courses for adults and rural schools that achieved greater literacy over the course of a decade, not one year as Fidel originally claimed. Importantly, however, by the 1970s, the individual sacrifice of young volunteers, called brigadistas, had faded into the background while Fidel’s protagonism in the 1961 Literacy Campaign took center stage. As National Book Award– winner and US educator Jonathan Kozol documented in his bestselling memoir on the educational system in Cuba, the primary reason all his informants gave for joining the campaign was Fidel. “The statement that ‘we could not allow Fidel to be embarrassed in the eyes of the world’ is made today by many men and women who were only ten or twelve years old during the year in which it took place,” Kozol wrote in 1978.65 “I wanted so much that we would prove that we could keep the promise that Fidel had made before the world [when he announced the campaign at the United Nations in September 1960],” attested Armando Váldez, a now aged brigadista and member of Cuba’s foreign service. “I did not want it to be said that we would not stand up beside Fidel.”66 María, another former brigadista, confessed to Kozol, “I did not know Marx or Lenin at that time. I only knew about Fidel. . . . It isn’t just for what he has already done—but also for the things he dreams to do.”67 Recalling that all seven hundred thousand Cubans whom the literacy workers taught in 1961 were required to write a thank-you letter to Fidel as their final exam, Kozol remarked that after looking at the letters preserved at the state literacy museum, it is impossible to deny their near complete uniformity. It was as if they were copied rather than written. Yet his “instinct” told him that he should “accept them as [participants’] open manifestations of pride and personal liberation.”68 In many ways, Kozol’s “instinct” to simply believe the state’s version of the truth, despite nagging evidence to the contrary, mirrors precisely the goals of the teacher-training programs for the brigadistas as well as the content of

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the literacy manuals and educational curricula intended to teach teachers, pupils, parents, and other citizens alike in the Revolution’s second decade. As thirty-three-year-old Christina explained to Kozol: “I learned the word revolución and I learned to write my own name for the first time, too. Everything else, up to the present day, was easy after that.”69 In many ways, love for the Revolution and love of self fused in Christina’s experience. Fidel’s guidance in that process became indistinguishable from that of the state, making its heavy hand feel loving, comforting, and kind. In Cuba, discourses of love for the Revolution and their ability to embed the self in an intimate relationship of subordinate power to the state served to manage collective morale, buoying it with individual testimony and personal experience—making the siege culture and patriot life on the Cold War binary as real as they could be; love might also have made the often overwhelming drive to perfect oneself and society feel like a fulfilling task, even it if was never fulfilled. These same discourses of love undoubtedly facilitated similar feelings for many foreigners who sought to identify with the Revolution for entirely different reasons. This was particularly clear in the case of progressive intellectuals who visited Cuba by formal invitation and participated in state-backed research on state achievements, as Kozol did in 1978, or who attended highprofile cultural and educational congresses the Communist Party organized, such as the one New York intellectual Susan Sontag attended nearly ten years earlier. In 1969, Sontag published a widely read essay titled “Some Thoughts on the Right Way (for Us) to Love the Cuban Revolution” in the antiestablishment magazine Ramparts. Addressing herself to a leftist US audience whom she assumed to be white, intellectual, and bourgeois, Sontag articulated a key principle essential to cultivating the “love” for the Cuban Revolution that all anti-imperialists were called to feel, whether Cuban or not. That is, Sontag argued that the standards by which any leftist might normally judge a system of power should not apply to Cuba because the humanistic intentions of the Revolution made it uniquely good and its adoption of communism—always so close to the United States—put its courageous leaders beyond reproach. Therefore, what might be considered oppressive policies or ideals in any other context, she contended, was, in the Cuban case, either a minor error that could be easily overlooked or a necessary path toward greater liberation. In other words, Sontag echoed both Fidel Castro and the Cuban Communist Party’s style of “teaching” the masses how to work their way out of criticizing the state by cultivating responses built on hope and love. She also pioneered the logos operandi of more than one generation of new left academics, progressives, and liberals in the United States when it came to judging Cuba: to be truly acceptable in such circles, one could seemingly never deign to judge at all.

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132 : Lillian Guerra For example, Sontag argued that visiting American critics’ “reflex posture of anti-militarism,” disgust with censorship, “aversion to patriotism,” mistrust of ideological conformity, and “unformulated pacifism” were all mistaken positions, akin to those of counterrevolutionaries, even when voiced by selfidentified leftists.70 Sontag also dramatically minimized the mass internment of thousands of citizens in isolated forced labor camps, a group of which were named UMAP, Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción (Military Units to Aid Production). Sontag characterized the UMAP as simply “one bad moment two years ago” when Cubans got “a little up-tight about sexual morals [and rounded] up several thousand homosexuals in Havana and [sent] them to a farm to rehabilitate themselves.”71 In punishing nonconformists, Cuba was defeating “individualism,” pure and simple.72 Of course, far from being “one bad moment,” Cuba’s UMAP camps lasted for over three years and may have comprised dozens, if not hundreds, of separate sites. Held without charge for months or years at a time, intellectuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Catholic priests, homosexuals, and others endured “political rehabilitation” through forced labor, electroshock therapy, and often sadistic forms of public humiliation. Indeed, it was largely due to the objections of foreign supporters of the Revolution that the UMAP were finally closed.73 UMAP also represented one of many means by which the Cuban state sought to combat a rising tide of critical voices among the most loyal ranks of revolutionaries, especially between 1965 and 1971.74 Perhaps typical of many anti-imperialist US intellectuals at the time, Sontag apologized for the authoritarianism of the Cuban state and managed to reproduce the very imperial gaze she sought to shatter all at once. Exemplifying this, one of her parting points of persuasion included the argument that Americans criticized Cubans too much because they did not realize “what this revolutionary generation in Cuba has had to work with: a bastard culture made up of degraded Spanish, Yoruba and American elements. The remarkable thing is that they have done as much as they have, not that one still finds such expressions of spic taste as the ubiquitous girls on the street wearing their hair in pink plastic rollers.”75 More important, however, Sontag saw the crisis in efficiency, stagnant productivity, and mass absenteeism plaguing the Cuban economy as evidence of Cubans’ habit “of making work seem like fun,” a tendency she readily attributed to support for the Revolution, not resistance to communist controls.76 Nonetheless, Sontag’s blindness—the need to justify the Revolution’s repression and means of control—formed a broader bedrock of complicity with the state that foreign apologists, foreign and revolutionary activists alike, constructed through arguments like hers as “love.” In the face of evidence that citizen complicity could at some level be coerced, Sontag voluntarily offered her own complicity as evidence of revolutionary love.

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Importantly, despite differences in tone and texture, Sontag’s evaluation found its echo, if not unanimity, in the evaluations that other foreign contemporaries made of the Revolution. Paulo Freire, renowned Brazilian intellectual and author of the highly influential Pedagogy of the Oppressed, first published in multiple languages between 1968 and 1972, offers a case in point. Freire similarly equated the energy that was needed to make revolution with a kind of “sensuality” that denies individual desires and redirects them toward societal transformation. He also credited the pedagogy of the Cuban Revolution with convincing him of this truth: “In this, I’m a follower of Che Guevara. Love and revolution are married together.”77 Marvin Leiner himself ended his book on early childhood education titled ¿Cuál es la realidad? (What Is the Reality?): “Love, joy, enthusiasm—all very Cuban. All have much to do with the Revolution and its expression in early childhood education.” Quoting Stanford University researcher Richard Fagen, fellow visitor and observer of Cuba’s new educational system, Leiner concluded that the Cuban Revolution was simply too “unique” to be judged in negative terms.78 In 1969, Sontag had ended her treatise on the logos of love for the Revolution with the claim that no Cuban writer had failed “to get his work published” nor had any writer been arrested for being too critical of the state. Ironically, she cited the case of Cuba’s then-famous rebel poet, Heberto Padilla, predicting that no writer ever would be jailed or censored.79 Of course, less than two years later, Padilla was arrested, tortured, and forced to participate in a filmed self-criticism session among dozens of his peers. When Sontag subsequently joined dozens of other foreign writers in signing an open letter of protest to Fidel Castro, she was summarily rebuked as “anti-Cuban” and a traitorous counterrevolutionary. Her writings were banned from the island and Sontag declared an enemy of the state.80 Yet, despite Sontag’s experience (or perhaps because of it), Ramparts’ publishing house went on to publish Karen Wald’s admiring ode to Cuba’s schools, Children of Che: Childcare and Education in Cuba, nine years later. Following Sontag’s lead, Wald glossed over any Cubans she encountered who expressed doubt, resistance, or contempt for government policy as ungrateful, ignorant, or supremely selfish bad apples amidst a harvest of good.81 This was especially true of children and young people whose rebellion the communist system answered with rehabilitative programs of incarceration led by “very loving people” who desired to make “anti-sociales” and political delinquents feel, in Wald’s words, “loved and needed.”82 She also ended a list of sixteen common responses to the question she posed to Cuban school kids, Who is Fidel? with the following child’s testimony: “Fidel is a great revolutionary who fought and was a prisoner for our happiness, and that’s why all the children of this center love him as though he were our father.”83 Wald notably began

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134 : Lillian Guerra the section immediately following her list of related quotes with the title No Personality Cult, assuring that “readers should not get the wrong impression” about her own evidence that state schools clearly glorified Fidel.84 Thus, in many ways, envisioning revolutionary society as an oppositionfree utopia united in the building of socialism through a collectively received and deployed pedagogy of love was intrinsic to the success of Fidel Castro’s leadership and foundational to his one-man, one-party rule: both rested on the complicity of the majority of Cubans not only with the structures of power but perhaps, most important, with its discourses. When this complicity was not coerced from supporters but voluntarily and committedly offered as testament to one’s belief in communist values, the reaction it demanded from others—similar evidence of complicity—became unavoidably and intentionally coercive. After all, the point of educational programs for the promotion of ideological purity was, in the end, uniformity and compliance, the antithesis of debate and diversity. Official culture worked to make political love—the highest expressions of individual altruism and trust in the Revolution—part of popular culture through emotional, deliberate appeals to individual consciousness. Imperial witnesses served this task better in some cases than others, as the examples of Sontag, Leiner, and many scholars or political activists courted by the Cuban government in this period show.85 Yet the external sources of support for the Revolution would have mattered little in the face of organized or even fragmentary internal opposition. Much like shutting one’s eyes to alternative interpretations of observed events, shutting out critical or negative voices was fundamental to the resilience and endurance of the revolutionary state as well as its call to trade power over the state for symbolic power in Fidel. A central element in this process was undoubtedly the construction of perceived, affective forms of knowledge, not simply in schools or through the multiple forms of revolutionary pedagogy so common to the era, but through an environment deliberately saturated in monothematic discourses approved by the state as well as emotional experiences in which the greatest censor of rebellion and critique was the consciousness of citizens themselves. Clear examples of this phenomenon can be found in the music of Silvio Rodríguez and Pablo Milanés, both former victims of government repression. Far too critical of state authoritarianism, far too celebratory of individual desires, and far too poetic, Silvio and Pablo’s music demoralized and therefore demobilized listeners in the 1960s. While Silvio was famously relegated to isolation and hard labor on a state fishing vessel for months, Pablo spent the better part of a year at an UMAP camp in Camagüey. By the late 1970s, however, their rehabilitation and integration apparently complete, each composed a song that typified precisely the lessons that Cuban officials had so desperately wanted them to learn. Both directed themselves to a personified Revolution, pledging a depth of love that few beyond the Revolution itself could understand.

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In the song “Acto de fé” (Act of faith), Pablo’s pledges of belief and devotion are made increasingly explicit with every verse. More to the point, Pablo admits—much as Sontag did years earlier—that every failure should be overlooked, every contradiction overcome, every doubt erased: Creo en ti, lleno de contradicciones, presto a soluciones, siempre creo en ti. / Creo en ti, porque nada hay más humano que prenderse de tu mano y caminar creyendo en ti (I believe in you, filled with contradictions, always offering solutions, I always believe in you. / I believe in you, because there is nothing more human than to hold your hand and walk alongside, believing in you).86 More than just the highest expression of humanity, the Revolution has acquired the carácter of the Divine; likewise, attested Pablo, as faithful servant and lover of the Revolution, so has he: Creo en ti, como creo en Dios, que eres tú, que soy yo, en ti, Revolución (I believe in you, like I believe in God, who is you, who is also me, in you, Revolution).87 Similarly, in the song “Te doy una canción,” Silvio rejects those who assume he still uses his music to criticize the state, saying they only think such a thing porque no te conocen ni te sienten (because they don’t know you for themselves, nor do they feel you). Today, he pledges to give the Revolution a song and in so doing, to invert all negative assessments that could be made about it. To those who say that there are limits on personal expression, Silvio will prove that there are not. To those who think that the Revolution teaches citizens to kill, Silvio will prove that learning how to kill is a creative act. To those who doubt his faith, Silvio offers a song to the Revolution and promises to always speak for it, la patria: Te doy una canción y hago un discurso, sobre mi derecho de hablar. / Te doy una canción con mis dos manos, con las mismas de matar. / Te doy una canción y digo Patria, y sigo hablando para ti (I give you a song and give a speech / about my freedom to speak. / I give you a song with my two hands / the very ones that kill. / I give you a song and say Patria, and continue speaking for you.)88 In the end, Silvio insists, writing a song for the Revolution is no different than firing a gun, writing a book, speaking for it, being a guerrilla, or making love: Te doy una canción como un disparo, como un libro, una palabra, una guerrilla: como doy el amor (I give you song, just as I would fire a shot for you, give you a book, a word, a guerrilla: just as I give you love).89 From Messiah to Mystic: The Death of Fidel in Historical Perspective For the Communist Party and its principal leader, Fidel Castro, the endurance and resilience of the Revolution rested squarely on three factors: discrediting all individual conditions of opposition, requiring the internalization of surveillance over it, and generating belief in the infallibility of an earthly messiah who would inspire citizens to feel that limitations on their agency, choices,

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136 : Lillian Guerra and identity were both empowering and worthwhile. In the 1970s and 1980s, Cuban day cares and preschools turned rigid Marxist-Leninist dogma into affective, instructional instruments meant to inculcate unconditional love for the Revolution in every citizen. In turn, generations of citizens ostensibly hoped that their love for the Revolution would inspire unconditional love from the Revolution. Yet by the time Fidel died in 2016, Cuba’s rulers commemorated his death by endorsing and enforcing displays of political mysticism and uncompromised allegiance rather than unearth long-buried memories of a contradictory, shamelessly authoritarian past. Doing so would have called his messianic message of inevitable communist triumph, let alone the legitimacy of his brother’s current regime, into question. By staging and scripting a mass mourning for Fidel, officials argued for the Communist Party’s own eternal life in the compliance and complicity of citizens: the slogan “Soy Fidel” signified that Fidel’s body might have died but his combative spirit and ideas had risen in the mind and body of all loyal Cubans. Once again, the Cuban state had returned to timetested emotional vehicles of the past rather than the past itself in order to shore up interpretations of the present. The result was a kind of “preschool curriculum” version of revolutionary history that served as a substitute and abstraction for the in-depth, improvised, and heady discussions of Fidel Castro’s rule that surely took place in private rather than in government-organized, policesupervised public gatherings. Today, sixty years after the flight of dictator Fulgencio Batista, scholarly meditations on the authoritarian legacies of Fidel Castro like those offered above are useful to assessing Cuba’s ideologically incoherent present. For all its differences, today’s army-controlled economy managed by foreign investors and unaccountable to average Cubans under Raúl Castro is, in principle, an outgrowth of yesterday’s government-controlled economy managed by communist militants and unaccountable to average Cubans under Fidel Castro. Once a grassroots dictatorship in the 1960s, Cuba’s government has gradually but surely become a militarized communist dictatorship that reproduced support for its structures and policies by seeking to shape citizens into mirrors of itself and its needs. Although as of April 2018, he is no longer president of the Cuban Communist Party, Raúl Castro nonetheless retains control over Cuba’s armed forces and massive internal security forces indefinitely. In addition to the long experience he brings to the job of intelligence and military chief (one he first assigned himself in 1959), Raúl continues to hold a monopoly not only on force but also as the head of the Revolutionary Armed Forces. He will remain “CEO” of Cuba’s biggest retailer, importer, and hotelier, the Cuban military, especially the giant conglomerate known as GAESA that owns Gaviota, Cuba’s largest tourist company, and controls the mammoth new port facilities at Mariel,

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among other assets. When Fidel Castro was alive, things were not so different: for the last thirty years, the armed forces have exercised primary economic and therefore political control. Nonetheless, comparisons with other Latin American dictatorships such as Somoza’s decades-long dictatorship (1936–1979) in which officers of the Nicaraguan National Guard controlled industry and generals secured fortunes by guaranteeing contracts for foreign investors continue to be notable for their absence—from media and academic discussions of Cuba—despite their eerie similitude. To what degree are such comparisons apt? To what degree is it necessary to sideline discussions of Fidel Castro’s legacies from the ways in which his rule has shaped the broader nature of identity for Cuba’s island citizens? As a specialist of modern Latin America, I sympathize with the desire to reject any comparison between the vast, bloodied fields on which millions of Latin Americans fought the US-backed Dirty Wars that defined the Cold War in the region for decades. Still, for the majority of Cubans who experienced the high communist era and whose identities became deeply enmeshed in state pedagogies of communist morality, adoration for Fidel, and love for the Revolution, there is a historical pattern to their government’s current behavior. Discussing that pattern—of seeking a monopoly over resources, controlling public discourse, and repressing dissent in order to maintain itself in power—is urgently needed. But Cubans need far more than a national conversation on the authoritarian legacies of Fidel’s regime. By demanding that citizens “feel like” Fidel, live up to his demands as a route to fulfilling his example and thereby love the state as themselves, Cuban leaders substituted citizen control over government policy (as well as the attending rights to critique, organize, and protest) with guarantees of loyalty and steadfast shows of belief, not a set of structures vested with contestatory political power. The result, five decades later, is the sort of tunnel vision typical of Cuba’s top political elite: they see the future before them without being able to turn around and assess either the present or the past. Rather than claim that a new revolutionary identity had been born with the death of Fidel Castro, Cuban officials resort to recycling old, now tired vehicles of (largely eroded) affect. It is precisely in catalyzing an entirely new, heterogeneous, dialogic, and diverse post-Revolution revolutionary identity that the youngest generations of Cubans are being born. Cubans do not need to “unlearn” the lessons that Cuba’s politocracy and crushing culture of ideological self-perfection that the state taught them in the past; they need to rescind them entirely. Yet today, as Fidel’s death brought to light, citizens face a state that refuses to remember, let alone deconstruct or denounce, the methods and mandates that Fidel Castro and other leaders once proudly elevated as proof of Cubans’ liberation. That state still holds both the reins of power—military, political, and eco-

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138 : Lillian Guerra nomic—firmly in its hands. Some might argue that the coerced and coercive complicity that the death of Fidel put on display demonstrates the communist system’s successful reengineering of Cubans’ historically rebellious political personalities into a passive, apathetic mold. I disagree. As the history of education and the popular culture of siege in Cuba reveals, there is always more to see in Cuba than meets the eye—and, I would add, more that anyone who genuinely wants to see, can see. Perhaps Cubans will find the greatest sources of hope and change not be in remembering but in simply unforgetting the power, the pain, and the paradox that Fidel Castro’s legacies bequest to them. NOTES 1. La Razón de México, “Conductores de TV cubana debaten por censura de ‘Buenos días,’” 00:50, YouTube video, filmed and posted November 28, 2016, https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=ZN9-iobSKLA. See also Man Vid7, “Locutores cubanos protestando en camara abierta,” 00:50, YouTube video, filmed and posted November 28, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=b6DGbAeQwco. 2. Cover and “Cuba-URSS internacionalismo militante,” Cuba internacional (October 1974): 2–3. Original Spanish: “¿Quién duda que algún día los lazos de todos los revolucionarios verdaderos y de todos los pueblos liberados serán tan fraternales como lo son hoy los de Cuba y la URSS?” 3. Interview with René Ariza in Conducta impropia, directed by Nestór Almendros and Orlando Jiménez Leal (Playor, 1983). Original Spanish: “Es, yo creo, que está dentro del carácter del cubano de hace mucho tiempo, que no es privativo de Castro y que hay muchos Castros. Y que hay que vigilarse el Castro que cada uno tiene dentro.” Achy Obejas cited this famous quote without providing due credit in her op-ed “The Little Fidel in All of Us,” New York Times, November 27, 2017. 4. Posters titled “Absueltos por la historia: XIX, Aniversario del Asalto al Cuartel Moncada” (1972) and “El Pueblo Cubano vivirá con su Revolución o morirá hasta el último hombre y mujer junto a ella” (1981) in Sección de Mapas y Planos, Archivo Nacional de Cuba (hereafter, SMP, ANC). 5. Fidel Castro, “Fidel en el Congreso de la UJC.” Educación 2, no. 5 (April–June 1972): 49. 6. Key contributions to the relatively new field of Latin American Cold War studies include Stephen G. Rabe, The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Hal Brands, Latin America’s Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Gilbert Joseph and Greg Grandin, A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence during Latin America’s Long Cold War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Herbert S. Klein and Francisco Vidal Luna, Brazil, 1964–1985: The Military Regimes of Latin America in the Cold War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017). 7. Lillian Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption and Resistance, 1959– 1971 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Devyn Benson, Antiracism in Cuba: The Unfinished Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Yvon Grenier, Culture and the Cuban State: Participation, Recognition and Dissonance under Communism (New York: Lexington Books, 2017).

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8. See article 16 of Statutes of the Communist Party of Cuba adopted by the First Congress, with the modifications agreed by the Second Congress (Havana: Political Publishing House, 1981), 11. The text does not vary from article 15 in the earlier statutes defined in 1975. Estatutos del Partido Comunista de Cuba (Havana, 1976), 27–29. 9. William Leogrande, “The Communist Party of Cuba since the First Congress,” Journal of Latin American Studies 12, no. 2 (November 1980): 405. 10. See article 62, Estatutos del Partido Comunista de Cuba, 64–66. 11. Federación Ganadera, “Estos niños serán patriotas o traídores . . . ,” in SMP, ANC. 12. On June 6, 1972, top army chief Raúl Castro gave one of the most significant policy speeches of his career to an assembly of officials, security agents, military officers, and others at the Ministry of the Interior, Cuba’s Soviet-trained and Soviet-modeled central intelligence agency. Days later it was disseminated widely, putting all of Cuba on notice, most especially teachers and the pedagogical community Raúl accused of patronizing and cultivating Cuba’s greatest internal threat, ideological division. See Raúl Castro Ruz, “El diversionismo ideológico: Arma sutil que esgrimen los enemigos contra la revolución,” Educación 2, no. 9 (July–September 1972): 21–35. 13. Humberto Pérez, “Colonización cultural y colonización ideológica,” Educación 4, no. 12 (January–March 1974): 47–48. The Communist Party required all members to “combat ideological diversionism and political confusionism, whatever forms it may take.” See Pérez, “Colonización cultural,” 65, and “Resolución,” Tesis y resoluciones: Primer Congreso del Partido Comunista de Cuba (Havana: Departamento de Orientación Revolucionaria del Comité Central del Partido Comunista de Cuba, 1976), 250–257. The same resolutions meant to eliminate the threat of “disideologization” represented by Marxist revisionists and “bridge-building” theorists of the West also included the goal of eliminating all “religious ideology.” See “Resolución,” 255. 14. Perhaps the best summary of the 2007 events that blew the lid off Cuba’s campaign of intellectual repression is found in Mauricio Vincent, “El recuerdo del ‘quinquenio gris’ mobiliza a los intelectuales cubanos,” El País, January 13, 2007, https://elpais.com/diario/2007/01/13/cultura/1168642801_850215.html. 15. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the term anti-cubano became a commonplace substitute for counterrevolutionary critics, citizens who left the country and alienated residents known as gusanos. I found the earliest use of the term in secret files documenting Cuba’s official response to international outrage over the detention and torture of writer Heberto Padilla in 1971. See “DGICL-2901 (Confidencial). Documento IV,” May 23, 1971, and Oficina de Dirección General del Instituto del Libro, “Memorandum confidencial a Co. Miguel Rodríguez, Co. René Roca, Co. Eduardo Neira. DGICL-2901,” May 28, 1971, p. 6, in Caso Padilla, estante 52, anaquel 12, legajo 1, Fondo General del Ministerio de Cultura. This archive has been moved from the Biblioteca Nacional de Cuba to the Instituto Cubano de Investigación Cultural Juan Marinello. My understanding is that the entire Caso Padilla file was removed. All transcriptions of this file, photographs, and other notes are available through the Digital Library of the Caribbean, at http://www .dloc.com/AA00019994/00001?search=lillian+=guerra. 16. Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba, 11, 20, 26, 36, 142–143, 291, 304–319, 342–345. 17. Susan Sontag, “Some Thoughts on the Right Way (for Us) to Love the Cuban Revolution,” Ramparts (April 1969): 19; Gerald H. Read, “The Cuban Revolutionary Offensive in Education,” Comparative Education Review, 14, no. 2 (June 1970): 142. 18. Informe del compañero José Llanusa Gobel, Ministro de Educación y miembro del Comité Central del Partido Comunista de Cuba (Havana: Imprenta del Militante Comunista, 1970), 106. 19. Cubans older than seventy repeatedly referenced this joke to me in informal conversations about their experiences of the mammoth labor mobilizations and failed economic policies of those years, especially the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s. 20. Informe, 106–107.

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140 : Lillian Guerra 21. Fabio Grobart, “Palabras de Fabio Grobart, miembro del Comité Central en la presentación del Primer Secretario del Comité Central del Partido Comunista de Cuba, 22 de diciembre de 1975,” La Unión nos dió la victoria (Havana: Departamento de Orientación Revolucionaria del Comité Central del Partido Comunista de Cuba, 1976), 404–405. 22. Quoted in Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba, 303. 23. “Modeling and the Role of Student Leadership and Teachers, Part 2,” Marvin Leiner Papers (hereafter MLP), Wagner Labor Archives, New York University, box 10, 124B. 24. Poster 1 of the series titled “Porque ellos son el futuro” in SMP, ANC. Emphasis added. Original Spanish: “Para formar el hombre revolucionario . . . el hombre comunista. Toda la atención que le presten al Partido y la Juventud a la organización de pioneros nunca será excesiva.” 25. María Luisa Soler Acosta, Aprender a leer y escribir: Un ensayo para el aprendizaje de la lectura-escritura para los adultos (Havana: Gobierno Provincial Revolucionario, Departamento de Cultura, 1959); ¡Cumpliremos! Temas sobre la Revolución para los alfabetizadores (Havana: Imprenta Nacional de Cuba, 1961); Ministerio de Educación, Alfabeticemos: Manual para el alfabetizador (Havana: Ministerio de Educación, 1961); Ministerio de Educación, Como se forma un maestro en Cuba socialista (Havana: Ministerio de Educación, 1965). 26. “Principios y lineamientos de la estructura y funcionamiento del MINED,” Educación 1, no. 1 (April–June 1971): 5–10. 27. Luis Prado García, “La educación comunista de los estudiantes a través del estudio del marxismo-leninismo,” Educación 6, no. 21 (April–June 1976): 71. 28. Carmen V. Manzano Andovega, “El trabajo educativo en la educación media,” Educación 9, no. 42 (July–September 1981): 81. 29. “Una experiencia de pedagogía revolucionaria: La escuela al campo. Selección e integración de los conceptos fundamentales sobre la escuela secundaria básica en el campo expuestos por el Cmdte. Fidel Castro Ruz . . . ,” Educación 1, no. 1 (April–June 1971): 21. 30. Declaración Final del III II, Pleno Nacional de la UJC,” Juventud rebelde, January 9, 1967, 8. 31. “Modeling and the Role of Student Leadership and Teachers, Part 2,” 112. 32. Irma López, “El papel del maestro en la formación de la personalidad comunista del niño,” Educación 6, no. 20 (January–March 1976): 49. 33. Teresita Aguilera Vargas, “La enseñanza de la historia en la escuela primaria,” Educación 8, no. 29 (April–June 1978): 12, 27; Marta Cuervo Díaz, “Nuestro estudiantado y el IV V, Congreso de la Federación de Estudiantes de la Enseñanza Media (FEEM),” Educación 8, no. 28 (January–March 1978): 25. 34. “Graduación revolucionaria: Patria es la humanidad,” Granma, December 11, 1967, 2. 35. “Fidel Visits Elementary School Opened Recently in Meneses, Las Villas Province,” Granma Weekly (September 26, 1971), 2. 36. “Fidel Visits.” 37. Leiner, Children Are the Revolution, 56–57. Clementina Serra, Spanish-language report, “Introducción-8,” pp. 1–7, 11–12, and pts. 28–30, p. 1, in MLP, box 3. Note that this report is divided into several unmarked parts. I have done my best to describe them according to the headings given. 38. Serra, Spanish-language report, pts. 28–30 in MLP, box 3, p. 1. 39. Serra, Spanish-language report, pp. 2–3. 40. Ministerio de Educación, Programas. Enseñanza primaria. Grado preescolar (Havana: Ministerio de Educación, 1968), 15–16, in MLP, box 3. 41. Serra, “Antecedentes,” 31. 42. Orlando Alba Beltrán, Con Fidel y con la historia (Havana: Editorial Gente Nueva, 1978). 43. Beltrán, Con Fidel, 3–4, 8–11, 29–30.

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44. Fidel Castro, “Hay que pensar en el futuro . . .” (Havana: Gente Nueva, n.d.). The publication date was likely 1979–1981. 45. Rafaela Chacón Nardí, Imágenes infantiles de Cuba revolucionaria: Testimonio gráfico, 1970–1975 (Havana: Gente Nueva, 1976), 8–9. 46. Chacón Nardí, Imágenes infantiles, 20. 47. Mid- to late-1970s poster titled “El esfuerzo de esta generación tiene que consagrarse al desarrollo” with image of Fidel Castro, in SMP, ANC. 48. This UJC poster reads “La historia de un país, las victorias, los avances se escriben cada día con el esfuerzo y el trabajo diario, no solo con el heroísmo de un día, sino de todos los días. Fidel” in SMP, ANC. 49. One of a 1978–1979 series of blue and orange posters meant for display in classrooms and public spaces of schools, this poster is titled (like many): “La Revolución ha puesto en la juventud sus más profundas esperanzas y confía a ella su future.—Fidel” in SMP, ANC. Original Spanish: “Lo más limpio, lo más puro, lo más honesto debe ser el estudiante, porque ellos serán los trabajadores de mañana; ellos son llamados a desarrollar, hasta su maxima perfección, la sociedad socialista y avanzar resueltamente por los caminos del comunismo.” 50. See the photograph accompanying Procopio Flores Uribe, “Acerca de los hábitos y normas de conducta,” Educación 4, no. 12 (January–March 1974): 60. 51. For examples from Ruíz’s class that explicitly use these phrases, see Tania Encarnación Pedroso Ortega, Alberto Einstein Essay 13; Ulises Barquín C., Alberto Einstein Essay 15; Nancy Barquín and Ana Cifuente, Albert Einstein Essay 20; March 13, 1969, Five Wishes Collection in MLP, Wagner Labor Archives, NYU, box 10. 52. Maria Elena Antuña, “Composición,” Albert Einstein Essay 16, Five Wishes Collection. Of twenty-three essays from the fifth and sixth grade at Alberto Einstein Elementary School, ten kids invoked Che and Tania by name or said they wanted to be “el Hombre Nuevo” (the New Man). At the primary school in Uvero, Oriente, teachers mistakenly instructed students to create a wish list of career choices, as eleven-year-old Virgen Almaradas de la Paz (Uvero Essay 26), pointed out. Consequently, only three of forty-three mentioned Che Guevara by name. However all fortythree invariably justified their choices as a means for “helping the Revolution,” especially the less obvious the form that such help might take in the case of certain careers (such as taxi driver). 53. Quotes taken from Ulises Barquín C., Alberto Einstein Essay 13; Dennys Aguilera Moralís, Uvero Essay 41; Vicente Rodríguez M., Albert Einstein Essay 1, March 13, 1969; and Fredys Puebla Aguilar, Uvero Essay 4, March 20, 1969, in Five Wishes Collection. Essays expressing primarily martial goals from the Uvero collection include Essays 2, 4, 12, 20, 25, 35, 37, 38, 42; from Albert Einstein, Essays 7–10, 13, 15–23. 54. Magalys Borrero Sánchez, Uvero Essay 1, March 20, 1969, Five Wishes Collection. 55. Margarita Aranzán Torna, Albert Einstein Essay 11, March 13, 1969, Five Wishes Collection. 56. Ernesto Aguilar García, Uvero Essay 35, March 23, 1969, Five Wishes Collection. Original Spanish: “A mi me gustaría ser doctor por si a caso hay un enfermo curarlo y que pueda seguir luchando contra la barbarie yanqui.” 57. Rolando Mustelier Castillo, Uvero Essay 25, March 22, 1969, Five Wishes Collection. 58. José Julián Cala Saqué, Alberto Einstein Essay 8, March 13, 1969, Five Wishes Collection. 59. Idania Hernández Domínguez, Uvero Essay 36, March 22, 1969, and Juan Ramón Orosa Bañobre, Uvero Essay 12, March, 22 1969, Five Wishes Collection. 60. Quoted in Read, “Cuban Revolutionary Offensive in Education,” 138. 61. José Quiroga is the first to recognize the depth of artificial and, indeed, illogical guilt with which young Cubans were invited to live. See Quiroga, Cuban Palimpsests (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).

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142 : Lillian Guerra 62. Part 2 of Interview with Inés, in MLP, box 3. Original Spanish: “Nosotros hablamos de los que están muertos no de los que están vivos, porque los que están vivos todavía no han dado todo, y lo más que se puede hablar aquí cuando se habla de una persona es cuando da la vida. El que no ha dado la vida todavía no ha hecho todo lo que tiene que hacer.” 63. Quoted in Antonio Núñez Jiménez, ¡Patria o muerte . . . ! (Havana: Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria, 1961), 5. 64. Examples include Karen Wald, Children of Che: Childcare and Education in Cuba (Palo Alto, CA: Ramparts Press, 1978); Gil Green, Cuba at 25: Continuing the Revolution (New York: International Publishers, 1983); and the best-selling book by Jonathan Kozol, Children of the Revolution: A Yankee Teacher in the Cuban Schools (New York: Delta Publishing, 1978), discussed in detail. Admittedly, I read all three of the books as assigned texts in high school and college. 65. Kozol, Children of the Revolution, 8. 66. Quoted in Kozol, Children of the Revolution, 22–23. 67. Quoted in Kozol, Children of the Revolution, 42. 68. Kozol, Children of the Revolution 51–52. Most of the letters are written in a hand that belies the notion that their writers had started learning how to read and write from ground zero; instead, many thousands are written in fluid, primary-school-level hand. This fact alone might explain the highly restricted access the Ministry of Education grants to interested researchers. 69. Quoted in Kozol, Children of the Revolution, 63. 70. Sontag, “Some Thoughts on the Right Way (for Us) to Love the Cuban Revolution,”12, 14, 16. 71. Sontag, “Some Thoughts on the Right Way (for Us) to Love the Cuban Revolution,”, 14. 72. Sontag, “Some Thoughts on the Right Way (for Us) to Love the Cuban Revolution,” 18. 73. Abel Sierra Madero, “El trabajo os hará hombres: Masculinización nacional, trabajo forzado e ingeniería social de la Revolución cubana,” and Abel Sierra Madero, “‘Eso fue un trabajo top secret’: Entrevista a la dra. María Elena Solé Arrondo (1941–2013),” ed. Lillian Guerra, Cuban Studies/Estudios cubanos 45 (2015): 308–349, 357–366. 74. Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba, 227–289. 75. Sontag, “Some Thoughts on the Right Way (for Us) to Love the Cuban Revolution,”18. 76. Sontag, “Some Thoughts on the Right Way (for Us) to Love the Cuban Revolution,” 14. 77. Quoted in Moacir Gadotti, Reading Paulo Freire: His Life and Work, trans. John Milton (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 152. 78. Leiner, Children Are the Revolution, 186. 79. Sontag, “Some Thoughts on the Right Way (for Us) to Love the Cuban Revolution,”18. 80. Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba, 353–362. 81. Especially illustrative of this theme are Wald’s chapters “The Littlest Gusana” and “Juvenile Re-Education,” 269–320. 82. Wald, Children of Che, 294–295. 83. Wald, Children of Che, 262. 84. Wald, Children of Che, 263–264. 85. Rafael Rojas, Fighting over Fidel: The New York Intellectuals and the Cuban Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017); see also Lillian Guerra, Patriots and Traitors in Cuba, 1961–1981: Education, Rehabilitation and Vanguard Youth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming. 86. Pablo Milanés, “Acto de fé,” in Acto de fé (Havana: 1980). 87. Milanés, “Acto de fé.” 88. Silvio Rodríguez, “Te doy una canción,” in Mujeres (Havana: 1979). 89. Rodríguez, “Te doy una canción.”

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YVON GRENIER, JORGE DOMÍNGUEZ, JULIO CÉSAR GUANCHE, JENNIFER LAMBE, C A R M E L O M E S A - L A G O , S I LV I A P E D R A Z A , Y R A FA E L RO JA S

¿Cuándo terminó la Revolución cubana?: Una discusión RESUMEN El propósito de esta mesa redonda es iniciar una discusión necesaria sobre la definición y la periodización de la revolución cubana. Aunque hay miles de publicaciones científicas sobre el tema, pocas examinan sistemáticamente el uso polisémico del concepto de revolución, tanto en el discurso oficial como en los estudios cubanos, o cuestionan la noción de que la revolución (la “Revolución,” con mayúscula) nunca terminó. Aquí cubanistas de diversas disciplinas contestan una pregunta simple: ¿Cuándo terminó la Revolución cubana, si alguna vez terminó? Como era de esperar, no hay consenso en una fecha o un período, aunque hay una cierta convergencia hacia mediados de los años setenta.

A B S T R AC T The purpose of this roundtable is to initiate a necessary discussion on the definition and periodization of the Cuban Revolution. Although there are thousands of scientific publications on the subject, few systematically examine the polysemic use of the concept of revolution, in both the official discourse and in Cuban studies, or question the notion that the revolution (or the Revolution, with a capital R) never ended. Here Cubanists from different disciplines answer a simple question: When did the Cuban Revolution end, if it ever did? As expected, there is no consensus on a date or period, although there is a convergence toward the mid-1970s.

Introducción: La revolución como problema Yvon Grenier El discurso oficial en Cuba tiende a amplificar el significado del concepto de Revolución (siempre con una R mayúscula), ensanchando sus contornos tanto verticalmente (es un proceso centenario y sin fin) como horizontalmente (revolución = líder = gobierno = nación). Esto es inusitado.1 Las definiciones de la revolución son muchas, pero generalmente designan un proceso (no un actor), a la vez rápido y violento, que moviliza nuevos actores políticos, y que conduce a un cambio de régimen político y a cambios profundos en la sociedad.2

143

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144 : Yvon Grenier et al., En general se sabe cuando termina el ciclo revolucionario cuando se adopta una nueva constitución; pero en el caso cubano, ¿es la legalidad tan importante para un régimen que esperó diecisiete años para adoptar una constitución propia (i.e., importada de Rusia)? Las revoluciones pueden tener impactos a muy largo plazo, como cualquier mega-evento histórico (guerras, colapsos de estados o imperios, pandemias). Pero hablar de cincuenta años de revolución, o de un régimen institucionalizado (¿osificado?) desde décadas como revolucionario parece ser, según la mayoría de las teorías de la revolución, un oxímoron.3 Cuesta deshacerse de la impresión que la Revolución cubana así concebida encanta (al revés del “desencanto” de Weber), mitifica y desproblematiza la historia. Sin embargo, el caso cubano puede ser único. Quizás una definición un poco fourre-tout y polisémica permite un análisis más amplio de la epopeya cubana contemporánea. ¿Es útil para los analistas de la realidad cubana concebir la revolución como una búsqueda sin fin de emancipación nacional, o como el otro nombre de la nación y del gobierno? ¿Esto ilumina u oscurecen las reglas del juego político y el proceso de toma de decisiones? ¿Se puede dar por hecho que “la Revolución,” más allá de los actores políticos, existe como memoria y ambición colectiva, sin contar con las herramientas y datos necesarios para escudriñar la opinión pública en la isla?4 Curiosamente, aunque contamos con miles de publicaciones científicas sobre la revolución y el impulso revolucionario en la isla, y que la palabra revolución es sin lugar a duda la más cansada en las discusiones sobre Cuba en la isla, el interés por el análisis del uso singular del concepto de revolución es casi nulo. Los libros históricos sobre la revolución cubana en general omiten el cuestionamiento sobre la periodización de la revolución. Quizás es más fácil reproducir un automatismo narrativo tan común que suena neutral e inocuo. El propósito de esta mesa redonda es iniciar una discusión necesaria sobre este tema. El desafío, para el grupo de seis destacados cubanistas de varias disciplinas, es el siguiente: sin decirlo todo, decir todo lo que hay que decir, en dos rondas y menos de diez mil palabras, en respuesta a una pregunta clara: ¿Cuándo terminó la Revolución cubana, si alguna vez terminó? Cada uno ofrece una primera respuesta y luego, un comentario final.

“La burocratización de los procesos políticos, económicos y sociales, principalmente a partir de la década de 1970, puso fin a la Revolución” Jorge I. Domínguez “Los dirigentes de la Revolución,” escribía Ernesto (Che) Guevara en El hombre y el socialismo en Cuba, publicado en 1965, “tienen hijos que en sus pri-

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meros balbuceos, no aprenden a nombrar al padre; mujeres que deben ser parte del sacrificio general de su vida para llevar la Revolución a su destino; el marco de los amigos responde estrictamente al marco de los compañeros de Revolución. No hay vida fuera de ella.” Es cierto que ya en 1965 Guevara estuvo en proceso de pasar de sus responsabilidades en el gobierno de Cuba hacia su última fase de guerrillero transnacional. Es cierto también que este párrafo se refiere explícitamente a los dirigentes. Sin embargo, no es menos cierto que pronto el gobierno, el que será pocos meses después de aquella publicación del Partido Comunista de Cuba, y las organizaciones de masas exhortarían a los jóvenes Pioneros que sean “como el Che.” El texto del Che captó bien lo que ya venía siendo la política oficial; su aporte personal lo transformó de observación empírica a dogma sacro. Por lo general, esta entrega total a la causa revolucionaria se difunde como proyecto oficial reiteradamente por toda la ciudadanía a medida que avanza la década de 1960. La subordinación de la vida personal—familia y amistades—a esa causa revolucionaria fue un elemento definitorio de ese proyecto revolucionario. En esos momentos, no hubo duda que fue un proceso revolucionario encabezado por un gobierno revolucionario, y de ahí surge la idea de revolución con mayúscula como el proyecto oficial. Esa revolución, con esas características, lanzó la campaña de alfabetización, que sacó a niños de sus casas en aras de alfabetizar y así lograr una transformación nacional. Esa revolución fue la que venció en Playa Girón y la que una y otra vez, “hasta la victoria siempre,” según el lema oficial, le declaró con éxito la guerra a los huracanes que azotan el archipiélago cubano. Esa revolución fue la que envió a los sospechados de ser homosexuales a las Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción (UMAP), en un intento alucinante de transformarlos supuestamente en heterosexuales. Esa revolución fue la que insistió en los estímulos morales como motivación laboral privilegiada, desembocando en el descalabro económico nacional al concluir aquella primera década. Estos variados ejemplos señalan la complejidad de esa revolución. Es bueno enseñar a leer y escribir; es bueno responder eficazmente frente a desastres naturales. Sin embargo, una revolución con ese poder puede, al lanzarse por un sendero erróneo y pernicioso, causar notables daños. Esta revolución fue un proyecto desde arriba. Por supuesto, ni todos los cubanos, ni siquiera todos los dirigentes, se desentendieron de sus familias o limitaron sus amistades al círculo de la revolución. Muchos de los intentos de movilización fallaron, no solamente por su ineficiencia sino además por falta de entusiasmo. Los intentos más persistentes desembocaron en la huelga de brazos caídos que fue la secuela de la gran zafra de 1970. Los homosexuales también, aparentemente, se resistieron al cambio. Pero no dejó de ser un proyecto sistemático, consistente, poderoso, dispuesto a movilizar recursos y

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146 : Yvon Grenier et al., arrasar obstáculos, convencido de la superioridad de esa moral revolucionaria, definitoria de la revolución. Ese proyecto desde arriba terminó, no de pronto pero sí paulatinamente, y en esos términos la revolución terminó hace mucho, e impera un gobierno conservador de ese pasado de más de medio siglo. El predominio de los incentivos morales se redujo durante la década de 1970 y han dejado de controlar y paralizar los procesos económicos, a pesar de intentos de reavivarlo durante la rectificación de la segunda mitad de los años 1980 o durante la Batalla de Ideas, últimos suspiros de Fidel Castro como presidente. El intento de cambiar la orientación sexual de tantos dejó de aplicarse, y poco a poco se debilitó la homofobia oficial. Las grandes movilizaciones, limitadas ya principalmente a las efemérides nacionales, y limitadas además a un horario que no interrumpa ni los días laborables ni las fiestas, no son ni la sombra de lo que fueron. La burocratización de los procesos políticos, económicos y sociales, principalmente a partir de la década de 1970, puso fin a la revolución e inició una fase nueva, menos heroica en su cotidianeidad. La participación de Cuba en guerras africanas fue un ejemplo dramático del esfuerzo de mantener la heroicidad pero ya exógena y excepcional en tiempos de guerra, mediante un comando militar institucionalizado y jerárquico en todos sus aspectos, no simplemente por seguir las consignas de un Comandante en Jefe. ¿Cuándo terminó la revolución? La aprobación de una nueva Constitución y la convocatoria al Primer Congreso del Partido Comunista de Cuba—es decir, mediados de década de 1970—señalan simbólicamente, y en términos prácticos y efectivos—el paso definitivo de la revolución al socialismo burocrático. Ya se vislumbraba ese cambio desde el fin de la gran zafra de 1970, y ya se seguiría consolidando ese cambio en el tiempo. La revolución fue un hecho histórico. La revolución fue un proyecto oficial, ya también parte de la historia nacional, no de su presente.

“La Revolución cubana duró entre 1953 y 1976” Julio César Guanche Cuando Napoleón se coronó emperador, Beethoven tachó su nombre de la dedicatoria de la Sinfonía Nº 3. El acto del “corso vil” ponía un fin a la Revolución francesa. No obstante, dos siglos después de 1789, Furet se veía aún en la necesidad de exigir el fin de la revolución: “La Revolución francesa ha concluido.” El historiador cuestionaba que a la revolución se le otorgase nacimiento pero no fin. Había que enfriarla—terminarla—para poder estudiarla. En contraste, Hobsbawm explicó por qué se ha considerado esa revolución como “sin final”—esto es, con ilimitada actualidad—: “fue un conjunto de acontecimientos suficientemente poderoso y universal en su impacto como

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para transformar permanentemente aspectos importantes del mundo y para presentar, o al menos dar nombre, a las fuerzas que continúan transformándolo.” En Francia los reyes recuperaron el trono, pero no regresó el antiguo régimen. Hoy los bienes comunales son allí propiedad colectiva municipal, un contenido central del 89, junto a la propiedad libre de la tierra. Es aceptable que la Revolución mexicana comenzó en 1910, pero es difícil certificar si concluyó en 1913, 1923, 1928 o 1940. El cardenismo, experimentado dos décadas tras la revolución, se ha tomado como la realización de esa revolución, por la reforma agraria y la mexicanización del petróleo. El cardenismo no ha regresado en esas formas, pero devino un recurrente mito nacional—sin fin—sobre el contenido de la revolución. Como argumentó Ernst Bloch, las formas ideológicas tienen vida más allá del aquí y ahora en que nacieron. Van más allá de sus pretensiones de origen: pueden ser, y son, apropiadas y resemantizadas. La posteridad de las revoluciones puede sobrevivir así a sus finales. Con todo, es una necesidad darles cierre, pues la revolución no es sinónimo de historia. La revolución podría ser permanente, como en Trotski (a través de la teorización del desarrollo desigual y combinado, del cual la revolución permanente es una estrategia), pero no puede ser infinita. Como la revolución no es la historia, y menos el fin de la historia, no puede ser eterna. Martí precisó esa distancia a través de la diferencia entre revolución y república. Por ello, la Constitución de Jimaguayú (1895) regiría “a Cuba durante dos años [. . .] si antes no termina la guerra de independencia.” Según Martí: el “profundo conocimiento de la labor del hombre en el rescate y sostén de su dignidad: ésos son los deberes, y los intentos, de la revolución. Ella se regirá de modo que la guerra, pujante y capaz, dé pronto casa firme a la nueva república.” La metáfora de la “casa firme” tiene traducción teórica: un proceso de institucionalización pone un fin a la revolución, aunque el marco institucional no pierda por ello a priori contenido revolucionario, si así lo asumiese: “La revolución no es la que vamos a iniciar en la manigua, sino la que vamos a desarrollar en la República.” Existen otras formas parecidas de decirlo. José Antonio Echeverría (1956) escribió: “La revolución es el cambio integral del sistema político, económico, social y jurídico del país y la aparición de una nueva actitud psicológica colectiva que consolide y estimule la obra revolucionaria.” Fidel Castro lo argumentó así (1953): “Suele darse el nombre de revolución a los pequeños desórdenes que un grupo de insatisfechos promueve para quitar a los hartos sus prebendas políticas o sus ventajas económicas [. . .]. Ése no es el criterio del filósofo de la historia, no puede ser el del hombre de estudio.” En ello, la revolución es un proceso de cambio social fundamental, en el cual la ruptura y la distinción con el ayer resulta fundamental, para dar paso a la institución de un nuevo orden que rectifique el pasado y otorgue forma al futuro.

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148 : Yvon Grenier et al., Una genealogía teleológica asegura la existencia de una sola revolución cubana comenzada en 1868. No obstante, Cuba ha experimentado cuatro revoluciones (1868, 1895, 1933 y 1959), diferenciadas por el país y la sociedad en que tuvieron lugar. Dicha teleología no es el dato más firme que permite discursar sobre la Revolución cubana como proceso sin final, sino este otro: el régimen político nacido de la revolución comenzada con el asalto al cuartel Moncada (1953), triunfante en 1959, y definida en un rumbo específico tras las victorias en Girón (1961) y en la llamada “Lucha contra Bandidos” (1965), se mantiene en el poder. Sin embargo, la duración de una revolución no es matemáticamente equivalente a la existencia del régimen político instituido por ella y legitimado en su nombre. Para Deutscher, a diferencia de la francesa, la Revolución rusa “había durado.” Stalin conservaba el poder con un “coste terrible,” pero mantenía las simbologías de 1917. Para E. H. Carr, algunos de los logros de esa revolución eran “irreversibles”—la irrupción de las masas en la política del siglo XX y la planificación estatal de la vida económica—, pero visto lo visto la forma en que duró abrió paso sin cortapisas al crudo capitalismo ruso. Una revolución eterna es una contradicción en los términos. La Revolución cubana duró entre 1953 y 1976. De entonces a hoy es un régimen institucional posrevolucionario, lo que no significa la cancelación de la revolución como mito nacional, para sus defensores y sus enemigos. Al propio tiempo, es un hecho que el discurso oficial cubano emplea “Revolución cubana” como proceso sin fin. Para su estudio, es crucial analizar no sólo lo que el discurso dice, sino también lo que su proponente hace con él—esto es, atender a la dimensión performativa del lenguaje—: sus usos reales dentro de los repertorios de construcción de poder y hegemonía, con independencia de lo que creamos sobre el hecho real de cuándo acabó, o si efectivamente acabó. Por otra parte, es crucial rastrear sus usos reales en los distintos sujetos sociales actuales cubanos, pues allí donde se use habrá que estudiarlo como forma viva de la duración de la Revolución cubana. Sé que esto acarrea encendidos debates pero, recuérdese, “uno no pierde los estribos ante las cuestiones muertas.”

“The Demise of the Socioeconomic Goals of the Cuban Revolution” Carmelo Mesa-Lago The revolution did not “end” in a specific year but occurred during a time period. Previously I developed a periodization of the revolution, under a socioeconomic viewpoint based on eight cyclical movements, away from the market (idealist) and toward the market (pragmatist): (1) 1959–1966, market erosion, Soviet orthodox model, and socialist debate (idealist); (2) 1966–1970, adoption and radicalization of the Guevarist model (the strongest idealist); (3) 1971–

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1985, Soviet model of timid economic reform (pragmatist); (4) 1986–1990, rectification process (idealist); (5) 1991–1996, Special Period and marketoriented reform (pragmatist); (6) 1997–2002, halting the reform (stagnation); (7) 2003–2006, Reforms reversal (idealist); and (8) 2007–2017, Raúl Castro’s structural economic reforms (the strongest pragmatist).5 Political stages are intertwined with the above cycles; for example, the institutionalization period (1970–1985) overlapped with the 1971–1985 pragmatist cycle.6 I agree that, from a political angle, the revolution ended at this stage. The goals of the revolution were economic development, universal and free social services, the reduction of income inequality, and the elimination of unemployment and poverty. Two means to attain those goals are state ownership of the means of production and central planning, both of which provoked grave harm in the long run but were successful in this period, with sizable Soviet aid. Cuban statistics are often questionable, but they do show that said goals achieved a zenith in 1985: the highest economic growth rates, investment, and real wages under the revolution, as well as zero fiscal deficit. After the tenmillion-ton sugar harvest failure, the country produced between seven million and eight million tons without disrupting the rest of the economy. The monetary overhang declined from 88 percent to 29 percent of income. Cuban social indicators led in Latin America and some Eastern-European countries: universal, free, and good-quality education and health care, high real wages, virtual universal pension coverage of the labor force, income equality, low open unemployment, low poverty levels, and a peak in housing construction. State ownership of the means of production was complete, except for 3 percent in agriculture; five-year plans were in operation throughout this period. In 1970–1985 the Soviet Union granted Cuba US$40 billion, mostly in donations and price subsidies, and annual Soviet credits covered all trade deficits. Such generous support helped advance the goals of this period but also sow the seeds for a harsh reversal.7 In 1986–1990, a new idealist period (with further restrictions in the tiny private sector and recentralization) led to declines in gross domestic product (GDP), production, and productivity, which weakened the country in the face of the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the worst socioeconomic crisis since the Revolution. In 1985–1993, all key indicators sank: GDP, 45 percent; investment, 25 percent; Soviet-Cuban trade, 93 percent; total exports, 81 percent; imports, 75 percent; oil imports 50 percent; sugar output, 50 percent; manufacturing output, 80 percent; and nickel, 23 percent. With the loss of Soviet subsidies, the export price of a pound of sugar declined by 79 percent, and that of nickel by 55 percent. Others indicators jumped: inflation, 26 percent; monetary overhang, 88 percent; food imports, 116 percent; and external debt, 150 percent. The fiscal deficit turned from a US$200 million surplus to a US$5 billion

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150 : Yvon Grenier et al., deficit. The exchange rate of 8 pesos per dollar leapt to 25 pesos per dollar. In 1996, the United States compounded Cuba’s problems by strengthening the embargo. The economic debacle had devastating effects on the population: the real wage plunged by 90 percent and the real pension by 84 percent, open unemployment and underemployment peaked at 33 percent, rationing was tightened (and a severe food scarcity resulted), dwelling construction sank 38 percent, and income inequality worsened. Some previously eradicated vices, like prostitution, corruption, and mendicity, reappeared. The lack of oil provoked long electricity blackouts. The government tried to ameliorate the crisis: for example, a twofold increase in physicians per thousand inhabitants and a reduction of 43 percent in the infant mortality rate.8 But these measures were grossly insufficient to protect the people from the crisis. Timid economic reforms were introduced in 1993–1996 to avoid a regime collapse, such as authorization of self-employment, free agricultural markets, and the transformation of state farms into cooperatives, hence lessening the state sector. The central plan was replaced by an emergency adjustment program. Many foreign experts and a good part of the Cuban people questioned whether the revolution had died.9 Subsequent periods confirmed the demise of the economic and social goals of the revolution. Most economic indicators had not recovered their peaks by 2016: the industrial index was 41 percent below the peak; sugar production, 76 percent; and nickel, 29 percent. The real wage was 61 percent lower than at its peak, and the real pension, at 50 percent; open unemployment and underemployment accounted for 28 percent of the labor force; income inequality expanded enormously, and poverty grew. Social expenses as a percentage of GDP, peaked in 2007, afterward falling by 8 percentage points, thus harming access to and quality of health care and education. In 2006–2016, health personnel dropped 22 percent, and all rural hospitals were shut down. Enrollment in higher education sank 71 percent, and all secondary schools in the countryside were closed. Infant mortality kept declining, but maternal mortality rose from 29 percent to 49 percent per hundred thousand births; the number of physicians per thousand inhabitants steadily increased, but 44 percent of them work abroad. Housing construction plunged by 80 percent. In view of a mounting vulnerable population, social assistance should have been extended, but it slumped 30 percent.10 In 2002–2013, Cuba received substantial economic aid from Venezuela, which became Cuba’s first trade partner, supplying 60 percent of oil needs, buying US$9 billion of Cuban professional services, and investing heavily in the island. In 2010, the whole economic relationship equaled 10 percent of Cuba’s GDP and peaked at 15 percent in 2013. But Venezuela’s crisis badly harmed Cuba. In 2004–2008, GDP annual growth averaged 8 percent, but it shrank to 2.4 percent in 2009–2015 and –0.9 percent in 2016. In 2017, Hur-

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ricane Irma and Trump’s sanctions should provoke another negative rate. The crisis today is now the worst since the 1990s, and it’s growing.11 Raúl Castro’s structural economic reforms have been positive, but they still uphold the predominance of central planning of the market and of the state over private property; this policy has been unable to accomplish tangible economic results, producing instead adverse social effects. Since 2015, the reforms have been halted and some of them reversed. The long-discussed plan of 2015–2030 did not take into account the Venezuelan crisis, and the plan contains a laundry list of goals without ways to attain them; there is not a coherent and effective strategy to overcome the crisis. The Cuban Revolution has depended heavily on generous aid from and beneficial trade with the Soviet Union and then Venezuela. In half a century (or 84 percent of the revolution), the island has received about US$100 billion in aid (US$2 billion annually) but has been incapable of transforming the country’s economic structure to generate enough exports to finance its imports and produce adequate and sustained economic growth. The latter has been erratic and partly the outcome of foreign aid; advancement of social goals has been facilitated by external support, which suffered when that support ended. Possibilities for meeting the original goals are currently doomed.

“It may not be up to us to decide” Jennifer Lambe In an oft-quoted passage from “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Walter Benjamin evokes the temporal disruption associated with political change. The “great revolution,” he relates, “introduced a new calendar. The initial day of a calendar serves as a historical time-lapse camera. And, basically, it is the same day that keeps recurring in the guise of holidays, which are days of remembrance.”12 In this Groundhog Day version of chronography, the revolutionary sense of time collapses the past into the present, then projects it perpetually into the future. Referring to the outbreak of revolution in late eighteenth-century France, Benjamin traces how history (consciousness of time) played out on both metaphorical and literal planes. “On the first evening of fighting,” he tells us, “it turned out that the clocks in towers were being fired on simultaneously and independently from several places in Paris. An eyewitness, who may have owed his insight to the rhyme, wrote as follows: Qui le croirait! on dir, q’irrités contra l’heure De nouveaux Josués au pied de chaque tour, Tiraient sur les cadrans pour arrêter le jour.13

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152 : Yvon Grenier et al., It is tempting to see in this epigram merely another reflection of the human battle against forces destined to prevail at end, most especially mortality itself. Revolution might thus be understood as a project of willful youth and constant renewal. In its compulsion to relive the moment of its birth, it refuses to admit the passage of time, which pounds at the door like an unwelcome guest. In this, like all other quests for eternity, revolutionary forces—even those that proclaim scientific atheism as a guiding principle—inevitably reach toward the metaphysical. By way of juxtaposition, we might offer Jean-Paul Sartre’s classic account of the early revolution at work. The euphoria of political transformation, he suggests, had turned the very rhythms of time upside down. For Sartre, no fact was more emblematic than the young barbudos’ avoidance of sleep. “Night doesn’t enter this office,” he marvels on the occasion of his meeting with Che Guevara. “Among these fully awake men, at the height of their powers, sleeping doesn’t seem like a natural need, just a routine of which they had more or less freed themselves.” In revolutionary Cuba, Sartre concludes, “they still speak of nights and days, but it is out of habit.”14 Indeed, the urgency of the early 1960s drew from a sense that too much time had already been lost. Burdened by the heritage of foiled movements past, it was up to revolutionaries of the present to hasten Cuban history toward its telos, the radical liberationist project dating back to the nineteenth century or even before. But all the hurry was not just a question of destiny. As Sartre recognized, there were real and proximate forces—most notably, US hostility— that threatened to doom the radicalizing Cuban Revolution to the same fate as its predecessors: “Thus, danger comes to it from its best works. It grows with Cuba’s improvement. It is a race against the clock.”15 Shooting at that pesky reminder of mortality would not have seemed so strange after all. Revolutionary haste unleashed energies of historical proportions, with an intensity familiar to any writer who has ever toiled against a deadline. Each night of sleep denied produced a renewed sense of hyperactivity that drove the next slumberless reverie in turn. The extension of day into night, of school year into summer, of workday into nighttime classes, militancy, and beyond: the more Cubans sacrificed their personal time, the more they were asked to give. At the risk of veering into abstraction, we might pose a question about the conservation of political energies: where did all the adrenaline go? The most obvious answer is that the Revolution itself absorbed the surplus.16 Popular cathexis lit the spark of mythifying animation. It turned a revolution into “the Revolution,” no longer mere event but a vivified entity in itself.17 In Cuba, the nominalization and metaphorization of “revolution” thus came to full fruition. The world spun on its axis, propelled by cane harvesters, literacy educators, and block watchers, and a paradoxical process of personification set in. On the one hand, as a result of both state messaging and popular adher-

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ence, “the Revolution” and Fidel Castro, its increasingly singular leader, began to merge, not unlike Dr. Frankenstein and his creation. The sheer number of CIA plots to assassinate Castro drew on exactly that logic—that the Revolution could be terminated by cutting off its head—as did prognostications on the recent occasion of Fidel’s death. Political slippages were built into this conflation, including the erasure of the diverse constituency that had brought the Revolution to power. Yet they were balanced by a parallel path of personification that turned all Cubans into the raw matter of revolution. Fidel-asRevolution made the island’s political project constitutively dependent on one man. But “somos la Revolución” portended the perpetual renewal of its life span from below.18 The all-consuming nature of revolutionary process applied not only to its partisans but to its opponents as well. All Cubans, whatever their ideological leanings or place of residence, found themselves pulled into the Revolution’s ever-expanding reach. At some point, utopian visions must contend with their terrestrial limitations. Already by the early 1970s, with economic and political Sovietization came a certain routinization. As Michael Bustamante argues in a forthcoming essay, this brought with it a kind of obsessive orientation to past heroics, as the prospect of future glory appeared to evanesce.19 For most Cubans, perhaps, this ushered in the chance to finally and fully inhabit the present. Some scholars have argued that this moment—or that of the Special Period decades later—marks the Revolution’s terminus. If we look to political and socioeconomic criteria, there is much to recommend this view. Yet popular discourse would suggest a less straightforward conclusion: that the Revolution (not process but personaje) instead settled into a more mundane position in the background of popular consciousness. As with the deteriorative ennui of a long-term relationship, some Cubans who grew up with “la Revolución” have found the immediacy of their lifelong companion beginning to fade, or have developed towards it a kind of resigned ambivalence. Others have sought to revitalize revolutionary fervor in political crossfire across the Florida Straits, but today’s youngest generation hardly knows it at all. The ambient energies that drove the Revolution’s anthropomorphization may have finally petered out, with no new source of fuel (literal or figurative) to renew them. Even so, as long as “Revolution” remains a category that for Cubans bears an obvious meaning—however attenuated or unpalatable, stragically or cynically deployed—terminal language, I would suggest, is premature. Historical evidence affords an important lesson in this regard: political elites may have exercised a monopoly in shaping Cuba’s political destiny, but the somos made revolution heterogeneous, if not necessarily inclusive, as it was mobilized from below. Social scientists can and should debate structural criteria to reach our own conclusions about when revolutions end. Nonetheless, it may not be up to us to decide.

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154 : Yvon Grenier et al., “The Cuban Government Built and Rebuilt Itself Three Times” Silvia Pedraza Yvon Grenier is correct in pointing out that too often the term la revolución as used by leaders of the Cuban government, as well as by intellectuals both in Cuba and outside of Cuba, who attribute thoughts (la revolución piensa) or actions (la revolución decreta) to this abstract entity, becomes a way for that same government leadership to avoid taking responsibility for their actions and policies. It also becomes a way for the intellectual leadership to avoid the real analysis of politics—who gets what and why.20 Grenier poses to a number of experts on the Cuban Revolution this question: When did the Cuban Revolution end? Surely it must have ended at some point earlier than its now fifty-sixth year. To assess this, I looked into some of the theoretical literature on revolutions, particularly regarding its definition and what makes it different from other social phenomena. In general, social scientists agree with the basic definition that a revolution is a social process that results in a fundamental change in political power and profound changes in society, a process that takes place in a relatively short period of time when new political actors are mobilized. Typologies abound as to the different types of revolution. In my own work, I have distinguished political from social revolutions. In its origins, the Cuban Revolution was a political revolution that was fought against the tyrant Fulgencio Batista to restore the Cuban Constitution and the rhythm of elections that his coup d’état had broken; under the charismatic leadership of Fidel Castro it became a social revolution that deeply transformed society.21 This distinction is also present in the work of Jeff Goodwin.22 Political revolutions entail the overthrow of a political regime by a popular movement in an extraconstitutional or violent fashion. Social revolutions entail not only mass mobilizations and regime change but also rapid and fundamental social, economic, and cultural change, during or soon after the struggle for state power. Jack Goldstone noted that so many social scientists have striven to understand revolutions that there are four major generations of scholars, each with a different viewpoint and emphasis.23 In the last generation, in which my own work belongs, Charles Tilly, Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy, Mayer N. Zald, Sidney Tarrow, and others argued that it was more useful to think about social revolutions together with other forms of “contentious politics,” especially social movements, with which they overlapped, so as to gain insights from the study of both. Most usefully, Tilly differentiated revolutions from what they are not: they are not coups d’état (which do not attempt to transform institutions or the justification for authority), civil wars (here the distinction is, at times, less clear), revolts or rebellions (which can lack a clear aim), abortive

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revolutions (as in Cuba in 1933), or peaceful regime transitions through electoral means to democracy (as in Eastern Europe’s exit from communism).24 The “great revolutions” are certain: French (1789), Russian (1917), Chinese (1949), Cuban (1959), and Islamic Revolution of Iran (1979). All definitions of revolution agree that the fundamental changes in political power and organizational structures take place in a relatively short period of time. Thus the Cuban Revolution surely ended long before its now fifty-six years—but when? Grenier’s survey of experts on Cuba’s revolution yielded different answers: Nelson Amaro gave us the five stages the revolution swiftly traversed in its origins.25 Both Amaro and I see the first ending of the revolution in 1961–1962, when it was consolidated with the failure of the Cuban exiles’ invasion at the Bay of Pigs. Moreover, Castro finally owned up to his having been a Marxist-Leninist all his life and made clear the revolution was a Marxist and socialist revolution. To me, the revolution ended a second time in 1968–1976, with “the revolutionary offensive” that confiscated all small businesses in Cuba; the death of Che Guevara in Bolivia and the resultant effort to export revolution to Latin America; and the end of the total mobilization of the Cuban people all over the island to achieve Fidel Castro’s empty dream of la zafra millonaria of ten million tons of sugar. This was the end of revolutionary utopia and of “the revolutionary effervescence,” as one of my respondents called it, many had lived with. This ushered in a new phase in the 1970s, when the regime adopted its new 1976 Constitution and the Partido Comunista de Cuba was institutionalized. Carmelo Mesa-Lago has called this a period of pragmatism, following on the earlier period of romanticism. To Mesa-Lago, the period of the institutionalization of the revolution (1971–1985) may be considered the end of the revolution because it was then able to accomplish its goal of reducing inequality by eliminating unemployment and poverty and widely distributing social services (education and health) thanks to the generous aid it received from the Soviet Union and its trade with the Eastern European communist countries.26 Is it possible for la Revolución to have more than one ending? Here the analysis of Arthur Stinchcombe (1999, 50) is most helpful, for he makes clear that he conceives “the core of revolution to be uncertainty about who, and what policies, will rule in the near and medium-run future.” He emphasizes that “uncertainty about power distribution, then, preserves the condition of rapid changes of relative power—preserves revolution” (51). Thus, there are two major moments in Cuba’s history from 1959 on when the great uncertainty generated by the particular policies of the government with respect to the relative power of social classes, races, political parties, legislatures, military groups and so on, came to an end: 1960–1962 and 1968–1976. I argue that the revolution had a third ending, in 2001–2013—the years during which Hugo Chávez’s new government in Venezuela brought about

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156 : Yvon Grenier et al., great uncertainty, steep decline, and hunger generated by the collapse of Cuba’s lifeline and benefactor, the Soviet Union and Eastern European communism, thanks to the new alliance that developed then. The steep decline and want that began with el Período Especial (as the time of Great Crisis became known, thanks to Fidel Castro’s euphemism) ceased with the government accords to trade Cuban doctors and health workers for Venezuelan crude oil, thus benefiting both countries. That would make it three times when the Cuban Revolution came to an end or, better put, when it survived the social forces that might have caused it to end. As Stinchcombe put it, “Revolution ends to the degree that governments are built that can slow down rates of change of relative power and decrease uncertainty about who, and what policies, will rule in the near and medium-range future.”27 Stinchcombe went on to establish the various kinds of governments that the uncertainties built into a revolution can give rise to: conservative authoritarianism (e.g., Franco in Spain); independence from colonialism (e.g., American Revolution of 1776, Cuba’s independence from Spain); military defeat and occupation governments (e.g., Reconstruction in the US South, MacArthur’s occupation government in Japan after World War II); totalitarianism (e.g., the Nazi, Soviet, and Maoist revolutions, all of which created special social structures that promoted ideological mobilization under regime control, thus mobilizing assent from below—as was also the case in Cuba); caudillismo (common in Latin America, as with Trujillo in the Dominican Republic); and political, electoral democracy.28 To Adam Przeworski, entrusting one’s welfare to the votes of others is the central continuation of the uncertainty of the revolution into a democratic end of revolution.29 For Stinchcombe, electoral democracy is, unfortunately, “an unlikely outcome of revolutionary processes alone, without the help of conquest,” because electoral democracy requires such trust and the creation of the certainty of the law, which are hard to generate in a situation of uncertainty.30 To this I add that they are also hard to generate when there are hardly any historical antecedents, as is the case of Cuba. As Stinchcombe underscored, revolutions “are stopped by building a government” that will render “the distribution of powers more certain than they are during a revolution.”31 To my mind, the Cuban government during the years that are called “the Revolution” (1959 to today) built and rebuilt itself three times.

“La Revolución cubana empezó entre 1956 y 1957 y concluyó en 1976” Rafael Rojas El análisis crítico del término revolución es tarea pendiente de la historiografía y las ciencias sociales en Cuba. Tal vez sea en esa isla del Caribe donde el con-

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cepto de revolución se socializó de un modo más prolongado, si se compara la experiencia cubana con otras revoluciones modernas, como la francesa, la rusa o la mexicana. Esa peculiaridad reside en el hecho de que “la Revolución”— con artículo y con mayúscula—, además de un fenómeno del pasado, es una noción básica de la ideología del Estado, que confunde su significado con el de otros conceptos integradores de la comunidad como nación, patria o socialismo e, incluso, con las figuras de sus dos líderes históricos: Fidel y Raúl. En Historias de conceptos (2006), Reinhart Koselleck sostiene que en la modernidad, revolución es a la vez un concepto y una metáfora, que trascienden el significado primario de insurrección, revuelta o toma violenta del poder. En casi todas las revoluciones modernas, que siguieron a la francesa de 1789, y no tanto a la norteamericana de 1776, los propios actores del cambio hicieron del concepto de revolución una metáfora que aludía a una entidad abstracta, colocada por encima del proceso histórico mismo. Al metaforizarse, la revolución se convertía en un sujeto, con su propia voluntad y su propia racionalidad. Como Robespierre, Lenin o Zapata, los líderes de la Revolución cubana muy pronto se dieron cuenta de ese fenómeno y comenzaron a hablar de lo que “la revolución pensaba, deseaba o sentía.” Pero si como metáfora, la revolución puede ser eterna, como concepto que significa un proceso de cambio histórico, es necesariamente efímera. Si aceptamos la definición básica de revolución como destrucción del antiguo régimen y construcción del nuevo, legada por la mejor historiografía liberal o marxista (p. ej. Tocqueville, Marx, Guizot, Carr, Wood, Lefebvre, Cobban, Furet, Guerra, Knight, McMeekin), habría que concluir que la Revolución cubana sucedió entre mediados de los años 50 y mediados de los 70, cuando finaliza la construcción del nuevo Estado socialista. Si tuviera que elegir un año, diría que la Revolución cubana concluyó en 1976, pero no porque entonces se aprobara la nueva Constitución socialista sino porque dicha Constitución y la instalación de la Asamblea Nacional del Poder Popular dieron término a la institucionalización. En Cuba, como en la Unión Soviética estalinista de 1936, y a diferencia del México carrancista de 1917 o de la Francia republicana de 1793, la Constitución fue el cierre y no el punto de partida de la edificación del nuevo orden. En 1976 se constitucionalizó la génesis del Estado socialista. No todos los historiadores, marxistas o liberales, son partidarios de incluir el proceso de construcción del nuevo Estado dentro de la temporalidad revolucionaria. François Furet siempre fue partidario de entender el directorio, el consulado y el imperio como fases de la Revolución francesa y Alan Knight prolonga la Revolución mexicana hasta el cardenismo, que es cuando el nuevo orden termina de perfilarse. Pero Sean McMeekin, en su reciente The Russian Revolution: A New History (2017), deja la institucionalización estalinista fuera del período revolucionario ruso. Mi posición es más cercana al enfoque de

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158 : Yvon Grenier et al., Knight, por lo que incluyo la institucionalización del nuevo orden socialista dentro de la semántica histórica de la Revolución cubana En toda revolución, el concepto de antiguo régimen cambia de significado rápidamente, a medida en que los actores revolucionarios se moderan o radicalizan. De ahí que, a mi entender, haya que ubicar el inicio de la Revolución cubana entre 1956 y 1957, cuando se generaliza la idea de una remoción violenta del régimen batistiano. El asalto al cuartel Moncada en julio de 1953 no es, propiamente, el inicio de la revolución ya que entonces no existía lo que Lenin habría llamado una “situación revolucionaria.” Dicha situación, en cambio, sí está bastante extendida a principios de 1957. Entonces el antiguo régimen era la dictadura de Batista: tres años después será toda la experiencia republicana de la isla.

Comentarios finales Julio César Guanche Tengo dudas sobre el carácter de revolución abortiva del proceso cubano de 1930–1933. El escenario cubano que desembocó en la Constitución de 1940 representó un cambio social y estatal que llevó a una ruptura respecto a la república oligárquica (1902–1933) y de sus modos de control de la economía, la política y la cultura. La dimensión de los cambios en esas dimensiones fue tan significativo como para habilitar la existencia de una segunda república después de 1933. Tres items posibles para comprender la magnitud del cambio fueron la emergencia de una nueva, vasta y muy diversificada sociedad civil, con amplia acción colectiva; el desarrollo de un nuevo y profundo nacionalismo con base en la elaboración del mestizaje como esencia de lo nacional; y la creación de un papel por completo novedoso para el Estado en su capacidad de intervenir en la economía. Considerar estos temas es relevante porque parte de una metodología de estudio que discute varios enfoques defendidos en este dossier: el de la revolución abortiva, la revolución desde arriba, el papel sobredeterminante del liderazgo y el carácter político de la insurrección cubana de la década de 1950 frente al social del proceso pos 1959. El enfoque de la revolución política en la década de 1950 no da cuenta del programa que fue adquiriendo la insurrección cubana a partir, sobre todo, de 1956, codificado en la frase que repudiaba tanto el 10 como el 9 de marzo, o sea, la denuncia integral del estatus al que había conducido el reformismo republicano a partir de 1940. El carácter social del proceso pos 1959 no aprecia del todo las nuevas dinámicas específicamente políticas, que también estuvieron en la base de los consensos de entonces, como los nuevos espacios abiertos

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para la participación social ampliada, aunque tuviese restricciones en la desviación burocrática de la participación como movilización. El argumento de la revolución desde arriba permite analizar el liderazgo, pero es menos capaz de observar los procesos de movilización social y cambio cultural desde abajo que fueron condición y resultado del proceso pos 1959. Por ejemplo, cómo una sociedad que en la década de 1950 había elaborado este verso popular: “yo no tumbo caña, que la tumbe el viento, que la tumbe Lola, con su movimiento,” acudió en número extraordinariamente masivo a cortar caña y a participar de la producción en general. Es cierto que esa adrenalina terminó, y hay que explicar cuándo y por qué. Por lo mismo, también son necesarias más explicaciones sociales y culturales sobre las bases políticas del proceso revolucionario ya institucionalizado. En este aspecto, el enfoque de Alan Knight sobre el cardenismo me parece productivo, cuando lo interpreta a la vez como un proyecto desde arriba y desde abajo: como una dinámica de pulsiones de sectores trabajadores y campesinos (a favor de la reforma agraria, y de la nacionalización del petróleo, empujada esta por conflictos entre los trabajadores y las empresas extranjeras), al tiempo que desarrolló políticas ejecutadas desde arriba (como el programa de educación socialista). Este enfoque permite apreciar el papel del liderazgo, pero lo sitúa como un punto en el mapa y no como sustitutivos del conjunto del mapa. Visibiliza actores, repertorios y demandas diferentes para ofrecer una explicación más integral sobre los orígenes de las demandas populares y sobre sus bases de sustentación. Creo que el enfoque es válido también para el análisis de la Revolución cubana, un proceso que no deja dudas sobre el carácter desde arriba de un número muy significativo de sus políticas, pero cuyos consensos, y sus crisis, son explicables en gran medida por sus procesos generados también desde abajo. Jennifer Lambe In reading the insightful submissions of my fellow respondents—as well as Yvon Grenier’s thought-provoking introduction—I am struck by the tight knot that binds revolutions to their scholars. The classic example may well be Edmunde Burke’s critical take on French radicalism, which became an indispensable part of the (counter)revolutionary canon. When it comes to revolutions, however, academic intervention is not merely an imposition on the part of prickly experts. In fact, in the case of Cuba, social scientists were sometimes hailed by the very process they sought to study, thereafter subsumed into its fabric and its archive. Some of our best accounts of 1960s Cuba, for example, were written by social scientists who traveled to the island in the dual capacity of disciplinary expert and revolutionary sympathist. As they discovered, their contributions

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160 : Yvon Grenier et al., were welcome only up to the point where they did not conflict with official orthodoxy. The politicization of expertise left scholars with no choice but to write accounts that would be taken, whatever their intentions, as critical and therefore verboten. Even so, many were as eager as their Cuban counterparts to let “the Revolution” take the intellectual lead, reexaming well-worn paradigms in light of the evidence afforded by the island’s present. In fact, the pervasive sense that the Revolution was breaking historical molds came not only from revolutionary leaders but also from the political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists who traveled there to study it. Yet, for a long time, historians of Cuba have inhabited more complicated terrain, given the context of an officially “unending” Revolution. In his piece, Julio César Guanche orients us to Furet’s tantalizing prescription that a revolution must be “put on ice” to study it, with the historian serving as the agent of “termination.” This, of course, would represent a politically uncomfortable proposition in the Cuban context. In a suggestive contrast, Guanche also offers Hobsbawm’s vision of the historian’s task, that of documenting the “permanent transformations” wrought by revolution. This might be usefully counterposed with the distinction referenced by Rafael Rojas, per Reinhart Koselleck, between the revolution as concept and the revolution as metaphor, with the latter allotted a less constrained life span. Both raise the question of whether we must first declare the Revolution over in order to properly historicize it. Perhaps there is room instead to write a critical history of its present. If a new historiographical school on post-1959 Cuba is overdue, as Rojas suggests, this might represent one of its principal tasks. Historians of the Revolution can certainly contribute to the process of marking the arc of its “pastness.” But they also have much to offer when it comes to excavating the contingencies, silences, and contestation that shaped the revolution’s emergence and trajectory thereafter. Carmelo Mesa-Lago Rather than individual comments I thought better to do comparisons among the six essays here. Most participants pinpointed a year for the end, whereas I and Domínguez argued that it was not sudden but gradual. Four selected the year 1976 (Domínguez, Guanche, Pedraza—one of three endings—and Rojas). Lambe believes that it is premature to set a date, and Guanche thinks that the myth persists. Choosing the year 1976 or the mid-1970s is explained by several factors: the failure of the ten-million-ton harvest and moral stimulation, the end of mobilization, and Sovietization. More specific are the enactment of the Constitution, the convocation for the first Communist Party congress, the creation of the National Assembly, and institutionalization. Domínguez deems those factors to be, symbolically and practically, “the definitive step of the Revolu-

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tion toward bureaucratic socialism” and “the reign of a government that preserves the past.” Guanche argues that “the revolution could be ‘permanent,’ as in Trotsky,” but it “cannot be infinite”; the “political regime” is still alive, but since 1976 the Cuban Revolution is over. Rojas adds that the Constitution and the National Assembly crystalized the institutionalization process. According to Lambe, “some scholars” could argue that either the 1970s with Sovietization (that generated routinization) or the Special Period (which supposedly provoked penury) marked the “true terminus” of the Revolution, and “by objective standards, they might be right.” She adds other clues such as the obsession with the past, as prospects for the future glory evanesced, and that the youngest generation hardly knows the revolution. Lambe then resorts to the metaphysical, a point made by Rojas, that Fidel and the revolution became one and the same and were infused into the people’s psyche, which is still alive (alas, though, not for the youth). She concludes that it is premature to announce the finale and conveniently leaves the task of defining the extinction criteria to social scientists. Somewhat in between is Guanche, with the idea that the revolution transforms key elements of the world and unleashes forces that continue altering it. The revolution is dead but continues as a national myth for loyalists and opponents, independent of what we believe is the real situation. Through a political angle, I concord with the notion that the revolution ended in the 1970s, but being the only economist in the group, I focus on the fundamental economic and social goals of the revolution and how they were smashed by the crisis of the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet bloc (Pedraza gives this also as a third ending). Venezuela provided a new umbilical cord of aid, trade, and oil supply, but not enough to reinstate the original goals; its crisis brought another blow to the goals. In 2016, most economic and social indicators were below the peaks of 1985. The achievement of the revolutionary goals was substantially helped by US$100 billion provided during 84 percent of the revolution. Without another strong subsidizer, the goals are doomed. Silvia Pedraza In contrasting the short essays we have, it is interesting to see the high level of consensus regarding the period 1970–1976 as the historical moment when the Cuban Revolution ended. Before that time period, as Jorge Domínguez has emphasized, people who believed in the goals of the revolution and its future threw themselves body and soul into the cause. That meant that one’s personal life—family and friends—were completely subordinated to the revolution. After that time period, Julio Cesar Guanche defined Cuba as being in a postrevolutionary institutional regime; Domínguez defined it as essentially a conservative government, when political processes became bureaucratized and daily life entered a less heroic phase. As Guanche underscored, this does

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162 : Yvon Grenier et al., not mean that it ceased to exist as a national myth, for those who defended it or for its enemies. Moreover, both Guanche and Rafael Rojas remind us of the importance of language not only for what it says but also for what its proponent does with that language, particularly in constructing relationships of power and hegemony. Even more, as Rojas stressed, that use of language can be seen not only in that it created an identity between the figure of Fidel and the revolution but also in its maximum expression when Fidel (and recently Raúl) spoke of la Revolución in the third person. Their expectations of Cubans were then made clear, while at the same time robbing Cubans of their ability to make decisions as to the course of their own history. Rojas pointed out that we ought to learn what Cubans on the island think today of the revolution and how they talk about it. Academics who study the trajectory of the revolution could help us learn by not focusing only on what happened or what was said but also on what did not happen or was not said. However, academics are hardly allowed to study the revolution, much less in an openly critical fashion, so that kind of understanding for the most part remains outside of our reach. It can, however, be gleaned occasionally by those who travel around the island in sympathy with the lives of ordinary Cubans and listen to what they have to say. They repeatedly say that in Cuba there is no future; today Cubans have little trust in their government. As in the case of the Mexican Revolution, in Cuba the notion of the revolution has continued to exist as a national myth, long after its revolutionary origins. I add that in Mexico the notion of the revolution continued long after it should have, as the public policies of the Partido Revolutionario Institutional (PRI) seldom benefited those in whose name the revolution was made. As I was able to witness, in Mexico City the earthquake of 1985 (as well as the one just past) resulted in people on the streets staring at the buildings that had collapsed and blaming the government for their unsound construction. Fifteen years later the Partido Alianza Nacional broke the hegemony of the PRI’s seventy-one years in power. The political consequences of the recent earthquake remain to be seen. For Cuba, the political consequences of Venezuela’s crisis also remain to be seen, as that crisis continues to deepen. As Carmelo Mesa-Lago underscored, unless “another strong subsidizer” of the revolution were to appear, what the Soviet Union was in the past, the social and economic goals of the revolution—to reduce inequality—are doomed. Because we are no longer living in a Cold War world divided into two enemy camps—the first world of the United States and the second world of the Soviet Union— that forced the underdeveloped third world to take sides and to become part of their struggle, we cannot expect another great subsidizer to buoy Cuba. If Venezuela’s limited but real assistance to Cuba were to come to an end, the

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Cuban Revolution may also come to a real end. Lifeless, it may also cease to be a national myth. Rafael Rojas La supuesta eternidad de la revolución en Cuba se basó, desde muy pronto, en el significado que ese concepto adquiría en el lenguaje de sus dirigentes, especialmente en la oratoria de Fidel Castro. A medida que el líder consolidaba su liderazgo máximo, entre los años 60 y 70, la semántica del término se fue desdoblando, hasta confundirse con el sentido de toda la historia de Cuba. En el habla de Fidel la revolución era el pasado, el presente y el futuro de Cuba: la historia total de la isla. Unas veces, como en el famoso discurso de 1968, en el centenario del Grito de Yara, era el motor del devenir nacional. Otras, como en cada celebración del 26 de Julio, era una trama excluyente, circunscrita a su propio movimiento político entre 1953 y 1959. Pero la metaforización del concepto llegaba a su máxima expresión cuando Castro hablaba de la revolución en tercera persona e interpretaba lo que ella, la Diosa Revolución, creía o esperaba del mundo o de los cubanos. Ese uso de la palabra acogía el significado, ya no del pueblo, del gobierno o de la unidad entre ambos, sino del núcleo estratégico del poder, de la máxima dirigencia del país. Fidel Castro le puso rostro al concepto de revolución en Cuba. Cientos, miles de funcionarios del Estado y buena parte de la ciudadanía hablaban de la revolución como una persona racional o sensible, no como un proceso histórico que había abierto las puertas al régimen socialista. Es en esa dimensión que el concepto actúa como una representación teológica o mítica, que resta civismo a la cultura política porque trasmite al ciudadano la idea de que el curso de su historia es decidido por una entidad que lo trasciende. La positividad siempre a prueba del vocablo revolución, con toda su carga emotiva e, incluso, afectiva, se superpuso al significado del concepto de socialismo. A diferencia de lo que sucedió en la Unión Soviética y Europa del Este y que, en buena medida, explica las transiciones democráticas de los 80 y 90, en Cuba el concepto de socialismo nunca rebasó al de revolución. O, lo que es lo mismo, la revolución nunca fue vista plenamente como un evento fundacional, que había quedado atrás. Ese mecanismo lingüístico neutralizó la crítica al socialismo burocrático por medio de la identificación icónica con la epopeya originaria. Si desde un punto de vista histórico podemos afirmar que la Revolución cubana concluye con la institucionalización del Estado socialista, en los 70, desde el punto de vista sociológico habría que localizar, con mayor precisión, cuándo cambia o cuándo se agota, si es el caso, el uso colectivo del término en la población de la isla. ¿Qué entienden hoy los cubanos por revolución cuando

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164 : Yvon Grenier et al., usan, si es que usan, la palabra? ¿Piensan la revolución como un fenómeno vivo o como un proceso histórico del pasado? Una historia de la socialización del concepto, en Cuba, permitiría reconstruir el proceso ideológico de la isla desde una perspectiva ciudadana. La muerte de Fidel Castro agrega mayor urgencia y complejidad a ese enfoque, por lo decisiva que fue su voz en la semántica del concepto. En la introducción a su monumental historia de la Revolución rusa, Richard Pipes sugería que, a cierto nivel, aquella revolución “solo finalizaba con la muerte de Stalin en 1953.” En 1917 se habían producido la revolución democrática de febrero y el golpe bolchevique de octubre, pero la historia del Estado construido por el estalinismo debía extenderse hasta la caída del muro de Berlín y la desintegración de la Unión Soviética. En las últimas décadas, la semántica de la Revolución cubana está viviendo mutaciones que atraen la mirada de los académicos. En buena medida, la construcción de un modelo más plural e inclusivo, en el presente, tiene como trasfondo una idea crítica de la experiencia revolucionaria cubana en el pasado. No basta con reprobar el autoritarismo del Estado de hoy, desde una visión nostálgica de la revolución de ayer. Es preciso avanzar, a la vez, en el deslinde conceptual entre la Revolución cubana y el Estado socialista, así como en la pluralización histórica de ambos procesos. N O TA S 1. Una posible excepción sería Venezuela, donde por cierto existe una fuerte influencia cubana. 2. Véase Martín Malia, History’s Locomotives, Revolutions and the Making of the Modern World (Yale University Press, 2006), “Appendix 1: Revolution, What’s in a Name?” 287–301. 3. Por la misma razón, resulta raro afirmar que Cuba está permanentemente en transición. Desde 1991, la Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy (ASCE) publica anualmente sus actos de conferencia bajo el título de Cuba in Transition, sin lugar a duda, un título más atractivo (aunque menos preciso) que Continuity in Cuba. 4. Yo contesto no a esas preguntas en Yvon Grenier, “The Revolution Is Over, Isn’t it? The Use and Abuse of the Term ‘Revolution’ in Cuban Studies,” presentación en la conferencia anual de Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy, Miami, July 2017. Ver también Yvon Grenier, Culture and the Cuban State: Participation, Recognition and Dissonance under Communism (Nueva York: Lexington Books, 2017). 5. Carmelo Mesa-Lago and Jorge Pérez-López, Cuba under Raúl Castro: Assessing the Reforms (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013). 6. Carmelo Mesa-Lago, Cuba in the 1970s: Pragmatism and Institutionalization (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press: 1978). 7. Carmelo Mesa-Lago, Market, Socialist and Mixed Economies: Comparative Policy and Performance—Chile, Cuba and Costa Rica (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). 8. Mesa-Lago, Market, Socialist and Mixed Economies. 9. Mesa-Lago, Market, Socialist and Mixed Economies, 289.

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10. Carmelo Mesa-Lago, “Social Welfare and Structural Reforms in Cuba, 2006–2017,” in Cuba in Transition (Washington, DC: ASCE, 2017). 11. Carmelo Mesa-Lago, “Retorna la crisis a la economía cubana,” Política exterior (Madrid), noviembre 2017. 12. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (1968; New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 261. 13. Benjamin, Illuminations, 262. Zohn translation: “Who would have believed it! we are told that new Joshuas / At the foot of every tower, as though irritated with / Time itself, fired at the dials in order to stop the day.” 14. Jean-Paul Sartre, Sartre on Cuba (New York: Ballantine Books, 1985), 99. See also Jill Lane, “Smoking Habaneras; or, A Cuban Struggle with Racial Demons,” Social Text 104 28, no. 3 (2010): 11–37. 15. Sartre, Sartre on Cuba, 113. 16. I am grateful to José Quiroga for helping me to develop my thinking on this point. 17. On this point, see also Alejandro de la Fuente, “La ventolera: Ruptures, Persistences, and the Historiography of the Cuban Revolution,” in The Revolution from Within: Cuba, 1959–1980, ed. Michael Bustamante and Jennifer Lambe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming). 18. Roberto Fernández Retamar, “Hacia una intelectualidad revolucionaria en Cuba,” Cuadernos Americanos 149, no. 6 (November–December 1966): 53. 19. Michael Bustamante, “Anniversary Overload? Memory Fatigue at Cuba’s Socialist Apex,” in The Revolution from Within: Cuba, 1959–1980 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming). 20. Yvon Grenier, “The Revolution Is Over, Isn’t it? The Use and Abuse of the Term ‘Revolution’ in Cuban Studies,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy (ASCE), Miami, July 29, 2017. 21. Silvia Pedraza, Political Disaffection in Cuba’s Revolution and Exodus (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 22. Jeff Goodwin, No Other Way Out: States and Revolutionary Movements, 1945–1991 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 23. Jack A. Goldstone, “Toward a Fourth Generation of Revolutionary Theory,” Annual Review of Political Science 4 (2001): 139–187. 24. Charles Tilly, European Revolutions, 1492–1992 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1995). 25. Nelson Amaro Victoria, “Mass and Class in the Origins of the Cuban Revolution,” in Cuban Communism, ed. Irving Louis Horowitz (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1981), 221–251. 26. Carmelo Mesa-Lago, “Economic and Ideological Cycles in Cuba: Policy and Performance 1959–2002,” in The Cuban Economy, ed. Archibald R. M. Ritter (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004), 25–41. Also see his contribution to this discussion. 27. Arthur L. Stinchcombe, “Ending Revolutions and Building New Governments,” Annual Review of Political Science 2 (1999): 54. 28. Stinchcombe, “Ending Revolutions,” 64–65. 29. Adam Przeworski, “Some Problems in the Study of the Transition to Democracy,” in Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Prospects for Democracy, ed. Guillermo A. O’Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter, and L. Whitehead (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). 30. Stinchcombe, “Ending Revolutions,” 56. 31. Stinchcombe, “Ending Revolutions,” 71.

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A D R I A NA N OVOA

“Transpensar”: Materialism, Spiritualism, and Race in José Martí’s Philosophy A B S T R AC T The historiography that analyzes the circulation of philosophical and political ideas in Latin America during the second half of the nineteenth century has been traditionally focused on the study of positivism. The debate between materialists and spiritualists that transformed the ideology of progress by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, both in the Americas and Europe, is much less known. The decline of speculative philosophy and the supremacy of materialist positions transformed the word of ideas by the 1880s. In this essay, I will analyze the writings of José Martí (1853–1895), the Cuban revolutionary and intellectual, to understand how the spiritualist and materialist positions shaped his philosophical ideas, and the dilemmas that this debate caused among those who wanted to create modern republics in the former Spanish colonies. I argue that his rejection of materialist socialism is connected to his philosophical choice to support a conception of humanity based on a balance between spiritual and materialist principles. His approach anticipated the philosophies of experience that became popular by the beginning of the twentieth century through the writings of Henry James and Henri Bergson.

RESUMEN La historiografía que analiza la circulación de ideas políticas y filosóficas en América Latina durante la segunda mitad del siglo diecinueve se ha concentrado mayormente en el estudio del positivismo. Mucha menos atención ha recibido el debate entre materialistas y espiritualistas que se desarrolló durante todo este siglo. En este ensayo analizaré la filosofía del revolucionario cubano José Martí para entender el impacto que estos debates tuvieron en su pensamiento filosófico. Mi argumento es que su rechazo del nuevo materialismo asociado a la teoría evolucionista de Darwin explica porqué el materialismo dialectico no podía ser una opción para Martí. Su filosofía anticipó e inspiró las filosofías de la experiencia que se popularizaron a comienzos del siglo XX a través de los escritos de Henri Bergson and Henry James.

Terry Eagleton characterized the last quarter of the nineteenth century as “an astonishing amalgam of spiritual and material ferment: the boisterous emergence of new political forces, to be sure, but also a veritable transformation of subjectivity, as the high-rationalist subject of Mill or Middlemarch gradually

169

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170 : Adriana Novoa imploded into Madame Blavatsky and Dorian Gray.”1 Following this characterization, I analyze how José Martí (1853–1895) navigated this ideological amalgamation, particularly in terms of his philosophical ideas. To do so, I will consider his writings exclusively in dialogue with the debates between materialists and spiritualists that took place during his lifetime. In making this decision I took into consideration that Martí’s appeal in the twentieth century was mostly related to his political goals and not to his philosophy. According to Lillian Guerra, following his death it was “the uncertainty of Cuba’s sovereignty and the precariousness of its internal harmony” that made him the source of political thinking for all Cubans.2 After 1959 he became even more relevant because the Revolution achieved what had eluded the country “for so long after independence from Spain: national sovereignty, the hegemony of the nation-state, and an appreciable degree of social, if not electoral or pluralistic, democracy.”3 But while the existence of these common political goals cannot be doubted, it is not so clear which are the links to Martí’s philosophy, particularly when we consider that he had a complex relationship with philosophical materialism, as we will see. Some scholars have avoided calling Martí a philosopher because he did not develop a coherent and clear philosophy, but this criticism is unfair considering that such a thing did not exist during the years he became a productive thinker.4 He lived at a time in which philosophy became separated from a science that supported a new kind of materialism, and the latter was used to turn racial categories into biological truths that were applied to the study of society. Cuba remained a colony for the entirety of Martí’s life, and the formulation of a revolutionary ideology of independence related exclusively to Darwinian evolutionism was a new development that contradicted past understandings of civil society’s formation. More important, while the independence movements of the early 1800s defended a project of radical freedom and emancipation, Darwinian ideas promoted a determinism based on the supremacy of natural law over human design that made this independence ideology obsolete, relegating emancipatory ideas to the spiritual realm. In 1891, for example, Martí wrote that the “problem of independence” was not related to “changing forms, but to a change of the spirit” and, philosophically, this meant to rescue a mixture of empiricism, transcendentalism, idealism, and republicanism that had been crucial to create new nations.5 This type of thinking restored metaphysics and recovered the notion of becoming, fulfilling the desire for self-realization that had been questioned by exclusively evolutionary materialist positions. Old and New Materialism Raymond Williams has explained that it was during the middle of the seventeenth century that doctrines “became known as ‘materialist’” and one century

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later as materialism.”6 By the second half of the eighteenth century this term started to be used in a positive way, though there still was a bad reputation connected to its reduction of everything to dead matter, and its erasure of the spiritual.7 Over the nineteenth century, “materialism takes on a meaning familiar to us today, as the science-friendly doctrine” that was connected at different times to the “elimination of superstition” and to a “theory of reality which seeks to apply the ‘rigor’ or ‘quantification’ of physics to all of its aspects of reality.”8 But while the connection between materialism and science is widely recognized, it is not always acknowledged that it was drastically changed after 1859 through the publication of two books: On the Origins of Species by Charles Darwin and Karl Marx’s A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.9 Previous materialist positions attacked religion in order to liberate philosophy from its control to promote political and scientific thinking. By the end of the eighteenth century, the struggle of France to build a republic was an important focus for such thought, as in the work of the Ideologues, led by Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis (1757–1808) and Antoine-Louis-Claude Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836). This philosophy associated the logic of republicanism with materialism after the 1789 revolution, and their philosophical radicalism “sought to restructure French society around principles derived from their physiologically based “science of man.” Education was for them the foundation of society because it was a “process of perfecting human nature.”10 This philosophy became known as sensualism, because it found “all its rudiments in sensation” and it denied “the existence of innate ideas and any à priori notions,” which associated it with materialism and atheism.11 The Ideologues were discussed in Cuba by the 1820s as a way to undermine theology and affirm the relevance of recent philosophers and scientists who supported political radicalization. In 1821, for example, Félix Varela (1788–1853) suggested that the latter were needed to liberate science through “an exact Ideology and an experimental Physics,” and he added that if Thomas Aquinas were alive, he would have abandoned the language of religion for the new philosophy.12 The embracing of sensualism was so complete that in 1890 Manuel Sanguily (1848–1925) described Cuban society as “materialist to the core.”13 The failures of the French republic led to a decline in the power of the Ideologues, and Victor Cousin (1792–1867) created what would become France’s state philosophy through a more conservative liberal approach that undermined materialism by the 1830s. It was derived from several French and German philosophers, and mostly from Thomas Reid’s influence on his mentor, Pierre Royer-Collard (1763–1845). It identified four philosophical systems, sensualism, idealism, skepticism, and mysticism; the sensualists claimed that there was not “a single element in the consciousness which [was] not explicable by

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172 : Adriana Novoa sensation,” which led to “fatalism, materialism, and atheism.”14 Idealism found reality “in the mind alone,” denied matter, and absorbed “all things, God and the universe, into individual consciousness, and that into thought” instead of sensation, as the sensualists did.15 But these two dogmatic thoughts were wrong, as was also skepticism. Finally, mysticism built its “system on an element of consciousness” overlooked by the other three philosophies: spontaneity, “the basis of reflection.” It was the “element of faith,” of religion, that reflected on a fact that was “primitive, unreflective, accompanied by a lively faith” that was “exalting in its influence.” It was reason “referred to its eternal principle, and speaking with his authority in the human intelligence.”16 But when exaggerated, mystic thought led to delusional ideas and extravagant conceptions. The solution for Cousin was based on a philosophical mixture in which sensations “are ways to experience things” and not “things experienced.”17 He proposed to accept that all systems contained some truths and some falsehoods, identifying them through an eclectic spirit that “by discriminating criticism” discerned and accepted “the true in each.”18 The spontaneous intuition of truth explained for him a process of knowing that came from poetry/religion and philosophy, and this was also applied to the problems created by republicanism. The English philosopher George Henry Lewes (1817–1878) described how Cousin appealed to “the ‘patriotism’” of his audience in favor of “nos belles doctrines.”19 This reaction against the materialistic philosophy of the previous century was motivated by the belief that it was the source of the immorality that had led to the excesses of the French Revolution, particularly during the Terror. Condillac, Diderot, and Cabanis “were held responsible for the crimes of the Convention,” and for this reason every opinion containing a “taint of materialism” was denounced as leading “to the destruction of all Religion, Morality, and Government.”20 Rebuilding individual morality was for Cousin a political project to renew France, an expression of the Romantic generation in the Restoration era. Cousin summarized his philosophy and republicanism as follows: Our true doctrine, our true flag is spiritualism . . . because its character in fact is that of subordinating the senses to the spirit, and tending . . . to ennoble man. . . . It sustains religious sentiment; it seconds true art, poesy worthy of the name, and a great literature; it is the support of right; it equally repels the craft of the demagogue and tyranny; it teaches all men to respect and value themselves, and, little by little, it conducts human societies to the true republic, that dream of all generous souls which in our times can be realized in Europe only by constitutional monarchy.21

Eclecticism, as this philosophy was called, had a strong influence in the Americas because it allowed for creative solutions to solve local problems. In 1833 Ralph Waldo Emerson (1802–1882) told Wordsworth “that all Bos-

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ton was talking about Victor Cousin,” who had “undoubtedly profited by his opportunities to studying the philosophy of Germany,” where he had learned about Kant, idealism, and Romanticism.22 In 1838, George Ripley (1802–1880) edited and translated contemporary German and French thinkers to provide new ideological options at a time in which sensualism had led the country to fatalism and his generation to materialism.23 Ripley predicted that Cousin’s philosophy would attain a cherished “abode in the youthful affections of this nation, in whose history, from the beginning, the love of freedom, the love of philosophical inquiry, and the love of religion, have been combined in a thrice holy bond.” Cousin’s ideas were an aid “to purify and enlighten our politics, to consecrate our industry, to cheer and elevate society.”24 This movement led to transcendentalism, a philosophy developed around the country’s needs. The same ideological experimentation was also important in Spanish America. In Chile, for example, Ventura Marín (1806–1877) mentioned his reading of Royer Collard, who purged the excess of “sensualism” he had acquired from the reading of “Locke, Condillac, and Destutt the Traci [sic].” Cousin was also relevant because he confirmed his respect for the work of Kant and obliged him to “suspend his readings” in order to “classify and combine” what he had learned from eclecticism.25 In 1843 the Argentine writer Domingo F. Sarmiento made clear that his generation had left behind the “way of reasoning of the eighteenth century” in order to follow “Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Cuvier, Arago, Jouffroi [sic], Cousin, Villemain, Hugo, Dumas, Geoffroi [sic] Saint-Hilaire.”26 This would be one of the roots of the liberalism that would emerge in the 1850s. In Cuba, eclecticism also had an enthusiastic reception that led to a series of debates from 1838 to 1841. One of the problems addressed was its conservatism, since Cousin had supported the 1830 revolution that put Louis Philippe as a constitutional monarch of France. José de la Luz y Caballero (1800–1862) criticized the “practical consequences of this philosophical system” as necessarily bad “for the political progress of the world and particularly for the island of Cuba, where the existence of slavery, and ultra-conservative and reactionary political institutions” made intellectuals feel the conservatism of these ideas with “more strength.”27 In his interpretation, Cousin’s philosophy was a hybrid attempt to address the ongoing political crisis of republicanism, giving up on basic tenants of its philosophy. According to him, the main damage inflicted by Cousin was how he blamed those he labeled as “atheists and materialists” for their use of science to accomplish “a complete revolution of ideas in order to establish the foundation of a political revolution.”28 In 1841, Varela also denounced eclecticism for having caused a return to the past, both philosophically and politically. He believed that “all the natural sciences belonged to philosophy,” and scientific thinking contradicted Cousin’s conclusions.29 By the 1860s there were growing concerns about Cousin both in Europe

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174 : Adriana Novoa and the Americas because of the new discoveries in the natural sciences. In Cuba, in a lecture delivered in 1861, José Manuel Mestre (1832–1886) criticized Cousin’s attempt to create a doctrine with such “heterogeneous and incompatible elements” as sensationalism, and the ideas of Royer-Collard, Descartes, Maine de Biran, Kant, Schelling, and Hegel; but he also recognized the creativity that this mixture had triggered in the development of local philosophy. His notes included a citation of Étienne Vacherot’s (1809–1897) La Métaphysique et la Science to support his argumentation. This book had been written in 1858 and affirmed that it would be good to “end Empiricism and Idealism through a mixture of experience and reason,” but eclecticism was not the solution, nor had it triggered “the emergence of a true positive metaphysics” that was not contradicted by the natural sciences.30 This situation led to a renewed interest in Kant and his contemporaries.31 One of them, Karl C. F. Krause (1781–1832), had been introduced to Cuba’s students by Antonio Bachiller y Morales (1812–1889), among others.32 This professor had also written articles against “communism and the pseudo-catholic reaction” in magazines.33 Francisco Calcagno (1827–1903) added that he had taught a generation of young Cubans about the existence of “communism and German philosophy, and rationalist and practical philosophical schools,” together with the most relevant contemporary philosophers of the time.34 But by the 1870s, the decline of eclecticism announced the problems facing speculative philosophy and the need to find a replacement for it. In 1877, German experimental psychologist Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) wrote about the changes brought on by the ascendency of scientific thinking over philosophy, noting how Darwinism had “the effect on not a few thinkers of leading them from other speculative systems to materialistic views.”35 But in this materialism there was “a confusion of ideas, and Skepticism, Sensualism, Empiricism, nay even bits of sheer Idealism were mixed up with genuine materialistic notions.”36 It was no longer clear how to link science, philosophy, and politics, which led by the 1880s to interpretations of society that only took science into consideration, an approach that was rejected by many intellectuals. In the United States, the psychologist and educator Granville Stanley Hall (1846–1924) wrote in 1879 that at Yale, philosophy was taught in favor of “the Scotch-Kantian speculation as opposed to Darwinism and materialism.”37 In Cuba there was also uneasiness about this new scientific thinking and how it could be adjusted to politics. In the past, revolutionary action derived everywhere “more from Enlightenment political ideals than from scientific discoveries,” unlike what was happening in the 1880s.38 Even those socialists who had fought for materialism before 1859 started to merge their writings into the new evolutionary science; Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) claimed that “modern materialism” embraced “the more recent discoveries of natural science, according to which Nature also has its history in time.”39 In addition, Ludwig Büchner

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(1824–1899) and Friedrich Lange (1828–1875) had appropriated “the term ‘Darwinian’ for their brands of socialism” as early as the 1860s and 1870s.40 Büchner’s Force and Matter was published in 1855, but in 1863 the book increased its popularity by becoming associated with Darwin. In the preface of the English translation, its author made clear that while writing the book he did not know “that the dogmata concerning the non-existence of primeval (spontaneous) generation, and the immutability of species, which were then considered too sacred for attack,” would soon be destroyed by Darwin’s theory.41 Also in 1863, the Revue des deux mondes published a series of articles by the philosopher Paul Janet (1823–1899), a defender of Cousin, criticizing the popularization of Büchner’s work. Janet republished the expanded articles in a book to warn young thinkers about the dangers of the materialism “already so extraordinary in Germany.” In his view, after the rapid development of the sciences and politics in the fifties and sixties, people wanted “to explain all things by one single cause, one single phenomenon, one single law.” Nobody denied that “one and the same harmony governs the visible world and the invisible world, bodies and spirits,” but the problem was to compel nature “to be nothing else except the eternal repetition of itself,” limiting “the real existence of things to those fugitive appearances which our senses perceive.”42 Materialistic perspectives were destroying the role of metaphysics in philosophical and political thinking. Janet identified the main problem that evolution had brought to politics: the absence of both human and spiritual design, since Darwin’s theory wanted “to establish that a blind and designless nature” had been able to obtain, “by concurrence of circumstances, the same result which man obtains by thoughtful and well calculated industry.”43 This new materialism also made it unclear how to explain the “difference existing between the Caucasian race and the Negro one.” The naturalists who were favorable to “external actions” to explain the assimilation of “the ape to man” were incredulous to do the same to “account for the difference between the white and the black men.”44 Racial changes were only possible due to internal processes determined by natural law and not by external influences based on education and culture, thereby subordinating nation formation to biological inheritance. The Scottish philosopher David George Ritchie (1853–1903) clearly expressed this change in 1891 when he proposed that civilization was “healthiest when it [worked] along heredity.” This process emphasized the “decay and extinction” of those who were inferior, but this perishing of a race did not mean that civilization needed to be lost, since it “may be handed on to worthier and more capable heirs.”45 This implied that those nations populated by those individuals susceptible to “decay and extinction” did not have a future, which included those inhabited by Native Americans, Asians, Latins, and people from Africa. In the case of Cuba, this logic of continuity and discontinuity meant

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176 : Adriana Novoa that independence was irrelevant, since the population of the island could not be truly emancipated from its racial limitations. The right of emancipation became associated to the evolutionary lineages and not solely to ideology. This is precisely the challenge faced by Martí. He inherited the philosophical interests that had characterized previous Cuban intellectuals, but without an emancipatory ideology that could remain plausible after the Darwinian revolution. As it was the case with Janet, Martí faced this new materialism with clear anguish since he recognized that “all the philosophical schools” could be divided “between materialists and spiritualists,” and there were no other alternatives.46 Janet was helpful in his analysis of post-Darwinian politics, and Martí wrote that this “insightful and kind philosopher” presented his “deep ideas” in a delightful way, making evident the “human purpose” that inspired the “prophetic work of the poets.”47 They both shared an interest in creating a philosophy that worked with science in resolving the problems affecting republicanism. Spiritualist Renewal Prominent intellectuals, politicians, and members of the elites created societies to promote contact with philosophical spiritualism, the world of the dead, and other esoteric practices that contradicted economic, scientific, cultural, and philosophical materialism by the 1870s. In Latin America, Francisco Madero (1873–1913), one of the leaders of the Mexican Revolution, is one of the bestknown examples of this culture indicating the growing practice of spiritualism by the Mexican elites from 1870 to 1880. This alternative was attractive to Martí, who spent time in Mexico while the debates between spiritualists and materialists were under way. He presented his ideas at an April 5, 1875, meeting at the “Liceo Hidalgo.”48 In his speech, Martí made his beliefs clear, but without siding with any of the parties in dispute. He spoke about “the existence of a spirit that never perishes, and was completely unrelated to matter,” but he also made clear that he brought to the encounter “a spirit of conciliation” between the materialism that was “an exaggeration of matter” and the spiritualism that was “an exaggeration of the spirit.”49 He defined “spirit” as what led people to “acts that were independent of our corporeal needs,” making us “strong” and enhancing our lives. The spiritual realm also revealed “our pre-existence and our supraexistence,” a dimension that consisted in the aspiration to perfection, and a desire for the constant improvement of society.50 As sources of his presentation he mentioned only Büchner’s book and those he had read on comparative anatomy. This balanced perspective was also present in the United States, as a book written in 1880 by Unitarian minister Octavius Brooks Frothingham (1822–1895) explains. He affirmed that in the United States the “philosophy

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of experience” was dominant, but “the materialist” found “himself in a region where to distinguish between matter and spirit” was “difficult, to say the least.”51 Recognizing that by this time a new materialism was in ascendance, he reminded his readers that “the everlasting battle between idealism and realism, spiritualism and materialism, can never result in victory” to either side.52 Also in 1875, in New York, the Russian aristocrat Helena Blavatsky (1831– 1891) created the Theosophical Society. Her doctrine was an attempt to synthetize occultism and evolutionary science to promote the “brotherhood” of humans and their unique status among all species, reviving universalist conceptions that were less deterministic than prevailing trends. Theosophy was also an expression of the undergoing revitalization of research on India’s sacred texts and Sanskrit, which this philosophy combined in its blend of Buddhist metaphysics with concepts derived from evolutionism. Politically, it was also connected with a strain of social reformism that affirmed the importance of religion and spiritualism. By the 1880s, transcendentalist philosophy and theosophy began to merge in the United States, as we can see in an article published in 1887 depicting an alleged conversation between two young women that ended affirming that “Emerson was a theosophist” even when he had never identified himself as one.53 These previous events are relevant to the development of Martí’s philosophy, because in 1880 he arrived in New York City, continuing his exile from Cuba. At the time, the city had gone through a decade of intense social activism related to the formation of working class organizations and spiritualist movements like theosophy. While it is not clear whether Martí read any of Marx’s writings, or which ones, it is evident that living in this city provided opportunities to learn about them in other ways.54 His arrival coincided with a growing concern in the United States about the expansion of communism and the dangers that it presented.55 In 1878, for example, an article explained that even when a report about the “Chicago Communists” having more than “5,000 men drilling with arms in nine different halls of that city” was wrong, still there was “little doubt that the Communistic movement [was] growing” and would one day “breed serious trouble.” The article attacked the violence of the Communists whose leaders were “refugees from the Paris Commune” of 1871 or “leaders of riots here or in foreign lands.”56 They promoted political chaos to destroy republicanism. As it is known, Spanish American intellectuals were shocked by the defeat of France at the hands of Prussia and the explosion of the Commune, and Martí was no exception. These events reinforced the belief in the supremacy of northern Europeans and the Anglo-Saxons and the racial decline of the Latins according to the pseudoscience of the time. In addition, they contributed to the idea that socialism was the true revolutionary doctrine. Martí was in Spain

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178 : Adriana Novoa when these events took place, and his rejection of the Parisian violence of 1871 appeared clearly thirteen years later when he translated the best-selling book Called Back, published in 1884 by Hugh Conway (Frederick John Fargus) (1847–1885). He hated the book and his translation followed the original almost word by word, except for one section in which Conway’s sympathetic view of the suffering of the communists is altered by words that were absent in the original text. The Gaul himself had destroyed what the Teuton spared. . . . The fair city was charred and blackened by the incendiary torches of her own sons; but the flames had been some time extinguished and ample revenge had been taken.57 Lo que el teutón respetó en la Galia, lo había destrozado el galo mismo: hicieron los comunistas lo que no habían osado hacer los alemanes. . . . Todo París, acá comido del fuego, allí ennegrecido, mostraba la fatídica faena que, antorcha y hacha en mano, emprendieron contra ella sus propios hijos.58

Martí made the communists mostly responsible for the use of force, an attitude that is common in his writings. For example, in 1885 he mentioned how the German socialist was “a fanatic propagandist of violent measures” to which the Russian added “his dazzling and fatalist word.”59 The socialist associations in the United States were responsible for sending their “professional agitators who poisoned people” and society.60 This rejection of revolutionary violence was philosophically rooted in a different understanding of nature; while Martí was interested in the ways to experience nature, particularly the aesthetic, Marx saw it as objective matter that determined life conditions. This meant that the former was interested in metaphysics, while the latter, as Engels noted, was against the “simply metaphysical, exclusively mechanical materialism” of the eighteenth century.61 But this characterization of the old materialism was not completely accurate, as Charles T. Wolfe has explained. The previous materialism was “an embodied discourse” that focused “significantly if not exclusively” on “the contribution that ‘biology’ or rather ‘natural history’ and physiology make to metaphysical debates,” and was “much more intimately connected to what we now call ‘vitalism’” and “an anti-mechanistic doctrine which focused on the unique properties” of organic beings.62 Martí understood materialism in this way; he assumed that living things possessed a vital force that led their development. Social changes worked in the same way, and for this reason could not be forced, which explains the main criticism that Martí made of Marx in his well-known article following the latter’s death. The German philosopher was going “too fast, and a bit in the dark,” without seeing that people were not born in history, in the same way that children were not born to mothers, without “a natural and laborious gestation.”63 This meant Marxist socialism was the true

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defender of a mechanical perspective, adding to it the denial of preexisting design. This was a correct assessment, since Engels denied the existence of logical categories that predated the existence of the world as “the fantastic survival of the belief in the existence of an extra-mundane creator.” According to him, “the material, sensuously perceptible world to which we ourselves belong” was “the only reality” and our consciousness and thinking, “however suprasensuous they may seem,” were the product of “a material, bodily organ, the brain.” This explained why for Marx matter was not “a product of the mind,” but mind itself was “merely the highest product of matter.”64 Politically this meant that if the standpoint of the old materialism was “civil” society, the standpoint of the new was “human society, or socialized humanity,” which implied a different understanding of subjectivity.65 By contrast, Martí defended a universalism that was based on a spiritualized conception of nature that combined both vitalist/materialist and spiritualist accounts. According to him “the real truths are powerless if they are not animated by ideal truths.” While “the fact” was the real truth, the ideal truth was the result of “the reflection on the facts,” following the German philosophy that had been relevant to Cuban thinkers before him.66 Marxists associated nature with struggle for life and scarcity of resources instead of seeing beauty and morality in it, but Darwin’s writings had elements that supported both interpretations, which originated a debate that continues today. Historian Robert J. Richards, for example, is the main contemporary critic of the interpretation that sustains that Darwin “advocated a kind of selfish utilitarianism,” which in his view misses his “morally saturated nature,” which embodied “aesthetic and moral values.”67 This is “an intelligent and moral nature, very much like the nature formulated by Schelling and purveyed by Humboldt and Owen.”68 In a similar manner, Martí defended the new evolutionary science through a mixture of Kantianism, idealism, and the Naturphilosophie of the German romantics. Schelling was particularly important, as his view brought multiplicity and individuality into nature, an idea that Martí shared. He attributed to Schelling the search for the fundamental truth that ended with the creation of a “universal identity” that reconciled one and the multiple. He wrote that “from one the multiple derives” and the ego was “the universe itself, and the universe itself [was] not more than the ego.”69 Beauty in nature was connected with a multiplicity that intuitively accessed the spiritual. The search for what was beautiful became the basis of spiritualism for Martí, as it is also shown in the comments that he made about the rejection that Oscar Wilde experienced in 1882 while in New York on tour to promote his aesthetic project. He was appalled about the reception given to the English writer and mentioned that “to get out of one’s self” was “a human aspiration” that was good for humanity.70 He went to hear Wilde, and commented on their

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180 : Adriana Novoa shared belief in the importance that romanticism and the classics had for the development of modernity.71 He joined the English poet in defending Goethe’s ideas of beauty, and the role that “Greek beauty” and “passion of the Italian Renaissance” had in the intellectual renewal of what was happening in England, characterized by the desire to use beauty to create works that had “that modern spirit.” The fusion of the Greek love for beauty and the “ardent, inquisitive and rebellious individualism” of the romantics was responsible for Wilde’s aestheticism.72 This sensibility was against the “commercial spirit” of England that had favored a materialist position that threatened the arts. “There cannot be art without a beautiful national life,” the English poet had affirmed in his lecture, a statement that had triggered a warm response from the audience.73 Martí acknowledged that it was a mistake to seek for “the future spiritual wellbeing” in the adoration of the past, but at the same time, “the vigorous reformers” needed to recognize that the cause of the problems society faced was not the love for the art expressed by Wilde but the love for “the physical wellbeing,” which resulted from the ascendancy of a new materialist culture that left many oppressed and marginalized.74 Socially, to fight oppression, it was important to avoid the ugliness of violence in supporting social progressive organizations that promoted spiritual practices, such as the Knights of Labor. This organization had become the most prominent labor association during Martí’s time in the United States, but it was not a proponent of Marxist or anarchist politics. Those who became members of the KOL did so in a ceremony “filled with symbolic allusions to death and rebirth” while facing “a masked figure in a black gown.” After “endless questions, lectures, oaths, and mystical allegories,” they became members of the association and were “given over to the Venerable Sage in order to learn the secret handshakes, signs, and rituals necessary to be a fully functioning Knight.”75 This secret practice sustained metaphysical ideas that were not compatible with new materialist political views, and for this reason Engels saw in the mysticism of the Knights a primitivism that contradicted modern revolutionary ideology.76 Anarchism was another expression of radical politics rejected in strong words by Martí. In a book review that analyzed God and State, published in 1871, and written by Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876), he made clear how much he despised this book and its author. This is not surprising considering it included this sentence: “The materialistic, realistic, and collectivist conception of freedom, as opposed to the idealistic, is this: Man becomes conscious of himself and his humanity only in society and only by the collective action of the whole society.”77 He called Bakunin “this great evangelical fool who did not believe that governments and gods” were necessary.78 But in the same article he also commented, this time in positive terms, on another book based on

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a lecture that had been delivered by the freethinker Robert C. Adams (1839– 1892) to explain evolution in plain language. The review made clear that Adams’s book did not use evolutionism to deny the possibility to know the “unknowable,” or necessarily question “the existence of God.” In it, the “Infinite Power” worked out “in orderly sequence the development of the universe. Man, its highest product, [was] brought into unison and sympathy with all nature,” and the existence of past progress stimulated humanity “to aspire toward future possibility.”79 Martí recognized in Adams a support for the idea that the “theory of evolution was not in conflict with the divine origin of the world,” which reconciled spiritualism and materialism.80 According to him, Darwinian evolutionism was “impotent” when trying to explain the mystery of life, and for this reason it was not opposed to the existence of “a supreme power.” The difference was that at this time this power had to be explained “through natural laws and not through miracles,” as it had been in the past.81 Scientists soundly rejected Adams’s approach to evolution; a review in the journal Science concluded that the lecture abounded “in such loose and inaccurate statements” that was “an unsafe guide to ‘the uninitiated,’” to whom it was specifically addressed.82 Martí was not a novice in science, but he needed to fight the control that new materialists wanted to exert over it. He was not wrong since, according to D. A. Stack, Engels “explicitly encouraged socialists to regard Marx and Darwin as complementary,” and in the United States this was the view that was being popularized. In an article published in the Milwaukee Sentinel in 1895, for example, it is mentioned that The Communist Manifesto was “destined to do for History what Darwin’s theory” had done for biology.83 Among those who rejected the new materialism, the work of Henry George (1839–1897) was also popular. He was an American economist and philosopher and the author of Poverty and Progress. In his view, humanity had already passed “the socialism of the tribal state” and was not able to reenter it again “except by a retrogression that would involve anarchy and perhaps barbarism.”84 Martí agreed with George, and if scientific socialists were promoting the association of Darwin and Marx, his response was that Darwin had created the new natural sciences in the same way George was responsible for the new science of society.85 In an article written in 1887, he explained that one of George’s public events showed that his movement was turning “into a religion.”86 This ideology was based in “the human individualism” that contradicted socialists’ belief in the supremacy of the social, and it “condemned” those who made ugly “the victorious march of the human spirit” through “violence and unnecessary crimes” that attempted to force change.87 Edward Bellamy (1850–1898), the author of Looking Backward, the bestselling book of the 1880s, was another intellectual admired by Martí. His

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182 : Adriana Novoa philosophical background prompted “man to identify with the oversoul, the cosmos, infinity, that [was] the vague spiritual force that, in the lexicon of the pantheists and transcendentalists,” underlay the universe.88 Bellamy also despised revolutionary violence and was afraid about the immigrant workers’ “inclination toward Marxism and anarchism” since it gave rise “to fears that the country would once again be rent by violence—this time along class rather than regional lines.”89 He attacked the emphasis on competition and survival of the fittest that was related to materialist conceptions of the world, and on every count his “insular, parochial, Christian, uniquely nineteenth century American” socialism was “far removed from the conventional definition” held by European revolutionaries at the time.90 Transcendentalist views were being challenged, though, as described in 1890 by the Unitarian minister George Willis Cooke (1848–1923). He affirmed that at the time the “intuitions” of the transcendentalist found a “saner interpretation . . . in the subtle laws of heredity.”91 Transcendentalism was viewed as “a passing phase of American thought” because “a more scientific word than was theirs” was needed.92 In this same year a newspaper article published in Oregon also reflected on this perspective, identifying Looking Backward as an example of “Christian sentimentalism” that was as “out of joint with practical modern life” as “polygamy and slavery” were. While the soul of ancient civilizations was “paternalism,” the essence of “modern life and achievement” was “individualism.” This paternalism meant the “pity and compassion for the depraved, the incompetent and the indolent”; unlike the “breath of individualism” that was not “maudlin mercy, but justice.” It was, the article concludes, “the survival of the fittest” established by evolutionary culture.93 Martí’s Materialism and Spiritualism, a Balancing Act As we saw with Janet and Mestre, starting in the 1860s there was a revival of Kant, which gave rise to a neo-Kantianism that was closer to the ideology of republicanism connected to transcendentalism and romanticism in the Americas. In addition, a new idealism was being developed to fight materialism by Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906), who updated Schopenhauer’s philosophy through evolutionary science. In 1884, the seventh edition of Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious was translated to English.94 The author explained in the preface to this edition that he was seeing “the first signs of a rising generation” that recognized “an idealistic philosophy beside and above the mechanical cosmic theory of the Sciences of Matter.” This philosophy reconciled “idealism” with “the results of the most recent investigation” to “obviate a total breach between the Future and the Past, between the Intellect and the Heart,” providing a challenge to materialist supremacy. He considered “the exclusively mechanical Cosmism of Darwinism” only a “historical transition

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from the prior shallow Materialism to a complete and whole Ideal-realism,” which would create the “inevitable reconciliation of modern Physical Science” with German idealistic culture.95 Hartmann blamed Darwinians for the idea that “the agency of human intelligence is to be excluded from the strictly natural process.”96 This was related to race, since he proposed “artificial breeding” as an example of Darwinism in which “human intelligence” selected the traits that led to the creation of creatures that were called “human products.”97 These products were the result of ideal types, since the creation or improvement of a new breed was the result of aesthetic and economic decisions. Hartmann’s view of genealogy proposed “that an agency may be used for the realization of the ideal relationship of nature’s types,” which meant that the “Ideal relationship” needed “other ways and means for its realization beside genealogical relationship.”98 Racially, this interpretation introduced a metaphysical interpretation that was very defective, since an ideal beauty meant that some types were better [more beautiful] than others. This idealist philosophy opposed “Modern Materialism” because its refusal “to admit the existence of mind apart from the animal brain,” which, as we saw, was defended by Marxists.99 Philosophy was here grounded on the nation’s identity, and without the “mysticism in the mind of the German people,” they would have been overwhelmed by “the shallow drifting sand of the French materialism.”100 This ideological paradigm fitted very nicely with the ideological needs of revolutionary Cubans because it attacked the biological determinism of materialists. Martí recognized this in an article written for La opinión nacional in 1882; in it, there is a passionate defense of Hartmann, and it is affirmed that “it was a shame” that the youth of Spanish America did not know enough German or English because those who were ignorant of them “lived outside their own time.”101 But he did not criticize the racism that was inherent to the ideal types, or the same meaning of them. Ironically, the worst racism of the twentieth century would come not from materialism, as Martí thought, but from the metaphysical conception of race contained in ideal types. In New York, Martí also came into contact with theosophy. He liked this doctrine for the same reasons that he also liked the Knights of Labor, George, Bellamy, Wilde, and Hartmann; it was another way to defend metaphysical/ spiritual principles that were under siege because of the popularity of the new materialism. The leader of theosophy, Annie Besant (1847–1933), gave a lecture in New York attended by Martí in 1891. Later, he wrote a letter to the director of El partido liberal reflecting on this event, describing Besant as “a humanitarian orator,” who had come to the United States from England to support the “theosophic dogma.”102 Those who were materialists found the ideas of theosophy absurd, and Martí agreed with some of the criticisms, but he also recognized in Besant a person interested in free thought and the redemption of humanity regardless of race.103

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184 : Adriana Novoa Besant had been a member of the English Fabian society and had publicly abandoned materialism and socialism. She also shared with the Cuban revolutionary an interest in social justice that was divorced from violence. In an interview given when she arrived in New York, she answered a question about the possible reconciliation between socialism and theosophy making clear that this was impossible with “dynamic Socialism because theosophy is opposed to force, but with the brotherhood idea in socialism theosophy is always allied.”104 Besant’s combination of science and spirituality gave Martí hope that theosophy could bring “the true religion” of the future.105 Theosophists and transcendentalists also linked metaphysical ideas to creation and poetry, which was also important for Martí. He thought that “the spirit provided a sense of the world and the science ratified it” and the experience of something was more important than the object itself, particularly the aesthetic experience that opened the access to the spiritual through poetics, making the poet a metaphysician.106 For Martí, while the object is outside oneself, “the intelligence of the object” is within the self and there is a communication between object and representation. Philosophical research consisted in “I,” “what it is not I,” and “how I communicate with what is not I,” and these three were the subject of his philosophy of the relationship ( filosofía de la relación) that came from Krause’s influence.107 The latter implied an idea that was very different from the one defended by scientific materialists, who, according to Engels, explained the consciousness of man “by his existence, instead of, as until then, his existence by his consciousness.”108 For Martí consciousness was “the science of ourselves,” subjective, and it was related to the ways to experience something. Consciousness . . . Knowledge of all that happen to us. It knows everything related to the individual—particular—everything that can happen to the individual—contingent.109

This conception also appeared in Martí’s writings on translation, a job he took in New York when he was hired by Appleton to translate a variety of books, from literary best-sellers to recent works on science and philosophy, one of which was already mentioned. Martí explained his ideas on translation in the introduction to Victor Hugo’s Mes files, titled Mis hijos.110 In it, he affirmed that translation was more than just transcribing from one language into another, as to translate one had to transpensar. To translate Victor Hugo, Martí had to “think like him, to think about him,” which explained why to translate was “to create” and “to study, analyze” a deeper contact with otherness and the experience of it. In short, it was the closest possible connection to another way of being.111 This understanding of translation came from the literary romantic tradition, and it implied that to bring meaning from one language to another was

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a Platonic search for truth beyond natural languages, the mere words, which turned translation into a process with a metaphysical aim. As Antoine Berman has explained, the German romantics “have been the purest incarnation” of the aim to find truth through translation, and in a similar way, Martí’s transpensar is a practice that reaffirms his metaphysical project.112 According to him, the translator had to possess “forces of the same kind and aim” as those present in the original author.113 Translation shared the speculative reformulation of the classical idea of self-education as defined by Schelling, Hegel, and Schlegel: “What is one’s own gains access to itself only by experience, namely the experience of the foreign.”114 This interest in the assimilation of the foreign is one of the characteristics of this type of thinking. This approach explains why Martí loved Ramona, a book written by Helen Hunt Jackson (1830–1885) that he translated to Spanish in 1888. In the notes written for the preface to the translation, Martí mentioned that the book’s inspiration had been the “compassion for an unhappy race,” developed through a tragic love story.115 Writing in English, he affirmed that it was a book to read “all day and far into the night” because it was “full of youthful idealism” and was not “overwhelmed by science.”116 He affirmed that the good translator was the one who, “through nature’s favor,” had the gift of being able to “reproduce the mind of a particular time,” as written by the original author.117 This was not difficult to do with Ramona, since Jackson and Martí understood the republic as the result of the assimilation of diverse, multiple experience. Her views were rooted in the philosophical transcendentalism that was under attack by those who were supporting the emergence of an imperialist stage in the United States. The latter used the new racial ideas based on AngloSaxonism, a concept that supported the idea that England was the “natural” land of materialistic modes of thought, which made transcendentalism an ideology of the past. The philosopher John Henry Muirhead (1855–1940) explained that this decline had begun in the 1880s due to the problems inherited from Cousin, and the fact that his philosophy “had showed itself inadequate to meet the demands of the time.” The Civil War demonstrated that transcendentalism was “a philosophy of detachment from the old world rather than of attachment to the new.”118 The post–Civil War order needed the promotion of a new sense of unity based on individual and material needs that were on the opposite of the paternalist culture of the South, or of Emerson’s philosophy. Both Martí and Jackson opposed this kind of interpretation and defended racial assimilation and unity, which explained, as it was noted years later, why even when the portrait of Ramona was “drawn from real life”; it was “so idealized that a multitude of people acquainted with the Mission Indian have declared it” a “pure work of a great creative genius.”119 While for author and translator the way we experience difference was more important than the difference itself, racial materialists saw in difference a challenge to the constitution of the mate-

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186 : Adriana Novoa rial and visible self, which required a strict separation of variation to preserve purity and integrity. For this reason, those who supported imperialism, such as Teddy Roosevelt, disliked Jackson’s work. After all, Jackson wanted with Ramona to “write a story that would do for the Indian . . . what Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for the Negro.”120 Racial assimilation was essential to the constitution of the nation for those who were influenced by transcendentalist ideas. But, while both Jackson and Martí came out against the way in which civilization was being spread by the 1880s, they did not question its superiority. Both criticized the new materialism that was originating racial determinism and commercial imperialism, but their reliance on forms of Idealism was not completely benign, as was discussed in the case of Hartmann. The existence of ideal types made it impossible to imagine the bodies of an existing population, such as the indigenous, existing in the future, which in the book’s story was resolved through a tragic assimilation that created better representable types. This assimilative process was helpful to conceive the independence of Cuba and the role of its racially diverse population, which explains why in the 1890s Martí adjusted his ideas about race “in preparation for the Cuban independence war,” as Jorge Camacho has shown.121 In 1895 Martí contradicted the narrative published by some newspapers in the United States that characterized the revolutionary war that was starting in Cuba not as emancipatory struggle but as “a racial war” because the revolutionaries cooperated with “Negroes” in their fight.122 This depiction was contradicted by letters sent by Martí and Máximo Gómez to the leaders of the revolution in New York, who spread their content to newspapers affirming that there was “no race war in Cuba.” There were, in fact, “negro officers and men” participating, but because they were “brave; because they have fought, and because they have proven themselves to be honorable and loyal to the cause— more honorable than some whites, who disgraced and dishonored the Lone Star flag.”123 Racial differences in Cuba could be overcome negating the fatalism and determinism emphasized by the imperialists. Conclusions Analyzing Martí in dialogue with the ideas of his time helps us to understand his somewhat contradictory, incomplete philosophy as the result of the ideological changes mentioned by Eagleton. He fought for Cuba’s independence at a time in which the supremacy of a new materialism conditioned emancipation on having the right embodiment, the right race. Living in the United States made him painfully aware of this situation; for example, in an article published in 1892 in Chicago, it was alleged that a Cuban had commented on his lack of faith in independence because of the defects of the island’s population:

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Cuba is indeed almost God-forsaken. Her only hope is annexation to the United States. Would to heaven we could have our own government—that is to say, that we were fit for it. The squabbling, the jealousies, the divisions among our “patriot” force in the United States shows only too well that would be inevitable. We are worse than the Irish with their factions. Our men are brave, but they are all impulse without no stability. In José Martí we have a sort of Parnell, people think. Martí is great in his way; that is as an orator and general literateur.124

But Martí was also a philosopher who resisted embracing this logic and promoted ideas based on ways to experience and metaphysical design. In this sense, he anticipated a type of thinking that challenged the materialists’ dominance by the 1900s. At this time philosophies connected to vitalism and experience became popular through the writings of William James (1842–1910) and Henri Bergson (1859–1941), and it is to this genealogy that Martí’s philosophy belongs.125 In 1903, James wrote a letter to Bergson in which he explained that he conceived the philosophy of the latter as one “of pure experience,” and that it could “be made to work, and will reconcile many of the old inveterate oppositions of the schools.”126 The Cuban revolutionary leader was also walking toward this path, following the philosophical roots of Cuban philosophy that he connected to the new science. According to James, “within experience, phenomena come and go. There are novelties; there are losses. The world seems, on the concrete and proximate level at least, really to grow,” and we can also identify Martí in these words.127 The difference was that experience was for him subordinated to the creation of an independent and sovereign Cuba, a metaphysical nation that would be materialized by a revolution led by spiritual forces. These ideological connections, though, were not due to Martí’s use of others’ ideas.128 Bergson, James, and Martí were all simultaneously attempting to restore metaphysics and intuitionism through the use of the same sources, and in places that were undergoing important political changes after the failures of republicanism, which explains their interest in similar philosophical positions. Martí’s defense of an emancipated Cuba was developed according to the philosophical possibilities available to him, and within the contradictions and defects that all the political philosophies that rejected a biological causality devoid of metaphysics faced at the time. He created a synthesis of ideas that made it possible to think about independence through the renewal of the transcendental project of early republicanism that was divorced from the revolutionary materialism of his lifetime. In doing so, he made possible the idea of an emancipated Cuba, which explains why after 1959 the Revolution could claim the realization of Martí’s political plan while, at the same time, it largely ignored his complicated relationship with scientific materialism.

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188 : Adriana Novoa Acknowledgments This article is the result of endless conversations with Madeline Cámara. Over the years she has inspired my work on spiritualism and all things sacred, though it is difficult to match Madeline’s depth and brilliance. I would also like to express my gratitude to Jorge Camacho, whose work on Martí has shaped many ideas of mine. My conversations with Mabel Cuesta, Maya Islas, Ella Schmidt, Pablo Brescia, Sonia Labrador, Andrea Pitts, Stephanie Rivera Berruz, and Alex Levine helped me to develop this essay. Finally, the comments made by three anonymous reviewers identified weaknesses and asked me to correct unclear aspects of the argument. I am very grateful for their suggestions, and any mistakes that remain are my own. NOTES 1. Eagleton, “Flight to the Real,” 11. 2. Lillian Guerra, Myth of José Martí, 2. 3. Guerra, Myth of José Martí, 323. 4. For example, Fernando Ortiz thought that he was a “philosopher without philosophy,” and Roberto Fernández Retamar affirmed that he was not a “philosopher, but, without a doubt, a thinker.” Qtd. by Pablo Guadamarra González, José Martí y el humanismo en América Latina, 115. 5. “Nuestra América,” El partido liberal [Mexico], January 30, 1891, in José Martí, Obras completas 6:23. 6. Martí, Obras completas 6:23. 7. Wolfe, Materialism, 14. 8. Wolfe, Materialism. 9. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (London: John Murray, 1859); Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans N. I. Stone. (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1904). [Here I am including the complete citations of the books mentioned in the text) 10. Tomlinson, Head Masters, xix. 11. Dabney, Sensualistic Philosophy, 1. 12. Varela, Miscelánea filosófica, 53. 13. Sanguily, José de la Luz y Caballero, 83. 14. Henry, “Introduction,” 86. 15. Henry, “Introduction,” 87. 16. Henry, “Introduction,” 88. 17. Manns and Madden, “Victor Cousin,” 571. 18. Manns and Madden, “Victor Cousin.” 19. Lewes, History of Philosophy, 645. 20. Lewes, History of Philosophy. 21. Cousin, Lectures on the True, the Beautiful and the Good, 8–9. 22. Garnett and Anderson, Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 82. 23. Ripley, Philosophical Miscellanies, 11. 24. Ripley, Philosophical Miscellanies, 42. 25. Ventura Marín, Elementos de la filosofía, iv–v. 26. Sarmiento, Memoria leida.

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27. Qtd. by Sanguily, José de la Luz y Caballero, 82. All the italics are in the original if not otherwise indicated. 28. Sanguily, José de la Luz y Caballero, 65. 29. Varela, Lecciones de filosofía, 1. 30. Varela, Lecciones de filosofía, 89. 31. Original text: Étienne Vacherot, La métaphysique et la science; ou, Principes de métaphysique positive (Paris: F. Chamerot, 1858), 2: 322–323. 32. Spanish translation, see C. Cr F. Krause, Sistema de la filosofia: Metafísica. Ia-parte. Análisis. Expuesto por Julian Sanz Del Río (Madrid: M. Galiano, 1860). On Krause in Cuba, see Josefina Suárez Serrano, “La impronta del krausismo en Cuba,” Revista brasileira do Caribe 8, no. 16 (2008): 397–410; Rafael V. Orden Jiménez, “La filosofía de Krause y su influencia: nuevas perspectivas para el estudio del krausismo en América Latina,” Universitas Philosophica 16, no. 32 (1999): 139-179; Antonio Sánchez de Bustamente y Montoro, La filosofía clásica alemana en Cuba 1841–1898 (Havana: Edición de Ciencias Sociales, 1984). 33. Mestre, De la filosofía, 76. 34. Calcagno, Diccionario biográfico cubano, 91. 35. Wundt, “Philosophy in Germany,” 501. 36. Wundt, “Philosophy in Germany,” 502. 37. Hall, “VI.—Philosophy in the United States,” Mind 13 (1879): 96. 38. Staum, Cabanis, 10. 39. Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, 39. 40. Stack, “The first Darwinian left,” 683. 41. Büchner, Force and Matter. 42. Büchner, Force and Matter, xii. 43. Büchner, Force and Matter, 173. 44. Büchner, Force and Matter, 157. 45. Ritchie, Darwinism and Politics, 101. 46. Martí, “Asgartha,” Obras completas 19, 361. 47. “Letter to La opinión nacional. January 7, 1882,” in Obras completas 14:315–316. 48. See Cervantes, El espiritismo seduce; Concheso, “José Martí, filósofo.” 49. Qtd. by Concheso, “Jose Martí, filósofo,” 115. 50. Concheso, “Jose Martí, filósofo.” 51. Frothingham, Transcendentalism in New England, 76. 52. Frothingham, Transcendentalism in New England, 17. 53. “Boston and Omaha, Galveston (TX) Daily News, April 24, 1887. 54. Martí knew Marx’s writings through the analysis of other authors. For example, José Carlos Ballón has studied the influence that John Rae’s book on socialism had on him. See Lecturas norteamericanas de José Martí: Emerson y el socialismo contemporáneo (1880–1887) (Mexico City: UNAM, 1995). 55. For the debate on the relationship between Martí and Marx, see Armando Hart Dávalos, “Martí y Marx,” http://www.josemarti.info/articulos/marti_marx.html; Juan Marinello, “El caso literario de José Martí: Motivos de centenario” (publisher not identified, 1954); Roberto Fernández Retamar, “Notas sobre Martí, Lenín y la revolución anti-colonial,” Casa de las Americas 10: 116–130. For arguments against the similarities of these two thinkers, see Carlos Ripoll, “The Falsification of José Martí in Cuba,” Cuban Studies (1994): 3–38; and José Martí, The United States, and the Marxist Interpretation of Cuban History (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1984); Enrico María Santí, “José Martí and the Cuban Revolution,” Cuban Studies (1986): 139–150; Rafael Rojas, Motivos de Anteo: Patria y nación en la historia intelectual de Cuba (Madrid: Editorial Colibrí, 2008). Also see Bruno Bosteels, “Marx y Martí: Lógicas del desencuentro,” Nómadas, Bogotá, no. 31, p. 63–73, October 2009; Jorge Ibarra, “Martí and Socialism,” in José

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190 : Adriana Novoa Martí: Revolutionary Democrat, ed. Christopher Abel and Nissa Torrets (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1986), 83–107. 56. “Army and the commune,” 626. 57. Conway, Called Back, 282–283. 58. Martí, Misterio, in Obras completas 24, 195. The italics are mine. 59. Martí, “Carta al director de La Nación. February 9, 1885,” in Obras completas 10, 159. 60. Martí, “Carta al director.” 61. Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, 38–39. 62. Wolfe, “Forms of Materialist Embodiment,” 129. For the connection between Martí and materialism, see Adriana Novoa, “José Martí and Evolution: An Analysis on Nation and Race,” in Interdisciplinary Essays on Darwinism in Hispanic Literature and Film, ed. Jerry Hoeg and Kevin Larsen (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2009), 169–205. 63. “Karl Marx ha muerto,” La Nación, March 29, 1883, in Obras completas 8, 285. 64. Engels, “Preface to the German Edition of 1888,” 25. 65. Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, 84. 66. Martí, “No bastan las verdades reales para explicar la ciencia transcendental,” in Obras completas 21, 54. 67. Richards, Romantic Conception of Life, 539–540. 68. Richards, Romantic Conception of Life, 539. 69. Martí, “Identidad universal,” in Obras completas 21, 56. 70. Martí, “Carta al director de La Nación. Buenos Aires, December 10, 1882,” in Obras completas 15, 361. 71. Martí, “Carta al director,” 363. 72. “Oscar Wilde,” 323, in Obras completas 15, 363, 361–368. 73. “Oscar Wilde,” 365. 74. “Oscar Wilde,” 367. 75. Weir, Beyond Labor’s Veil, 19. 76. Engels, “Preface to the 1887 Edition,” 308. 77. Martí, “Libros nuevos. La América, April 1884,” in Obras completas 13, 440. 78. Martí, “Libros nuevos,” 441. Martí was reviewing Evolution: A Summary of Evidence (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1883). 79. Adams, Evolution, 44. 80. Martí, “Libros nuevos,” 45. 81. Martí, “Libros nuevos.” 82. “Adams’s Lecture on Evolution,” Science 2, no. 41 (1883): 659. 83. Stack, “The First Darwinian Left,” 1; “Frederick Engels,” Milwaukee Sentinel, August 8, 1895. 84. George, Progress and Poverty, 247. 85. Martí, “Carta al director de El Partido Liberal. New York, January 16, 1887,” in Obras completas 11, 146. 86. Martí, “Carta al director,” 208. 87. Martí, “Carta al director,” 282; Martí, “Carta al director de La Nación. New York, May 16, 1886,” 448, in Obras completas, 10. 88. Patai, “Double Vision of Edward Bellamy,” 27. Christopher Abel also analyzed the similarities in the writings of these two authors. See “Martí, Latin America and Spain.” 89. Strauss, “Gender, Class, and Race in Utopia,” 70. 90. Cantor, “Backward Look of Bellamy’s Socialism,” 34. 91. Cooke, “Poets of Transcendentalism,” 26. 92. Cooke, “Poets of Transcendentalism,” 26, 28.

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93. “Christian Socialism,” Morning Oregonian, May 25, 1890, 6. 94. The first edition appeared in 1868 and the seventh in 1875. 95. Hartmann, “Preface to the Seventh Edition,” xix. 96. Hartmann, “The True and the False in Darwinism,” 393. 97. Hartmann, “The True and the False in Darwinism.” 98. Hartmann, “The True and the False in Darwinism,” 399. 99. Hartmann, Philosophy of the Unconscious, 43. 100. Hartmann, Philosophy of the Unconscious, 359. 101. Martí, Obras completas 23, 200. 102. “Carta de Martí, December 7, 1891,” in Obras completas 12, 504. 103. “Carta de Martí, December 7,” 504. 104. “To Teach Theosophy,” Daily Inter Ocean (Chicago), November 28, 1891. 105. “Carta de Martí, December 7,” 504. 106. Martí, “Emerson,” La opinión nacional (Caracas), May 19, 1882, in Obras completas, 13, 25. 107. Martí, “Kant y Spencer,” Cuadernos de apuntes, no. 18, in Obras completas, 21, 387. 108. Engels, Development of Socialism, 13. 109. Martí, “Cuadernos de apuntes,” in Obras completas, 21, 63. 110. Martí, Obras completas 20, 14–34. 111. Martí, Obras completas. 112. Berman, Experience of the Foreign, 8. 113. Martí, “Cuadernos de apuntes,” in Obras completas 21, 202. 114. Berman, Experience of the Foreign, 162. 115. Martí, Obras completas, 22, 177. 116. Martí, Obras completas, 178. 117. Martí, Obras completas, 23, 139. 118. Muirhead, “How Hegel Came to America,” 230. 119. Hufford, Real Ramona, 33. 120. Qtd. in John M. Rhea, Field of Their Own, 76. Roosevelt has criticized Jackson’s view on nature and the rights of Indians, writing that during the nineteenth century “a good deal of sentimental nonsense has been talked about our taking the Indian’s lands.” Qtd. in Philippon, Conserving Words, 50. 121. Camacho, “Signo de propiedad,” 78. 122. For example, see “The Cuban Revolt,” Penny Press (Minneapolis), March 21, 1895, n.p. 123. Máximo Gómez, “The Cuban Rebels Give Their Side,” Daily Picayune (New Orleans), May 19, 1895. 124. “Yearning to Be Annexed,” Daily Inter Ocean (Chicago), August 6, 1892. This article was also printed in the Galveston Daily News, August 6, 1892. 125. Roberto Agramonte and Ricardo Nassif also noted the connections between Martí and James in their views on education. See Las doctrinas educativas y políticas de Martí (Río Piedras: La Editorial, UPR, 1991); Ricardo Nassif, “José Martí,” Prospects 24, no. 1–2 (1994): 107–119. 126. James, Letters of William James, 184. 127. James, Manuscript Lectures, 383. 128. For example, Saúl Flores referred to the influence of Dewey’s pragmatism in Martí, even when this author was never mentioned by Martí in his writings. See “Martiì educador,” in Archivo José Martí, ed. F. Lisazo, nos. 1–4 (Havana: Ministerio de Educacioìn, 1952).

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192 : Adriana Novoa REFERENCES Abel, Christopher. “Martí, Latin America and Spain.” In José Martí: Revolutionary Democrat, edited by Christopher Abel and Anna Turrets, 124–153. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015. Adams, Robert C. Evolution: A Summary of Evidence: A Lecture Delivered in Montreal, March 1883. New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1883. “The army and the commune.” In United States Army and Navy Journal and Gazette of the Regular and Volunteer Forces 15. Army and Navy Journal Inc., 1877. Berman, Antoine. The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992. Calcagno, Francisco. Diccionario biográfico cubano. New York: N. Ponce de Leon, 1878. Camacho, Jorge. José Martí: Las máscaras del escritor. Boulder, CO: Society of Spanish & Spanish, 2006. Cantor, Milton. “The Backward Look of Bellamy’s Socialism.” In Daphne Patai, Looking Backward, 1988–1888: Essays on Edward Bellamy, 21–34. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988. Concheso, Aurelio F. “José Martí Filósofo.” Ibero-amerikanisches Archiv 11, no. 1 (1937): 107–121. Cooke, George Willis, ed. The Poets of Transcendentalism: An Anthology. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1903. Cousin, Victor. Lectures on the True, the Beautiful and the Good. New York: D. Appleton, 1857. Dabney, Robert Lewis. The Sensualistic Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century. New York: ADF Randolph, 1887. Eagleton, Terry. “The Flight to the Real.” In Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle, edited by Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken, 11–21. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Engels, Friedrich. “Preface to the German Edition of 1888.” In Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy. Vol. 15. New York: International Publishers, 1941. ———. Socialism, Utopian and scientific. No. 56. London: S. Sonnenschein, 1892a. ———. The Development of Socialism from Utopia to Science. Vol. 1, No. 1. New York: New York Labor News Company, 1892b. Frothingham, Octavius Brooks. Transcendentalism in New England: A History. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1880. Garnett, Richard, and John Parker Anderson. Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson. London: W. Scott, 1888. George, Henry. Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions, and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth, the Remedy. New York: W. Reeves, 1884. Guerra, Lillian. The Myth of José Martí: Conflicting Nationalisms in Early Twentieth-Century Cuba. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Pablo Guadamarra González, José Martí y el humanismo en América Latina. Bogotá: Convenio Andrés Bello, 2003. Hall, G. Stanley. “VI.—Philosophy in the United States.” Mind 13 (1879): 89–105. Halliwell, Martin. Romantic Science and the Experience of Self: Transatlantic Crosscurrents from William James to Oliver Sacks. New York: Routledge, 2016, 19. Henry, Caleb C. “Introduction.” In Victor Cousin, Elements of Psychology. New York: Ivison and Phinney, 1856. Hufford, David Andrew. The Real Ramona of Helen Hunt Jackson’s Famous Novel. Los Angeles: D. A. Hufford and Company, 1900.

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Ibarra, Jorge. In José Martí: Revolutionary Democrat, edited by Christopher Abel and Nissa Torrents, 83–108. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015. Jackson, Helen Hunt. Ramona. Translated by José Martí. In Obras Completas 24. ———. Ramona. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1888. James, William. The Letters of William James. Vol. 2. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1900. ———. Manuscript Lectures. Vol. 19. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. Janet, Paul. The Materialism of the Present Day: A Critique of Dr. Büchner’s System. London: Williams and Norgate, 1867. Lewes, George Henry. The History of Philosophy from Thales to Comte by George Henry Lewes: Modern Philosophy. Vol. 2. London: Longmans, 1867. Manns, James W., and Edward H. Madden. “Victor Cousin: Commonsense and the Absolute.” Review of Metaphysics 43, no. 3 (1990): 569–589. Marín, Ventura. Elementos de la filosofía del espíritu humano. Santiago: La Independencia, 1834. Martí, José. Obras completas. Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1992. Marx, Karl. Theses on Feuerbach. In Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy. Vol. 15. New York: International Publishers, 1941. Mestre, José Manuel, Félix Varela, and José Zacarías González del Valle. De la filosofía en La Habana. Havana: La Antilla, 1862. Muirhead, John H. “How Hegel Came to America.” Philosophical Review 37, no. 3 (1928): 226– 240.Patai, Daphne. “The Double Vision of Edward Bellamy.” In Daphne Patai, Looking Backward, 1988–1888: Essays on Edward Bellamy, 3–20. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988. Philippon, Daniel J. Conserving Words: How American Nature Writers Shaped the Environmentals Movement. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004. Rhea, John M. A Field of Their Own: Women and American Indian History, 1830–1941. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016. Richards, Robert J. The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Ripley, George, Victor Cousin, Théodore Simon Jouffroy, and Benjamin Constant. Philosophical Miscellanies Translated from the French of Cousin, Jouffroy, and B. Constant. With Introductory and Critical Notices. Boston: Hilliard, Gray, and Company, 1838. Ritchie, David George. Darwinism and Politics. Vol. 4. London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1891. Sanguily, Manuel. José de la Luz y Caballero: estudio crítico. Havana: Establecimiento tipográfico O’Reilly, 1890. Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino. “Memoria leida a la facultad de humanidades: el 17 de Octubre de 1843.” La Opinión, 1843. Stack, D. A. “The First Darwinian Left: Radical and Socialist Responses to Darwin.” History of Political Thought 21, no. 4 (2000). Staum, Martin S. Cabanis: Enlightenment and Medical Philosophy in the French Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. Strauss, Sylvia. “Gender, Class, and Race in Utopia.” In Looking Backward, 1988–1888: Essays on Edward Bellamy, edited by Daphne Patai , 68–80. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988. Tomlinson, Stephen. Head Masters: Phrenology, Secular Education, and Nineteenth-Century Social Thought. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2013. Varela, Félix. Miscelanea filosófica. Imprenta que fue de Fuentenebro, 1821. ———. Lecciones de filosofía. Imprenta de don Juan de la Granja, 1841. von Engelhardt, Dietrich. “Romanticism in Germany.” In Romanticism in National Context, edited by Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich, 109–133. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

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194 : Adriana Novoa von Hartmann, Eduard. Philosophy of the Unconscious. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner and Company, 1893. von Hartmann, Eduard, and H. I. D’Arcy. “The True and the False in Darwinism: A Critical Representation of the Theory of Organic Development (continued).” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 11, no. 4 (1877): 392–399. Weir, Robert E. Beyond Labor’s Veil: The Culture of the Knights of Labor. University Park: Penn State Press, 2010. Williams, Raymond. Keywords. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Wolfe, Charles T. Materialism: A Historico-Philosophical Introduction. London: Springer, 2016. ———. “Forms of Materialist Embodiment.” In Anatomy and the Organization of Knowledge, 1500–1850, edited by M. Landers and B. Muñoz, 129–144. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011. Wundt, W. “Philosophy in Germany.” Mind 2, no. 8 (1877): 493–518.

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MARÍA A. CABRERA ARÚS AND M I R TA S U Q U E T

La moda en la literatura cubana, 1960–1979: Tejiendo y destejiendo al hombre nuevo RESUMEN Este artículo analiza la representación de la moda en la literatura posterior al triunfo de la Revolución cubana, deteniéndose en un conjunto de textos literarios producidos durante los años sesenta y setenta. La investigación recorre las representaciones del vestir y sus significaciones en relación con la ideología del socialismo de Estado cubano y la entelequia del hombre nuevo. Las autoras analizan las representaciones literarias del uniforme verde olivo y de milicias y de la ropa de trabajo; así como los inventos artesanales con que los cubanos intentaron sortear la escasez. Las autoras concluyen que la moda jugó un papel significativo comunicando afiliaciones políticas y valores, con lo que lo mismo amplificó los mecanismos de espectacularidad en los que se apoyó el poder político como permitió emitir críticas más o menos sutiles de dicho poder.

A B S T R AC T This article studies the representation of fashion in the literature produced in Cuba after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, especially during the 1960s and 1970s. The research problematizes the representation of dress and its relation with the ideology of state socialism and the entelechy of the “new man.” The authors trace the literary representations of olive green and militia uniforms and work clothes, as well as of practices of make-do developed to sort out scarcity. The authors conclude that Cuban writers resorted to sartorial tropes to communicate political allegiances and values, either amplifying the revolutionary spectacle that supported the Cuban state socialist regime or more or less openly contesting its logics.

En la madrugada del primero de enero de 1959, en cuanto supo de la huida del dictador Fulgencio Batista, el fotógrafo norteamericano Burt Glinn tomó un avión en el aeropuerto J. F. Kennedy rumbo a La Habana. En la isla, según narra en su libro de fotos Cuba 1959, observó que muchos opositores y críticos de la recién derrotada dictadura salían a las calles a celebrar el triunfo revolucionario vestidos de verde olivo, para confusión de quienes como él querían documentar la victoria de los rebeldes.1 “No estaba claro”, dice, “quién era

195

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196 : María A. Cabrera Arús and Mirta Suquet el rebelde legítimo y quién no hasta el día en que algunos de los fornidos y harapientos barbudos, los ‘barbudos’ de las montañas, llegaron vestidos con uniformes del ejército y cartuchos de municiones terciados en los pechos”.2 El testimonio de Glinn, repetido en varios relatos literarios y fílmicos ambientados en los primeros días de 1959, da cuenta no solo de la inmediatez con que el vestir, a diferencia de otros órdenes de la materialidad de más lenta transformación —piénsese en la arquitectura, por ejemplo—, representó el cambio político del primero de enero. Unos y otros exponen la capacidad simbólica del traje, y en particular del uniforme verde olivo, para comunicar simpatías y valores políticos en la Cuba posterior a la victoria rebelde.3 En la viñeta “El día inicial”, por ejemplo, incluida en la colección Aquí once cubanos cuentan compilada por el crítico José Rodríguez Feo, el escritor César Leante expresa su sorpresa ante la vertiginosidad del cambio en la manera de vestir del pueblo que salió a las calles a recibir a los rebeldes: “¿De dónde han salido tantas armas y tantos uniformes verdeolivo?”, se pregunta el narrador, quien además toma nota del deseo de muchos de que “las barbas les crezcan pronto. Ojalá y fuera posible en una noche!”.4 En el presente artículo nos proponemos analizar las representaciones de la moda en la literatura de ficción producida en Cuba durante las décadas sesenta y setenta, deteniéndonos en un conjunto de obras en las que el vestuario constituye un elemento para ubicar a los personajes en la cartografía ideológica de la época, o en las que se aborda de manera ostensible el desmontaje del capital cultural prerrevolucionario y el reordenamiento de los nuevos códigos de representación engendrados por la Revolución. Por moda entendemos el sistema de significados asociado con las prácticas vestimentarias y de adorno del cuerpo, incluidas la producción, circulación, consumo y transformación de la ropa, el calzado y los accesorios, así como las políticas de modulación del gusto colectivo en lo relativo al vestir.5 En otras palabras, nos referimos no a la mera producción de cambio y novedad, sino al marco referencial desde donde los individuos y los colectivos extraen los repertorios simbólicos que definen sus maneras de vestir.6 Las obras estudiadas exponen la relación entre moda e ideología promovida tanto por el Estado como por los escritores leales a este. Entre ellas, un grupo da cuenta, además, de la urdimbre asfixiante que dicha relación adquirió durante el Quinquenio gris (1971–1975), época en la que los escritores construyeron personajes literarios en gran medida estereotipados a partir a su forma de vestir, y en la que la moda se convirtió en un índice caracterológico y en una clave para descifrar la trama literaria. Más aún, en esta época la literatura hace visible la expresión de prácticas de resistencia a través del vestir, en algunos casos resultado de una voluntad expresa de representar identidades conflictuadas y/o conflictivas. La representación de la moda en la literatura cubana de la segunda mitad del siglo XX ha sido apenas explorada, si bien su tratamiento en textos del si-

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La moda en la literatura cubana, 1960–1979 : 197 glo diecinueve sí ha llamado la atención de algunos estudiosos.7 Puede citarse, a modo de excepción, el reciente artículo de la investigadora Idalia Morejón Arnaiz, “Reinaldo Arenas prêt-à-porter: la escritura de la ropa en ‘Que trine Eva’”, en el que la autora analiza la disfuncionalidad y extravagancia del vestuario recreado por Arenas como dispositivo de resistencia y diferenciación de los personajes ante el canon sartorial revolucionario.8 Sin embargo, al restringirse al universo narrativo de este cuento, la autora pasa por alto una serie de relaciones intertextuales y dinámicas históricas relacionadas con el vestir que, a nuestro juicio, es necesario destacar para entender la complejidad del entramado simbólico que Arenas desarrolla en su cuento. Baste señalar que, ya en el primer cuento sobre la Revolución cubana publicado en la isla, “Parto sin dolor”, Víctor Agostini da cuenta del cambio de época señalando el contraste entre la apariencia de los rebeldes recién bajados de las montañas y los modos urbanos de vestir habitualmente representados en las cadenas nacionales de televisión, espacios altamente codificados por la etiqueta burguesa que pasarán, en adelante, a promover de manera decisiva la nueva etiqueta revolucionaria.9 Vale la pena citar in extenso un fragmento de este cuento: Y ahora los tenemos aquí a estos hombres que no se han afeitado hace meses ni pelado vienen arrugados y con los zapatos comidos y sucios... mira qué bien ese locutor tan simpático y tan bien vestido con el gusto que presenta a esos tres barbudos y les pide que saluden a su gente allá en el pueblo y ellos lo miran y casi no saben hablar y se quieren ir enseguida pero el locutor no los deja. Es un hombre que sabe hablar bien y vestirse con ropa muy bonita y planchada ... pero cuando está presentando a estos hombres peludos con pelos largos en la cara sobre los labios y que les asoman por debajo de los grandes sombreros que nunca se quitan se ve que siente lo que siente el sacerdote cuando la comunión.10

Vemos aquí cómo la representación de los cambios del vestir ayudó a comunicar la radicalidad del nuevo orden político y de sus actores, dando cuenta del lugar fundamental que la moda adquirió, desde fecha muy temprana, en las políticas de visualización y espectacularización de ideologías.11 El modo en que el régimen político cubano incidió en las costumbres vestimentarias de la ciudadanía respondió no solo a una intención de transformar de manera radical las prácticas sociales, sino también a un proyecto de transformación de identidades o ingeniería social abocado a construir un hombre y una mujer nuevos. El cuerpo devino lugar fundamental donde se imaginó y se fraguó dicho ideal, entre otros mecanismos a través del vestir, elemento que permitió, además, la visibilización de viejas y nuevas adhesiones políticas. En tanto signo de valores ideológicos y de capital político, la moda matizó tanto las relaciones entre los ciudadanos como las relaciones entre estos y el Estado, permitiendo que este último ejerciera, como apunta Morejón Arnaiz, mucho más poder sobre los individuos que el que dicha institución posee dentro del orden político liberal burgués.12 Según Morejón Arnaiz, la intervención

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198 : María A. Cabrera Arús and Mirta Suquet

FIGURA 1. Niño vestido de guerrillero (con barba negra y uniforme verde olivo) para asistir a una actividad en la escuela primaria José Martí, en la ciudad de Matanzas. 1997. Foto cortesía de Gerardo Muñoz

estatal en las formas de vestir fracturó “la cadena de transmisión cultural y de memoria” que el vestuario reproduce, estableciendo, podemos añadir, nuevos criterios que, al menos hasta fecha muy reciente, se han añadido al bagaje cultural de varias generaciones de cubanos.13 Así se puede constatar en la fotografía reproducida en la figura 1, donde aparece un niño vestido con camisa verde olivo y falsa barba negra con motivo de una actividad escolar político-cultural. Cuatro décadas después del histórico primero de enero de 1959, las barbas negras y el uniforme de campaña continuaban denotando pertenencia y comprometimiento con el orden político establecido aquella lejana madrugada.

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La moda en la literatura cubana, 1960–1979 : 199 Una literatura verde olivo Propagada en soportes gráficos que incluyen desde el anverso de los nuevos billetes puestos en circulación en 1961 (fig. 2) hasta los logotipos de organizaciones de masas como la Federación de Mujeres Cubanas, pasando por el cartel político, las publicaciones periódicas y la filatelia, entre otros, la imagen del rebelde barbudo y vestido con uniforme verde olivo ocupó un lugar fundamental en el imaginario cubano a partir del triunfo revolucionario.14 La reiteración iconográfica de la identidad verde olivo contribuyó a mantener activa la condición de excepcionalidad del nuevo orden político y su ruptura con el pasado burgués, haciendo evidente, en palabras del académico Duanel Díaz Infante, la “voluntad de eternizar el momento de extrañamiento y fascinación que fue la entrada de los rebeldes en La Habana”.15 Durante los años sesenta y setenta, la saturación visual de este uniforme en el espacio público, y su efecto homogeneizador de identidades, se incrementó con la incorporación del verde olivo al uniforme de otras organizaciones paramilitares, tales como las Milicias Nacionales Revolucionarias (MNR), fundadas en 1959, y de masas, como es el caso de las brigadas alfabetizadoras que condujeron la Campaña de Alfabetización en 1961. La literatura de ficción publicada en Cuba en los años sesenta y principios de los setenta reflejó sin ambages esta transformación, dando voz a los nuevos actores sociales y a sus maneras de representación sartorial. Podríamos afirmar que una buena parte de la literatura de la década del sesenta se vistió de miliciano, para decirlo con una prosopopeya semejante a la que Jesús Horta Ruiz, el Indio Naborí, utiliza en su poema “El arte de las masas” (1971), donde declara que “La Poesía va fusil al hombro / con pantalones milicianos”.16 Este

FIGURA 2. Anverso del billete de un peso. Serie de 1966. Nótese la similitud en la identidad sartorial de hombres y mujeres. Colección Cuba Material; foto de las autoras

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200 : María A. Cabrera Arús and Mirta Suquet verso no solo reafirma la transformación conceptual de la función social del poeta y el valor militante de la literatura dentro de la revolución, sino que también expone las mutaciones en el campo de lo estético así como los nuevos modelos de sublimidad y belleza épicas que se han gestado. La prosopopeya del Indio Naborí alcanza una significación literal en poemas y textos autobiográficos que exponen la participación del escritor en la cotidianidad revolucionaria, tales como el reportaje Con las milicias (1962), de César Leante, que inauguró las ediciones de la Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba; el cuaderno de poesía Himno a las milicias (1961), de José Álvarez Baragaño, y el poema que da título al libro; la colección de cuentos Gente de Playa Girón (1962), de Raúl González de Cascorro, premio Casa de Las Américas; o el testimonio Girón en la memoria (1970), de Víctor Casaus, también premio Casa de las Américas, en esa ocasión otorgado por primera vez a dicho género literario. Otras representaciones menos ortodoxas de los milicianos incluyen Los años duros (1966), de Jesús Díaz; Condenados de Condado (1968), de Norberto Fuentes, y La guerra tuvo seis nombres (1968) y Los pasos en la hierba (1970), de Eduardo Heras León. En otro grupo de obras, las imágenes de unidad y uniformidad asociadas con la moda y, en particular, el uniforme de miliciano adquieren una representación protagónica. Tal es el caso, por ejemplo, de los cuentos ambientados en los primeros desfiles revolucionarios. En “Pueblo (26 de julio)” (1975), Víctor Agostini ofrece la visión de una comunidad monolítica cuyos rasgos de individualidad quedan suprimidos con el vestir simple, índice de la desaparición de diferencias de clase: “Junto a mí, sudoroso, chiquito y grande, gordo y flaco, joven y viejo, curioso, desorientado, alegre, en mangas de camisa: el pueblo”, escribe.17 Muy pronto el sentido realista que impuso la revolución, asociado con una demanda ética a la acción, urgirá a los escritores a cambiar, literalmente, de ropa, toda vez que su apariencia burguesa resultaba anacrónica, cuando no inconforme o, incluso, abiertamente contrarrevolucionaria. “Visto mi camisa de miliciano”, dice José Álvarez Baragaño en su “Himno a las milicias”, donde enuncia: “paso entre batallones y banderas... No tengo más grado que mi pluma y mi arma / Canto contigo miliciano / Me disuelvo en guerrillas batallones”.18 La transfiguración del poeta se verifica a partir del instante en que debe vestirse como el resto, en que su identidad desaparece dentro del colectivo, idea que también vemos en el poema “Crónica 1961”, de Víctor Casaus, escrito a propósito de las movilizaciones a raíz de los episodios de Playa Girón.19 En el poema “Miliciana”, publicado en México en 1974, Roberto Fernández Retamar alega: “Con mi camisa azul de miliciano / Soy más feliz”, habiendo aparecido un año antes en la portada del libro Cuaderno paralelo, publicado en La Habana, vestido con un uniforme militar que sabemos de color verde olivo (fig. 3).20 Aquí, como en los otros textos citados, la moda sirve para

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La moda en la literatura cubana, 1960–1979 : 201 comunicar la lealtad al nuevo orden político. Esta voluntad de los escritores de representarse cambiando el traje y la corbata por el uniforme militar o de milicias, más allá de valores propios y/o presiones políticas circunstanciales, da cuenta de la aceptación por parte de la intelectualidad de marcadores de distinción social basados en la acumulación de capital político revolucionario, tan o más necesario que el capital cultural que los distingue en tanto intelectuales. Como se sabe, este capital revolucionario adquirirá cada vez mayor relevancia en detrimento del cultural, sobre todo a partir de los procesos de parametración a que dio lugar el Primer Congreso de Educación y Cultura, celebrado en 1971, y de la emergencia a lo largo de la década de los setenta de un nutrido número de militares escritores promovidos por el Ministerio del Interior a

FIGURA 3. Portada del libro de Roberto Fernández Retamar, Cuaderno paralelo. 1973. Fotografía de las autoras

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202 : María A. Cabrera Arús and Mirta Suquet través del Premio de Literatura Policial “Aniversario de la Revolución”, fundado en 1975. La extensión del uniforme verde olivo o de milicias a la vida civil a partir de 1959 incidió, por otra parte, en los discursos de género, sin llegar a transformar radicalmente los valores conservadores y patriarcales prerrevolucionarios.21 La literatura no se mantuvo al margen del cambio en los patrones estéticos y en las transformaciones en el vestir femenino que tuvieron lugar a partir de la incorporación de la mujer a los nuevos programas de socialización política, incluidos la Campaña de Alfabetización, los programas de formación de maestros emergentes y las movilizaciones populares de apoyo a la producción. En 1962, Daura Olema obtuvo mención en el concurso literario Casa de las Américas con un texto que narra, en primera persona, la transformación política de una joven aspirante a maestra.22 Maestra voluntaria comienza con la descripción del viaje, real y figurado, de la protagonista, una mujer de la clase media camagüeyana: su historia “empieza [en]... un tren de tercera clase... Observo la gente que me rodea. Todas las muchachas llevan pantalón verde olivo y camisas grises”, nos cuenta la narradora.23 Se dirigen hacia la Sierra Maestra, donde recibirán adoctrinamiento político y aprenderán los rudimentos del oficio de maestro mientras conviven, bajo un régimen cuasi militar, en uno de los varios campamentos construidos para tal efecto en esa región del país. Al igual que las jóvenes alfabetizadoras que renunciaron, como recuerda la historiadora Michelle Chase, al “ocio frívolo por la dedicación y el autosacrificio militantes en tanto participantes en las campañas revolucionarias” para terminar convertidas, muchas de ellas, en auténticas defensoras del nuevo sistema político y social, la futura maestra del relato de Olema se identificará, en el transcurso de la narración, con el nuevo régimen político, sus prácticas sartoriales y sus códigos de distinción.24 Este personaje encarna un nuevo arquetipo literario femenino, la joven mujer cosmopolita de la antigua clase media que renuncia a su antiguo mundo de frivolidad consumista para convertirse en la mujer nueva, un sujeto femenino que, según Chase, comprende “que los vestidos y zapatos nuevos carecen de importancia y que su verdadera vocación es ayudar a los campesinos, a ella misma y a su patria”.25 De signo opuesto es, en cambio, la mascarada que Rosa Ileana Boudet narra en Alánimo, alánimo (1977), novela situada en 1963 y centrada en un grupo de muchachas de origen rural que han llegado a La Habana en calidad de becarias para estudiar una carrera universitaria asignada por el gobierno. En una de las escenas, las jóvenes irrumpen en una suntuosa mansión de Miramar cuyos dueños habían abandonado el país, apropiándose de modo carnavalesco de los objetos y ropas de los antiguos residentes. El vestuario burgués se transforma entonces en disfraz que se posee con fruición pero que, a la vez, se repudia. De la escena narrada por Boudet emerge el tufo rancio de lo decadente, falso e inservible. Las muchachas

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La moda en la literatura cubana, 1960–1979 : 203 saquean los escaparates, desordenan los closets y se prueban la ropa de los dueños. Bajan la escalera y los trajes se renuevan con la luz, surgen las telas y el olor a trapo viejo y a perfume estridente... las telas resplandecen, gargantillas con cuentas y piedras de fantasía, ese tul y esas perlas inventadas; las ropas quedan mal, los vestidos con hombreras y los trajes enormes. Bebita, traje de puta con escote, ¿no te da pena? Anilce, traje de luto, las pocas joyas y los collares cercenando los cuellos como petos de hierro... y la cena puesta. La mesa, el mantel y los disfraces.26

El cambio drástico que tuvo lugar en las formas de vestir y, por consiguiente, en las convenciones de género representadas en el vestuario no dejó de provocar, desde luego, polémica e inconformidades. A través de uno de los personajes masculinos del cuento “Aquí me pongo” (1967), centrado en un grupo de escritores y artistas que parten hacia el corte de caña, Edmundo Desnoes denuncia la reproducción de valores burgueses y machistas con respecto a la identidad femenina expresada a través de la moda: “Las mujeres con pantalones no son mujeres, pensó Sebastián mientras atravesaban [la provincia de] Matanzas y fijaba los ojos sorprendidos en las mujeres con vestidos, con las piernas descubiertas y las faldas tremolantes”.27 La frase citada sintetiza la inquietud e inconformidad de muchos hombres que, aun apoyando el proyecto socialista de nación, no comulgaban con los discursos más radicales de la moda revolucionaria, que no solo vistió con pantalones verde olivo a las mujeres que se integraron a las fuerzas armadas y a las milicias, sino también con pantalones de trabajo y, en general, un estilo andrógino a aquellas que se sumaron a la producción agrícola e industrial, como puede apreciarse en el documental Fidel (1968), realizado por el productor de televisión y documentalista norteamericano Saul Landau.28 En él, las ganadoras del concurso de belleza “La reina del cinturón verde de La Habana”, celebrado en 1968, coronadas reinas de las cosechas de café, cítricos y gandules, entre otros cultivos, desfilan vestidas con pantalones y camisa de trabajo de mezclilla azul, y botas militares negras.29 La limitada producción literaria femenina de los sesenta y setenta dificulta, sin embargo, el análisis de la asimilación o negociación de los nuevos códigos sartoriales desde el punto de vista de la mujer.30 A partir del testimonio de la escritora norteamericana Margaret Randall, quien residió en Cuba desde 1969, podemos asumir que la voluntad de reproducir en el vestuario su identidad de género —principalmente a través del uso de accesorios y la reproducción de prácticas de belleza tradicionales— pudo haber servido a muchas mujeres para contrarrestar la masculinización impuesta por el uniforme militar o de trabajo.31 Dichas prácticas, que feministas como la propia Randall asocian al canon opresivo burgués, deben entenderse entonces como estrategias tanto de singularización y resistencia a la homogeneización de los sujetos impuesta desde el poder como de preservación de expresiones culturales amenazadas por el cambio políticos:

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204 : María A. Cabrera Arús and Mirta Suquet Descubrí que muchas mujeres cubanas valoraban productos de moda y belleza que las feministas consideraban opresivos en los Estados Unidos. En la década de los setenta conocí a mujeres que hacían la sombra para los ojos con tizas de colores y que se dibujaban las líneas de las medias en la parte de atrás de sus piernas debido a la escasez de medias de nylon de mujer. Una experimentada cortadora de caña se quitó sus gruesos guantes y me mostró con orgullo sus uñas elegantemente pintadas. La escasez de bienes de consumo generó creatividad y prolongó, a la vez, la aspiración a la ornamentación femenina.32

En busca del sujeto revolucionario en la literatura Junto a la etiqueta verde olivo, la ropa de trabajo ganó visibilidad en los discursos políticos y en el imaginario social al tiempo que, sobre todo dentro del estrecho marco ideológico de lo que se conoce como Quinquenio gris, la ropa llamativa y, en general, la apariencia intelectualista (fig. 4) pasó a ser objeto de censura. El debate anti-intelectualista adquirió visibilidad a partir de la celebración del Congreso Cultural de La Habana en 1968, donde se legitimó la crítica frontal al elitismo de los artistas y escritores, supuestamente visible en ciertos atributos del vestir y de la identidad que distinguían a este grupo de los verdaderos sujetos revolucionarios: los obreros y los campesinos. La etiqueta proletaria también encontrará expresión en la literatura producida en los sesenta y setenta, cuyos autores y personajes incorporan los códigos de vestir característicos de la clase obrera urbana y agraria.33 En la novela de Cintio Vitier De Peña Pobre, el personaje Jacinto Finalé, alter ego del escritor, acude en 1964 a su primera movilización productiva “con pantalón y camisa de trabajo, botas de milicia y sombrero guajiro”.34 Vitier describe con detalle el contraste entre la ropa de este personaje y la de otros intelectuales: “Un conocido director de orquesta” que lleva “un sombrero de fieltro carmelita” y un “pintor de renombre internacional... [vestido con un] gastado pulóver neoyorquino [que] intentaba unirse simpáticamente a la pobreza circundante”.35 Para el narrador de De Peña Pobre, “el solo espectáculo de aquellos intelectuales y artistas dando pico y pala, coa y barreta junto a empleados modestísimos y obreros ignorantes... era ya por sí mismo un testimonio espléndido de la Revolución, impensable cinco años atrás”.36 Pero, más allá de la productividad económica de la movilización —que el pasaje citado de la novela caracteriza como infructuosa y estéril—, Vitier ubica la verdadera ganancia en el orden simbólico: la espectacularidad del acto y la capacidad performática de los actores, destacada en el caso de Jacinto Finalé por su ropa de obrero. Al igual que con el uniforme verde olivo, la voluntad del escritor de asimilarse al obrero pasa indefectiblemente por la asimilación de los códigos vestimentarios de este, aun cuando se admita el carácter de puesta en escena o de simulación de ese acto de mimesis.

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La moda en la literatura cubana, 1960–1979 : 205

FIGURA 4. “El intelectualizado.” Ilustración de 1965 donde se muestra la apariencia “intelectualizada.” Publicada en El archivo de Connie y reproducida con autorización de Anna Veltfort

La etiqueta revolucionaria promoverá, asimismo, el uso de referentes y materiales locales. En la clausura del X Congreso Textil, celebrado el 22 de julio de 1959, Fidel Castro expresó que “la política que la Revolución [iba] a seguir en materia textil” estaría dirigida a promover los productos manufacturados de origen nacional.37 Castro aspiraba a que Cuba produjera “absolutamente todos

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206 : María A. Cabrera Arús and Mirta Suquet los tejidos que [se] consum[ieran] y [a] que... en Cuba se consuman productos cubanos... y se cumpla la consigna de que... se consuman exclusivamente los tejidos elaborados en el país, por fábricas establecidas en el país y por obreros cubanos”.38 Sin embargo, a pesar de los planes de desarrollo de la industria textil, la producción doméstica de vestuario se limitó, fundamentalmente, a la confección de uniformes escolares, militares y de las milicias, entre otros, y ropa y calzado de trabajo (botas, pantalones de caqui, vestuario laboral), cuya demanda apenas alcanzó a satisfacer.39 Para hacer frente al limitado repertorio comercial de estas décadas, regulado además por un sistema de racionamiento que reglamentaba, mediante una cuota básica, la adquisición de vestuario —incluido el calzado y la ropa interior— y textiles, la ciudadanía recurrió a la fabricación de prendas manufacturadas en casa, muchas veces de confección improvisada y con materiales generalmente precarios. Este tipo de prácticas puso de moda artículos tejidos y soluciones alternativas basadas en la refuncionalización de antiguas prendas de vestir y materias primas (fig. 5), con los que la población intentó paliar el desabastecimiento y continuar vistiendo según lo que consideraban “a la moda”, muchas veces siguiendo cánones pautados por la industria internacional en lugar de la moda socialista.40 Ello fue objeto de la crítica oficial, que encontró eco en ciertos círculos de la intelectualidad comprometida. En su canción “Epistolario del subdesarrollo” (1968), el cantautor Silvio Rodríguez se burla de quienes, ignorando los cánones sartoriales del hombre y la mujer nuevos, imitaban la moda de sociedades capitalistas desarrolladas, produciendo lo que para él son ridículos pastiches. Rodríguez critica, entre otras cosas, “las mallas de hilo tan mal hechas / que se tejen las niñas / que no pueden ir a Londres a comprarlas”; los pantalones que “los pobres muchachitos / ... convierten en campanas / sordas o sórdidas”; “lo

FIGURA 5. Medias tejidas de confección artesanal. Años setenta. Donación de Mirta Martínez, colección Cuba Material; fotografía de las autoras

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La moda en la literatura cubana, 1960–1979 : 207 mal que tiñen nuestros tintes, / que se le caen de la ropa a las muchachas / de cintas” y “nuestra moda Go-Go, / nuestros peinados... / siempre a la / retaguardia de cualquier extranjero”.41 Para estar a la vanguardia de la moda, sugiere el cantautor, habría tiempo en el futuro cuando el desarrollo económico del país hiciera “palidecer a Europa / —a Europa misma, sí, a Europa”.42 En el presente, opina, es momento para romperse “el alma y las manos” trabajando.43 Años más tarde, Rodríguez explicará que compuso esta canción en “la época de las minifaldas y la moda de llevar unas medias tejidas. Como aquí no teníamos los materiales para hacer esas medias, las muchachas se las tejían como podían. Resultaba un poco grotesco, para mí era tremendamente triste. Yo no le echaba la culpa a la revolución ni al país ni a nadie. Lo que veía en eso era una expresión de lo ridículo”.44 “Epistolario del subdesarrollo” reproduce la moral de austeridad y la crítica a la moda capitalista formulada a inicios de los años sesenta por los líderes cubanos, paradójico en el caso de un artista muchas veces criticado por su manera iconoclasta de vestir.45 Sin embargo, más allá del ridículo y el reproche, “Epistolario del subdesarrollo” visibiliza —y contradictoriamente censura— la emergencia de deseos y prácticas alternativas, formulando indirectamente el conflicto ideológico con relación a las prácticas de vestir cotidianas que se manifestó tanto a nivel social como individual en los sesenta y setenta.46 La apetencia por la moda foránea, por otra parte, no solo se visibiliza en la fabricación artesanal de prendas de vestir a partir de modelos extranjeros, como igualmente se verá en el cuento de Reinaldo Arenas “Que trine Eva” (1971), sino también en la demanda expresa de artículos de vestir de importación. Margaret Randall comenta en sus memorias que cuando visitó Cuba por primera vez en 1968 algunos amigos intelectuales se le acercaron a pedirle ropa y otros bienes de consumo de su propiedad. Randall cuenta que “un poeta llamó a [su] habitación, tarde en la noche, el día antes de regresar a casa, para pedir[le] que le dejara un par de medias de mujer que le gustaron mucho. Dijo que las quería para su esposa. Esta obsesión por los bienes extranjeros se haría más intensa en los años venideros”, dice, “a medida que más y más artículos desaparecieron de las tiendas”.47 Excluida de la uniformidad verde olivo, de la ropa de trabajo y los productos de producción y estética nacionalista, la expresión extrema de individualidad en el vestir y la apetencia por la moda extranjera occidental chocaron, durante los años sesenta y setenta, con los muros de contención de los aparatos propagandísticos y represivos del régimen cubano, que asociaron estos estilos con la vagancia, el ocio y la homosexualidad, entre otras prácticas e inclinaciones supuestamente facilitadoras de la contrarrevolución y/o el delito. Las melenas, sandalias masculinas, pantalones estrechos o de un largo no convencional, así como la minifalda y los peinados demasiado cortos en las mujeres,

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208 : María A. Cabrera Arús and Mirta Suquet jugaron en el discurso de los líderes el rol de indicadores de “desviaciones” del rígido canon político y de la ortodoxia sexual del régimen cubano.48 En 1964, la revista Mella enumeraba algunos de los atuendos de los “desviados”, también calificados de “enfermitos”: Agrupados en legiones que transitan por algunas calles de la capital, los desviados se identifican por el disfraz... espejuelos oscuros, sandalias y motas. Pull-overs de cebra y camisones anchos. Pantaloncitos estrechitos. Peinados Accatone, Nerón, etc. Pelos bien revueltos y en distintos colores. Faldas bien cortas con pantorrillas al aire. Medallones con tiras largas. Patillas bien finitas. Libros en el sobaco. Todo puede combinarse. De acuerdo con el sexo. No es que el sayo siempre haga al monje, pero los “enfermitos”, a diferencia de los jóvenes obreros, campesinos, militares o estudiantes, siempre tienen un modo por el cual identificarse: el vestir extravagante.49

El nuevo sujeto social que el régimen cubano se propuso crear debía manifestarse inmune a la influencia de la moda capitalista y las ropas importadas de los países occidentales desarrollados pues, como dijera Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, miembro del comunista Partido Socialista Popular (PSP) y director del periódico comunista Hoy, el consumo de artículos capitalistas suponía una deficiencia ideológica que daba paso a “una forma insidiosa de control social, e incluso [constituía] un problema de seguridad nacional”.50 Durante el Congreso de Educación y Cultura de 1971, Fidel Castro expresó, además, la necesidad de crear políticas dirigidas a “neutrali[zar] o imp[edir] la entrada de tendencias de la moda que se originen en países capitalistas de gran desarrollo” con vistas a defender la “unidad monolítica” de la sociedad cubana.51 Estas políticas encontraron su clímax en el concepto, formulado a partir de 1968, de diversionismo ideológico, definido como la expresión de ideas o prácticas contrarias a los principios socialistas promovidos por la Revolución cubana y considerado un crimen de naturaleza política.52 En las novelas policiales y de contraespionaje que copan el panorama editorial de la isla a partir de los setenta, la moda constituirá un indicio clave de la actitud marginal y/o contrarrevolucionaria de los personajes negativos. El uso de referencias sartoriales desaprobadas por la nueva moralidad socialista requiere, desde luego, la competencia del lector, quien deberá estar entrenado en la identificación de indicios sospechosos como el uso de joyas o prendas asociadas con la burguesía prerrevolucionaria; la imitación de modas extranjeras; la ropa extravagante o llamativa, tratada en estas obras como síntoma de perturbación mental, inadaptación al entorno social o afeminamiento; el excesivo cuidado en el vestir, visto como un anuncio de frivolidad o vagancia; o la falta de cuidado en el vestir y de las apariencias en general, señal de apatía o abulia y, al cabo, desinterés por el proceso revolucionario. Ello se evidencia en la novela policial La ronda de los rubíes, reeditada en siete ocasiones en Cuba y ganadora en 1973 del concurso Aniversario del

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La moda en la literatura cubana, 1960–1979 : 209 Triunfo de la Revolución, convocado anualmente por la Dirección Política del Ministerio del Interior.53 La trama gira en torno al robo de unas joyas pertenecientes a dos ancianas de la antigua burguesía habanera.54 Un collar de rubíes es la prenda codiciada por los personajes negativos, quienes pretenden financiar con la venta de este su salida ilegal hacia Estados Unidos. Significativamente, se trata de un homosexual, identificado por la “ropita” extravagante y/o “afeminada” que usa, índice que es comentado cada vez que el personaje entra en escena; un individuo sin vinculación laboral, demasiado atento al “cuidado de su persona, [lo] que podía apreciarse desde el brillo sin tacha de sus zapatos de puntera hasta el recortado bigote, en el filo de los pantalones o el almidonamiento de la camisa que llevaba por fuera”;55 una empleada doméstica, que se arregla de manera extravagante y copia los patrones de la moda extranjera, descrita “con la cara pintada un poco exageradamente, y los cabellos peinados exóticamente”;56 y una sofisticada joven filóloga, quien sintomáticamente conocerá a uno de los autores intelectuales del delito en casa de una modista, lo que sugiere no solo que estos individuos se interesan por asuntos “superficiales” como la moda, sino también que los espacios en que la moda se produce —la casa de la costurera— son potencialmente contrarrevolucionarios.57 Al final de la novela encontramos a Ernestico, el hijo de un matrimonio revolucionario para quienes las piedras preciosas carecen de valor económico o estético, jugando con los rubíes como si fueran canicas, tropo que da curso a la idea de que el lujo y sus indicadores son irrelevantes como símbolos de distinción en la nueva sociedad. El collar de rubíes que representa el pasado burgués, según Díaz Infante, solo es valorizado por personajes ubicados en el afuera de la revolución —las ancianas burguesas, los delincuentes y un agente de la CIA.58 Ernestico, cuyo nombre remite al comandante guerrillero Ernesto Guevara, ideólogo del hombre nuevo cubano, se identifica, en cambio, con el policía que en las páginas finales de la novela se presenta en su casa para confiscar el collar. Vestido con su uniforme escolar, Ernestico mira “el uniforme [del policía] y la pistola que colgaba del zambrán” y le pide: “¿Por qué no me llevas contigo?... Yo también tengo un uniforme”.59 Esta escena no solo comunica la actitud desinteresada que debe caracterizar al futuro hombre nuevo, también demuestra el capital simbólico de la ropa en tanto índice que permite el reconocimiento mutuo de los sujetos sociales, en este caso, de los revolucionarios. Destejiendo la trama y la urdimbre del poder El cuento “Que trine Eva”, de Reinaldo Arenas, escrito en Cuba en 1971 y publicado en Viaje a La Habana (1990), se ubica en los tempranos años sesenta, en un clima caracterizado por la escasez de bienes de consumo.60 Mientras el pueblo se volcaba a la búsqueda de soluciones alternativas para paliar las

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210 : María A. Cabrera Arús and Mirta Suquet carencias y el desabastecimiento, el gobierno ponía en marcha operativos de represión en contra de expresiones de individualidad y resistencia que ponían en evidencia la heterogeneidad del cuerpo social. El crítico literario Francisco Soto ha referido, a propósito del cuento de Reinaldo Arenas, que “Que trine Eva” “trata, de manera indirecta, la tragedia de una revolución recusante para aceptar la diferencia”.61 Arenas comunica la separación de los personajes de este cuento del proyecto socialista a través de la obsesión de la pareja protagonista por producir, motu proprio y de manera ingente, bienes de consumo que no redundan en el beneficio comunitario, sino en el placer y el goce individual, particularizado en un apetito desmedido por la moda. Los personajes del cuento se dedican a confeccionar, de manera exclusiva y permanente, prendas de vestir con las que se exhiben en el espacio público en busca de la atención de los espectadores. A la pareja de este cuento la consume la fiebre por producir marcadores sartoriales que la singularice y convierta en “seres extravagantes”, como lo habría sido el propio Arenas.62 En lugar de dedicarse a la producción de bienes de consumo para el beneficio de la sociedad, o participar en las movilizaciones de masas y trabajos productivos convocados por el gobierno cubano, este matrimonio se dedica a producir un universo sartorial fastuoso y efímero, que pone en escena en un espacio público dominado por la gravedad de la moral socialista y sus discursos de sacrificio y consagración al trabajo. Como explica Morejón Arnaiz, “la indumentaria extravagante creada y modelada por estos personajes funcionaría como dispositivo de resistencia y de diferenciación del cuerpo disciplinado ante la normatividad guerrillera”.63 Eva, quien como el arquetípico personaje negativo de la novela policiaca cubana pertenece a una familia de la alta burguesía habanera, americaniza su nombre escribiéndolo con tres “t”, Evattt, para exagerar su exotismo y “para hacerlo más jai”.64 Ricardo, su esposo, a quien Evattt llama Richard con el propósito, también, de marcar la preferencia del matrimonio por lo norteamericano, es hijo de campesinos de la región oriental que ha emigrado a La Habana poco antes de conocer a Evattt. Ambos se conocen gracias a ciertas pistas sartoriales que solo ellos son capaces de identificar, índices de estilo que revelan a Evattt la singularidad de Ricardo y sus potencialidades como fashion icon que ella misma contribuirá a desarrollar: “Yo miré para tu pie levantado y vi unas medias tejidas —pero muy bien tejidas, Ricardo, y quedé deslumbrada. Tú alzaste más la pierna y recogiste un poco el pantalón, como para enseñar la media”, Evattt cuenta después.65 Evattt y Richard comunican su inconformidad con la estandarización de las apariencias que la etiqueta revolucionaria impone de diferentes maneras en el transcurso de la narración. En su largo monólogo, Evattt se quejará de que la sociedad se hubiera convertido en “una sola masa compacta”66 de “gente sin preparación, sin sentido del estilo, sin ningún caché”.67 Ante un orden político

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La moda en la literatura cubana, 1960–1979 : 211 que, como también ha dicho Soto, “vio en la moda una amenaza potencial para la construcción de una conciencia revolucionaria uniforme”, los personajes de Arenas eligen el oropel de los fracs y los vestidos de noche, rechazando el populismo igualitario de la vestimenta “fúnebre” de los obreros.68 Para ellos, asegura Morejón Arnaiz, la moda “se convierte en campo de ejercicio del poder libidinal”, en pulsión que conlleva al delirio, a la proliferación y sobreabundancia de signos superfluos, como lo son las tres “t” que americanizan el nombre de Eva.69 Los mecanismos de singularización puestos en marcha por Evattt y Richard subvierten el proyecto igualitario, cuya moral pregona la sencillez y la abnegación en tanto virtudes primordiales de los futuros hombre y mujer nuevos. La ostentación de estos personajes representa, así, un acto de desafío político que no se detiene, siquiera, ante los símbolos de la etiqueta revolucionaria, que también son transformados e individualizados. En su delirio creativo, Evattt teje “un mantón semejante a la bandera cubana hecho con hilo chino y estambre español”, quizás aludiendo a la estrecha relación que, a mediados de los años sesenta, Cuba, antigua colonia española, mantenía con la República Popular China, y forra un termo con hilo “verde caimán”, marcador que remite a la forma que supuestamente tiene la isla de Cuba.70 Teje, también, un uniforme de miliciano para Richard, que ciñe al cuerpo de su esposo desafiando tanto los discursos que proscribían el uso de pantalones ajustados como las normas de uso de dicho uniforme. En lo que puede verse como una burla al imaginario simbólico revolucionario, Evattt lo adorna, además, con un cierre “con nudos en forma de botones recién abiertos; las altísimas botas negro centelleante, con una ronda calada al costado, donde se ilustraba a color, con hilo chino, búlgaro y portugués, todas las batallas del Cuartel Moncada, copiadas de la portada de la última revista Bohemia... y luego, la boina verde-botella, hecha a doble cadeneta, terminando en una gran borla deshilachada de la cual salían flecos de todos los colores”.71 Es, precisamente, el desafío político que supone la espectacularidad de sus exhibiciones públicas lo que permite entender que Evattt y Richard copien las tendencias internacionales de la moda de invierno, inapropiadas para el clima tropical, llegando a usar bufandas, gorros de conductor de trineo, pullovers con cuellos de tortuga, botines forrados y guantes porque, de acuerdo con Evattt, “en la moda hay que regirse por las estaciones, aunque esta isla sea siempre un infierno”.72 En esas referencias a la ropa invernal hay implícita una crítica a la comercialización de artículos de vestuario y textiles producidos en los países socialistas de Europa Central y del Este o en la propia Unión Soviética, y a las ilustraciones de moda que aparecían con frecuencia en revistas femeninas cubanas, directamente recortadas de revistas foráneas y, por tanto, llenas de modelos inadecuados para el clima de la isla.73 Como las jóvenes criticadas en la canción “Epistolario del subdesarrollo”,

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212 : María A. Cabrera Arús and Mirta Suquet Evattt y Richard resuelven la ausencia de alternativas sartoriales glamurosas recurriendo al pastiche de tendencias y estilos. Mezclan modelos de su propia creación con otros copiados de revistas extranjeras que obtienen de contrabando, e hilvanan unos y otros con materiales refuncionalizados. Fabrican, por ejemplo, “capas enceradas hechas con hilo de tendedera a siete cabos y barnizadas con esperma rosa y azul”.74 Estas soluciones innovadoras les permitirán actualizar el ropero, a pesar de la crisis económica que afectaba al país. El diseñador y artista Ernesto Oroza ha conceptualizado estas prácticas de resistencia en el ámbito de la tecnología y los electrodomésticos como “desobediencia tecnológica”, por lo que ellas conllevan de contravención de la normalidad y lo prescrito por fabricantes e ingenieros.75 Evattt y Richard se embarcan, puede decirse, en prácticas de desobediencia sartorial, lo que ha llevado a la crítica literaria Mónica Simal a comparar a Evatt con una Penélope moderna que teje para evadir la escasez.76 Sin embargo, el tejido de Evattt es, más que una alternativa ante la escasez, un acto de reafirmación de la individualidad y la diferencia. En la medida en que teje, Evattt trama, también, una subjetividad para sí y para su esposo que nada tiene que ver con la colectividad pautada en los discursos de los líderes y organizaciones de masas. Por esta razón, el personaje de Arenas se asemeja más a la Eva bíblica en su papel activo y desafiante de las normas que a la Penélope homérica. Podría pensarse que, en efecto, el personaje seduce y pervierte a Ricardo, el guajiro que llega al paraíso cosmopolita de La Habana: es ella quien transforma el nombre y el estilo de su pareja y quien lo enrola en la espiral delirante del exceso y de su puesta en escena. Eva, la creadora, está marcada, como los artistas nacidos y formados antes de la revolución según diría Ernesto Guevara, por el “pecado original” de la herencia cultural capitalista, demasiado alejada del ideal del hombre nuevo.77 Ello explica que, al final del cuento, cuando Richard la abandona por un joven pescador, este recupere la fonética castellana de su nombre en el monólogo de Evattt. Esta contraheroína se ubica en las antípodas de la mujer nueva quien, como ha dicho Michelle Chase, es “la antítesis de la antigua ama de casa, de la mujer que no estudia ni trabaja y que defiende los intereses de su familia por sobre los de la colectividad” y subvierte los rígidos roles de género heredados del pasado burgués.78 Asimismo, en el cuento de Arenas, Richard nada tiene en común con el hombre nuevo guevarista. Es él quien se encarga de adquirir los bienes materiales necesarios para el sustento de la familia y para mantener la producción suntuosa de Evattt, cada vez más difíciles de obtener aun en el mercado negro; quien sufre las interminables colas del comercio socialista y negocia la compra-venta o canje de artículos y bienes de consumo en el mercado subterráneo; quien funge como ayudante y maniquí de Evattt, tareas y roles que se alejan de los patrones de masculinidad promovidos por el régimen cubano.79

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La moda en la literatura cubana, 1960–1979 : 213 En su permanente desafío, los personajes de Arenas se encierran en un mundo aislado del devenir revolucionario, perdiendo la conexión con el mundo y con el tiempo, como también la pierde la familia Orozco en el cuento de Antonio Benítez Rojo “Estatuas sepultadas”, publicado en 1967 en el volumen Tute de Reyes, que inspiró la película de Tomás Gutiérrez Alea Los sobrevivientes.80 Pero, a diferencia de la familia Orozco, Evattt y Richard no se parapetan tras los muros de su residencia, sino que ocupan las calles y otros espacios públicos en busca de la atención de un público que, si bien ha sido congregado para asistir al espectáculo de la revolución, acaba siempre seducido por ellos. En sus intervenciones públicas, Evattt y Richard producen una representación opuesta al espectáculo revolucionario. Su intervención en el desfile del Primero de Mayo, por ejemplo, desvirtúa la puesta en escena original, acaparando la atención del “millón de guajiros, encasquetados en sus ropas arcaicas y haciendo, como los monos, mil maromas y no sé qué tabla gimnástica que finalmente se convertía en letras y formaba una gran consigna”, desfilando junto a los estudiantes, los batallones de milicianos y “los obreros... portando banderolas enormes y desplegando unos carteles tan imponentes que tenían que hacer esfuerzos para no caer al suelo, muertos”.81 “A medida que avanzábamos, Ricardo”, evoca con posterioridad Evattt, “notábamos que todos los aplausos y las miradas eran para nosotros... Olvidaron las consignas que tenían que repetir con gran entusiasmo, y ahora alzaban los brazos, aplaudían y hasta parecían piropearnos”.82 Contra las lógicas dictadas por la moral socialista, los personajes de Arenas llaman la atención no por sus méritos políticos o tesitura moral, sino por lo que aparentan, por los vestidos que llevan y por la forma en que se apropian de los espacios y de los espectáculos del poder para crear nuevas formas de espectacularidad desideologizadas y centradas en el consumo de una visualidad y una materialidad diferente: una espectacularidad de lo frívolo que se agota (y renueva) en el acto de producción y escenificación, muy distinta de la espectacularidad revolucionaria que se produce y consume “en un círculo vicioso”.83 Frente a un orden político que se (re)produce como “mercancía y espectáculo”84 y se convierte en “el gran teatro que opaca o mediatiza a cualquier otra representación artística”,85 Evattt y Richard “[contra]atacan”86 ofreciendo un espectáculo alternativo que se roba el público de la puesta en escena revolucionaria, una y otra vez: en el Congreso de Arquitectos —en cuya clausura Fidel Castro abordará la necesidad de construir proyectos urbanísticos compuestos por idénticas unidades habitacionales prefabricadas—; en el festival de la Canción de Varadero y en los Carnavales revolucionarios; en la guerra civil del Escambray donde se lucha por diferentes proyectos de nación; en la conmemoración de fechas patrióticas o las movilizaciones hacia los cortes de caña; en los nuevos planes económicos y educacionales; en el desfile del Primero de Mayo o en los vestíbulos de los aeropuertos; incluso, en los toques de tambor

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214 : María A. Cabrera Arús and Mirta Suquet cuasi secretos donde se adora a los dioses del panteón afrocubano, en los que Evattt y Richard encarnan lo sagrado. Gracias, precisamente, a su permanente desafío de las normas sartoriales dictadas por el régimen cubano, estos personajes se ganan la protección y apoyo de grupos contraculturales, también discriminados y perseguidos por las autoridades a causa de su manera de vestir. Son los hippies y otras tribus urbanas que en el texto aparecen descritas como “Los camisas abiertas” y “Los batts”, acosados también por el gobierno, quienes protegen a los protagonistas de este cuento y los ayudan a evadir el peso del poder y la censura. A pesar de atraer todas las miradas en cada performance, Richard se obsesiona por descubrir un “alguien” que nunca los habría mirado: “a veces yo te sorprendía mirando”, monologa Evattt, “a un sitio distante, buscando... a esa persona que tú presentías que no nos estaba mirando”.87 Aquel que no los mira, pero cuya presencia y mirada esquiva intuyen, pudiera ser el poder panóptico, en presencia del cual el ciudadano se sabe observado. Evattt y Richard buscarían desesperadamente ser el blanco de los mecanismos de vigilancia social, toda vez que solo el reconocimiento del desafío político por parte del poder puede legitimar la desobediencia que llevan a cabo. En el transcurso del cuento, la ansiedad por saberse no mirados se acrecienta: “Presentía que el que nunca nos miraba estaba cerca, pisándonos los talones y que en cualquier instante, cuando menos lo imagináramos podría hacer su aparición”, recuerda Evattt.88 Mas el ojo esquivo pudiera ser también el del yo interior, como parece sugerir Evattt cuando narra el (tra)vestimento de su marido en la oscuridad del cuarto, un yo que no se atreve a mirarse a sí mismo y a revelar su homosexualidad. De ser así, Richard representaría la internalización del control panóptico del cuerpo y de la subjetividad por parte del Estado cubano. Al final del cuento, sin embargo, tras una larga peripecia que lleva a los personajes a recorrer la isla, el personaje se libera de la mirada ausente —acusadora— al encontrar una mirada de identificación y de erotismo. Un pescador de la zona, impertérrito ante la performance de la pareja, lo mira y lo seduce: “lo vi llegar hasta ti, y mirarte”, lamentará después Evattt.89 La ansiedad por descubrir a aquel que no los mira habría llevado a la pareja a recorrer la isla en una expedición que parte de La Habana y viaja hacia el Oriente, en dirección contraria a la de otros desplazamientos fundacionales de la nación cubana, reales y simbólicos, como el avance de los colonizadores españoles al fundar las siete primeras villas, comenzando en Baracoa y terminando en San Cristóbal de La Habana; la invasión mambisa de oriente a occidente, y la Caravana de la Libertad, que concluyó con la entrada triunfal del Ejército Rebelde en La Habana el 8 de enero de 1959. En busca de la atención de aquél que no los mira, Evattt y Richard recorren desde Pinar del Río hasta la

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La moda en la literatura cubana, 1960–1979 : 215 punta más oriental de Baracoa, en una suerte de retorno que puede interpretarse también como una cruzada a favor del derecho a la afocancia, término acuñado por el gobierno para, según acota el historiador Abel Sierra Madero, “describir de modo negativo a personas que se distinguen públicamente por determinadas características físicas o morales”; una cruzada a favor del derecho a la extravagancia y, en última instancia, a la homosexualidad.90 Evattt se evoca junto a Richard “afocando en medio de las ruinas. Contra las paredes descascaradas, junto a las terrazas apuntaladas... solo nosotros brillantes y triunfales”.91 Este viaje debe ser visto, además, como una cruzada civilizatoria, una alternativa al ruralismo que promovía el régimen cubano. Como ha apuntado la historiadora Lillian Guerra, tras el triunfo revolucionario el gobierno promovió “una visión de la vida urbana como fuente de corrupción moral, y del trabajo como el camino más auténtico hacia la realización personal y la salvación social. En 1965, la frase ‘Menos urbanismo y más ruralismo’ se convirtió en un eslogan político entre los jóvenes revolucionarios”.92 Evattt y Richard, en contra de estos valores, llevan la sofisticación de la vida urbana y cosmopolita de La Habana a los rincones más remotos de la geografía insular. La capacidad de resistencia y voluntad performática de los personajes de este cuento los convierte en sujetos heroicos. “Una vez [me] dijiste que nosotros éramos los verdaderos héroes. Porque en un lugar, dijiste, donde todo el mundo es héroe, el único que realmente lo es, es el que no quiere serlo”, dialoga imaginariamente Evattt con su esposo, que se ha marchado con el joven pescador del oriente del país.93 La heroicidad de Evattt y Richard está dada, sobre todo, por el carácter lúdicro con que estos personajes intervienen y pervierten el espectáculo revolucionario, del mismo modo que este último intervino y se apropió de cualquier otra forma de espectacularidad. En lugar de consumir el espectáculo de la revolución que el poder estatal pone en escena, los personajes de Arenas emplean sus días y sus noches produciendo y consumiendo el espectáculo alternativo de la moda y, con ello, ponen en crisis aquella otra espectacularidad que, parafraseando a Díaz Infante, se pone en escena a sí misma una y otra vez.94 Conclusiones El análisis de las obras discutidas confirma el uso simbólico de la moda y los códigos vestimentarios para comunicar afiliaciones políticas y valores en una Cuba abocada a la construcción del socialismo y el hombre nuevo. Las obras literarias discutidas ponen en evidencia la cualidad de índice político que la moda adquirió en la nueva sociedad, facilitando la identificación de los sujetos en tanto revolucionarios o gusanos a partir de la manera de vestir y de las

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216 : María A. Cabrera Arús and Mirta Suquet ambiciones y prácticas con relación al cuerpo y al ropero. Los autores cubanos discutidos, incluso aquellos que asumieron posiciones más o menos críticas con relación a determinados procesos sociales, como es el caso del cantautor Silvio Rodríguez, reproducen en sus obras las posiciones y valores con relación al vestir promovidos desde el poder, creando en muchos casos personajes muy cercanos al ideal del hombre nuevo. Sin embargo, al hacerlo dejan también ver las costuras que sostienen la falsa uniformidad del colectivo socialista y los pespuntes que hilvanan el modelo maniqueo de hombre nuevo. Dentro del universo narrativo que hemos discutido en este artículo solo un texto como “Que trine Eva”, del extravagante Arenas, cuya biografía y escritura se posicionan abiertamente en el afuera de las lógicas que sostienen y legitiman el poder político cubano, puede revelar, a partir de la exuberancia de la estética y escritura areniana, la riqueza de las dinámicas de resistencia al poder y de búsqueda de la propia individualidad, más allá de los límites que imponen la camisa de fuerza verde olivo y la etiqueta proletaria. N O TA S 1. Glinn, Cuba 1959. 2. Glinn, Cuba 1959, 96, nuestra traducción (en adelante NT). 3. Chase, Revolution within the Revolution; Molina, “Un mundo que va a existir”. 4. Leante, “El día inicial”, 88. También López-Fresquet, My 14 Months with Castro. Ver también el documental de Agnes Varda, Salut les cubaines (Paris: Pathé-Cinema, 1971). Una idea similar es desarrollada por el escritor Reinaldo Arenas en el cuento “Mi primer desfile”, cuyo narrador, un niño de catorce años que no pudo incorporarse a la guerrilla y que se viste de verde olivo para dar la bienvenida a las tropas victoriosas, se muestra contrariado al percibir la diferencia entre su uniforme lustroso recién estrenado y los andrajos de los rebeldes que habían bajado recientemente de la Sierra Maestra: “Te veo con ese uniforme deshilachado caminando a mi lado entre el tropel de la gente y los caballos; entre el tumulto. Tú, con ese formidable uniforme destartalado que se te cae a pedazos. Y la escopeta al hombro, amarrada con alambres”. Arenas, “Mi primer desfile”, 55. 5. Lee Blaszczyk, “Rethinking Fashion”. Términos como traje, vestuario, ropero y otros similares serán usados como sinónimos de la definición de moda que manejamos, sobre todo para evitar repeticiones. 6. Barthes, Language of Fashion; Entwistle, Fashioned Body. 7. Ver, por ejemplo, los análisis de los críticos literarios Víctor Goldgel, Cuando lo nuevo conquistó América; y Franco Quinziano, “Fin de siglo en La Habana”, así como los textos de los historiadores de la moda Diana Fernández, “Lo cubano en el vestir”, e Ismael Sarmiento Ramírez, “Vestido y calzado de la población cubana en el siglo XIX”. 8. Morejón Arnaiz, “Reinaldo Arenas prêt-à-porter”. 9. Fornet, Cuentos de la Revolución cubana, 21. Sobre la transformación de las representaciones, mensajes, y programas televisivos a partir de 1959, ver Rivero, Broadcasting Modernity. 10. Agostini, “Parto sin dolor”, 41. 11. Díaz Infante, La revolución congelada; Guerra, Visions of Power. La significación política y social de la moda en el período revolucionario es analizada por María A. Cabrera Arús en

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La moda en la literatura cubana, 1960–1979 : 217 su tesis de doctorado, “Dressed for the Party”, en el manuscrito homónimo en elaboración y en “Pañoletas y polainas”; y “Thinking Politics and Fashion”. 12. Morejón Arnaiz, “Reinaldo Arenas prêt-à-porter”. 13. Morejón Arnaiz, “Reinaldo Arenas prêt-à-porter”. 14. El 4 de enero de 1959, durante una breve escala en la provincia de Camagüey rumbo a La Habana al frente de la Caravana de la Libertad, Fidel Castro negocia de manera retórica el uso de las armas y del uniforme verde olivo: “Cuando todo se normalice no se verá un fusil en la calle”, dice, y agrega: “¡Verde olivo, por supuesto! (Exclamaciones: ¡Verde olivo y sin fusil!)”. “Discurso pronunciado por el Comandante Fidel Castro Ruz, en la plaza de la ciudad de Camagüey, el 4 de enero de 1959”; versión taquigráfica de la Oficina del Primer Ministro, accedido el 12 de junio de 2016, en http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1959/esp/f040159e.html. Es evidente aquí la paradoja que supone la mención al proceso de normalización de la vida cotidiana en la misma línea en que se apela a un régimen sartorial de excepcionalidad. La expresión “verde olivo y sin fusil” subraya, por otra parte, el valor simbólico que desempeñará el uniforme de guerrillero (y el color verde olivo en sí mismo) dentro del imaginario de la Cuba futura. 15. Díaz Infante, “La revolución es el espectáculo”. 16. En Duanel Díaz Infante, “Sesión de poesía: Tres poemas del Indio Naborí”, Cuba: La memoria inconsolable. Apuntes sobre cultura, historia e ideología (blog), 10 de mayo de 2007, http://duaneldiaz.blogspot.com/2007/05/sesin-de-poesa-tres-poemas-del-indio.html. 17. Agostini, “Pueblo (26 de julio)”, 70. 18. Álvarez Baragaño, Himno a las milicias, edición sin paginar. 19. Casaus, “Crónica 1961”, publicado en el dossier Poemas a Girón, La Jiribilla, Revista de cultura cubana, 16–22 de abril de 2011, http://epoca2.lajiribilla.cu/2011/n519_04/poesia.html. Las camisas azules se refieren al uniforme de miliciano, compuesto por una camisa de mezclilla azul y un pantalón verde olivo. 20. Fernández Retamar, “Mi miliciana”, 24; Fernández Retamar, Cuaderno paralelo. 21. Téngase en cuenta que el Estado cubano nunca abandonó del todo la explotación política de las prácticas y discursos prerrevolucionarios más convencionales con relación a la belleza, el gusto y la moda. Cabrera Arús, “Dressed for the Party”; Chase, Revolution within the Revolution; Guerra, Visions of Power; Guerra, “Gender Policing”; Loss, “Paper Cut-Outs”. 22. Olema, Maestra voluntaria. 23. Olema, Maestra voluntaria, 7. 24. Chase, Revolution within the Revolution, 152, NT. 25. Chase, Revolution within the Revolution, NT. El arquetipo de la mujer de clase media que se incorpora a la revolución es reflejado, por ejemplo, por Cintio Vitier en De peña pobre (1980), a través del personaje Violeta Palma. Seducida por el encanto de la Revolución cubana, Violeta se suma al proceso político y cambia los vestidos de moda que adquirió en tiendas por departamentos como “El Encanto” por el uniforme de miliciana. “Ahora tenía cosas urgentes que hacer”, reflexiona el personaje el mismo día del triunfo de los rebeldes: “cambiarse de ropa (sonrió pensando en el sentido tan distinto que ahora adquiría esta frase, mientras al trasluz de las vidrieras engalanadas por el Año Nuevo se veía a sí misma, años atrás, en un vestidor de El Encanto, frente al que ahora pasaba, probándose blusas y sayas)”. Vitier, De Peña Pobre, 151. Poco después de este episodio, Violeta reaparece, camino a su casa, con una “boina ladeada a la izquierda y el brazalete [del M-26-7] bien visible”. Vitier, De Peña Pobre, 158. 26. Boudet, Alánimo, alánimo, 27. El travestimiento de la muchacha humilde en burguesa también se representa en Memorias del subdesarrollo de Edmundo Desnoes, aunque de muy diversa manera. Si en el texto de Boudet se enfatiza lo ridículo que resulta el disfraz burgués para los nuevos escenarios ideológicos, en la novela de Desnoes, en la que no se deja de subrayar que antes “las damas cubanas se vestían como putas”, los vestidos burgueses de Laura, que Malabre regala a Elena el mismo día que se conocen, se convierten en un símbolo de seducción y perversión

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218 : María A. Cabrera Arús and Mirta Suquet operado por la clase media que se resiste a integrarse a la revolución. Desnoes, Memorias, 23. Así lo afirma Malabre, con plena conciencia de su acto: “Hoy volvió Elena con el vestido de Laura puesto. Me sentí un puro monstruo de perversidad... Ella la necesitaba [la ropa] y yo me eroticé al verla disfrazada de Laura”. Desnoes, Memorias, 42. 27. Desnoes, “Aquí me pongo”, 125. 28. Chase, Revolution within the Revolution; Guerra, Visions of Power. Fidel es un documental independiente, filmado en la isla en 1968 por invitación del gobierno cubano y distribuido en los Estados Unidos por Microcinema. 29. Guerra, Visions of Power. 30. Campuzano, “La mujer en la narrativa de la Revolución”. 31. Randall, To Change the World. 32. Randall, To Change the World, 103, NT. 33. Cabrera Arús, “Dressed for the Party”. 34. Vitier, De Peña Pobre, 245. 35. Vitier, De Peña Pobre, 246. 36. Vitier, De Peña Pobre, 252, subrayado nuestro. 37. Fidel Castro, “Discurso pronunciado por el Comandante Fidel Castro Ruz, Primer Ministro del Gobierno Revolucionario, en la clausura del X Congreso Textil, el 22 de julio de 1959”, versión taquigráfica de las Oficinas del Primer Ministro, accedido el 18 de diciembre, 2016, en http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1959/esp/f220759e.html. 38. Fidel Castro, “Discurso pronunciado por el Comandante Fidel Castro Ruz, Primer Ministro del Gobierno Revolucionario, en la clausura del X Congreso Textil, el 22 de julio de 1959”, versión taquigráfica de las Oficinas del Primer Ministro, accedido el 18 de diciembre, 2016, en http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1959/esp/f220759e.html. 39. Cabrera Arús, “Dressed for the Party”. Por ejemplo, el primer plan económico de la era postrevolucionaria, diseñado en 1961, contemplaba duplicar la producción de ropa de trabajo. Guevara, “La industrialización de Cuba”. 40. Cabrera Arús, “Dressed for the Party”. Cabrera Arús analiza los resultados de algunas investigaciones realizadas por el Instituto Cubano de Investigación y Orientación de la Demanda Interna que dan cuenta de los hábitos de consumo de vestuario de la población cubana en las décadas de los setenta y ochenta e indican que era la población urbana profesional, con acceso a mejores salarios, la que principalmente adquiría ropa y calzado fabricados por costureras y artesanos. Sin embargo, si bien la población adulta se hallaba satisfecha con las alternativas disponibles, la juventud se encontraba mayormente descontenta con las escasas posibilidades de consumo sartorial disponibles aun en el mercado negro. 41. Silvio Rodríguez, “Epistolario del subdesarrollo”, en Zurrón del aprendiz (blog), accedido el 9 de enero de 2017, http://zurrondelaprendiz.com/canciones/epistolario-del-subdesarrollo. 42. Rodríguez, “Epistolario del subdesarrollo”. 43. Rodríguez, “Epistolario del subdesarrollo”. 44. Sanz, Silvio, memoria trovada, 116. 45. 55 Sanz, Silvio, memoria trovada, 107. 46. Guerra, Visions of Power. 47. Randall, To Change the World, 29. 48. Cabrera Arús, “Pañoletas y polainas”; Cabrera Arús, “Thinking Politics and Fashion”. 49. Mella 293 (1964), 9, en Castellanos, “El diversionismo ideológico del rock”, 12–13. 50. En Chase, Revolution within the Revolution, 151, NT. 51. Casal, El caso Padilla, 105. 52. Guerra, “Gender Policing”. 53. Cristóbal Pérez, La ronda de los rubíes; Gewecke, “La ‘nueva’ novela policial cubana”. 54. Objetos de valor pertenecientes a la burguesía prerrevolucionaria aparecen también como

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La moda en la literatura cubana, 1960–1979 : 219 móvil del delito tanto en el cuento “El caso del neumático pinchado”, de Juan Ángel Cardi (1980) como en la novela No es tiempo de ceremonias, de Rodolfo Pérez Valero (1974). Díaz Infante interpreta este leitmotiv, acompañado siempre de la posterior refuncionalización de los objetos de valor por parte del Estado cubano, como una representación simbólica de la muerte de la burguesía y de sus ideales estéticos. Díaz Infante, La revolución congelada. 55. Cristóbal Pérez, La ronda de los rubíes, 57–58. 56. Cristóbal Pérez, La ronda de los rubíes, 57. 57. El personaje de la costurera ha sido llevado anteriormente a la literatura en obras emblemáticas del teatro cubano como Lila, la mariposa (1954), de Rolando Ferrer; Aire frío (1962), de Virgilio Piñera; y La repetición (1963), de Antón Arrufat. Se trata, sin embargo, en estos casos, de obras ubicadas en la época prerrevolucionaria, donde la costurera es más bien vista como una víctima de las desigualdades de clase de la sociedad capitalista. 58. Díaz Infante, La revolución congelada. 59. Cristóbal Pérez, La ronda de los rubíes, 185. 60. Arenas, “Que trine Eva”. 61. Soto, Reinaldo Arenas, 100, NT. 62. Manuel Zayas, Seres extravagantes (España: Malas Compañías, 2004). 63. Morejón Arnaiz, “Reinaldo Arenas prêt-à-porter”, 137. 64. Arenas, “Que trine Eva”, 25. 65. Arenas, “Que trine Eva”, 13. 66. Arenas, “Que trine Eva”, 24. 67. Arenas, “Que trine Eva”, 42. 68. Soto, Reinaldo Arenas, 99, NT. 69. Morejón Arnaiz, “Reinaldo Arenas”, 138. 70. Arenas, “Que trine Eva”, 23. 71. Arenas, “Que trine Eva”. 72. Arenas, “Que trine Eva”, 29. 73. Cabrera Arús, “Dressed for the Party”. 74. Arenas, “Que trine Eva”, 49. 75. Ernesto Oroza, “Desobediencia tecnológica: De la Revolución al revolico”, Ernesto Oroza (blog), 6 de junio de 2012, http://www.ernestooroza.com/desobediencia-tecnologica-de-la -revolucion-al-revolico/. 76. Simal, “Borrando fronteras”. 77. Ernesto Guevara, “El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba”, accedido el 16 de julio de 2017, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/guevara/65-socyh.htm. Según Guevara, “la culpabilidad de muchos de nuestros intelectuales y artistas reside en su pecado original; no son auténticamente revolucionarios”, pues se formaron antes de la revolución. “Las nuevas generaciones”, agrega, “vendrán libres del pecado original... Nuestra tarea consiste en impedir que la generación actual, dislocada por sus conflictos, se pervierta y pervierta a las nuevas... Ya vendrán los revolucionarios que entonen el canto del hombre nuevo con la auténtica voz del pueblo. Es un proceso que requiere tiempo”. 78. Chase, Revolution within the Revolution, 168, NT. 79. Chase, Revolution within the Revolution. 80. Benítez Rojo, “Estatuas sepultadas”, 249–267; Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Los sobrevivientes (La Habana: ICAIC, 1979). 81. Arenas, “Que trine Eva”, 24–25. 82. Arenas, “Que trine Eva”, 25. 83. Díaz Infante, La revolución congelada, 34. 84. Díaz Infante, La revolución congelada. 85. Díaz Infante, “La revolución es el espectáculo”.

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220 : María A. Cabrera Arús and Mirta Suquet 86. Arenas, “Que trine Eva”, 37. 87. Arenas, “Que trine Eva”, 28. 88. Arenas, “Que trine Eva”, 48. 89. Arenas, “Que trine Eva”, 64. Para una lectura del tratamiento de la homosexualidad en el cuento y en la obra de Arenas en general, véase Soto, Reinaldo Arenas. 90. Sierra Madero, “El trabajo os hará hombres”. Según Sierra Madero, el término afocancia será también utilizado por los psicólogos de las Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción para clasificar a los homosexuales y determinar la terapia a que se les sometería. 91. Arenas, “Que trine Eva”, 27. 92. Guerra, “Gender Policing”, 274, NT. 93. Arenas, “Que trine Eva”, 31. 94. Díaz Infante, “La revolución es el espectáculo”.

REFERENCIAS Agostini, Víctor. “Pueblo (26 de julio)”. En El cuento en la revolución, editado por F. Pita Rodríguez, 61–71. La Habana: Uneac, 1975. Álvarez Baragaño, José. Himno a las milicias. La Habana: Editorial Guerrero, 1961. Arenas, Reinaldo. “Mi primer desfile”. En Cuentos de la Revolución cubana, editado por A. Fornet, 54–67. Santiago de Chile: Editorial Universitaria, 1970. ———. “Que trine Eva”. En Viaje a La Habana, 10–66. Madrid, España: Mondadori. 1990. Barthes, Roland. The Language of Fashion. Oxford, Inglaterra: Berg, 2005. Benítez Rojo, Antonio. “Estatuas sepultadas”. En El cuento en la Revolución, editado por F. Pita Rodríguez, 249–267. La Habana: Uneac, 1975. Boudet, Rosa I. Alánimo, alánimo. La Habana: Editorial Arte y Literatura, 1977. Cabrera Arús, María A. “Dressed for the Party: Fashion and Politics in Socialist Cuba”. Tesis de doctorado, New School for Social Research, 2016. ———. “Pañoletas y polainas: Dinámicas de la moda en la Cuba soviética”. Kamchatka 5 (2015): 243–260. https://doi.org/10.7203/KAM.5.4577. ———. “Thinking Politics and Fashion in 1960s Cuba: How not to Judge a Book by its Cover”. Theory & Society 46 (2017): 411-428. http://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-017-9299-x. Campuzano, Luisa. “La mujer en la narrativa de la Revolución: ponencia sobre una carencia”. En Quirón o del ensayo y otros cuentos, 66–104. La Habana: Letras Cubanas, 1988. Casal, Lourdes. El caso Padilla: Literatura y revolución en Cuba; Documentos. Nueva York: Ediciones Nueva Atlántida. 1971. Castellanos, Ernesto J. “El diversionismo ideológico del rock, la moda y los enfermitos”. Centro Teórico-Cultural Criterios. 2008. http://www.criterios.es/pdf/9castellanosdiversionismo.pdf. Chase, Michelle. Revolution within the Revolution: Women and Gender Politics in Cuba, 1952– 1962. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Cristóbal Pérez, Armando. La ronda de los rubíes. La Habana: Letras Cubanas, 1973. Desnoes, Edmundo. “Aquí me pongo”. En Aquí once cubanos cuentan, compilado por J. Rodríguez Feo, 103–126. Montevideo: Arca, 1967. ———. Memorias del subdesarrollo. Tabasco, México: Joaquín Mortiz, 1980. Díaz Infante, Duanel. La revolución congelada: Dialécticas del castrismo. Madrid: Verbum, 2014. ———. “La revolución es el espectáculo”. Diario de Cuba, 11 de agosto de 2012. http://www .diariodecuba.com/cultura/1344672447_694.html. Entwistle, Joanne. The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory. Cambridge, Inglaterra: Polity Press, 2000.

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La moda en la literatura cubana, 1960–1979 : 221 Fernández, Diana. “Lo cubano en el vestir”. La Jiribilla 692 (2014). http://www.epoca2.lajiribilla. cu/articulo/8419/lo-cubano-en-el-vestir. Fernández Retamar, Roberto. Cuaderno paralelo. La Habana: Girón, 1973. ———. “Mi miliciana”. En A quien pueda interesar (poesía, 1958–1970), 24. México, DF: Siglo XXI, 1974. Gewecke, Frauke. “La ‘nueva’ novela policial cubana: Leonardo Padura Fuentes, Amir Valle, Lorenzo Lunar”. En Cuba: La Revolución revis(it)ada, editado por A. Gremels y R. Spiller, 171–190. Tubingen, Alemania: Narr, 2010. Glinn, Burt. Cuba 1959. Londres: Rare Art Press, 2015. Goldgel, Víctor. Cuando lo nuevo conquistó América. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2013. Guerra, Lillian. Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption, and Resistance, 1959–1971. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. ———. “Gender Policing, Homosexuality and the New Patriarchy of the Cuban Revolution, 1965–70”. Social History 35 (2010): 268–289. https://doi.org/10.1080/03071022.2010.487 378. Guevara, Ernesto. “La industrialización de Cuba”. Universidad Popular. Séptimo Ciclo: Economía y planificación, editado por C. Olivares, L. Soto, R. Anillo, R. Alarcón y S. Fraile, 15–65. La Habana, Cuba: Imprenta Nacional, 1961. Leante, César. “El día inicial”. En Aquí 11 cubanos cuentan, compilado por J. Rodríguez Feo, 86–90. Montevideo: Arca, 1967. Lee Blaszczyk, Regina. “Rethinking Fashion”. En Producing Fashion: Commerce, Culture, and Consumers, editado por R. Lee Blaszczyk, 1–18. Filadelfia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. López-Fresquet, Rufo. My 14 Months with Castro. Nueva York: World Publishing Co., 1966. Loss, Jacqueline. “Paper Cut-Outs: Notes on Cuba, Taste and Mobility”. Manuscrito, 2018. Martínez, Tomás E. “Documento No. 1”. En Literatura y Revolución en Cuba: Documentos, ed. L. Casal, 11–19. Miami: Ediciones Universal y Nueva Atlántida, 1971. Molina, Alessandra. “Un mundo que va a existir”. En La utopía vacía: Intelectuales y Estado en Cuba, editado por C. A. Aguilera, 105–135. Barcelona: Linkgua, 2009. Morejón Arnaiz, Idalia. “Reinaldo Arenas prêt-à-porter: La escritura de la ropa en ‘Que trine Eva”. Anales de Literatura Hispanoamericana 45 (2016): 135–144. Olema, Daura. Maestra voluntaria. La Habana: Casa de las Américas, 1962. Randall, Margaret. To Change the World: My Years in Cuba. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009. Rivero, Yeidy M. Broadcasting Modernity: Cuban Commercial Television, 1950–1960. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2015. Sanz, Joseba. Silvio, memoria trovada de una revolución. Tafalla, España: Txalaparta, 1994. Sarmiento Ramírez, Ismael. “Vestido y calzado de la población cubana en el siglo XIX”. Anales del Museo de América 8 (2000): 161–199. Sierra Madero, Abel. “El trabajo os hará hombres: Masculinización nacional, trabajo forzado y control social en Cuba durante los años sesenta”. Cuban Studies 44 (2016): 309–349. Simal, Mónica. “Borrando fronteras: Reconfiguraciones sexuales y textuales en la obra de Reinaldo Arenas y Juan Goytisolo”. Tesis de maestría, Montclair State University, 2005. Soto, Francisco. Reinaldo Arenas. Nueva York: Twayne, 1998. Vitier, Cintio. De Peña Pobre. La Habana: Letras Cubanas, 1980.

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CHRISTINA GARCÍA

Baroque Revolutionaries, Communist Fags, and Risky Friendships: Reading the Politics of Friendship in Fresa y chocolate A B S T R AC T In its Greco-Roman formulations, friendship is conceived as a filial bond established through similitude. Later philosophers claimed it is the belief of knowing a friend as one presumes to know oneself that generates security and a sense of belonging. Moreover, the authenticity of a friend is determined by his self-sufficiency and the total transparency of his actions. Against this classical, androcentric paradigm, contemporary theorists, such as Leela Gandhi and Tom Roach, have valorized friendships that demand risk, discomfort, and becoming Other. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s film Fresa y chocolate presents us with an unlikely friendship between a homophobic, militant communist and a gay, suspected counterrevolutionary. While the larger narrative of the film advocates for a politics of assimilation, paying close attention to expressions of vulnerability, dissymmetry, and irreducible difference, I aim to show how the film unworks the notion of community as shared identity and gestures toward an ethics of hospitality. Betrayals and disguised intentions between the two friends place them in danger of political persecution and exclusion from their respective communities. In my reading of Alea’s film, friendship and the insecurity it necessarily entails reflects what Gandhi has described as an extra-institutional and nonofficial ethico-political practice.

RESUMEN En sus formulaciones grecorromanas, la amistad se concibe como un vínculo filial establecido a través de la similitud. Filósofos posteriores afirmaron que es la creencia de conocer a un amigo como uno supone conocerse a sí mismo lo que genera la seguridad y un sentido de pertenencia. Además, la autenticidad de un amigo está determinada por su autosuficiencia y la total transparencia de sus acciones. Frente a este paradigma clásico androcéntrico, teóricos contemporáneos, como Leela Gandhi y Tom Roach, han valorizado amistades que demandan riesgos, incomodidad y devenir en el Otro. La película de Tomás Gutiérrez Alea Fresa y chocolate nos presenta una amistad inesperada entre un militante comunista homofóbico y un gay, sospechado de ser contrarrevolucionario. Mientras que la narrativa más grande del filme aboga por una política de asimilación, prestando especial atención a las expresiones de la vulnerabilidad, la asimetría y la diferencia irreducible, mi objetivo es mostrar cómo la película desafía la noción de la comunidad como una identidad compartida y apela por una ética de la hospitalidad. Traiciones e intenciones ocultas entre los dos amigos los ponen en peligro de

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persecución política y la exclusión de sus comunidades respectivas. En mi lectura de la película, la amistad y la inseguridad que necesariamente conlleva refleja lo que Gandhi ha descrito como una práctica ético-política extra-institucional y no oficial.

Introduction “¿Por qué tú eres así?” The question upsets; it is taken offensively, as a rejection of his lifestyle. It is his friend and guest that poses the question and later follows it with an accusation: “Tú no eres revolucionario.” In this scene from Fresa y chocolate the disdain the militant student, David, expresses toward the effeminate mannerisms, or “monerías,” of his friend Diego in part reflects a historical machismo inherited from the Spanish and cultivated in Cuban national identity formation since the late eighteenth century.1 However, for the interests of this article, I would like to point to another source of intolerance toward the feminine and accentuated gestures that Diego so emphatically exhibits from the start of the film. While many have looked to Cuba’s postrevolutionary militarization as a cause of its hypermasculinity,2 I would add, alongside critics such as José Quiroga, that the figure of the homosexual presents an unassimilable excess to the ends of totalizing nation building.3 With the revolution’s promise of the hombre nuevo, or new man, the birth of a new generation whose sense of civic obligation would surpass the pursuit of pleasure,4 where would nonreproductive sexual behavior fit within the telos of this utopic project? If the institutionalized discrimination of gays served as a means to persecute political dissidents, designating their conduct as improper or counter revolutionary, I suggest that in associating the figure of the homosexual with decadence, spectacle, and extravagance—as indicated by the laws designed to persecute them, such as Ley contra la extravaganza and Ley contra la vagancia—this figure represents an unproductive expenditure,5 a certain baroque aesthetic that is antithetical to the aims of monolithic communal projects (especially one that had become increasingly Sovietized) and the establishment of a national subject.6 This becomes all the more evident when we consider that the 1960s labor camps, designed to rehabilitate homosexuals, religious believers, and those deemed antisocial, were called Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción (UMAP).7 Indeed, the effort of making the figure of the homosexual a productive member of the community through forced labor and later attempts to incorporate this figure within the national narrative through representations, such as Fresa y chocolate, are symptomatic of reading nonheteronormative modalities of sexuality in excess to national unity. The confinement of gay citizens within the UMAPs implied not only that they were unproductive but also that they were a contaminant to society. The medical discourse that circulated within the camps pathologized homosexuality as an incurable disease and societal reintegration was sought through the disciplining of “ostentatious”

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224 : Christina García behavior, rules of comportment, and quota requirements.8 Fresa y chocolate’s deployment of the codified and accessible genre of melodrama might be seen as another form of disciplining the figure of the homosexual, making what presents a threat to the integrity of the body politic consumable to even its more machista audience. Critics familiar with Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s experimental films, in which confrontational techniques, decentered narratives, and the use of collage demand an active viewership, were quick to note the stylistic shift Fresa y chocolate presented within his corpus. Having a straightforward narrative structure, clear protagonists and antagonists, and no Brechtian interruptions of the filmic illusion, Fresa y chocolate has been described as overly demonstrative and comparatively less complex.9 In interviews, both Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabío, with whom he co-directed the film, have accredited its “universal” appeal to its denunciation of intolerance and promotion of the “comprehension of difference.”10 With regard to his stylistic shift, Gutiérrez Alea explains he felt the imperative to reach the largest audience possible and celebrates the accomplishment of doing so, noting, “I’ve seen people you could call supermachos who left the film crying. If you cry, it’s because you identify with Diego, who is not a macho. That’s very important for me.”11 Although Gutiérrez Alea calls for the “comprehension of difference,” the cathartic experience he holds dear entails a process of assimilation and, tellingly, he elaborates that in his adaptation of Diego’s character from Senel Paz’s short story, he left out the exaggerated effeminate behavior of the “loca” or “homosexual escandoloso” so that more viewers could self-identify with Diego.12 In response to this image of the gay man made palatable, queer theorists have critiqued the film’s attempts to domesticate the homosexual, neutralizing its oppositional charge.13 Notwithstanding the film’s melodramatic structure and directorial aims to make its characters identifiable, in this article I sustain my attention on interactions and visual components that remain extraneous to a project of incorporation and its presumptive elimination of a threat to national unity. If, on the level of the larger narrative, Senel Paz’s script realized by Gutiérrez Alea and Tabío’s direction advocates for a politics of assimilation, I suggest there are aspects of the film that signal irreconcilable differences—for instance, Diego’s devotion to the Virgin Mary and David’s dialectical materialism—and, in so doing, challenge the notion of community as a shared property or identity. Returning to the scene referenced above between Diego and David, I take this confrontation where penetrating gazes intersect as an instance of friendship that questions the unity of the subject and provokes a self-othering. In the exchange of verbal jabs and unsettling stares, the staging of friendship here entails a vulnerability and risk that calls for an ethics of hospitality toward the foreigner and potential enemy. Set in 1970s Cuba, a political context of high vigilance and self-policing,14 the interior of the home becomes a site for ethico-

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political practice and personal interactions acquire the revolutionary significance of public demonstrations. Philosophies of Friendship In its Greco-Roman formulations, friendship is conceived as a filial bond established through similitude. Aristotle tells us that just as a father loves his son, or a brother loves another, friends love each other for being “other selves of theirs . . . having grown from the same sources.”15 Cicero would later write, “El que mira a un verdadero amigo, mira, por así decir, un modelo de sí mismo.”16 With its self-identical subjects, the paradigm of classical friendship produces an aesthetic of harmonious geometry, achieving equilibrium through mutual reciprocity. For Aristotle the balance between giving and receiving is essential. And yet as Derrida underscores in the Politics of Friendship, in this very model of reciprocity there is an irreducible dissymmetry.17 Curiously, while Aristotle valorizes mutuality, he also argues that it is preferable to love than to be loved, to give than to receive. In his reading of these passages, Derrida argues, “The friend, the being-friend . . . is to love before being loved. . . . What is proper or essential to friendship, can be thought and lived without the least reference to the be-loved, or more generally to the lovable.”18 Accordingly, friendship becomes an imperative to love without the expectation of it being corresponded, a unilateral act without measure. If we consider friendship not between identical or exemplary beings, if we depart from a filial model, this allows us to avoid the trap of producing centric structures—androcentric, phallocentric, or anthropocentric—and their inevitable exclusions. Moreover, recalling that for thinkers such as Cicero the ideal friend is confident, virtuous, wise, and totally self-sufficient, the model exemplary friend is thus an absolute and immutable figure: having no need of or reliance to something outside of himself, he is invulnerable to an Other.19 Deleuze and Guattari offer another useful reading of classical friendship and point to a necessary departure from its paradigm. Greek philosophy, they observe, emerged not from hierarchal or vertical relationships but from the horizontal interconnections that are formed in the society of friends, the society of equals.20 And among these friends there are rivalries, opinions, and antagonisms—the very stuff that generates concepts. As the persona of thought, the figure of the friend comes to signify a division within thought itself: “Thought needs the thinker-as-friend to actualize the concept. . . . Thought and thinker become claimant and rival and vice versa.”21 For Deleuze and Guattari, friendship as a splintering, or difference, continues to be the condition for the exercise of thought. However, after the catastrophe of totalitarian states, after the shame of Auschwitz—in a statement that markedly departs from the above quote by Cicero—they write, “friends can no longer look at each other, or each

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226 : Christina García at himself, without a ‘weariness.’”22 Friendship can no longer be “a simple rivalry” or a contest among equals for it is those selfsame homosocial institutions that led to incalculable atrocities.23 As such, friendship and thought must “mutate”: “After an ordeal too powerful . . . [there are] not two friends who communicate and recall the past together but, on the contrary, who suffer an amnesia or aphasia capable of splitting thought, of dividing it in itself. Personae proliferate and branch off.”24 The shame that follows these catastrophes, “the shame of being human,” does not arise from feeling “responsible for the victims but responsible before them.”25 If we consider that shame indicates feelings of inadequacy and constitutes an affront on dignity, then Deleuze and Guattari’s call for a new friendship is one that not only makes the relation between identical subjects untenable but insists on an insufficiency and “a vital relationship with the Other.”26 Following Deleuze and Guattari’s lead, I want to suggest that the legacy of the 1960s forced labor camps in Cuba, which worked to excise all that did not correspond to the exemplary revolutionary subject, compels us to consider alternatives to traditional models of friendship based on similitude and shared interests. Indeed, the shame of this legacy demands rethinking friendship in such a way that does not reiterate institutional collectives or social memberships. Against an androcentric model that produces exclusive allegiances and insists on mutual reciprocity,27 the depiction of friendship in Fresa y chocolate, as we shall see, inverts classical norms, placing difference, vulnerability, and relations of dissymmetry at the foreground. The mutation and proliferation of personae Deleuze and Guattari observe “after an ordeal too powerful” is also operative in the film. Incorporating las locas Based on Senel Paz’s story “El Bosque, el lobo y el hombre Nuevo,” Fresa y chocolate presents us with a friendship between a young militant communist, David, who claims he only believes in dialectical materialism, and Diego, an older man who describes himself as “marícon,” “religioso” “[y con] problemas con el sistema.”28 Produced in 1993 by the Cuban film institute, the film was lauded for its criticism of the state’s rejection of its gay citizens.29 The film aims to integrate not only this excluded community but also a body of cultural production that had been stigmatized as superfluous to the revolution’s project. References to José Lezama Lima and his baroque novel El paradiso abound in the film.30 However, alongside the praise, other critics have dismissed the significance of the film’s political critique as too little, too late—never explicitly apologizing for the state’s incarceration of gays and dissidents in the labor camps.31 Emilio Bejel, among others, has pointed to the film’s heteronormative ending, where David hooks up with Diego’s neighbor Nancy, in the place of

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offering “a more committed gay politics.”32 Significantly, Diego’s character “is from a social class inherently opposed to the film’s basic ideology” and has “internalized some of the other prejudices of the society that discriminates against him.”33 He is, in Bejel’s reading, racist and Eurocentric and fetishizes high art, all of which “prevent [the film] from becoming a full blown treatise on the repressed.”34 José Quiroga and Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé offer strong critiques of the film in its effort to incorporate the figure of the homosexual through the construction of a national allegory. Quiroga aptly posits that the film produces a typology of characters where the figure of the homosexual is subsumed in the larger narrative of the revolution, legitimized as the nation’s cultural producer, or the one who “bear[s] culture from one generation to the other.”35 Diego is not only stereotypically gay with effeminate and dramatic overture; he is seen in a “positive light,” as Quiroga says, and imparts to David a much needed education on national and international artists: Maria Callas, John Donne, and Lezama Lima, to name a few. Not unlike Emilio Bejel, Quiroga also observes that Diego is “a conservative culture queen.”36 Drawing from Néstor Perlongher’s essay “La desaparición de la homosexualidad,” Quiroga succinctly states, “Si la sociedad no ha podido acabar con las locas, lo que resta entonces es incorporarlas.”37 He cautions against identity-based politics and the aims of making marginal figures visible in ways that are easily consumable by a dominant public, ultimately rendering these figures knowable and unthreatening.38 Looking at Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s filmography, Quiroga explains that Fresa y chocolate serves as another progressive marker in the revolution’s teleological narrative. If Memorias del subdesarrollo (1968) addressed class-consciousness, Fresa y chocolate does the work of erotic liberation. For all its critique of the state, the film operates within the revolution’s dialectic.39 In a similar vein, Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé demonstrates how the homosexual in Fresa y chocolate represents an allegorical restitution. In his reading, the film and Paz’s story aim to incorporate the error of the revolution as part of the formation of a national subject.40 The young communist David is no longer homophobic thanks to Diego’s tutelage and comes to represent the new revolutionary man. In what Cruz-Malavé sees as a Christian telos in Che Guevara’s promise of the hombre nuevo, the revolution’s initial rejection and persecution of gays is subsumed as an originary sin, or necessary transgression, in a narrative of redemption.41 Citing a well-known phrase by Antonio Pérez, CruzMalavé illustrates the logic of incorporation in another way: “Sólo los grandes estómagos digieren veneno.”42 Calling to mind the process of inoculation, I want to suggest that perhaps Cruz Malavé’s and Quiroga’s concern—the elimination of a threat posed by an oppositional figure through its integration—may be better understood and also complicated through the metaphor of the immunitary mechanism. Before engaging with immunization’s contradictory nature,

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228 : Christina García we could say that on a characterological level, David has been inoculated by Diego; he is no longer threatened by gay men while Diego, forced into exile, is excised and disappeared from the body politic. Inclusion through Exclusion In a description that links its biological and political significations, Roberto Esposito writes of the immunitary logic: Evil must be thwarted, but not by keeping it at a distance from one’s border; rather, it is included inside them. The dialectical figure that thus emerges is that of exclusionary inclusion or exclusion by inclusion. The body defeats a poison not by expelling it outside the organism, but by making it somehow part of the body.43

Significantly, Esposito tells us “this homeopathic protection practice—which excludes by including and affirms by negating—does not consume itself without leaving traces on the constitution of its object.”44 As Cruz-Malavé himself notes at the very end of his essay, despite attempts, it would be impossible “depurar el excedente homosexual de la nación, de devorarlo, de despedirse de él.”45 Remembering that the early 1990s was an especially vulnerable time for the Castro government with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, some have considered the film’s production as a strategy to redeem the country’s image abroad.46 If Fresa y chocolate aims at immunizing the body politic by allegorically incorporating the figure of the homosexual, given “the structurally aporetic character of the immunitary process,”47 then the film inadvertently affirms this figure’s oppositional charge. Put differently, in trying to vaccinate the body politic against the poison of the revolution’s error, the film affirms what it never explicitly addresses, the legacy of the camps and the institutional discrimination against gays. Immunitas is an especially productive metaphor to understand the context in which friendship happens in the film. In its effort to protect the integrity of the body from an outside, or the limits of an identity from foreign incursion, Esposito explains, “Immunity is a condition of particularity: whether it refers to an individual or a collective, it is always ‘proper,’ in the specific sense of ‘belonging to someone’ and therefore ‘un-common’ or ‘non-communal.’”48 Recalling that individuals were sent to the UMAPs for “improper conduct,” the camps may be interpreted as trying to preserve a collective identity, to maintain the boundaries of its properties in the most violent defense of an immunitary impulse. In the film, the perceived threat of a foreign incursion, specifically US imperialism, is made evident when David’s friend Miguel exclaims “el enemigo está a 90 kilómetros.” It is perhaps no coincidence that Diego’s suspected counterrevolutionary art exhibit is linked with a foreign embassy. More

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accurately, it is Diego’s supposed dealings with a foreign embassy that compel Miguel and David to investigate him. Recounting his initial encounter with Diego, David says: “Primero me enseñó unos libros extranjeros. . . . El tipo tiene la casa llena de cosas raras, unas esculturas rarísimas . . . Quieren [él y su amigo] hacer una exposición y una embajada lo va a ayudar.” To which Miguel responds, “¿Una embajada? ¡Coño, David eso sí es grave!” In an early scene, when David looks out the window of a cheap motel room, where he expects to finally sleep with his girlfriend, he sees a CDR billboard, signaling that even private spaces do not escape this penetrating surveillance. The Committees for the Defense of the Revolution provide another manifestation of an immunitary impulse, as Ted Henken explains, these were “neighborhood-based organizations . . . intended to monitor potential dissidents and pass information on to state security, further consolidating government power by turning the entire population into informants.”49 The fact that these are neighborhood-based organizations does not negate their noncommunal operations, for as we shall see immunitas and communitas are inextricably linked. What is important to highlight about this context is the high level of vigilance and inevitable paranoia, which make a friendship like the one that develops between David, a card-carrying communist, and Diego, a religious fag, not only unlikely but also especially risky.50 Reiterating this sense of surveillance, references to “la vigilancia” become a common refrain throughout the film. All three main characters at some point remind the other not to say certain things out loud, or raise the volume of the music to mask their conversation. Before entering Diego’s apartment for the first time, Diego pulls David under the stairs presumably to hide from “la vigilancia” about to cross their path and who happens be singing the verse, “yo perjudico tu reputación.” As we later discover, this in fact is Nancy, Diego’s black-market dealing neighbor and good friend. Nonetheless, this scene frames the gesture of hospitality that follows within a context of neighbor informants. Upon entering the apartment, Diego makes clear its desired exclusivity: “Bienvenido a la Guarida. Este es un lugar donde no se recibe a todo el mundo.” “La guarida,” Diego’s name for his apartment, has been associated with the proverbial closet, generating readings of the film as “la salida de la guarida.”51 Drawing from its significations—den, hideout, refuge, or cover—I read “la guarida” as an immunitary space, or an attempt thereat. La Guarida: Jonny Walker, Marilyn Monroe, and El Che As viewers, we rarely see the apartment from a comfortable distance; the camera is placed from the actors’ perspective, providing us with intimate and partial views of the sunlit space, brimming with objects. The building’s architecture is classic baroque and the interior of the apartment exhibits an array of

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230 : Christina García mismatched antique furniture, folding patio chairs, artworks, cultural memorabilia, and religious iconography. Music is almost always playing. Objects from abroad, others off the street, like a fragment of an elaborate wroughtiron gate—a quintessential Cuban architectural fixture—form an assemblage of personal identitarian markers that act as a boundary between him and the outside. Diego has, in effect, created a visual and sonic enclosure. And yet in bringing these objects within the walls of his apartment, he is producing a contact with the outside. Doors are notably left unlocked; we see Nancy and David come in and out of Diego’s apartment unannounced. When Diego sits by his typewriter to compose a letter—his act of parrhesia against government censorship—he is exposed through a large open window.52 Drawing once again from its aporetic structure, Esposito provides us with an apt description to think through this immunitary space: The clivage that at the same time juxtaposes and connects immunity and community, mak[es] one not only the contrasting background for the other, but also the object and content of the other. . . . Immunity as a private category, only takes relief as a negative mode of community. . . . Immunity, in short, is the internal limit which cuts across community, folding it back on itself in a form that is both constitutive and deprivative: immunity constitutes or reconstitutes community precisely by negating it.53

Following Esposito’s logic, in trying to create a personal sanctuary, Diego initiates a boundary, a point of touch between the private and the public, or immunitas and communitas. Significantly, La Guarida, as an enclosure, is nowhere near sealed, but dynamic and porous. We may read the composition of the apartment as expressing, what Esposito has described as, “immunity in a nonexcluding relation to its common opposite,” “a conception of individual identity . . . [where] the body is understood as a functioning construct that is open to continuous exchange with its surrounding environment.” In other words, identity and the body are not conceived as closed and monolithic units.54 Alongside items that would bring Diego’s revolutionary loyalty into question, such as bottles of Johnny Walker (“la bebida del enemigo”) and images of Marylyn Monroe, are photographs of national Cuban icons. This nonexcluding relation is perhaps best expressed in the shrines to the orishas and La Virgen de la Caridad we find in both Diego’s and Nancy’s apartments. As the art historian Donald Cosentino has noted, almost any object may be appropriated and converted into a sacred icon in the process of AfroAtlantic altar making; that is, new objects may always be incorporated into the spaces of these altars.55 This aesthetic—accumulative, proliferating, and unrestricted—is reiterated not just in the building’s baroque architecture but also in the arrangement of Diego’s apartment.56 We see this especially when David adds photographs of Fidel and El Che to one of Diego’s displays on a wall. Ideologically incompatible as they may be with the Virgin Mary and pictures

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of Julián del Casal, at the level of the composition, these additions are easily accommodated. When David places these images alongside Diego’s other objects, we have what Tom Roach calls “non-dialectical mingling.”57 I return to this concept in more detail further ahead. Suffice it to say for now that the ethos expressed in these arrangements is one of hospitality to the foreign Other. It is in Diego’s apartment, “llena de cosas raras” and where national and international cultural objects cohabitate, that the large majority of the film is shot. Staging the friendship that develops within the conventions of hospitality, Diego and David are both placed in vulnerable positions. Foregrounding this perilousness, David first refuses Diego’s invitation: “Yo no voy a casa de gente que no conozco.” Crossing the lines between host and guest, hostage and hostile intruder,58 the first time David enters Diego’s home it is due to a trick, a bet between Diego and his friend German; the second time, David enters with the intention of covertly investigating and reporting Diego to the authorities. While the conventions of hospitality would in principle require an immunitary space of which the host is master,59 in opening one’s home to the foreigner that space is no longer impervious. This precariousness is made all the more palpable in the film, not only because of the CDR’s presumed monitoring, “violating the inviolable” principle of the home,60 but also because the roles of host and guest are initially performed by Diego and David with ulterior motives. Tocar la tecla que no se podía tocar: The Shame of Becoming Other Whereas for Cicero virtuousness, transparency, and self-sufficiency are the defining features of an exemplary friend,61 in Fresa y chocolate, disguised intentions, moments of weakness, desire, and need are the engines that propel friendships. In their first interaction at an open-air café when Diego takes a seat at David’s table, David is visibly annoyed. He gestures to switch seats but finds himself corralled. Diego, with his many shopping bags and effeminate mannerisms, is perceived as an intruder, an uninvited guest in this public setting. Undeterred, Diego makes a spectacle of savoring his strawberry ice cream, complains about the country’s status quo, and invites David to his house on the pretext of lending him some hard-to-find books. Just before this encounter we see Diego walking with German. When the two see David, they exchange looks that suggest an understanding. These two like-minded friends conspire together. And when Diego finally approaches David we suspect a scheme. As the narrator in Paz’s story, David says: “Sentí como si una vaca me lamiera el rostro. Era la mirada libidinosa del recién llegado . . . y se me trancó la boca del estómago.”62 The expression of discomfort and exposure to the other’s gaze is indicative of the friendship that will ensue. In this initial encounter David feels like hunted prey: “Me di cuenta de que se trataba de una carnada, y no estaba dispuesto a morderla.”63 He refers here to the contraband books Diego

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232 : Christina García has deliberately removed from his bag to call his attention. What begins as bait later becomes gifts. Notably, David’s references to ingestion, with mention of his stomach, bait, and biting, can be linked back to our reading of incorporation and inoculation operative in the film. Behind all the dissimulation and pretext, there is a genuine desire on Diego’s part to know David. This desire of course is not mutual but unilateral. We learn, especially in Paz’s story, that Diego has admired David since long ago when he saw him perform on stage in a production of Ibsen’s House of Dolls. Although the production as a whole was a fiasco, David’s acting and improvisation were very good. Nonetheless, when Diego makes a reference to the play, David tells his readers “de haber sabido el efecto que me iban a producir sus palabras, Diego hubiera evitado aquel lance. Tocó la tecla que no se podía tocar.”64 For David, his participation in the play is associated with profound humiliation and he finally accepts Diego’s invitation to go to his house in order to recover photos that Diego claims to have taken of the performance. David explains, “Eso fue lo peor, la lástima con que me aplaudieron. . . . [I]luminado por los reflectores, rogaba con toda mi alma que se produjera un efecto de amnesia total sobre todos . . . y que nunca, jamás, never, ¿me oyes, Dios?, me encontrara con unos de ellos, alguien que me pudiera identificar.”65 Curiously, in this moment of desperation, the militant atheist appeals to God and uses the language of the enemy. As we shall see, calls to gods and saints that seem to go unanswered will be a recurring device throughout the film. Although the friendship between the two has not yet developed, there are various aspects of these initial encounters that signal a different friendship to come. That Diego’s interest in David should be his creative talent works against classical models where shared moral values are considered the bonds between friends.66 As a “culture queen” (Quiroga) Diego would predictably esteem artistic talent above all else; however, it is worth considering that for Plutarch acting is the craft of the adulator not the exemplary friend.67 Significantly, what Plutarch finds threatening about the adulator’s mimetic skills is the malleability of his or her subjectivity, the ability to adapt and transform. And, in so doing, the adulator destabilizes meanings and commonly held beliefs.68 In a complete inversion of these values, I suggest that is precisely what Diego and David’s friendship brings about: instability and transformation. When Diego sits at David’s table at the open-air café and addresses him as “compañero Torvaldo,” Ibsen’s lead character, we may read this moment as “solicit[ing] a becoming.”69 In her text Precarious Life, Judith Butler formulates subjectivity in relation to an Other; it is in the address and in the request to be recognized that initiates a new sense of self. Butler writes: When we recognize another, or when we ask for recognition for ourselves, we are not asking for an Other to see us as we are, as we already are, as we have always been, as we

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were constituted prior to the encounter itself. Instead, in the asking, in the petition, we have already become something new, since we are constituted by virtue of the address, a need and desire for the Other that takes place. . . . To ask for recognition, or to offer it, is precisely not to ask for recognition for what one already is. It is to solicit a becoming, to instigate a transformation, to petition the future always in relation to the Other.70

Not only is one’s sense of self constituted in the encounter but, consequently, questioned, made vulnerable: “It is also to stake one’s own being, and one’s own persistence in one’s own being.”71 The fear “of becoming foreign to oneself” is perhaps expressed when David repeatedly says, “No soy yo” to Diego’s claim, “Yo a ti te conozco. Te he visto muchísimas veces.”72 Removing his Communist Youth Union ID from one front pocket to the other, David insists on being identified in a particular way. And yet when Diego asks him, “¿Te interesa Vargas Llosa?” David reveals to the reader that he was in fact more than curious about this notoriously critical author of the revolution, “Yo estaba loco por leer su última novela.”73 Against the persona of an obedient and loyal revolutionary who would abstain from reading such contraband books, Diego instigates and calls forth the possibility of an Other self: “Lo forras, viejo. Ten imaginación.” Remembering that for Derrida what is proper to friendship “can be thought and lived without the least reference to the be-loved, or more generally to the lovable,”74 then the initial link between David and Diego is a shared sense of shame. Diego later confesses that his experience as an audience member at David’s performance was “la vergüenza más grande que he pasado en mi vida. . . . No hallaba cómo esconderme en la butaca, la mitad del público rezaba por ti . . . Por eso fuimos tan pródigos en los aplausos.”75 In Barbara Cassin’s definition of the word, vergüenza implies a failure to fulfill a duty. To feel shame one must first have a sense of commitment and obligation. We might describe Diego’s vergüenza for David as vergüenza ajena, which “captures the feeling of shame that is experienced in the face of the incompetent or inadequate conduct of another person.”76 Cassin continues: The feeling of shame in this case has nothing to do with the subject’s actions, for he or she has not done anything and cannot feel responsible or be held guilty. It is precisely because there is no direct relation to the person for whom one feels shame that the sentiment of vergüenza exhibits and constructs a tie. Vergüenza in this instance helps build a sense of community.77

Drawing from this definition, what Diego and David share even before their first interaction is an experience of inadequacy and an instance of community that has nothing to do with the security of belonging or a shared identity. When David is recognized by Diego as the actor in the play, something which he desperately wished would never occur, he is placed in a vulnerable

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234 : Christina García position, obligated to recall aspects of himself he had repressed in favor of his identity as an engineering student. After all, performing foreign plays is no way of serving the revolution. In a later scene when Diego asks David why he is studying engineering when what he really wants to do is write, David responds that he owes it the revolution. Pursuing a vocation that is “unpurposive” would mean failing on his obligation to be a productive member. More important, recognizing this desire or potential self would mean becoming Other. In effect, Diego’s words are like a “lance.” The touching of “una tecla que no se podía tocar” will occur more than once in the trajectory of their friendship. In one of the few scenes where the camera pans back, we see Diego and David sitting across from each other listening to melancholic music. Moments of silence transpire between them as Diego adoringly stares at David, whose gaze is turned in the opposite direction, possibly avoiding direct eye contact. When their eyes finally do meet, following a comment Diego made about the affective quality of the music, David antagonistically asks Diego, “ven acá chico, ¿Por que tú eres así?” What ensues is a series of questions that reproduce heterosexist myths of homosexuality as a medical condition that is treatable. Diego finds himself not only correcting these views but also defending his revolutionary commitment. Before asking him to leave, Diego does a parody of Cuban macho men and calls David “un comemierda.” In the section that follows, I aim to show that these confrontational and unsettling exchanges might be understood as fulfilling “an ethics of discomfort.”78 Nondialectical Mingling, Betrayal, and Discomfort Drawing from Foucault’s late work, Tom Roach formulates a mode of friendship in which discomfort and estrangement realize an ethical imperative: “to annihilate identity [and] to transform the self and the friend.”79 Identities, we’ve seen, can produce exclusive communities and violent immunitary impulses. Roach’s conception of friendship as “the space of the in-between . . . a zone of unbelonging, a property of the property-less” allows us to imagine more fluid and transformative relations where coming together never coagulates into institutional bodies.80 He writes, “Involving attraction and resistance . . . a friendship resists dialectical fusion in favor of non-dialectical mingling.”81 Collapsing the distinction between friend and enemy, Roach valorizes the act of betrayal, as it forces one to rethink their sense of self and produces a distance between friends that would prevent a fusion, or the Other being reduced to the Same. For Foucault, Roach explains, the concept of friendship “is anything but utopian”: Betrayal, distance, brutal honesty, indeed, an impersonal intimacy founded on estrangement are its making. . . . This is, to be blunt, the shit of friendship. When the most

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troubling aspects of relationships become the very foundation of a friendship, however, new subjective, communal, and political forms can be imagined. . . . The friend-enemy dichotomy, which holds considerable sway in the philosophical canon from Aristotle through Carl Schmitt, is shattered when the betrayal of secrets is part and parcel of friendship. In this sense, the true friend—the friend who will push one beyond historically determined identity, the friend who will help another think and relate differently— is the betrayer.82

What betrayal affords is the discovery that I am other. This is critical for Foucault whose interest in “care of the self” as practiced by the Greeks provided a way to work against current identitarian or “out politics,” while attending to an ethos, or a way of life on an individual level.83 In same way that Nestor Perlonger and later José Quiroga were concerned with the “disappearance of the homosexual,” Foucault saw coming-out politics and its aims of self-discovery as working within the medicalization of sexuality and the institutions of biopower.84 For him, care of the self “is the care of the activity and not the care of the soul-as-substance.”85 Care of the self is an aesthetic approach that does not assume there is anything to reveal about the self but rather something that is wholly constructed through a principle of activity.86 Friendships can facilitate these activities; push one away from their presumed sense of self to adopt other ways of beings, other ways of life.87 Returning to the heated scene between Diego and David we can see here not just a discomfort, but also a betrayal. In response to Diego’s expression of pathos with regard to the affectivity of the music, and thus at a moment of exposure and emotional vulnerability, David betrays Diego’s friendship and hospitality by trying to provoke him with heterosexist comments. The dialogue that ensues—each accusing the other of “monerías” and “payasearías”—demonstrates the performative and fictive quality of their self-representations. In addition to this confrontation, there are a series of deceptions and betrayals that carry a great risk and destabilize the binary between friend and enemy. As he later confesses, Diego befriends David as part of a bet he makes with his friend German to lure and seduce him. David, we know, returns to Diego’s house on the pretext of friendship as part of his strategy with Miguel to investigate and denounce him to the state. These betrayals never come to full fruition. However, had David completed his mission to report him for presumably working with a foreign embassy, as Miguel had instructed him, we learn that Diego could have faced a fifteen-year prison sentence. And though Diego had already jeopardized himself with his letter protesting the censorship of German’s art exhibition, it is possible to imagine that Miguel’s inquiries into Diego might have led to his forced exile. David’s decision not to report Diego places him in a precarious position, as Miguel threatens to have him kicked out of school for colluding with an enemy. The threat of being exposed and reported to the

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236 : Christina García authorities is reiterated in the various immunitary gestures referenced above. The film’s allusions to the CDR suggest that the presumed inviolable space of the home is transgressed, making hospitality politically dangerous. In her treatment of friendship, Leela Gandhi explains that for friendship to have an ethical capacity it requires taking a risk: “the risk to become foreign to ‘one’s own’ and above all to oneself.” Friendship with a foreigner (or in this case someone outside of one’s social milieu) is “unquestionably political . . . involving the potentially ‘agonizing’ risk of self exile.”88 For Gandhi, an ethico-political friendship is “extra-institutional”; it does not valorize the “relation of same with same” nor “privileges commitments to those who are either ‘proximate’ ‘given’ or in some inalienable way ‘our own.’”89 In effect, hospitality, risk, and exile are the defining features of an ethics for Gandhi, all of which, as we have seen, are operative in Fresa y chocolate. The risk of becoming foreign to one’s own is, perhaps, best exemplified in the distance that develops between the original pairs of friends: Diego and Germán, and David and Miguel. These other friends with whom Diego and David conspire, each represents the identitarian community that corresponds to them at the beginning of the film; these are friendships based on similitude. Through David and Diego’s friendship, one marked by instances of deception, betrayal, and discomfort, both characters transform and adopt different personas. David, as the narrator of Paz’s story, becomes a writer (as opposed to an engineer) and Diego is now referred to as “la Loca Roja” by his former friends. Notably, at the end of this story both Diego and David have produced texts. Although Diego always insisted on his revolutionary commitment, it is nonetheless surprising that it should be his text (the letter protesting censorship) that is the explicitly political one and David’s a work of fiction—given that Diego is the “conservative culture queen” (Quiroga) who values art for art’s sake and David the dialectical materialist. A Matter of Honoring the Gods: Gifts, Debts, and Failings David privileges his friendship with the “enemy” of the state over his commitments to Miguel and his obligation to report counter revolutionaries. In so doing, David fails to reciprocate on his debt as a benefactor of the revolution. He fails to complete the mission that Miguel adamantly claims is his duty above all else. These failures to reciprocate or dissymmetrical exchanges, as I have been pointing to throughout this article, are staged on another level of the film. Much like David’s plea to God in Paz’s story “¿me oyes, Dios?,” in the film we see Diego and Nancy regularly make appeals to the various Virgins and Orishas assembled in their home. Diego and Nancy will ask for favors, share intimate details, joke, reprimand, beg, and threaten these deities in such a way that reproduces the same conversations the friends have among themselves.

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Of course, these are monologues since the statues never respond. And in this regard the relationship with these statues is completely unilateral. Although Aristotle valorized mutual reciprocity he also recognized instances where this is not possible: “Where it is a matter of honouring the gods or one’s parents . . . no one could ever render them the honour they deserve. . . . [T]he son must repay the debt he owes, and since there is nothing he can do that is worthy of the benefits he has already received, he is always a debtor.”90 Accordingly, Diego and Nancy are always in a relationship of dissymmetry with these Virgins and Orishas, unable to ever adequately repay the debt they owe for their existence. It is significant that what surrounds the space of hospitality are these figures, to which we are forever indebted and vulnerable to their whims. Nancy and Diego are often seen making offerings of flowers, drinks, food, and candles to the statues. We also see these same offerings made between the three friends. I suggest that in the same way that Nancy and Diego are in a relationship of incommensurable debt to the gods, as Aristotle would have it, following Butler, the three friends, whose subjectivities are constituted in the encounter, are always in a relationship of incommensurable debt to each other. Recalling Derrida here too, friendship is an imperative to love without it being corresponded, a unilateral act without measure. The inability to ever adequately return the favor—be it David’s donation of his blood to save Nancy’s life after having attempted suicide, or Diego’s invaluable tutelage—is what makes community. It is in the debt, the owing of the gift where community happens.91 Untying the concept of community from its historical association to the semantics of proprium, it is from a sense of debt, the absence of a property, the negative, or to use his word, the concave, that Esposito aims to engage the notion of community. His text, Communitas, answers the call of philosophers, such as Jean Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot, who argue for the exigency of rethinking community not as a work, a unified, or coherent body of subjects but through its incongruousness, its exposure to loss, and the sharing of mortality. If community has been misconceived as a fullness, an interiority, the unity of individual subjects forming a larger subjectivity, he insists that what we have in common “is an otherness that withdraws us from our subjectivity.”92 Honing in on its etymological implications of gift, obligation, and duty, communitas, Esposito demonstrates, is calibrated on a “‘debt,’ ‘guilt,’ ‘failing,’” and thus expresses “a defective condition” and “insurmountable incompleteness.”93 In The Inoperative Community, Nancy explains that the failure of communist projects wasn’t that its ideals were betrayed, but that its main ideal was problematic: “human beings defined as producers . . . human beings defined at all.”94 He presents the humanist archetype of the indivisible self as a totalitarian form since its articulation can only be achieved through a work of death. That is, the desire for immanence, an interiority without relation—the closure of the absolute—or communion of individuals within a mystical body, or head

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238 : Christina García of state—calls for “the extermination of the other,” as it seeks to eliminate all that is extraneous to its circumscribed identity.95 Through his reading of Heidegger’s “being-with,” Esposito arrives at the conclusion that community is, it is existence, ontological, that is to say, community is not something that was lost, to be recovered, or a teleological end, but the awareness that I am insufficient, that “I owe you.”96 Conclusion If Fresa y chocolate aims to incorporate the figure of the homosexual through a national allegory, there are aspects of this film that remain in excess to any totalizing narrative. The film may do the work of sexual liberation, but the question of religious faith—evoked in the film through the ubiquitous statuettes and offerings—remains outside the telos of a Marxist-Leninist project. These statuettes and offerings, moreover, are reminders of debts that may never be adequately repaid, reminders of insufficiencies and excesses that make a “society of equals,” or the symmetry of mutual reciprocity and unity under shared identity, untenable. Significantly, the character of Nancy, who is not in Paz’s short story, referred to affectionately by Diego as “puta de mierda,” is not easily subsumed within the Revolution’s dialectic. Nancy provides a counter figure to David’s first girlfriend who feigns purity and prudishness when they are about to have sex, and hypocritically marries someone for financial stability. In contradistinction, Nancy is sincere in her courting and financially selfsufficient. In this respect, her character works within the narrative of progress, inverting gender stereotypes. However, Nancy generates income through the black market. And when Diego asks her to sexually initiate David, she responds “ya no hago eso,” allowing us to suspect she has also sustained herself as a sex worker. While some have dismissed the relationship that develops between Nancy and David as a heteronormative ending,97 I offer that there are provocative aspects about their pairing. She is not only a criminal according to the state; she is religious and notably older than David. Most significant, she has attempted to take her own life on various occasions. Nancy’s character makes visible those lives unincorporated by the revolution. Her illegal, monetary self-sufficiency puts her outside the economy of debt and obligation between citizen and the revolutionary state and, at the same time, she expresses “a defective condition” and “incompleteness” (to use Esposito’s words), a need and desire for the Other. David’s donation of blood to Nancy is indicative of an incommensurable gift of friendship. From a biological viewpoint, the transfusion also evokes contamination by a foreign body and, as such, the process of inoculation to which I have alluded throughout this essay. The notion of being contaminated is further reiterated when Nancy claims, “Dentro de mí hay una cosa limpia

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que nadie ha podido ensuciar.” Although this statement might be interpreted as sustaining a part of the self that is immune, what I want to underscore about the exchange between Nancy and David, is an interdependence and vulnerability that counters the hubris of the Revolution’s impervious and heroically righteous New Man.98 If the figure of the new man represents a future community, a telos realized through the logic of sacrifice,99 then the relationships in Fresa y chocolate bring to the fore a consubstantiality and an “irreducible and inoperative difference.”100 Given that queer theorists have strongly critiqued Fresa y chocolate as an attempt to neutralize the oppositional charge of the homosexual figure,101 through the logic of inoculation, Fresa y chocolate affirms what it aimed to deactivate. In its desire to incorporate the figure of the homosexual, to immunize itself against the poison of the revolution’s error, it necessarily corrupts the integrity of the body politic. Moreover, we might also consider the film’s failure to adequately address the legacy of the UMAPs, never explicitly apologizing, as indicative of the “amnesia or aphasia” that Deleuze and Guattari observe in the shame that arises not from feeling “responsible for the victims but responsible before them.”102 Shifting our attention from how Diego may or may not be a consumable representation of gay men, to the dynamics of a postclassical friendship, has allowed us to find another politics at work in the film that does not reiterate selfsame models of community. Considering again Derrida’s statement, “What is proper or essential to friendship, can be thought and lived without the least reference to the be-loved, or more generally to the lovable,” Diego and David may be deeply flawed (or for that matter the film itself), but that does not negate the potential to tease from their relationship an ethics of friendship. In fact, it enhances this potential given that we are privileging what is inadequate and insufficient. In its representation of friendship and the risks it necessarily entails, Gutiérrez Alea’s film points to experiences of insecurity and un-belonging as that which create the possibility for political transformation.

NOTES 1. Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Susan Sontag discuss the roots of homophobia in Cuba in Nestor Almendros and Orlando Jiménez-Leal’s documentary, Conducta impropia (France: Egales Editorial, 1984, 2008). See also Frances Negrón-Muntaner, “‘Mariconerías’ de estado: Mariela Castro, los homosexuales, y la política cubana,” Nueva sociedad 218 (2008): 168. 2. Sontag, Conducta impropia; and Negrón-Muntaner, “‘Mariconerías,’” 168. 3. In his book Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America (New York: New York University Press, 2000), José Quiroga writes that the body of the homosexual “stands for an excess of signification” in post–Cold War Cuba, 124. 4. Ernesto “Che” Guevara, “El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba,” cited in Arnaldo CruzMalavé, “Lecciones de cubanía: Identidad nacional y errancia sexual en Senel Paz, Marti y Lezama Lima,” Cuban Studies 29 (1999): 133.

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240 : Christina García 5. Almendros and Jiménez-Leal, Conducta impropia. In his text “The Accursed Share, Volume I,” trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991), Georges Bataille uses the term unproductive expenditure to describe the consumption, waste, or expenditure of energy that does not operate within a productive or useful economy. He arrives at this concept in part by looking at the gift economies studied by Marcel Mauss. 6. Ted Henken, Cuba: A Global Studies Handbook (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2008), 246. 7. Henken, Cuba, 248. See also Abel Sierra Madero’s interview of Dr. Lillian Guerra, a psychologist who participated as a researcher and in the presumed rehabilitation of “anti-social” citizens in the UMAP camps. “Lo de las UMAP fue un trabajo ‘top secret’: Entrevista a la Dra. María Elena Sol Arrondo,” Cuban Studies 44 (2016). 8. Madero, “Lo de las UMAP,” 358, 359. 9. Enrico Mario Santí, “Fresa y Chocolate: The Rhetoric of Cuban Reconciliation,” Institute for Cuban & Cuban-American Studies Occasional Papers (University of Miami Scholarly Repository, 2001), 16–17; Laurence Chua, “I Scream You Scream: Lawrence Chua Talks with Tomás Gutiérrez Alea,” Artform 33, no. 4 (1994): 62. 10. Chua, “I Scream You Scream,” 63. Gemma Casadevall, “Con o sin el embargo, la película se estrenará en Estados Unidos,” El mundo (España), February 22, 1994. 11. Chua, “I Scream You Scream,” 63. 12. Chua, “I Scream You Scream.” 13. See Quiroga and Cruz Malavé, which I discuss in more detail further ahead. 14. See Henken and especially Conducta impropia. 15. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 221. 16. Cicerón, Lelio: Sobre la amistad; Sobre la vejez, sobre la amistad (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2009), 120. 17. Jacque Derrida, Politics of Friendship (London: Verso, 2005), 13. 18. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 9. 19. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, chap. 10, passim. 20. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlison and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 87. 21. Tom Roach, Friendship as a Way of Life: Foucault, AIDS, and the Politics of Shared Estrangement (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2012), 60. 22. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy, 107. 23. Roach, Friendship as a Way of Life, 60. 24. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy, 71. 25. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy, 108. 26. Barbara Cassin, Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood, eds., Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 1196. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy, 4. 27. Guillermina De Ferrari’s study of friendship in the post-soviet Cuban novel illustrates another sense in which classical formulations of friendship have served totalitarian ends. She observes that the rhetoric of the Cuban state has “coopted values commonly associated with male friendships” and in so doing retained the loyalty of its citizens even after failing to comply with its social contract. In the novels she looks at, artistic integrity, revolutionary compliance, and friendship are simultaneously unsustainable. The three cannot coexist not only because of “the high demands placed on individuals by the socialist government, but also the fact that all three social formations feed off a common fund of virtues: loyalty, honor and courage . . . the very definitions of manliness.” “Embargoed Masculinities: Loyalty, Friendship and Role of the Intellectual in the Post-Soviet Cuban Novel,” Latin American Literary Review 35, no. 69 (January–June 2007): 84. 28. Senel Paz, “El Bosque, el lobo y el hombre Nuevo” (Mexico City: Biblioteca Era, 1991,

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2007), 19. While the focus of this article is on the film adaptation, I will also cite relevant passages from Paz’s text. Any dialogue that is not footnoted is taken from the film. 29. Reynaldo González’s article “La cultura cubana con sabor a fresa y chocolate: Un artículo salido del closet,” La Gaceta de Cuba (March–April 2007), is one example of the more celebratory readings of the film. 30. While there were not explicit policies against a particular aesthetic, Eloy E. Marino explains in his essay “Los usos del almuerzo lezamiano en El lobo, el bosque y el hombre nuevo de Senel Paz,” “la visión barroca ante la vida, de exceso, [fue] reputada tradicionalmente de femenina, contra una austeridad, de tirante contención masculina, que la Revolución auspicia en sus abanderados.” Chasqui (2004): 43. More significant, the UMAPs and the laws designed to persecute gays reflect a desire for standardization and utilitarianism, which is antithetical to a Baroque aesthetic. 31. Santí, “Fresa y chocolate,” passim. 32. Emilio Bejel, Gay Cuban Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 160. 33. Bejel, Gay Cuban Nation, 165. 34. Bejel, Gay Cuban Nation, 160, 165–169. 35. José Quiroga, Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 132. 36. Quiroga, Tropics of Desire, 133. 37. José Quiroga, “Cuba: la desaparición de la homosexualidad,” in Una ventana a Cuba y los estudios cubanos, ed. Amalia Cabezas, Ivette N. Hernández-Torres, Sara Johnson, and Rodrigo Lazo (San Juan, PR: Ediciones Callejón, 2010), 193. 38. In regard to the political and cultural status of gays in the 1990s, Quiroga (“Cuba: la desaparición de la homosexualidad,” 195) writes: “En este nuevo capítulo en la historia de la homosexualidad con la revolución cubana, el hombre homosexual va adquirir un significado diametralmente opuesto al de la “escoria” con el que había sido identificado. Primero, va a representar la alegoría de una restitución, para finalmente convertirse en una identidad avalada por el estado, despojado de su carga opositora y rebelde.” 39. Quiroga, Tropics of Desire, 131, 132. 40. Cruz-Malavé, “Lecciones en cubanía,” 143, 144. 41. Cruz-Malavé, “Lecciones en cubanía,” 133. 42. Cruz-Malavé, “Lecciones en cubanía,” 144. 43. Roberto Esposito, Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life (Malden, MA: Polity, 2014), 8. 44. Esposito, Immunitas, 8. 45. Cruz-Malavé, “Lecciones en cubanía,” 145. 46. Santí, “Fresa y chocolate,” passim. 47. Esposito, Immunitas, 8. 48. Esposito, Immunitas, 6. 49. Henken, Cuba, 210. 50. Various accounts in Conducta impropia recount the extensive policing, paranoia, and distrust that these committees generated within the Cuban community. 51. Emilio Bejel, “Fresa y chocolate o la salida de la guarida: Hacía una teoría del sujeto homosexual en Cuba,” Casa de las Américas 35, no. 196 (1994): passim. 52. See Michel Foucault’s “The Meaning and Evolution of the Word Parrhesia,” in Discourse and Truth: The Problematization of Parrhesia, ed. Joseph Pearson, Digital Archive: Foucault.info, 1999. Drawing from Foucault, my use of this word is meant to evoke the event of truth telling, in plain speech, and the political dangers it entails. 53. Esposito, Immunitas, 9. 54. Esposito, Immunitas, 17, 18.

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242 : Christina García 55. “Lespri Endepandan: Discovering Haitian Sculpture,” exhibition catalog, Frost Art Museum, Miami, 2004. 56. Lois Parkinson Zamora uses these same adjectives to describe the Baroque in her book The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 57. Roach, Friendship as a Way of Life, 5. 58. In Of Hospitality Derrida demonstrates how the lines between host and guest, hostage and hostile intruder are easily crossed. In abstract terms, the law of absolute hospitality places the host in a relationship of unconditional obligation to the guest, paradoxically rendering the host hostage and collapsing the roles between host and guest. Such a conceptualization puts Diego at a greater disadvantage and produces a dissymmetry in the relationship, which will be significant for our reading further ahead (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 25. 59. Derrida, Of Hospitality, 51. 60. Derrida, Of Hospitality. 61. Cicero, Lelio, 123. 62. Paz, “El Bosque,” 11. 63. Paz, “El Bosque,” 12. 64. Paz, “El Bosque,” 13. 65. Paz, “El Bosque,” 18. 66. Plutarch, Obras morales y de costumbres: (Moralia) / Plutarco. 1, 1 (Madrid: Gredos, 2007), 73. 67. Plutarch, Obras morales, 125. 68. Plutarch, Obras morales, 73. 69. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2006), 44. 70. Butler, Precarious Life, 44. 71. Butler, Precarious Life. 72. This phrasing is taken from Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-siécle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 30. 73. Paz, “El Bosque,” 12. 74. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 9. 75. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 18. 76. Cassin, Dictionary of Untranslatables, 1196. 77. Cassin, Dictionary of Untranslatables. 78. Roach, Friendship as a Way of Life, 45, 47. See also Luis Aviles, “En los límites de la amistad: Silencio, risa, honestidad,” 80grados.net, May 8, 2015, for an analysis of the ethics of discomfort, truth telling, and the capacity of transformation in friendship. 79. Roach, Friendship as a Way of Life, 9. 80. Roach, Friendship as a Way of Life, 14, 15. 81. Roach, Friendship as a Way of Life, 5. 82. Roach, Friendship as a Way of Life, 7, 8. 83. Roach, Friendship as a Way of Life, 94, 95. 84. Roach, Friendship as a Way of Life. 85. Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 25. 86. Foucault, Technologies of the Self, 25. 87. Roach, Friendship as a Way of Life, chap. 2, passim. 88. Gandhi, Affective Communities, 30.

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89. Gandhi, Affective Communities, 17, 25. 90. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 225. 91. Roberto Esposito, Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), introduction, passim. 92. Esposito, Communitas, 10. 93. Esposito, Communitas, 95. 94. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. and trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 76:21. 95. Nancy, Inoperative Community, passim. 96. Esposito, Communitas, 95. 97. See Bejel, Gay Cuban Nation. 98. Marta Hernández Salván, Mínima Cuba: Heretical Poetics and Power in Post-Soviet Cuba (Albany: SUNY Press, 2015), 48, 49. See also Mirta Suquet Martínez’s dissertation chapter, “De testimonios y de reos: Biopolítica y revolución, el seropositivo cubano” (2015), where she explains how the Cuban Revolution’s strong public health policy (and its corresponding moral codes) manifested itself in the medicalization of the new man as an immune man, 303. http://www .tdx.cat/handle/10803/383016. 99. Hernández Salván, Mínima Cuba. 100. Ignaas Devisch, Jean-Luc Nancy and the Question of Community (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012), 203. 101. See Quiroga, “Cuba,” and Cruz-Malavé, “Lecciones de cubanía.” 102. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy, 108.

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CARMEN DIANA DEERE

The Special Relationship and the Challenge of Export Diversification: Cuban Exports of Fruits and Vegetables to the United States, 1900 to 1962 A B S T R AC T For almost sixty years, Cuban exports to the United States enjoyed an advantage not available to any other country: at least a 20 percent reduction in import duties on items subject to a US tariff. This article explores the extent to which Cuba was able to take advantage of this special relationship to diversify its agricultural exports to the United States. I argue that US trade preferences toward Cuba played different roles in different periods. The 1903 Reciprocity Convention provided the incentive for the development and growth of a number of nontraditional fruit and vegetable exports to the US market. The combination of growing US protectionism and expanding US production of similar crops cut short this trajectory, as did external shocks. The 1934 Reciprocal Trade Agreement that granted these exports even more favorable duty concessions during the US winter season had a minimally positive effect. In the post–World War II period, the lack of supportive domestic policies, the rise of nontariff barriers to trade, and growing competition from Mexico also constrained the growth of these nontraditional exports. Thus, Cuban exports of fresh and processed fruits and vegetables to the United States rarely reached four percent of total exports, reflecting the dominant role of sugar.

RESUMEN Por casi sesenta años, las exportaciones cubanas a los Estados Unidos tenían una ventaja en relación a otros países: una reducción de por lo menos 20 por ciento en los aranceles aduaneros para la mayoría de sus productos. Este artículo examina hasta qué punto Cuba pudo aprovechar esta relación especial con los Estados Unidos para diversificar sus exportaciones agropecuarias. Se argumenta que estas preferencias aduaneras jugaron un rol diferente dependiendo del periodo. Sin duda, la Convención de Reciprocidad de 1903 fue un incentivo para el desarrollo de exportaciones de frutas y vegetales no-tradicionales hacia el mercado estadounidense. Pero el crecimiento de estas exportaciones fue truncado por el proteccionismo que caracterizó la política arancelaria estadounidense en la década de los 20, la expansión de su producción interna de estos mismos productos, más el golpe de la Gran Depresión. El Tratado de Reciprocidad de 1934, el cual concedió ventajas aún más favorables a estos productos en ciertos meses

247

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248 : Carmen Diana Deere del año, tuvo un efecto positivo mínimo. En el periodo después de la Segunda Guerra Mundial otra serie de factores incidieron en el poco crecimiento de estas exportaciones no-tradicionales: la falta de políticas internas cubanas que favorezcan su desarrollo, la proliferación de barreras no-arancelarias al intercambio, y la competencia de México. Por lo tanto, las exportaciones cubanas de frutas y vegetales frescas y procesadas casi nunca sobrepasaron el cuatro por ciento del total de sus exportaciones a los Estados Unidos, reflejando el rol predominante de sus exportaciones de azúcar.

The architects of Cuba’s special relationship to the United States envisioned that, through trade preferences and foreign investment, Cuba might become the “garden spot” of its northern neighbor.1 For example, the special commissioner for the United States to Cuba and Puerto Rico, Robert P. Porter, considered the fruit industry in Cuba in 1899 to be in its infancy, and that its future development would “be of the vastest proportions.” Somewhat optimistically, he predicted, “Cuba will control the future fruit supply of this country,” and more accurately, that American capital would participate in this process.2 Shortly after he stepped down as military governor of Cuba in 1902, Leonard Wood and colleagues, in Opportunities in the Colonies and Cuba, reflected that it would be detrimental for Cuba to specialize in only one export crop, for all the vulnerabilities that such created. “Cuba should and could export, not sugar alone, but coffee, tea, livestock, and, because of existing favorable conditions, especially fruit and what is commonly known in the North as ‘garden truck’ [fresh vegetables].”3 Nonetheless, at the time of the Cuban Revolution of 1959, sugar made up around three-quarters of the value of Cuban exports to the United States, not that much different from the early decades of the century. Given that for almost sixty years Cuban exports to the United States enjoyed an advantage not available to any other sovereign country—at least a 20 percent discount on import duties on products subject to a US tariff—I explore in this article why Cuba was not able to achieve greater diversification in its exports to the US market. I argue that, on the one hand, the dominant role of sugar in Cuba’s exports conceals the diversification that did take place in the country’s agricultural exports. On the other, while trade preferences gave Cuba a privileged position against foreign competitors, in periods of high US protectionism Cuba was at a disadvantage compared to US producers of similar crops. Oscillating US trade policy combined with expanding US production of fruits and vegetables, broader economic conditions (two world wars and the Great Depression), and Cuban domestic policies, among other factors, largely explain why Cuba was not able to diversify its exports to a greater extent. The 1903 Reciprocity Convention, which granted Cuba a 20 percent reduction in US import duties, provided the incentive for the development of a

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number of nontraditional fruit and vegetable exports geared to the US market. In less than two decades, Cuba became practically the sole foreign supplier of pineapples and grapefruit. Moreover, the 1934 Reciprocal Trade Agreement granted Cuba even more favorable duty concessions during the US winter season, and it became the dominant foreign supplier of vegetables such as cucumbers, okra, and eggplant, and an important source of fresh tomatoes. Further, in the post–World War II period, in most years the value of Cuban exports of processed fruit to the United States exceeded that of fresh fruit. Yet, over these sixty years, Cuban exports of fresh and processed fruits and vegetables to the United States rarely reached 4 percent of total Cuban exports, reflecting the dominant role of sugar. Historians of Cuba have amply debated the conditions that favored Cuba’s specialization in sugar export production as well as its consequences for the Cuban economy and society.4 Given its ensured US market, in most periods sugar production was simply more profitable than any other activity, leading to the concentration of land, capital, and labor in this crop.5 While at various moments, analysts and policy makers argued in favor of the need to diversify the country’s agricultural sector by placing greater attention on domestic food production as well as more diversified export products and markets, the comparative advantage that Cuba held in the production of cane sugar was never really questioned.6 Nevertheless, with the exception of bananas, there have been few detailed studies of the relationship between the concentration on sugar and the performance of other agricultural exports in this period,7 or of the impact of the US-Cuba trade treaties on the development of Cuba’s nontraditional exports. In this article, I focus on this latter question and show how US trade preferences toward Cuba played different roles in different periods. The 1903 Convention had a positive effect in stimulating production of nontraditional agricultural exports from Cuba up to 1925. Export diversification was compatible with the increasing share of sugar in Cuban export earnings in this period, since both sugar and nontraditional exports grew rapidly. This changed with rising US protectionism in the 1920s that coincided with expanding US production of fresh fruits and vegetables. The Great Depression then exacerbated the unfavorable market conditions for Cuba’s nontraditional exports. In contrast to the Reciprocity Convention, the 1934 Reciprocal Trade Agreement failed to provide a sufficient stimulus to the growth of these Cuban exports, which subsequently stagnated. The continuing growth of US production of fresh fruits and vegetables was a major barrier, combined with rising nontariff barriers to trade, the lack of supportive export diversification policies, and competition from Mexico. Nonetheless, the variety of Cuban fruits and vegetables exported continued to increase, as did the forward linkages to the processing industry. In the next section, I describe in more detail the special trading relationship between the United States and Cuba that provided the island with privileged

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250 : Carmen Diana Deere access to the US market. I then draw on a unique, disaggregated data set of US imports of fresh fruits and vegetables to analyze the trends in Cuba’s nontraditional exports in three periods: 1900 to post–World War I (a period of falling US tariff rates), the early 1920s to World War II (a period of rising US protectionism as well as two major external shocks), and post–World War II to the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and its immediate aftermath, the imposition of the US trade embargo on Cuba. Subsequently, I consider the long-run trend of these fresh fruit and vegetable exports and examine the growth of Cuba’s fruit processing industry. In the concluding section, I sum up why Cuba was not able to achieve greater diversification of its agricultural exports, and draw out the potential lessons for future Cuba-US trade. The Special Relationship: The Reciprocity Agreements and US Trade Policy The 1903 Reciprocity Convention8 formalized Cuba’s special trading relationship with the United States, a quid pro quo for Cuba’s agreement to include the infamous Platt Amendment in its 1902 Constitution. The Platt Amendment (an amendment to a 1901 US army appropriations bill), spelled out eight conditions deemed necessary for US military forces to be withdrawn from the island after the Cuban-Spanish-American War and for sovereignty to be transferred to the Cuban people, among them, the right of the United States to intervene when it deemed necessary. Notwithstanding considerable opposition, the Cuban Constitutional Convention acquiesced when the McKinley administration promised a trade treaty guaranteeing Cuba’s sugar exports access to the US market.9 The Reciprocity Convention contained two provisions of interest to Cuban leaders: it maintained duty-free access to the US market for those products which at the time were being imported free of duty, and it granted Cuba a special 20 percent reduction on the duty rates provided for in the 1897 US Tariff Act or any subsequent tariff law.10 In return, Cuba also agreed to maintain dutyfree access for US exports with this status, and reduced duties from 25 percent to 40 percent on a range of products imported from the United States.11 The main Cuban agricultural exports that entered the United States duty free at this time were cacao, coffee, bananas and plantains, and coconuts.12 For a brief period in the early 1890s, sugar and molasses had been on the free list, but the 1894 Wilson-Gorman Tariff Act rescinded this status.13 Thus, the main immediate benefit to Cuba from the 1903 Reciprocity Convention was the 20 percent reduction in the duties on sugar and tobacco that allowed Cuba’s main two exports to gain market share. Cuba’s share of US sugar imports increased from 35 percent in 1900–1903, to 91 percent a decade later, and to

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98 percent by 1922–1925.14 The main losers were the European sugar beet industry and Dutch East Indies and British West Indies cane sugar exporters.15 The 1913 Underwood-Simmons Tariff Act sharply lowered US tariffs across the board, and provided an additional incentive for Cuban production and export of nontraditional crops. This potential stimulus, however, was relatively short-lived. The Fordney-McCumber Tariff Act of 1922 raised the average duty on all US imports to 14 percent from the 9.1 percent that had previously prevailed. Then, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 increased duties to the levels prevailing at the beginning of the twentieth century, with the average duty reaching 19.6 percent in 1932.16 Smoot-Hawley also imposed duties on a few of Cuba’s export products that had previously been on the free list, such as avocados and mangoes.17 As partial cause and consequence of the Great Depression, trade between the United States and Cuba, as well as global trade, subsequently contracted severely. President Roosevelt’s secretary of state, Cordell Hull, was among those in his administration committed to lowering trade barriers and battling the “economic nationalists” responsible for Smoot-Hawley.18 He led the effort to achieve a downward revision in US tariffs through bilateral, reciprocal trade agreements that included unconditional most-favored-nation clauses. The US Congress finally authorized the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act in June 1934 (an amendment to Smoot-Hawley) as an emergency measure to increase US exports. Between 1934 and 1940, Hull’s State Department negotiated some sixteen reciprocal agreements worldwide, eleven of these with Latin American countries. Although not the initial intent, these agreements are considered the economic arm of Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy in the hemisphere—a policy initiative that provided many Latin American countries with a potential way out of the Great Depression through increased trade. The first reciprocal agreement concluded was with Cuba.19 The 1934 Cuban agreement differed from the others in that it did not include most-favorednation treatment and maintained Cuba’s special trading relationship with the United States. It focused on bilateral concessions aimed at containing Cuba’s economic and political instability. The Great Depression and the associated fall in the price and volume of sugar exports hit Cuba particularly hard. Whereas in 1924 Cuba had been the United States’ sixth-largest export market, by 1933 it ranked sixteenth. Moreover, only those in Canada surpassed US investments in Cuba.20 As Steward argues, “The United States was well aware that Cuba needed stability and prosperity to safeguard US investments in Cuba.”21 Negotiations over the trade agreement took place as the US Congress was once again revising US sugar policy. The May 1934 Jones-Costigan Act ensured Cuba a fixed quota of 1.9 million short tons of sugar in the US market and reduced the duty for Cuban sugar from that stipulated in Smoot-Hawley;

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252 : Carmen Diana Deere the final US-Cuba Reciprocal Trade Agreement of September 1934 included a further concession on sugar.22 The 1934 treaty gave many Cuban fruit and vegetable exports even greater preferential treatment during the US winter season than the 20 percent duty preference that they commanded under the 1903 Reciprocity Convention.23 For example, under Smoot-Hawley, the duty on tomatoes had increased from 0.5 cent to 3 cents per pound; Cuba, with its 20 percent preferential, faced a duty of 2.4 cents per pound. Under the 1934 treaty, Cuba could now export tomatoes in the December to February period favored by an additional 20 percent reduction (a duty of only 1.8 cents per pound); in other months, tomatoes from Cuba would continue to pay the 2.4 cents per pound rate.24 Grapefruit and a few vegetables received reductions of between 40 percent and 50 percent during the US winter season. A few products received an additional duty concession year-round, such as the 40 percent reduction on Cuban pineapples and the 50 percent reduction on other fruit pastes and pulps. Cuban concessions to the United States included a reduction in the duty on food items such as meat, lard, vegetable oils, wheat flour, rice, and potatoes. According to Steward, popular opinion in Cuba was that it gave up too much, since the agreement stood to ruin its lard and oil industries, and it was unsuccessful in regaining a quota on Cuban tobacco in the US market, an objective of Cuban negotiators. He concludes that while this agreement, combined with the JonesCostigan Sugar Act, helped stop the decline in Cuban exports of sugar to the United States, “monoculture, not viability, was the chief result of the treaty.”25 The US Sugar Act of 1937 for the first time created a fixed quota system based on total US consumption requirements, and allotted Cuba 28.6 percent of the US market.26 The Cuban government then lobbied for a further reduction on the sugar duty and a quota for tobacco, a demand not met earlier. These negotiations resulted in two further amendments to the 1934 Reciprocal Trade Agreement, in 1939 and 1941, which further lowered the duty on Cuban raw sugar and provided some concessions on tobacco, and gave further duty reductions to some US exports to Cuba. In the post–World War II period, one of the main US objectives was to achieve a general liberalization of global trade through the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), negotiated by twenty-three countries in 1947. Cuba was understandably concerned that it would lose its special preferences in the US market. A condition of its joining GATT was an exclusive 1947 agreement with the United States, supplementing GATT, which maintained most of these preferences and reduced duties on raw sugar and a number of other items even further.27 The US Sugar Act of 1948 also changed the method of calculating the US sugar quota allocation. US domestic producers and territories received fixed annual quotas, with the remaining amount of projected US consumption al-

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located according to percentage quotas. Cuba received 98.6 percent of this remainder, subject to a guaranteed floor of 28.6 percent of total US consumption requirements.28 Renewed in 1952 and 1956, this system continued to favor Cuba above other global producers until July 1960 when President Eisenhower eliminated Cuba’s sugar quota for the remainder of that year. Then, the United States declared an embargo of Cuba (except for food and medicine) in October 1960, ended diplomatic relations with the island in January 1961, and put into effect a complete trade embargo in February 1962. The United States formally rescinded the 1903 Reciprocity Convention in August 1963.29 US Imports of Fresh Fruits and Vegetables from Cuba The periodization followed in this section—from the passage of the Reciprocity Convention to the early 1920s, the mid-1920s to World War II, and post–World War II to 1962—allows for consideration of the potential impact of changes in overall US trade policy as well as of external shocks. I compare the performance of “nontraditional” agricultural exports favored under the two trade agreements to Cuba’s “traditional” non–sugar and tobacco (NST) agricultural exports of coffee, cacao, coconuts, and avocados, as well as bananas and plantains. These traditional NST agricultural exports entered the US market duty free at the time the Reciprocity Convention was negotiated and, hence, did not require the 20 percent preferential duty rate. The Impact of the 1903 Reciprocity Convention At the beginning of the twentieth century, 75 percent of total Cuban exports were to the US market and 88 percent of US imports from Cuba consisted of sugar and tobacco.30 Post–World War I (1919–1921), Cuban exports were even more concentrated on the US market, and these two products constituted 96 percent of US imports from the island. Sugar alone made up 90 percent, due to the relative decline of tobacco and the spectacular growth in sugar exports. These trends support the charge that one of the main effects of the Reciprocity Convention was to condemn the island to a monoculture economy.31 Nonetheless, these figures belie the degree of diversification that took place within Cuba’s agricultural sector, particularly the growth of nontraditional exports of fruits and vegetables. The initiation of citrus and winter vegetables and the expansion of pineapple production for the US market was largely the initiative of US colonists in Cuba.32 Facilitated by US land companies that rushed to buy land in Cuba during the US occupation, the political stability promised by the Platt Amendment, and the economic incentives provided by the Reciprocity Treaty, by the end of the 1910s there were as many as eighty American colonies in Cuba.33 The densest concentration of colonies was on the Isle of Pines, whose politi-

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254 : Carmen Diana Deere cal status was unclear under the Treaty of Paris that concluded the SpanishAmerican War. The US land companies that developed the Isle of Pines heavily promoted the idea that it was US territory and that eventually agricultural exports from the isle would not face any US tariffs at all.34 As noted by a contemporary, the history of the American colonies in Cuba is “bound inseparably to the establishment of the island’s citrus industry.”35 Citrus production for export was largely concentrated in the colonies on the Isle of Pines and in those located in the relatively undeveloped eastern end of Cuba (the provinces of Camagüey and Oriente) while truck gardening principally developed in the western provinces of Havana and Pinar del Rio, with ready rail access to the port of Havana. Before the US intervention, pineapple production for export to the United States had already developed near Havana City; with the growth of the colonies, its production also expanded westward.36 Table 1 provides a detailed breakdown of Cuba’s NST agricultural exports during the period of the US occupation (1900–1902), immediately after the implementation of the Reciprocity Convention (1903–1905) and in four-year annual averages until after World War I (1918–1921).37 During these decades, relatively low US import duties prevailed and a number of tropical agricultural products entered the US duty free. Of those entering duty free, only the value of Cuban exports of bananas and plantains was of substantial magnitude in 1903–1905 and made up a significant share of US imports; nonetheless, its market share fell from a high of 15 percent in 1903–1905, to 4 percent in the aftermath of World War I (table 2). While the value of Cuban exports of cacao and coconuts vacillated from 1903 to 1917, both fell precipitously post–World War I, as did their share of the US market. Cuban banana and cacao exports to the United States fell after World War I primarily due to the expansion of sugar cane production.38 During the “Dance of the Millions,” when sugar prices reached unprecedented highs, banana plantations were ploughed over and cacao trees were uprooted to make way for cane, and a similar fate may have affected coconut groves.39 Even coffee production, which tended to be located in the more mountainous regions, suffered from the fever to put more land into sugar production.40 While Cuban coffee exports to the United States show a slight recovery post–World War I, the value of coffee exports remained quite low and the country never regained market share from Brazil, Colombia, and the Central American coffee exporters.41 The performance of those fruits and vegetables subject to the 20 percent tariff reduction (shown as “dutied” in table 1) demonstrate the positive impact of the Reciprocity Convention. The value of “all other fruits,” principally pineapples and grapefruit, almost quadrupled by 1906–1909, and then doubled again by 1918–1921,42 so that Cuba was supplying 99 percent of pineapple and 95 percent of grapefruit imports to the United States. The value of Cuban exports of vegetables also grew notably from 1903 on, and by 1918–1921 Cuba

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TABLE 1. US Imports of Fresh Fruit, Vegetables and Tree Crops from Cuba by Duty Status, 1900 to early 1920s (average annual, in current US$) Product

1900–1902 1903–1905 1906–1909 1910–1913 1914–1917 1918–1921

Free of duty Coffee 4,994 6,159 Cacao 292,347 f 197,709 Coconut 153,127 f 233,491 Banana & plantain 386,316 f 1,299,584 13,664 f 19,060 Other fruita Subtotal, free 850,448 1,756,003 Dutied All other fruits 239,581 657,923 Of which: Pineapple n.a. n.a. Grapefruit n.a. n.a. Orange & lemon 1,391f 3,007 Otherb 238,190 f 654,916 All vegetables 51,632 99,057 Of which: Beansc 2,866f 6,048 Peas n.a. n.a. Oniond 25,437 27,252 5,444 Potato 6,915f Othere 16,414 60,313 Subtotal, dutied 291,213 756,980 Total 1,141,661 2,512,983

4,050 220,242 231,790 1,000,125 35,716 1,491,923

4,386 168,821 108,180 878,832 48,054 1,208,273

14,929 351,382 109,224 923,146 60,849 1,459,530

28,199 84,110 56,446 683,002 93,666 945,423

846,963

1,229,775

1,446,904

1,740,224

n.a. 1,143,954 1,078,588 1,213,071 n.a. n.a. n.a. 477,220 6,749 2,051 7,226 7,006 840,214 83,770 361,090 42,927 158,353 156,395 308,708 419,214 7,133 9,593 29,810 5,666 n.a. 2,797g 23,299 19,310 22,526 6,255 5,541 95 121,666 119,154 250,611 1,005,316 1,386,170 1,755,612 2,497,239 2,594,443 3,215,142

105,211 7,833 11,421 49 294,700 2,159,438 3,104,861

Other fruit refers largely to avocados, which were mostly imported duty free. b Includes pineapple through 1909 and grapefruit through 1917; otherwise, primarily avocados on which duty was charged. c Up through 1909, includes dried beans and peas; from 1912 on, dried beans and lentils. d Includes garlic from 1919 on. e Includes tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant, peppers, and other fresh vegetables, which are not reported separately until later years. f Two-year averages since data for 1900 not available for imports from Cuba. g For 1912 and 1913 only. Source: Compiled from US Department of Commerce, Foreign Commerce and Navigation of the United States, for General Imports, multiple volumes. a

was supplying 12 percent of US imports of “other vegetables,” principally, the winter truck-garden crops. Nonetheless, US imports from Mexico and Canada dominated this rubric.43 World War I (unlike World War II) caused relatively little disruption in the upward trajectory of nontraditional exports. Once the United States joined the war effort, it prohibited the use of shipping for the import of nonessential commodities. Sugar, of course, was deemed essential, as were pineapples and bananas, although these two fruits could only be shipped from Cuba on a spaceavailable basis. Grapefruit and vegetables were relegated to the ferry service between Havana and Key West, for rail shipment to northern markets.44 This ended up being a positive development, since it led to vastly improved transpor-

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256 : Carmen Diana Deere TABLE 2. Cuban Share of US Imports of Fresh Fruit, Vegetables, and Tree Crops, 1900 to early 1920s Product Free of duty Coffee Cacao Coconut Banana & plantain Other fruit Dutied All other fruits: Pineapple Grapefruit Orange & lemon Other All vegetables: Beans Peas Onion Potato Other

1900–1902 1903–1905 1906–1909 1910–1913 1914–1917 1918–1921 negl. 5.2% 22.9% 7.2% 3.9%

negl. 3.9% 23.6% 14.9% 4.3%

negl. 1.7% 17.4% 9.0% 9.1%

negl. 1.1% 6.4% 6.4% 7.2%

negl. 1.2% 5.3% 6.7% 8.3%

negl. negl. 1.7% 3.9% 4.8%

n.a. n.a. negl. 22.9%

n.a. n.a. negl. 29.3%

n.a. n.a. negl. 52.2%

96.8% n.a. negl. 16.5%

95.9% n.a. negl. 43.6%

99.3% 95.3% negl. 2.1%

negl. n.a. 6.8% negl. 5.4%

negl. n.a. 3.6% negl. 9.4%

negl. n.a. 3.3% negl. 11.9%

negl. negl. 2.2% negl. 6.3%

negl. negl. 2.2% negl. 13.3%

1.0% negl. negl. negl. 12.2%

Note: Negl. = neglible. a Other fruit refers largely to avocados, which were mostly imported duty free. b Includes pineapple through 1909 and grapefruit through 1917; otherwise, primarily avocados on which duty was charged. c Up through 1909, includes dried beans and peas; from 1912 on, dried beans and lentils. d Includes garlic from 1919 on. e Includes tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant, peppers, and other fresh vegetables, which are not reported separately until later years. f Two-year averages since data for 1900 not available for imports from Cuba. g For 1912 and 1913 only. Source: Compiled from US Department of Commerce, Foreign Commerce and Navigation of the United States, for General Imports, multiple volumes.

tation and marketing in subsequent years. Another positive development was that the war encouraged some import substitution efforts, given the shortage of packing crates for fruit and vegetable exports. A large wood-crate factory was established on the Isle of Pines, adding to at least one other that had been previously established to take advantage of the Isle’s abundant pine forests.45 The high price that sugar commanded during the war did lead to the temporary displacement of pineapple production for cane sugar, likely explaining the short-term fall in its average export value during 1914–1917 (table 1).46 Citrus groves in Oriente were also uprooted to make way for cane, with its displacement from the eastern end of the island being somewhat more permanent.47 Notwithstanding the transportation difficulties noted above, the discovery of the black fruit fly in Cuba in 1916 (which led to a temporary quarantine of citrus exports from the island),48 and a major hurricane in 1917, grapefruit exports to the United States continued their growth trajectory throughout this period. Overall, in 1903–1905 some 70 percent of Cuban agricultural exports

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other than sugar and tobacco consisted of duty-free traditional products, with those subject to duties comprising 30 percent. The incentive provided by the duty differential of 20 percent reversed this relationship post–World War I: traditional NST exports constituted only 30 percent and nontraditional exports, 70 percent, of the total average annual US$3.1 million in exports of these products to the US market. Hence, one of the beneficial impacts of the Reciprocity Convention was to broaden and diversify Cuba’s agricultural exports. The Impact of Protectionism, the Great Depression, and World War II The 1922 Fordney-McCumber Act ushered in a period of higher US tariffs that peaked with the Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930. Cuba, with its automatic 20 percent reduction off US tariffs, should have been somewhat buffered from the full effect of US protectionism as compared to other foreign suppliers, such as Mexico. However, the higher US tariffs of the 1920s disadvantaged Cuba with respect to US producers (continental as well as in the US territories) of similar commodities, such as its expanding citrus, pineapple, and vegetable industries. Duty-free items, which consisted of tropical products the United States did not produce in sufficient quantities, were of course the least likely to be affected by rising US protectionism. Taken together, imports of these traditional NST commodities from Cuba show steady growth over the 1920s, led by imports of bananas; other duty-free fruit, principally avocados, show more modest increases (see table 3). Nonetheless, Cuba did not manage to increase its market share of bananas significantly over this decade (table 4). The average value of cacao imports was erratic, while coconut and coffee imports from Cuba continued to decline. Turning to dutied commodities, in the 1920s, the most spectacular increase in Cuba’s nontraditional exports to the United States was with respect to winter vegetables, whose annual average value more than tripled from 1918 to 1921 to the late 1920s, particularly tomatoes (table 3). By the end of that decade, Cuba was supplying 18 percent of US tomato imports and 23 percent of other winter vegetables, principally cucumbers, eggplant, peppers, and okra (table 4). It was the leading foreign supplier of these other truck crops, surpassed by Mexico only with respect to tomato exports. While the value of imports of “all other fruits” increased from an average US$1.7 million in 1918–1921 to a peak of US$3.2 million in 1922–1925, thereafter it declined steadily until the late 1930s. This trend mirrors that of fresh pineapple imports from Cuba, the island’s most important nontraditional agricultural export, as well as that of grapefruit. Since Cuba remained the main source of foreign imports of these commodities (table 4), this suggests they were among the most adversely affected by the higher tariffs and the more intense domestic competition of the 1920s.

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258 : Carmen Diana Deere TABLE 3. US Imports of Fresh Fruit, Vegetables and Tree Crops from Cuba by duty status, 1920s to WWII (average annual, in current US$) Product Free of duty Coffee Cacao Coconuta Banana/plantain Other fruitb Avocado Subtotal, free Dutied All other fruits Of which: Pineapple Grapefruit Other citrus Otherc All vegetables Of which: Beans Peas Onions & garlic Potato Tomato Otherd Cucumber Eggplant Okra Pepper Subtotal, dutied Total

1922–1925 1926–1929 1930–1933 1934–1937 1938–1941 1942–1946e 20,698 60,802 21,345 1,130,364 94,611 — 1,327,820

9,356 143,626 10,313 1,522,304 100,206 — 1,785,805

238,308 62,203 7,626 1,426,643 151,081 — 1,885,861

206,997 36,498 5,112 2,883,155 2,942 171,042 3,305,746

469,205 9,743 6,038 1,865,288 24,437 198,789 2,573,500

695,027 5,032 31,303 1,982,163 6,522 121,721 2,841,768

3,174,677

2,239,120

1,738,049

947,525

1,129,352

1,805,558

2,632,379 506,000 14,966 21,332 753,849

1,998,449 220,835 1,229 18,607 1,574,638

1,490,017 179,226 588 68,218 943,041

833,557 108,761 5,207 — 1,234,593

1,009,014 116,846 3,492 — 1,366,829

1,748,318 54,371 2,869 — 1,214,334

12,845 25 18,795 10,109 102,719 609,356 — — — — 3,928,526 5,256,346

6,090 3 1,156 135,917 655,890 775,582 — — — — 3,813,758 5,599,563

36,748 540 279 63,064 524,433 317,977 — — — — 2,681,090 4,566,951

124,974 403 386 32,087 756,784 23,384 47,094 111,806 54,104 83,571 2,182,118 5,487,864

121,380 1,033 1,366 33,739 843,068 19,375 60,341 120,855 69,187 96,485 2,496,181 5,069,681

66,635 5,405 0 1,533 991,753 27,209 45,075 32,236 24,191 20,297 3,019,892 5,861,660

a There was US duty on coconuts from 1922 to 1933; however, under the terms of the Reciprocity Convention, most coconut imports from Cuba remained duty-free. b Other duty-free fruit are largely avocados, which are not listed separately until 1934. Watermelons are listed separately from 1927 on but have been kept in this category given its small volume. c Largely coconut and avocado imports on which duty was paid. d Beginning in 1934 many of these other vegetables are listed separately as shown. e This is a five-year average; 1946 was included because the official publication of US imports changed format in 1947. Source: Compiled from US Department of Commerce, Foreign Commerce and Navigation of the United States, for General Imports, multiple volumes.

US production of grapefruit grew by an average annual rate of 7.9 percent between 1919 and 1921 to 1926–1929, and at even faster rates thereafter.49 Production grew faster than internal demand, with a growing share of US domestic production exported. While Cuba was providing virtually all foreign imports of grapefruit in this period (table 4), the share of foreign imports in apparent US consumption fell from 1.9 percent in 1922–1925 to 1 percent in

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TABLE 4. Cuban Share of US Imports of Fresh Fruit, Vegetables, and Tree Crops, 1920s to World War II Product Free of duty Coffee Cacao Banana/plantain Coconut Other fruit Avocado Dutied All other fruits: Pineapple Grapefruit Other citrus Other All vegetables: Beans Peas Onions & garlic Potato Tomato Other Cucumber Eggplant Okra Peppers

1922–1925 1926–1929 1930–1933 1934–1937 1938–1941 1942–1946 negl. negl. 5.0% 7.7% 37.8% —

negl. negl. 4.4% 100% 97.8% —

negl. negl. 5.2% 94.2% 43.2% —

negl. negl. 10.2% negl. 11.9% 99.9%

negl. negl. 6.4% 1.5% 91.4% 99.9%

negl. negl. 8.0% 1.4% 24.9% 99.9%

96.9% 99.2% negl. negl.

98.5% 97.0% negl. negl.

99.5% 99.7% negl. 3.7%

89.8% 99.3% negl. —

90.7% 97.4% 2.6% —

62.4% 99.9% 1.1% —

negl. negl. negl. negl. 6.2% 21.8% — — — —

negl. negl. negl. 2.6% 17.6% 23.3% — — — —

1.9% negl. negl. 2.6% 16.4% 20.5% — — — —

11.8% negl. negl. 5.7% 39.8% negl. 98.3% 94.1% 99.5% 43.0%

29.9% negl. negl. 15.5% 42.8% negl. 98.0% 92.3% 99.9% 39.4%

15.5% 1.1% — negl. 9.2% negl. 79.8% 53.4% 99.9% 2.3%

Note: For note and source information, see table 3.

1926–1929. Already in these years, Cuban grapefruit exports where competitive only during the months of August and September, prior to the commencement of the harvests in Florida and California, the two dominant grapefruitproducing states. The situation of pineapples was somewhat different, in that foreign imports constituted a much larger share of apparent US consumption than did grapefruit, 82.1 percent in 1923–1925.50 But this share fell to 70.1 percent in the late 1920s, and even further in the 1930s, primarily due to expanding production in Puerto Rico which, as a US territory, did not pay duties. Moreover, apparent US consumption of fresh pineapple peaked in 1923–1925, primarily due to the rapid expansion of production and consumption of processed pineapple, sourced principally from Hawaii. The impact of higher tariffs, more intense US domestic competition, and periodic US quarantines on Cuban fruit after the black fruit fly appeared on the island are among the reasons that many of the American colonies, particularly those focused solely on citrus production, went into decline after World War I.

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260 : Carmen Diana Deere In addition, the Isle of Pines was particularly hard hit by devastating hurricanes in 1917 and 1926; moreover, ratification of the Hay-Quesada Treaty in 1925, which confirmed Cuban sovereignty over the isle, dealt a mortal blow to colonists’ aspirations of annexation to the United States.51 In 1930, the Times of Cuba provided a list of the main producers of fruits and vegetables that were exporting.52 It included only 104 citrus growers, 133 vegetable growers, and 17 who grew both. Some 80 percent of the remaining citrus growers had English surnames and were concentrated on increasingly larger holdings on the Isle of Pines.53 Spanish surnames were more prominent among the vegetable growers, constituting 44 percent (along with 9 percent with Japanese surnames). Pineapple production, generally based on mediumsize plantations, had also passed to mainly Cuban growers by this time. The contraction in US aggregate demand as a result of the Great Depression resulted in a fall in the value of Cuba’s total NST exports of fruits and vegetables to the United States from an annual average of US$5.6 million in the late 1920s to US$4.6 million in the early 1930s (table 3). Worth noting is that nontraditional exports suffered a greater decline than traditional NST exports, principally because US banana imports remained relatively stable while coffee and avocado imports from Cuba increased substantially. The successful import-substitution policies that the country adopted in 1927, which resulted in a surplus, largely explain the increase in coffee imports from Cuba.54 Cuba’s share of the US coffee market, nonetheless, remained negligible, while that of bananas increased marginally. In the early to mid-1930s, US imports of nontraditional fresh fruits and vegetables from Cuba continued to decline. This decline was particularly steep for fresh pineapple, reflecting both stagnant US demand as well as the fact that Cuba’s pineapple canning industry expanded and the country began to export larger quantities of processed fruit. The fall in grapefruit imports from Cuba, besides expanding US production, may reflect other internal factors already mentioned regarding the Isle of Pines, as well as declining production from the now aging (and hurricane-battered) citrus groves which had been established at the beginning of the century.55 Foreign competition was not a major factor, since Cuba continued to supply almost all of US imports of pineapples and grapefruit in the early 1930s (table 4). In contrast, winter vegetables lost some market share and overall, were likely the most affected by decreased US demand during the Depression, in addition to Cuba’s two main traditional exports, sugar and tobacco. Cuba’s total exports to the United States decreased from an average annual US$229.4 million in 1926–1929 to US$82.2 million in 1930–1933, largely due to the fall in the price and volume of sugar exports.56 The severity of the depression in Cuba was one of the reasons President Roosevelt urged speedy approval of the 1934 Reciprocal Trade Agreement. It entered into effect in September

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of that year, in time to encourage a spurt in winter vegetable production during late 1934.57 Recall that this treaty gave Cuba substantial duty reductions on vegetables and certain fruits during the US winter season. Overall, the 1934 treaty had a minimally positive effect on Cuban exports of fresh vegetables to the United States, whose total average annual value increased in the 1934–1937 period compared to 1930–1933, but remained below the 1926–1929 peak. Cuba’s share of US tomato imports, however, increased from 16 percent in the early 1930s to 40 percent in 1934–1937.58 While the island became almost the sole foreign supplier of cucumbers, eggplant, and okra, the total annual average value of these other fresh vegetables in 1934–1937 was similar to the pretreaty level (see “other vegetables”), perhaps reflecting continued stagnant US demand for fresh produce as the Depression ran its course.59 Although both pineapple and grapefruit imports from Cuba received extra preferential treatment under the 1934 treaty, this did not stop a decline in the average value of imports of both products in the 1934–1937 period, suggesting trade preferences could not overcome negative market forces. In addition, while the 1934 treaty favored further diversification of Cuba’s tropical fruit exports, US phytosanitary regulations prohibited the importation of fresh mangoes, guavas, mameys, and zapotes because of a possible fruit fly infestation.60 While the average value of US imports of dutied fruits and vegetables from Cuba recovered somewhat in the late 1930s, these imports did not regain their previous peak levels (for dutied fruit, the peak period was 1922–1925 and for vegetables, 1926–1929) prior to the outbreak of World War II. Bananas contributed the most to Cuba’s recovery in the mid-1930s (table 3). The dismal situation of sugar in the world market spurred a reconversion of sugar cane lands to bananas, partly in response to the lower costs brought about by the Depression.61 Its increased market share in 1934–1937 also reflects the problems experienced by Cuba’s competitors in the US banana market—Central America, Colombia, and Mexico—who all suffered the impact of Panama disease or adverse climatic conditions in these years. Nonetheless, once sugar recovered, Cuba’s expansion of banana exports was not sustainable; moreover, from 1941 on, the island’s banana plantations began to experience the disastrous impact of sigatoka disease. Even before the United States joined World War II, it instituted import controls in late 1941 to ensure that strategic commodities received priority shipping space. Cuba’s sugar and coffee exports were on the critical list, but other commodities depended on available shipping space.62 Among the most affected were US imports of fresh vegetables from Cuba, with the exception of tomatoes (table 3). The US tomato and pea canning industries received government incentives to produce at full capacity during the war, both to supply US troops and to meet Lend-L ase commitments.63 The increase in the value

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262 : Carmen Diana Deere of Cuban tomato exports during World War II, however, is largely because of steep price increases, due to strong demand, rather than volume. In the 1942– 1946 period, Cuba lost market share to Mexico (table 4), in part because of a temporary 50 percent reduction in duties granted tomatoes—due to a US shortage—in Mexico’s 1942 Reciprocal Trade Agreement with the United States, which placed Cuba at a competitive disadvantage.64 In sum, the growth of Cuba’s traditional exports of bananas and avocados65 did more to facilitate its recovery from the Great Depression than the nontraditional products favored by the 1934 preferential treaty rates. Moreover, the 1934 treaty had both benefits and costs with respect to export diversification. The concentration of Cuban exports of nontraditional fruits and vegetables from Cuba during the months in which these were less likely to compete with US domestic production did ensure higher prices for these exports. Nonetheless, in the case of grapefruit, the concentration of exports in a small window of the year discouraged investment because of the difficulties in developing early ripening varieties to replace the aging tree stock. Moreover, the concentration of vegetable exports during a few months of the year sometimes led to stiff competition for labor and caused marketing problems. The window of reduced tariffs for vegetables coincided with the sugar harvest, surely making access to labor a major constraint on the expansion of production.66 In addition, since the Cuban winter vegetable crop typically was auctioned as a boatload in the New York City market, prices sometimes fell below the Cuban wholesale price. In contrast, US domestic competitors had more stable operations, since they could sell smaller quantities throughout the growing season and had markets that were more diverse.67 World War II to the US Embargo of Cuba The most prosperous years for Cuban NST agricultural exports to the United States were 1955–1958, when their average annual value reached US$13.4 million, led by a dramatic increase in one of Cuba’s traditional exports, coffee (table 5). The surge in Cuban coffee exports to the United States is all the more remarkable given that these exports had fallen substantially after 1946. While domestic production had been steadily increasing because of Cuban protectionist measures, so had internal demand, resulting in Cuba importing coffee in some years; favorable domestic price supports instituted in the mid-1950s likely explain the increase in coffee exports.68 The expansion in Cuban coffee exports helped cushion the dramatic fall in the island’s banana exports to the United States, which decreased tenfold in the early 1950s due to the combined impact of sigatoka and Panama disease. Thereafter, the production of plantains for export eclipsed bananas; taken together, they never regained their pre–World War II level.69 Cuban cacao and avocado exports to the United States reached their peak in the early 1950s,

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TABLE 5. US Imports of Fresh Fruit, Vegetables and Tree Crops from Cuba by Duty Status, Post-WWII to 1962 (annual average, in current US$) Product Free of duty Coffee Cacao Coconut Banana/plantain Avocado Subtotal, free Dutied All other fruits Of which: Pineapple Grapefruit Other citrus Melona Other freshb All vegetables Of which: Beansc Peasd Potato Tomato Cucumber Eggplant Okra Pepper Other freshe Subtotal, dutied Total

1947–1950

1951–1954

1955–1958

1959–1962

18,902 469,055 7,660 1,927,173 344,693 2,767,483

0 636,563 18,782 180,854 432,172 1,268,371

7,307,057 605,374 14,785 612,620 290,076 8,829,911

426,119 228,158 12,318 421,160 188,581 1,276,336

1,933,185

1,680,657

2,187,716

1,122,067

1,759,972 151,914 89 15,616 5,594 2,083,169

1,458,551 154,251 3,654 54,546 9,657 2,045,188

1,925,280 79,473 112,055 22,610 48,298 2,338,112

857,045 51,814 133,324 9,028 70,856 1,973,602

158,423 55,188 6,787 1,384,074 264,845 82,081 64,283 37,083 30,405 4,016,353 6,783,836

2,796 102,707 26,229 877,153 662,255 86,008 176,322 42,088 69,631 3,725,844 4,994,215

2,043 46,017 64,604 879,965 777,153 60,598 234,848 29,287 243,598 4,525,828 13,355,739

4,581 94 0 852,955 541,130 50,491 118,468 28,862 377,021 3,095,668 4,372,004

a Includes watermelon (dominant category), cantaloupe, and other melons. b Principally mangoes, which began to be exported to the US in significant quantities in 1954, but also guavas, tamarinds, berries, cherries, grapes, cashew apples, olives, and “other fruit (nes natural).” c Mainly green or ripe lima beans, but also dried red kidney beans in some years. d Mainly cowpeas, but also chickpeas and green peas in some years. e Includes twelve vegetables, each of whose value never exceeds US$23,000 in its peak year. The dominant category, particularly from 1955 on, is “other vegetables (fresh nes).” Source: Compiled from USDC, United States Imports for Consumption of Merchandise: Commodities by Country of Origin, Report No. FT 110 (Washington, DC: Bureau of the Census), multiple volumes.

falling thereafter. Given its unique duty-free status, Cuba dominated US imports of avocados (Table 6), but had to compete with expanding US domestic production.70 After a promising recovery in the late 1940s, nontraditional agricultural exports stagnated in the early 1950s and then peaked in 1955–1958, at a new high of US$4.5 million. The performance of nontraditional fruit exports from

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264 : Carmen Diana Deere TABLE 6. Cuban Share of US Imports of Fruits, Vegetables and Tree Crops, Post-WWII to 1962 Product Free of duty Coffee Cacao Coconut Banana/plantain Avocado Dutied All other fruits Pineapple Grapefruit Other citrus Melon Other fresh All vegetables Beans Peas Potato Tomato Cucumber Eggplant Okra Pepper Other fresh

1947–1950

1951–1954

1955–1958

1959–1962

negl. 0.4% 1.1% 3.7% 100%

0 0.4% 3.7% 0.3% 99.6%

0.5% 0.4% 2.6% 0.9% 100%

0.1% 0.3% 2.9% 0.7% 98.6%

62.1% 97.7% negl. 5.3% 14.1%

77.5% 93.9% 0.5% 8.6% 5.7%

83.9% 96.5% 28.8% 1.0% 8.1%

72.7% 78.2% 12.1% 0.3% 31.2%

11.4% 10.3% 1.1% 8.0% 94.9% 81.2% 98.7% 2.7% 0.5%

0.6% 8.6% 1.0% 6.4% 90.3% 85.8% 99.5% 2.8% 1.1%

0.2% 7.2% 3.4% 8.7% 75.7% 53.7% 99.5% 3.1% 3.0%

1.6% 0.1% 0 6.0% 37.2% 24.8% 77.8% 2.0% 4.3%

Source: See table 4.

Cuba was lackluster, principally due to the fluctuations in the average annual value of Cuban fresh pineapple exports to the United States. Beginning in the late 1940s, Cuba lost market share to Mexico, principally in bulk exports of pineapples destined for the US processing industry, while it retained the lead in crated fresh pineapple exports. Mexico also began challenging Cuba’s predominance in grapefruit imports to the United States. In the mid-to-late 1950s, however, Cuba made some inroads on Mexico’s dominance in orange and lime exports to the US market. Diversification in the number of different fruits exported to the United States continued through the 1959 Revolution, with watermelon appearing in the 1940s and then mangoes from 1954 on (included under ‘other fresh fruit’). In 1958, nonetheless, Mexico was the dominant foreign supplier of both of these. Turning to winter vegetables, the value of Cuban exports of tomatoes to the United States reached a historic peak in the late 1940s and then fell, although the country continued to supply between 6 percent and 9 percent of US imports of tomatoes (tables 5 and 6), with Mexico being the dominant supplier.

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In the 1950s, cucumbers and okra were the most dynamic of Cuba’s winter vegetable exports. While the value of cucumber exports surged, US imports of cucumbers were growing at an even faster rate, and Cuba’s share of US imports decreased over this period, primarily due to competition from Mexico. Imports from Mexico were also responsible for Cuba’s declining share of US eggplant imports. In contrast, from 1947–1950 to the 1959 Revolution, Cuba was providing almost all of US imports of okra. Also worth noting is that Cuba continued to diversify the number of different fresh vegetables exported, with the value of the category “other fresh vegetables” increasing notably in the 1955–1958 period and in the early years of the Revolution. The data for 1959–1962 capture the initial impact of the 1959 Revolution followed by the embargo placed on imports from Cuba in late 1960. US imports of fresh fruits and vegetables did not decline drastically until 1961; hence, the average annual total value for 1959–1962 of US$4.4 million is not much below the average level of US$4.9 million of the early 1950s. Cuban Fruit and Vegetable Exports to the United States in Broader Perspective I now turn to the long-term trend of NST agricultural exports from Cuba to the United States in constant 1960 prices, and analyze the growth of Cuba’s fruit and vegetable processing industry and the changes this introduced in the composition of nontraditional exports. As figure 1 shows, in constant 1960 US dollars, the period of most rapid growth of Cuba’s nontraditional exports of fresh fruits and vegetables to the United States was from 1903–1905, when the Reciprocity Convention went into effect, through 1922–1925. The growth of US protectionism after 1922 ended this trajectory, along with the shock of the Great Depression and increased US production of many of the crops that competed with Cuba’s nontraditional exports. While in the early decades, nontraditional agricultural exports served to compensate for the decline in traditional NST agricultural exports, from 1925 through the mid-1930s traditional NST agricultural exports outperformed nontraditional exports. Growth of coffee, banana and avocado exports somewhat cushioned Cuba’s dismal export performance during the Great Depression and led the recovery of export earnings. Figure 1 also confirms that the 1934 Reciprocity Agreement had a minimally positive effect on the production and export of nontraditional fresh fruit and vegetable exports. While the treaty, which concentrated Cuban exports in the US winter season, initially created an almost exclusive market for some vegetable exports, Cuba’s share of the US market vacillated considerably, usu-

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266 : Carmen Diana Deere 16000000 14000000 12000000 10000000 8000000 6000000 4000000 2000000 3 –1 19 7 18 – 19 21 22 – 19 25 26 – 19 29 30 – 19 33 34 – 19 37 38 – 19 41 42 – 19 46 47 – 19 50 51 – 19 54 55 – 19 58 59 –6 2 19

14

9

–1

19

10

–0

06

19

19

03

–0

5

0

Non-traditional

Traditional

Total

FIGURE 1. Value of US Imports of Fresh Fruit, Vegetables and Tree Crops from Cuba, 1903 to 1962 (in constant 1960 US$) Note: Traditional imports are those that traditionally entered the US duty-free; non-traditional are those which paid duty and subject to preferential tariffs. Sources: Based on tables 1, 3, and 5, and US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, ‘CPI Inflation Calculator’ www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm. Accessed 8 June 2015.

ally because of competition from Mexico. This was particularly the case in terms of tomatoes (the most important in export volume), which led the 1938– 1941 recovery of nontraditional exports. Nonetheless, during and after World War II, imports of tomatoes from Cuba never surpassed 9 percent of total US imports. The rather flat trajectory depicted in figure 1 of nontraditional fresh fruit and vegetable exports to the United States from the mid-1930s to the years immediately preceding the 1959 Revolution suggests that this subsector stagnated. Foreign analysts of the period attributed this stagnation to marketing and credit bottlenecks and inadequate government policies.71 For example, prior to the establishment of Cuba’s Agriculture and Industrial Development Bank in 1951, the only growers besides sugar planters with access to bank credit were large landowners producing tobacco, rice, and livestock. Fruit and vegetable growers were largely dependent for credit on the commissioning houses that marketed their exports. Cuba’s agricultural experiment stations and agricultural education in general were also considered to be deficient. Nonetheless, one of the success stories of the 1940s and 1950s is Cuba’s food processing industry, particularly the development of processed and preserved fruit for export. Prior to the Reciprocity Treaty, Cuba exported very small amounts of processed fruit to the United States. These exports grew steadily

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over the next two decades, reaching an average annual value of US$114,938 in 1918–192172—a modest accomplishment compared to exports of fresh fruit (US$1.7 million annually in this same period). The steady expansion of processed fruit exports dates from the late 1930s, when several modern pineapple-canning facilities came into production.73 By 1941, the value of processed pineapple imported to the United States exceeded fresh pineapple, and from then on Cuba provided well over 90 percent of US imports of this processed fruit. Hence, the growth of Cuba’s fruit processing industry may have been the most successful outcome of the 1934 Reciprocity Treaty due to the combined effect of the 20 percent (pineapple) to 50 percent (other fruit pastes and pulps) year-round reduction in duties it received and strong US demand. While Cuba began to export canned tomatoes to the United States in very small quantities in the late 1920s, this export industry did not develop until the 1940s and, overall, the value of US imports from Cuba remained quite modest. As table 7 shows, in the post–World War II period the combined value of Cuban exports of processed fruits, nuts, and vegetables to the United States almost rivaled that of fresh products in most years. With the exception of the early 1950s, the average annual value of Cuban exports of processed fruits to the United States continued to exceed fresh fruits, with the dominant product TABLE 7. US Imports of Fresh versus Processed Fruits, Nuts and Vegetables from Cuba, post-WWII to 1962 (average annual, in current US$) Product

1947– 1950

Fresh fruits 4,205,050 Processed fruits 5,426,397 Fresh nutsb 7,663 Processed nuts 116,834 Fresh vegetables 2,083,169 Processed vegetables 73,637 Subtotal 6,295,881 fresha Subtotal processed 5,616,868 Total 11,912,750

% US Imports

1951– 1954

% US Imports

1955– 1958

% US Imports

1959– 1962

% US Imports

7.5%

2,293,683

3.5%

3,090,411

4.1%

1,731,808

2.7%

29.6% 2,165,145 0.2% 18,782

8.9% 3.7%

3,933,182 26.0% 2,331,832 16.1% 14,878 2.6% 12,318 2.9%

0.5%

2,445

negl.

2,825

negl.

1,802

negl.

7.4%

2,045,188

7.5%

2,338,112

9.7%

1,973,602

7.4%

1.7%

75,386

2.5%

124,855

1.8%

75,414

0.9%

7.1%

4,357,652

4.7%

5,443,400

5.4%

3,717,727

4.0%

12.8% 2,242,976 9.0% 6,600,628

5.0% 5.0%

4,060,862 11.5% 2,409,048 9,504,263 7.0% 6,126,775

7.5% 4.9%

This subtotal differs from the total for table 8, as it excludes coffee and cacao. b Principally coconuts. Source: Compiled from USDC, United States Imports for Consumption of Merchandise: Commodities by Country of Origin, Report No. FT 110 (Washington, DC: Bureau of the Census), multiple volumes. a

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268 : Carmen Diana Deere being prepared and canned pineapple although there was some diversification into mango and guava preparations. In addition, Cuban exports of processed fruit were capturing a larger share of the US import market than fresh fruit. After a surge in exports of processed nut products (principally, shredded coconut meat) to the United States in the late 1940s, these subsequently became negligible, and exports of processed vegetables (principally canned tomato) remained modest.74 While the fruit and vegetable subsector both expanded, diversified, and generated forward linkages to agro-industrial processing in the post–World War II period, this subsector never constituted more than 4 percent of total US imports from Cuba, and generally much less. As Table 8 demonstrates, sugar and sugar-based products continued to dominate exports, representing 84 percent of total exports to the United States in 1947–1952, and then falling to a low of 77 percent prior to the 1959 Revolution. TABLE 8. Agricultural and Nonagricultural Imports and as a Share of Total US Imports from Cuba, 1947 to 1962 (average annual, in current US$) Category Vegetables & preparations % Fruits, nuts & preparations % Cacao, coffee & tea % Sugar & products % Tobacco & manufacturing % All other agricultural- relateda % Subtotalb % Non-agricultural % Total imports from Cuba %

1947–1950

1951–1954

1955–1958

1959–1962

2,156,806 0.5 9,755,944 2.3 502,077 0.1 351,330,785 83.7 28,696,964 6.8

2,120,573 0.5 4,480,054 1.1 684,707 0.2 335,850,374 79.8 28,954,096 6.9

2,462,962 0.5 7,041,295 1.5 7,956,523 1.7 357,540,322 76.5 28,812,121 6.2

2,049,016 1.0 4,077,759 1.9 663,639 0.3 155,929,403 72.5 26,294,705 12.2

4,419,153 1.1 396,861,729 94.6 22,781,345 5.4 419,643,075 100

7,991,414 1.9 380,081,217 90.3 40,659,072 9.7 420,740,289 100

8,741,858 1.9 412,555,085 88.3 54,899,061 11.7 467,454,146 100

3,987,288 1.9 193,001,810 89.7 22,067,829 10.3 215,069,639 100

All other agricultural-related includes SITC Commodity Groups 1–7 (meat, dairy, and seafood), 8–13 (hides, leather, fur, animal and fish oils), 14–15 (grains, fodder), 19 (vegetable oils), 21 (spices), 23 (beverages), 24–31 (rubber, gum, herbs, oil seeds, nursery products), and 33 (miscellaneous). b Percentages may not add because of rounding. Sources: For 1947 and 1948, compiled from US Department of Commerce, United States Imports of Merchandise: Country of Origin by Subgroup, Report No. FT 120, pt. 2, Imports for Consumption (Washington, DC: Bureau of the Census); and for 1949 to 1962, US Department of Commerce, United States Imports of Merchandise for Consumption. Country of Origin by SITC Commodity Group, Report No. FT 120 (Washington, DC: Bureau of the Census), multiple volumes. a

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The development of new agricultural and agro-industrial exports in the 1950s, and in particular, the growth of nonagricultural exports (both mining and manufacturing) account for the relative decline of sugar exports in total Cuban exports to the United States. The new agricultural sector exports of the 1950s consisted primarily of livestock by-products and shellfish (listed under “all other agricultural-related” in table 8). However, while rivaling the fruit and vegetable subsector, these new exports never exceeded much more than 2 percent of total Cuban imports to the United States, nor challenged tobacco and cigars as the island’s long-standing, second-most important agriculturalrelated export. With respect to the combined share of the agricultural and agro-industrial sectors in the composition of total Cuban exports to the United States, from the late 1940s to the late 1950s this share declined, from 95 percent to 88 percent, illustrating some of the broader, but modest diversification of the Cuban economy that took place in this period. In addition, in the 1950s Cuba succeeded in somewhat lessening its dependence on the US market.75 Nonetheless, the continuing importance of sugar in the Cuban economy and of the US market was starkly apparent in 1960 when the United States cut Cuba’s sugar import quota. The value of Cuban sugar exports in the early postRevolution years of 1959–1962 plummeted to less than half the level of the late 1950s. As Table 8 shows, tobacco and cigar exports withstood the US embargo the best in these years. Conclusion Under the special relationship with the United States, Cuba never became the “garden spot” for the US market envisioned by its planners. Nonetheless, the dominance of sugar in Cuban exports obscures the considerable diversification of agricultural exports that took place in the early decades of the twentieth century and later, in the post–World War II period. The 20 percent discount on US duties provided by the 1903 Reciprocity Convention served as an important incentive for North American and some Cuban growers to experiment with new crops and develop nontraditional exports geared to the US market. As figure 1 shows, Cuba’s nontraditional agricultural exports to the United States grew rapidly up through the mid-1920s, led by pineapple and grapefruit exports. While Cuba became almost the sole foreign supplier of these products, both faced increasing competition from US producers, a factor aggravated by the growth of US protectionism. The Great Depression, which severely constricted US demand, further deteriorated the prospects of these main nontraditional exports. Compared to the Reciprocity Convention, the 1934 Reciprocity Agreement had a minimally positive effect on the production and export of nontraditional agricultural exports. Cuba’s recovery from the Great Depression is more

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270 : Carmen Diana Deere closely associated with the better performance of its traditional NST exports, such as bananas and avocados, and particularly, the more favorable terms that sugar acquired in the US market. While the treaty, which concentrated Cuban exports in the US winter season, initially created an almost exclusive market for some vegetable exports, Cuba’s share of US imports vacillated considerably, usually because of competition from Mexico. This was particularly the case in terms of the most important crop in export volume, tomatoes. From the late 1930s to the late 1950s, the trajectory of Cuban nontraditional fresh fruit and vegetable exports was rather flat in real terms (fig. 1). The underwhelming performance of this subsector in this period is partly attributable to the continued expansion of US production of fruits and vegetables along with the voice of the California, Texas, and Florida fruit and vegetable industry lobby. Nontariff barriers became as important as tariff barriers in this period. New sanitary and phytosanitary regulations, along with consumer preferences, continually raised the bar on the quality of imports. These explanations, nonetheless, do not shed much light on why Mexico was able to gain US market share on Cuba in these commodities. Some analysts consider that Mexico had developed a far superior packing, transportation, and distribution system than Cuba by this time, likely making it a lower cost and more reliable source of supplies.76 This topic, nonetheless, requires further research. Internal Cuban policies and dynamics also bear some responsibility for the relatively weak performance of this subsector. The former focused on creating the conditions for profitable sugar production and exports, and to a lesser extent, for tobacco, the second major export. Other traditional agricultural exports, such as coffee, cacao, coconuts, and bananas, often languished, suffering from neglect. Since these commodities entered the United States duty free, along with those from every other country, Cuba’s exports had to be internationally competitive to gain market share. The exception here is avocados, which for most of this period had exclusive duty free access to the US market during the off-season for US domestic production, and which was the star performer of the traditional NST agricultural exports in the post–World War II period. The concentration of land, labor, capital, and agricultural research on sugar stymied diversification in multiple ways. In most periods, the above world market prices that sugar exports could command in the United States likely made the growing of sugar cane more profitable than any other agricultural activity. The growing of cane may also have been less risky than fresh fruit and vegetable production, providing growers with little incentive to diversify. In addition, both traditional and nontraditional NST agricultural exports suffered directly from “sugar mania” when these were displaced whenever high sugar prices prevailed. These factors, along with the lack of explicit development policies for this sector, also explain why, even under favorable tariff concessions for

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fruits and vegetables during certain months, Cuba often lost US market share to foreign competitors such as Mexico throughout these sixty years. From an economic development perspective, the bright spot in the otherwise discouraging trajectory of nontraditional fresh fruit and vegetable exports was the backward and forward linkages that these products generated in the Cuban economy. The value of exports of processed fruit in the post–World War II period came to rival that of fresh fruits, while the growth of the domestic vegetable and fruit canning industry contributed somewhat, if insufficiently, to lessen Cuba’s dependence on food imports. Among the lessons that can be drawn from this analysis of Cuba’s special relationship with the United States from 1903 to 1960 is that preferential tariffs can be a powerful stimulus for export growth, yet tariff preferences alone are not sufficient to transform a country’s export profile. A number of other factors need to be in place to both develop and sustain the growth of nontraditional agricultural exports. While some of these factors are exogenous, such as external demand, others are within a country’s policy domain, for example, support to agricultural research and extension, and the provision of adequate financing and marketing channels, to mention a few. Looking forward, to the eventual normalization of US-Cuban trade, much has obviously changed since 1959. US tariff levels have fallen to historic lows and trade agreements have proliferated globally. In the hemisphere, the United States now has free trade agreements with Mexico and Canada, Central America, and the Dominican Republic, Chile, Panama, and Colombia. Once the US embargo is lifted, and normal US-Cuba trade resumes, Cuba may find itself in the position of being among the few Latin American countries facing full (albeit, low) tariffs for its products in the US market. Moreover, nontariff barriers have continued to grow. What is potentially worrisome for Cuba, given the historical record of trade reviewed in this paper, is the current dominant position of Mexico in the US market for fresh and processed fruits and vegetables. If Cuba once again attempts to compete with Mexico in this subsector, its best bet may be in specialty markets, drawing upon the expertise it has developed in recent decades in organic fruit and vegetable production. Acknowledgments The author is grateful for the research assistance of Boaz Anglade and Diana Moreno in compiling an original data set on US imports from Cuba, and to the University of Florida Center for Latin American Studies for financing this effort. She also benefited from the comments of team members in the University of Florida and University of Havana collaborative project on “The Agricultural Sector and the International Economy: Challenges and Opportunities for Cuba and the United States,” and from two anonymous reviewers.

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272 : Carmen Diana Deere NOTES 1. The term garden spot is drawn from the promotional pamphlet produced by the Cuban Land and Steamship Company to publicize the colony that it was developing in Camagüey: “Cuba. The Garden Spot of our New Territory,” n.d. For an image, see “The Cuban History,” www .thecubanhistory.com/2017/07/rise-and-fall-of-the-first-american-colony-in-cuba-la-gloria-city -camaguey-photos. 2. Robert P. Porter, Industrial Cuba (New York: G. P. Putnam & Sons, 1899), 348–349. Part of his optimism was due to the devastating effects of the 1894, 1895, and 1899 frosts on Florida citrus and vegetable production. 3. Leonard Wood, William H. Taft, Charles H. Allen, Perfecto Lacoste, and M. E. Beall, Opportunities in the Colonies and Cuba (New York: Lewis Scribner, 1902), 171. 4. See, for example, Ramiro Guerra, Azúcar y población en las Antillas (1927; Havana: Ed. de Ciencias Sociales, 1970); Oscar Zanetti, Los cautivos de la reciprocidad (1989; Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 2003); Alan Dye, Cuban Sugar in the Age of Mass Production: Technology and the Economics of the Sugar Central, 1899–1929 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); and Antonio Santamaría García, Sin azúcar no hay país: La industria azucarera y la economía cubana (1919–1939) (Sevilla: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas/ Universidad de Sevilla, 2001). 5. Julián Alienes Uroso, Características fundamentales de la economía cubana (Havana: Banco Nacional de Cuba, 1950), 231–232; Zanetti, Los Cautivos de la Reciprocidad, 89; and on the factors behind the success of Cuba’s sugar industry, Dye, Cuban Sugar. 6. Frances A. Truslow, Report on Cuba: Findings and Recommendations of an Economic and Technical Mission Organized by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development in Collaboration with the Government of Cuba (Baltimore: IBRD and Johns Hopkins University Press, 1951), 94–95; and Leida Fernández Prieto, Cuba agrícola: Mito y tradición, 1878–1920 (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Instituto de Historia, 2005). 7. See Alejandro García Álvarez, La costa cubana del guineo: Una historia bananera (Havana: Ed. Ciencias Sociales, 2008) on the inverse relationship between cane sugar and banana production and exports. 8. United States Congress. ‘Convention.’ U.S. Statutes at Large, 58th Congress, 1903–1905, 33, pt. 2 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, n.d.), 2136–2144. 9. For a detailed treatment of those in favor and against the Platt Amendment and the Reciprocity Convention in both Cuba and the United States, see Zanetti, Los cautivos de la reciprocidad, 50–81. 10. US Tariff Commission, Effects of the Cuban Reciprocity Treaty, Appendix I (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1929), 172–173. 11. Among the US agricultural or agro-industrial products ceded the 25 percent reduction was processed fish and shellfish; a 30 percent reduction, butter, wheat flour, corn and processed corn, and processed vegetables; and a 40 percent reduction, cheese, preserved fruits, rice, and cattle. According to the US Tariff Commission (US Tariff Commission, Effects), Cuba ceded these larger percentage cuts in duties either to stimulate domestic consumption or because the US share of the Cuban market was so small that a larger cut was necessary for US exports to reap some competitive advantage. 12. US Department of Commerce and Labor, Analysis of the Foreign Commerce of the United States, Showing the Principal Articles Forming the Trade of the United States with the Various Countries of the World in Each Year from 1895 to 1905 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1906). 13. Alfred E. Eckes Jr., Opening America’s Market: U.S. Foreign Trade Policy since 1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).

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14. US Tariff Commission, Effects, table 12. 15. Cuba was also supplying a growing share of US domestic consumption requirements. While sugar imports from Cuba more than doubled between 1910–1913 and 1922–1925, receipts from the noncontiguous territories of Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and the Philippines grew by only 42 percent over this period (US Tariff Commission, Effects). 16. Eckes, Opening America’s Market, table 4.1. 17. John William Lloyd, Pan American Trade with Special Reference to Fruits and Vegetables (Danville, IL: Interstate Printers & Pubs., 1942), table 9.2. 18. This analysis draws on Dick Steward, Trade and Hemisphere: The Good Neighbor Policy and Reciprocal Trade (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1975). 19. US Department of State, Reciprocal Trade Agreement between the United States of America and the Republic of Cuba Signed at Washington August 24, 1934, as Amended by Supplementary Agreements Signed at Washington, December 18, 1939, and at Havana, December 23, 1941, Department of State Publication 1787 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1942). 20. Between 1913 and 1929, the value of US direct investments in Cuba increased by 594 percent. Whereas in 1913 Cuba held 18 percent of US direct investment in Latin America, by 1929, this share had increased to 27 percent. Max Winkler, Investments of United States Capital in Latin America (Boston: World Peace Foundation, 1929), tables 11 and 12. 21. Steward, Trade and Hemisphere, 93. 22. Steward, Trade and Hemisphere, 107–08. 23. Cuba’s vegetables could be planted earlier than in Florida and Texas, thus provisioning the US market when domestic supplies were low, a pattern that had already developed prior to the 1934 treaty. Roberta Wakefield, “Some Factors in Cuba’s Foreign Trade,” Economic Geography 13, no. 2 (1937): 109–131. 24. Lloyd, Pan American Trade, tables 83 and 92. 25. Steward, Trade and Hemisphere, 111. See Zanetti, Los cautivos de la reciprocidad, 89– 92, 119–124, for similar criticism regarding both treaties. 26. Robert F. Smith, The United States and Cuba: Business and Diplomacy, 1917–1960 (New Haven, CT: College and University Press, 1960). 27. Smith, United States and Cuba. Technically, the 1903 Convention and 1934 Reciprocity Agreement and Amendments were “inoperative” as long as both countries are GATT members, requiring this special concession. 28. Smith, United States and Cuba, 169. 29. “Reciprocal Trade,” in Charles I. Bevans, comp., Treaties and Other International Agreements of the United States of America 1776–1949 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office), 6:1198. 30. US Tariff Commission, Effects, tables 109 and 10. 31. Steward, Trade and Hemisphere. Another effect of the Reciprocity Convention was to give the US a larger share of total Cuban imports. In 1900–1903, the United States was supplying 43 percent of Cuba’s imports; this figure reached a high of 75 percent in 1919–1921 and then fell to 68 percent in 1922–1924. US Tariff Commission, Effects, table 109. 32. George Reno, Cuba: What She Has to Offer to the Investor or the Homeseeker (Havana: Department of Agriculture, Commerce and Labor, Bureau of Information, 1915); H. O. Neville, “The Citrus Industry in Cuba,” Cuba Review 17, no. 9 (1919): 13–25; and Fernández Prieto, Cuba agrícola , 65–67, 295–296. Contemporaries referred to these as the “American colonies,” since the majority of settlers were emigrants from the United States, but they also included Canadian, British, and other northern and central European settlers. 33. See Louis A. Pérez, “Insurrection, Intervention, and the Transformation of Land Tenure Systems in Cuba, 1895–1902,” Hispanic American Historical Review 65, no. 2 (1985): 229–

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274 : Carmen Diana Deere 254. See also Carmen Diana Deere, “Here Come the Yankees! The Rise and Decline of United States Colonies in Cuba, 1898–1930,” Hispanic American Historical Review 78, no. 4 (1998): map 1. 34. The Hay-Quesada Treaty of 1904 settled the political status of the Isle of Pines in Cuba’s favor. However, the US Senate did not ratify the treaty until 1925, largely due to the lobbying efforts of the land companies and settlers and their political allies. Deere, “Here Come the Yankees,” and Michael E. Neagle, “‘That Magnificent Land of Sunshine, Health, and Wealth’: How U.S. Entrepreneurs Sold Cuba’s Isle of Pines,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 11, no. 4 (2012): 575–611. 35. Neville, “Citrus Industry in Cuba,” 13. 36. The establishment of Cuba’s first modern agricultural experiment station in 1904, the Estación Central Agronómica, in Santiago de Las Vegas (Havana province), facilitated all these efforts. US professionals largely staffed the station up through the teens, and carried out many of the field trials on the farms of colonists in this region. Fernández Prieto, Cuba agrícola, 124–125, 274–276. 37. This latter four-year average has the advantage of smoothing out any potential impact of the 1919 “Dance of the Millions,” when world sugar prices reached unprecedented heights, as well as the depression of 1920, when sugar prices crashed. 38. On bananas, see García Álvarez, La costa cubana del guineo, 120–121. On cacao, Truslow, Report on Cuba, 823. 39. The decrease in Cuban coconut exports was also due to the spread of coconut budrot disease, which was amply reported in these years. See “Present Status of the Coconut Budrot Disease,” Cuba Review 14, no. 9 (1916): 16. 40. Fernández Prieto, Cuba agrícola, 312. 41. The data on principal suppliers of US imports is drawn from the same source as tables 1 to 4, United States Department of Commerce, Foreign Commerce and Navigation of the United States, general imports, multiple volumes for the years 1906 to 1946. 42. The category “other” under this rubric falls drastically in 1910–1913, primarily because pineapple is listed separately from this period on. In those years and 1914–1917, “other” consists primarily of grapefruit exports. Another series in US Department of Commerce, Foreign Commerce and Navigation of the United States, on the value of imports for consumption (as opposed to general imports), does provide disaggregated data for these crops (but not others consistently) from 1905 on. It shows that Cuban pineapple exports to the United States were already substantial in 1905, but that grapefruit exports did not surpass US$100,000 until 1912, thereafter increasing significantly to their 1922 peak. See Deere, “Here Come the Yankees,” table 3, for the disaggregated data on grapefruit imports from Cuba through 1940. 43. Unfortunately, disaggregated import data on these “other vegetables” is provided only from 1934. Mexico’s winter vegetable export industry, also developed by US growers, dates from the decade of the 1910s. Lloyd, Pan American Trade. 44. “Havana Correspondence,” Cuba Review 15, no. 6 (1918): 9–12; also see issues nos. 7, 8, and 9. 45. Stephen Chalmers, “The Island’s Industries and Resources,” Isle of Pines Appeal, April 26, 1919, 5–6. Reprinted at Pine-Box Lumber Company, http://bullock1.com/pinebox/pinebox .html. A Cuban pineapple grower established the Pine-Box Lumber Company to supply crates for his plantation in Havana province, while an earlier factory supplied the isle’s citrus exporters. 46. “Citrus and Other Fruits,” Cuba Review 15, no. 8 (1917): 12–16. 47. Deere, “Here Come the Yankees,” 755–756; Neville, “Citrus Industry in Cuba,” 24–25. 48. Deere, “Here Come the Yankees,” 752. The outbreak of the black fruit fly led to Cuba organizing its first Plant Health Commission in 1916 and the development of a national inspection system in subsequent years.

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49. Author’s calculations from US Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Statistics (Washington, DC: US Printing Office, 1952), table 242. 50. US Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Statistics, table 275. 51. See Deere, “Here Come the Yankees,” 752–757, for an analysis of the different factors that led to the decline of the colonies in different parts of the island. 52. Deere, “Here Come the Yankees,” table 2. 53. In the early 1930s, the isle was providing four-fifths of Cuban exports of grapefruit, 40 percent of which was exported to Great Britain, perhaps because of the high US tariffs combined with saturated US internal demand. Lloyd, Pan American Trade, 221. 54. Paul Minneman, “The Agriculture of Cuba,” Foreign Agricultural Bulletin no. 2 (1942): 90–91. 55. Minneman, “Agriculture of Cuba,” 67–68. 56. Author’s calculations from US Department of Commerce, Foreign Commerce and Navigation of the United States, multiple volumes. 57. The data for 1934 reported in US Department of Commerce, Foreign Commerce and Navigation of the United States is already broken down to reflect imports from Cuba which came in under the special treaty rates versus the normal 20 percent duty reduction, demonstrating the immediate impact of the 1934 treaty. In 1934, 81 percent of the okra, 30 percent of cucumbers, 29 percent of tomatoes, and 7 percent of eggplant imports from Cuba were imported under the special treaty rates. 58. This increase also reflects a steep decline in Mexico’s tomato exports after 1930, which according to Lloyd, Pan American Trade, did not recover from the effects of the Great Depression until the 1940s. 59. The value of US imports from Cuba also reflects prevailing prices, which could fluctuate substantially depending on growing conditions in Florida and California. Lloyd, Pan American Trade, notes how Cuba and Mexico tended to benefit from frosts in these competing states, such as in 1939–1940, which resulted in relative high prices and expanded acreage in both countries. 60. Minneman, “Agriculture of Cuba,” 60, 74. 61. García Álvarez, La costa cubana del guineo, 146–147, 153–154. 62. “500 Import Items on Priority List,” New York Times, August 6, 1942, 29. 63. George Mooney, “Canners Assured on Sugar Supplies,” New York Times, January 28, 1942, 28. 64. US Department of State, Reciprocal Trade Agreement between the United States of America and Mexico, Executive Agreement Series 311 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1943). In schedule 2, of the treaty, it is noted that the lower rate of 1.5 cents a pound was applicable as long as the “unlimited national emergency proclaimed of May 27, 1941” with respect to tomatoes was in effect; thirty days after, the rate would increase to 2.5 cents per pound. At the time, Cuban tomatoes paid 1.8 cents per pound in duty during the months of December to March and 2.4 cents per pound thereafter. Minneman, “Agriculture of Cuba,” table 38. It is unclear when the national emergency in tomatoes ended; total US imports of tomatoes continued to increase in volume through 1948. The US-Mexican Reciprocal Trade Agreement expired in 1950. 65. By a side agreement to the 1934 treaty, Cuban avocados regained the duty-free status they had prior to Smoot-Hawley, however, only in the months of June to September. The Cuban government agreed to prohibit export during the rest of the year, which favored California’s growing industry. Minneman, “Agriculture of Cuba,” 69–70. 66. The author is grateful to an anonymous reviewer for this point. 67. Truslow, Report on Cuba, 866. 68. US Department of Commerce, Bureau of Foreign Commerce, Investment in Cuba. Basic Information for United States Businessmen (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1956), 40–41; Rodolfo Arango, Política agraria (Havana: Ed. Cenit, 1958), 18.

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276 : Carmen Diana Deere 69. While Cuba was supplying less than 1 percent of total US imports of bananas and plantains in the early 1950s (table 6), by 1958 it was the top supplier of plantains, outcompeting the Dominican Republic and Haiti. 70. Total US imports of avocados reached their post–World War I peak in 1951 at 9.1 million pounds, much below total imports of around 11 million in the early 1940s, primarily due to the expansion of avocado production in California. 71. Minneman, “Agriculture of Cuba,” 142–143; Foreign Policy Association, Problems of the New Cuba (New York: Foreign Policy Association, 1935), 343–344; Truslow, Report on Cuba, 343–344, 590–591; and US Department of Commerce, US Investment in Cuba, 122–124, 189–200. 72. Author’s database on processed fruit and vegetable imports from Cuba to the United States compiled from USDC, Foreign Commerce and Navigation of the United States, multiple years. The steady increase in exports of processed pineapple from Cuba in the decade of the teens are likely due to the efforts of American colonists on the Isle of Pines, where, according to the US Consul, there were two canning factories in production in 1921. W. Bardel, “Nueva Gerona, Isle of Pines,” Cuba Review 19, no. 5 (1921): 13–14. 73. Lloyd, Pan American Trade, 216–225, considers that the pineapple canning industry for export to the United States dates from 1928, and attributes the surge in exports in the late 1930s to two new factories, one that was established in Pinar del Río in 1938, and another that moved from Florida to Cuba in 1939. The latter previously had imported fresh pineapples from the island, thus partly accounting for the decrease in these exports. 74. A factor that likely deterred the broader development of the vegetable canning industry were the trade preferences given to US processed vegetables by Cuba in the 1903 Reciprocity Convention, referred to earlier, and by the 1934 Reciprocal Trade Agreement. The latter gave canned peas, sweet corn, and asparagus a duty reduction of 40 percent, and canned beans and other vegetables, a 30 percent reduction of Cuban duties; canned tomatoes, however, are not explicitly mentioned. US Department of State, Reciprocal Trade Agreement, schedule 1. 75. In 1958, 67 percent of total Cuban exports of US$734 million were to the United States. In that year, the United States provided 70 percent of total Cuban imports of US$777 million. Kathryn H. Wylie, A Survey of Agriculture in Cuba, ERS-Foreign 268, Economic Research Service, US Department of Agriculture (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1969). 76. Arango, Política agraria, 133.

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P AV E L V I D A L - A L E J A N D R O

Cuban Macroeconomic Trends and the Pending Monetary Reform A B S T R AC T This article focuses on analyzing the leading macroeconomic trends and policies in Cuba from 1985 to 2013. Five macroeconomic indexes were estimated using dynamic factor models. The estimated indexes show that, on average, fiscal policy was procyclical while monetary policy was countercyclical. The analysis suggests that pending monetary reform could create negative pressure on goods production and on households’ living conditions, which could not be mitigated by an expansionary fiscal policy. Instead, the negative effects of such shocks can be mitigated through greater international openness.

RESUMEN El artículo analiza las principales tendencias y políticas macroeconómicas en Cuba en el período 1985–2013. Se estimaron cinco índices macroeconómicos utilizando modelos factoriales dinámicos. Los índices estimados muestran que, en promedio, la política fiscal cubana ha sido procíclica, mientras que la política monetaria ha sido contracíclica. El análisis sugiere que la reforma monetaria pendiente podría tener un efecto negativo sobre la producción de bienes y sobre las condiciones de vida de los hogares, lo que no podría mitigarse con una política fiscal expansiva. En cambio, los efectos negativos de tales perturbaciones sí pueden mitigarse a través de una mayor apertura internacional.

Introduction This article focuses on analyzing the leading macroeconomic trends and policies in Cuba from 1985 to 2013. In this period, the fall of the Soviet Union led to the biggest economic crisis of Cuba’s entire revolutionary period. The government responded to the crisis by opening the economy to foreign investment, tourism, remittances, and self-employment. Toward the end of the 1990s, the impetus for structural change weakened. Then, between 2003 and 2004, when Cuba began to receive benefits from its alliance with Venezuela, the liberalization process halted and many reforms were even reversed. In the past ten years, President Raúl Castro returned and expanded the incomplete reforms of the 1990s.1 In the early 1990s significant macroeconomic disequilibrium surfaced along with triple-digit inflation, which triggered the currency and exchange

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278 : Pavel Vidal-Alejandro rate duality that is still in force today. The monetary duality, in place for more than twenty years, has led to cumulative distortions for enterprises’ balance sheets, relative prices, and the fiscal accounts, taking a toll on competitiveness and the efficient allocation of resources (De la Torre and Ize 2014; Vidal and Pérez 2014). The cornerstone of the pending monetary reform will be a significant devaluation of the official exchange rate, which, according to government announcements, will be implemented in the near future. Using dynamic factor models, I estimated macroeconomic indexes in five areas: (1) the production of goods, (2) the external sector, (3) households’ economic conditions, (4) fiscal policy, and (5) monetary policy. I collected twentysix key macroeconomic series and estimated common factor or co-movement for each group. This empirical strategy overcomes, to some extent, the lack of macroeconomic data, the bias introduced by the existence of two currencies and several exchange rates in the national accounting system, and the derived complication for the international comparability of the Cuban indicators. Thus, the analysis does not focus on a specific macroeconomic value or on a particular variable but on the common trend of several indicators over time. The five indexes are then included in a vector autoregression (VAR) model along with Cuba’s GDP growth rate to simulate and analyze the macroeconomic effects of monetary, fiscal, and external shocks. The VAR model provides information on the macroeconomic effects of shocks that are likely to hit Cuba in the coming years due to the currency reform. Time-series econometric techniques were preferred to support the empirical strategy in the paper because conventional structural models do not fit the special characteristics of Cuban macroeconomics and policy. Macroeconomic Context of the Currency and Exchange Rate Duality The fall of the Soviet Union led to a huge depression, with GDP contracting by 35 percent from 1990 to 1993. At the beginning of the 1990s, all of the fiscal variables suffered a contraction, except for enterprise subsidies, which increased as the government sought to avoid a massive closure of state-owned enterprises (SOEs). At the time, only 30 percent of SOEs were profitable. Because the reduction in expenses was not enough to offset the drop in revenues, the deficit exceeded 30 percent of GDP in 1992 and 1993. The Central Bank’s monetary policy depends on fiscal policy, as deficits are financed by printing new money (monetization).2 Increasing the money supply between 1990 and 1993 (M0 by 116 percent and M2 by 165 percent) when goods production and importation were contracting led to an excess of monetary liquidity, which in turn resulted in a triple-digit inflation rate and a significant devaluation of the exchange rate. In 1993, prices were ten times

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Cuban Macroeconomic Trends : 279 higher and the exchange rate for individuals was twenty times higher than in 1989. This episode of monetary instability resulted in the partial dollarization of the economy and led to the currency duality. The developments during these years were also the roots of the multiple exchange-rate regime, as enterprises and state institutions continue to use the official fixed exchange rate of the Cuban peso, namely, a one-to-one parity with the US dollar (see the appendix for more details on the current exchange rate regimen in Cuba). Opening the economy to tourism, remittances, and foreign investment was a vital step to emerging from the crisis. In 1994, external sector indicators bounced back. The opening rate increased from 25.2 percent in 1993 to 34.8 percent in 1996. In 1994 the government began to implement the so-called measures of financial restructuring (medidas de saneamiento financiero), which included a significant reduction in subsidies to SOEs and increased taxes (mainly sales tax); as a result, tax revenue that year increased by 42 percent. The government regained control of expenditures and managed to reduce the deficit to less than 3 percent of GDP beginning in 1996, which allowed it to regain control over the money supply and inflation. In 2004, encouraged by the revenue coming from Venezuela, Fidel Castro’s government launched plans for huge investments in education, health services, and energy capacity. In just three years (2004–2006) investment grew by 90 percent and construction by 80 percent; by contrast, the manufacturing industry grew by only 9 percent, while agriculture and mining both contracted, by 17 percent and 6 percent, respectively. Revenue from Venezuela was mostly allocated to the services sector and to the expansion of imports and expenditures. Between 2005 and 2008, expenditures on education and health increased by 139 percent and 181 percent, respectively. Total fiscal expenditures increased by 135 percent and government demand rose by 35 percent. In 2008 the deficit scaled up to 6.9 percent of GDP. In 2005, the Central Bank purchased circulating dollars in exchange for the two national currencies (pesos and convertible pesos or CUC) to de-dollarize the economy. This meant an expansion of money supply. At first, this was complemented by an increase in international reserves, but over time, international reserves gradually dwindled. Irresponsible fiscal and monetary policies—namely, out-of-control fiscal expansion since 2005 and a de-dollarization process that compromised monetary equilibria—left the economy exposed to the 2009 negative shock to terms of trade and the global financial crisis and plunged Cuba into its own financial crisis. In 2009, foreign debt payments were stopped and banks froze investors’ and international suppliers’ deposits (Mesa-Lago and Vidal 2010).

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280 : Pavel Vidal-Alejandro With Raúl Castro’s assuming the presidency in 2008, the investment and construction boom deflated. The investment rate as a share of GDP fell from 15.9 percent in 2008 to 12.3 percent in 2010. The fiscal policy of Raúl Castro’s government exerted tight control over expenditure growth. From 2009 to 2013, the cumulative increase in total government spending was only 5 percent, spending on education grew by just 0.9 percent, and public health spending contracted 1.8 percent. As a result, the deficit shrank, and in 2013 it represented 1.3 percent of GDP.3 Raúl Castro´’s government has promoted a more rational public expenditure policy, meets with more rigor financial commitments, and made notable progress in renegotiating its outstanding international debts, including those to the Paris Club. To reinvigorate GDP growth, policy makers have defined the core strategy to be opening the country further to foreign investment (Font and Jancsics 2015; Torres 2014; Hidalgo and Cribeiro 2015). To attract foreign investment, the government published a new law with fiscal incentives since 2014, and it set up the creation of 100 percent foreign-owned companies. It invested in infrastructure and logistics of the Mariel Special Development Zone. However, taking a gradual approach to reforms has not resulted in faster GDP growth rates. From 2008 to 2016, the average annual GDP growth rate was 2.3 percent, far short of the government’s initial target of 5.1 percent and of its revised target of 4.4 percent. The end of the Raúl Castro presidency couldn’t have been any more discouraging, with a recession in 2016 (-0.9 percent), and very uncertain projections for 2017 and 2018 in terms of a rapid re-emergence from the crisis and what could happen with the Trump administration. The effect of the Venezuelan crisis dragged the Cuban economy into recession, affecting the macroeconomic and financial equilibrium that had been rebuilt with so much attention. Low GDP growth rates and financial vulnerability can be explained by the failure of Cuba’s authorities to address currency and exchange-rate unification. Cuban monetary reforms imply the following aims: (1) devaluation of the official exchange rate of the Cuban peso for organizations (since the 1980s it has been anchored to an artificial parity to the US dollar), (2) reestablishing the Cuban peso as the only monetary denomination (in other words, eliminating the convertible peso), and (3) building a scheme of monetary and exchangerate policies that can provide convertibility and stability to the national currency (Vidal and Pérez 2014). Looking ahead, changes in the political landscape—most notably reestablishing diplomatic relations with the United States—may provide opportunities for further economic reforms. In 2014, the Obama administration began launching several measures to ease travel and the sending of remittances to Cuba, to make trade in foodstuffs, medication, and telecommunications

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Cuban Macroeconomic Trends : 281 more dynamic, and to promote exports to support farmers, cooperatives, and microentrepreneurs. In addition, Cuba was removed from the list of countries sponsoring terrorism, and embassies were opened in both countries’ capitals. These actions lowered the financial risks of having links with the Cuban economy and increased the opportunities for the future, thus increasing international interest in investing or having some kind of presence in Cuba (Cuba Standard 2015). It remains to be seen how the Trump administration will implement its new policies, which seem to focus on greater control over travel by US citizens and links with enterprises controlled by Cuban armed forces. In addition, joining international financial institutions like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Inter-American Bank for Development (IDB) are essential steps to speed up international integration, increase the investment rate, and enhance the balance of payments conditions (Feinberg 2011; Vidal and Brown 2015). In 2017, the Central American Bank for Economic Integration’s official announcement to welcome Cuba as a member had an important symbolical value, showing the willingness of the Cuban government to join international multilateral financial institutions. Data Data sources for the annual time series from 1985 to 2013 are Cuba’s Statistical Yearbook prepared by the National Statistics and Information Office of Cuba (ONEI, various years) and the series offered by the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC 2000). From 1996 to 2013, national accounts were available with base year 1997; before that the base year was 1981. Thus all series were converted into base year 1997 applying the variation rates. Logarithmic first difference is taken for all series, and they were also standardized.4 Production of Goods. To examine economic conditions from the supply side, data on value-added production at constant prices were analyzed for the following sectors: agriculture and fisheries (AGR), manufacturing industry (IND), mining (MIN), and construction (CONS). The services sector is not considered in this group. State budgeted services, such as education and health, are considered below in the fiscal policy group, while tourism is included in the external sector group. Investment (INV) is considered even though it is a component of GDP from the expenditure side. I include investment because the information it provides about variations in capital factor strengthens the analysis of the economy from the supply side.

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282 : Pavel Vidal-Alejandro External Sector Unfortunately, external sector is an area where the Cuban government provides less transparent statistics. It is impossible to get access to data on international reserves, foreign debt, and the current account’s primary and secondary incomes or the financial account. For the external sector variables, I collected series on exports (X) and imports (M) of goods and services at constant prices, terms of trade (TOT), and external financing (EF) estimated by the trade balance at constant prices. Households’ Economic Conditions To analyze economic conditions from the household side, data were compiled on the following factors: number of employed workers (EMP), open unemployment rate (UNER), consumption at constant prices (CON), average real wage in SOEs and institutions (WAGE), and real revenues received by households (INCOM).5 Fiscal Policy The following series comprise the fiscal policy analysis: total expenses (FISEXP), expenditures on education (EDU) and health (HEA), subsidies to SOEs and cooperatives (SUB), deficit (DEF), collected taxes (TAX), and government demand (GOVD). All series are from the budget, except for government demand, which is taken from the GDP components. Monetary Policy The following series comprise the monetary policy analysis: money circulation (M0), the monetary aggregate (M2), individuals’ savings accounts (SAV), the consumer price index (CPI), and the exchange rate of the Cuban peso against the US dollar for individuals (RATE). Empirical strategy Five macroeconomic indexes associated with the available variables were estimated: goods production (ProdIndex), external sector (ExtIndex), households’ economic conditions (HousehIndex), fiscal policy (FispIndex), and monetary policy (MonpIndex). The methodological approach to index estimations is based on the dynamic factor model (DFM) of Sargent and Sims (1977) and further developed by Stock and Watson (1991). DFM attempts to identify repetitive and common sequences in series, or co-movements. The interpretation of the co-movements depends on the characteristics of the variables; the most common case is when data related to economic activity are taken into account and, consequently, the co-movement approximates the business cycle.

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Cuban Macroeconomic Trends : 283 The most used methods for DFM are principal components estimation and the Kalman filter. Principal components estimation requires a large number of variables that becomes a disadvantage when studying Cuba, given the lack of available data. In this article, the Kalman filter has been applied. It is the foremost algorithm for estimating a dynamic system represented in state-space form.6 DFM assumes that a vector Yt with N observed variables, can be represented as the sum of two unobserved, mutually independent components: one component is common to all variables (Ft), and one is idiosyncratic (µt) and represents the dynamics of each series. Then, the equation for the observed Yt is as follows: t

where P is a loading matrix (N 1) and represents the weight of each variable in the common factor (Ft). The common factor or co-movement (Ft) of the variables is the index, and the weight matrix (P) with which each variable contributes to the index calculation (see appendix). These five indexes are then included in a vector autoregression (VAR) model along with Cuba’s GDP growth rate. The VAR model is estimated in order to simulate the macroeconomic effects of different kinds of shocks, considering the dynamic relations in multiple directions among the variables: AX t

C L X t –1

ut ,

where X is a vector with five indexes and GDP growth rate (also standardized), all the variables being I(0). C(L) is a polynomial in the lag operator having the coefficients that relate each variable with the lags of the rest of the variables and with its own lags. Only one lag is specified following the likelihood ratio (LR) test. Also, ut represents the shock associated with each variable (structural shocks), and there is assumed to be no correlated residual white noise (E(utut' ) is assumed to be a diagonal matrix). Matrix A is formed by the coefficients aij containing contemporary relationships among variables. Matrix A is a restraint following Cholesky’s decomposition to identify the system and estimate impulse-response functions. A is a triangular matrix:

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284 : Pavel Vidal-Alejandro where every line defines the contemporaneous effect over the ExtIndex, ProdIndex, FispIndex, MonpIndex, HousehIndex, and GDP, in that order. GDP is the most “endogenous” variable, because it can be affected contemporaneously by all indexes. The rest of the restrictions are established by trying to approximate characteristics of macroeconomic relations and policy in the Cuban economy. Given the particular characteristics of the markets in Cuba (price controls, currency and exchange rate duality, market segmentations, and command central planning), conventional structural modeling of transmission mechanisms is ineffective; specifically, it makes little sense to use equations like the Phillips curve, the IS curve, Uncovered Interest Parity, or the Taylor rule. In the Cuban case, time-series econometrics result in a more viable alternative. Results Macroeconomic trends Table 1 shows the weights (P) estimated by maximum likelihood using the Kalman filter, that is, the weight that variables contribute to each index. All variables have a positive correlation with the index to which they belong. The TABLE 1. Weights (P) with which each variable contributes to macroeconomic indexes (P) ProdIndex Agriculture (AGR) Manufacturing industry (IND) Mining (MIN) Construction (CONS) Investments(INV)

ExtIndex 20.8 26.3 5.7 18.8 28.4

HousehIndex Employment (EMP) Aggregate consumption (CON) Real average wage (WAGE) Real income (INCOM) Unemployment rate (UNER)

(P) Import (M) Export (X) External financing (EF) Terms of trade (TOT)

35.5 19.1 22.9 22.5

MonpIndex 19.2 25.8 29.7 27.5 -2.2

Cash in circulation (M0) Monetary aggregate (M2) Savings accounts (SAV) Consumer price index (CPI) Exchange rate (RATE)

21.5 24.6 21.3 14.5 18.1

FispIndex Government demand (GOVD) Tax revenue (TAX) Total fiscal expenditures (FISEXP) Education expenditures (EDU) Health expenditures (HEA) Subsidies to enterprises (SUB) Fiscal deficit (DEF)

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19.2 10.5 19.8 20.3 14.2 8.5 7.6

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FIGURE 1. Macroeconomic indexes, 1985–2013. Co-movement (Ft) estimated with the Kalman filter (standardized variation rate).

exception is the unemployment rate, and this finding is in line with expectations, since an increase in the unemployment rate means a worsening of the households’ living conditions. The only series with a questionable sign is collected taxes, since tax increases are associated with a contractionary fiscal policy. Note that this study is not measuring tax rates but tax revenues. Figure 1 shows the five estimated indexes. Indexes provide synthetic information on trends and turning points of macroeconomic performance and fiscal and monetary policies. According to the variables included in each of the indexes, an increase above zero means improvement in the growth rate of production of goods (ProdIndex), favorable balance-of- payments position (ExtIndex), improvement in economic conditions of households (HousehIndex), expansionary fiscal policy (FispIndex), and expansionary monetary policy (MonpIndex), all in relation to their average value for the period 1985–2013. There are four visibly different moments distinguishing Cuban macroeconomic trends and policy over the period, which in turn synthetize the economic facts described in the previous section: 1990–1993: After the fall of the Soviet Union, indexes show a sharp deterioration of the external sector situation, collapse of goods production, and significant negative effects on households’ economic conditions. In this period fiscal policy reaction was procyclical and monetary policy was countercyclical.

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286 : Pavel Vidal-Alejandro 1994–2003: Following the opening of the economy, indexes show that constraints on the balance of payments were relaxed, production of goods began to grow with ups and downs, and households’ economic conditions slowly improved. Fiscal and monetary policy moved progressively from contractionary to moderate. 2004–2008: In the period of closer economic relations with Venezuela, indexes show a relaxing of the balance of payments constraints, which, however, had no substantial and sustainable effect on either production of goods or households’ economic conditions. Fiscal policy was extremely expansionary. Monetary policy was excessively expansionary in 2005 during the de-dollarization of the economy. 2009–2013: During the Raúl Castro presidency, indexes show a negative external shock in 2009 and procyclical adjustment of fiscal and monetary policies, while goods production slowed down, and the households’ economic conditions tended to stagnate. These results confirm that economic reforms failed to provide the promised vitality to investments, agriculture, industry, exports, and households’ economic indicators.

The correlations between the indexes and GDP growth show that, on average during the period 1985–2013, fiscal policy tends to be procyclical (the correlation coefficient is 0.69), and monetary policy tends to be countercyclical (the correlation coefficient is –0.43). Macroeconomic Shocks: Lessons for the Pending Currency Reform The following analysis focuses on simulating with the VAR model three kinds of shocks: monetary policy shock, fiscal policy shock, and external shock. These shocks would be connected with the currency and exchange rate unification. The positive external shock could be linked to a scenario of international opening. Whatever monetary reforms the Cuban authorities finally undertake (today their detailed plans are secret), devaluation of the official exchange rate of the Cuban peso would be the cornerstone. Devaluation of the exchange rate would have to be significant due to the huge gap between the current exchange rates (2,300 percent). Devaluation would generate upward pressure on inflation and create financial stress on the balance sheets of the SOEs and banks. According with the pieces of information the government has provided on its strategy to implement the monetary reform, it is considering an economic policy response that tends to cushion most of the real effects of the devaluation on SOEs’ balance sheets through subsidies and accounting adjustments. The government would try to keep inflation under control, so price subsidies in retail markets increase. In this scenario, the transition to a single currency is accompanied by higher government expenditures and deficits and by expansionary monetary

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Cuban Macroeconomic Trends : 287 policy. This option would lead to a rise in both the fiscal policy index and the monetary policy index. The impulse-response functions associated with each of these shocks are shown in figures 2 and 3. According to the impulse-response functions, an expansionary monetary policy (a positive shock in the index) would have a negative impact on goods production, households’ living conditions, and even GDP. The major negative effects manifest themselves with a two-year lag. Therefore, the Cuban authorities’ preoccupation with the possible negative effects of monetary reform is well founded. The government is expecting to mitigate the negative impacts of exchange rate devaluation by pursuing an expansionary fiscal policy; however, according

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FIGURE 2. Response to a shock in monetary policy index.

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288 : Pavel Vidal-Alejandro

FIGURE 3. Response to a shock in fiscal policy index.

to the simulations, neither goods production nor households’ conditions show a significant response to fiscal policy shocks (see fig. 3). Rather, such a fiscal shock could mitigate only the negative impact on GDP, and the reason might be that this variable has a large service sector component (76.3 percent) including public education and public medical services. To understand the results for monetary and fiscal policy shocks, consider the following. During the study period (1985–2013), two expansionary monetary shocks occurred: one at the beginning of the 1990s and the other in 2005. The first led to triple-digit inflation, and the second led to a financial crisis. Both had a negative consequence for production and households, and neither event could be mitigated by fiscal policy. Even when fiscal policy can help pro-

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Cuban Macroeconomic Trends : 289 vide subsidies to a certain group of enterprises and households, it does not have the capacity to exert a significant influence on these sectors as a whole. The lack of significance of fiscal policy for the goods-producing sector can be explained by its dependence on balance-of-payments constraints. The major budget constraint on the SOEs is not defined by subsidies or fiscal expenditures in Cuban pesos or convertible pesos, but by foreign currency availability to pay for imported inputs and capital goods. Below we will see that the goods production index shows a very significant response to external shocks. The lack of significance of fiscal policy for households’ economic conditions can also be explained by the fact that only economic indicators have

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FIGURE 4. Response to a shock in external sector index.

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290 : Pavel Vidal-Alejandro been considered (income, consumption, employment) and not the related social indicators. Based on this discussion, clearly fiscal policy alone is not sufficient to cushion the Cuban economy from the shocks of the expected exchange rate devaluation. Opening the economy in the 1990s was a positive experience that produced rapid and visible improvement in the goods production index and households’ economic conditions index. The VAR model estimation confirms this impression: a favorable shock in the external sector results in very significant and same-sign responses in goods production, GDP growth, and households’ economic conditions. The response is immediate (in the same year) and increases in the following year (see fig. 4). The monetary policy index shows a significant response to an external sector shock, with the opposite sign and a one-year lag. Therefore, such a positive external shock could compensate the expansionary monetary policy and its inflationary effects associated with the monetary reform. In short, econometric estimation informs economic policy recommendations by showing that the best way to cushion the cost of currency reform is not by following an expansionary fiscal policy but by opening the economy and promoting international integration, so that monetary unification can proceed under better balance-of-payments conditions. Conclusions The correlations between the estimated indexes and GDP growth show that, on average, during the period 1985–2013 Cuba’s fiscal policy has been procyclical while monetary policy has been countercyclical. The estimated indexes exposed that during the period 2004–2007, when relations with Venezuela took off, the Cuban economy did not get a significant or sustainable upsurge in goods production and households’ economic conditions. Furthermore, the prevalent tendency since 1995 toward moderate fiscal and monetary policies was broken. From 2008 to the present, economic policy under Raúl Castro’s presidency has been obliged to apply procyclical fiscal adjustments. Structural reforms failed to provide the promised vitality to goods production and have not resulted yet in an improvement in households’ economic conditions. Econometric simulations suggest that pending monetary reforms could create negative pressure on goods production and on households’ living conditions that cannot be mitigated with an expansionary fiscal policy. Instead, mitigation of the negative effects can be achieved through greater international openness.

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Cuban Macroeconomic Trends : 291 Appendix Cuban exchange rate regimen The exchange rate regime in Cuba involves two national currencies, multiple exchange rates, and exchange control, with markedly different implications for individuals and organizations. Individuals can engage in transactions in the consumer market using either Cuban pesos (CUP) or Cuban convertible pesos (CUC). They are also allowed to have savings accounts denominated in either of these two currencies or in US dollars. Individuals can freely buy and sell currencies in the house of exchange (CADECA) and in the stated-owned commercial banks. The exchange rate of the CUP for individuals (individuals, the self-employed, and tourists) is 24CUP:1USD. This fixed exchange rate was established by the Central Bank’s Committee on Monetary Policy. From 1995 to 2001, the CUP exchange rate regime was close to what could be described as a managed floating regime. The exchange rate of the Cuban convertible peso is 1CUC:1USD. Its exchange rate with respect to other foreign currencies depends on the value of the US dollar in international currency markets. A currency board ensured the parity between the CUC and the US dollar, but after the de-dollarization in 2005 the board was disbanded. When Cubans or foreign tourists sell US dollars, they pay a 10 percent tax. This tax was established to discourage tourists and senders of remittances from bringing US dollars into the Cuban economy (because of the US embargo) and to encourage them to bring euros or other foreign currency instead. There is a black market for both currencies, which operates with values similar to the exchange rates; the premium is around 5 percent to 10 percent. For organizations (mainly SOEs, public institutions, and joint ventures), the exchange rates are 1CUP:1USD and 1CUC:1USD; that is, both national currencies have parity to the US dollar. The exchange rate of the Cuban peso for organizations (also commonly referred to as the official exchange rate) is used for recordkeeping purposes for balance sheets and financial reports, and for computing the budget and the national accounts. Enterprises cannot directly use their income in CUP or CUC to buy US dollars or other foreign currency. Instead, since 2005, a single centralized hard currency account (Cuenta Única de Ingresos en Divisas del Estado) at the Central Bank has served as an exchange control mechanism limiting the convertibility of the national currencies for enterprises. Thus, the Ministry of the Economy and Planning and the Central Bank assign available hard currency at their discretion every year. Enterprises and institutions are prohibited from operating in the exchange market for individuals and arbitraging the differences in the exchange rates for

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292 : Pavel Vidal-Alejandro the Cuban peso; this would be difficult in any case, as individuals engage in operations involving only small amounts of cash. As of December 1, 2011, a special exchange rate of 10CUP:1USD was established for transactions between state hotels (and state restaurants) and agricultural cooperatives. This exchange rate is also used for transportation cooperatives to purchase imported inputs and for a group of SOEs under a special experimental monetary regime. More recently, this special rate was also established for calculating salaries in the Mariel special economic zone. The Dynamic Factor Model DFM assumes that a vector Yt , with N observed variables, can be represented as the sum of two unobserved, mutually independent components: one component is common to all variables Ft , and one is idiosyncratic t and represents the dynamics of each series. Then, the equation for the observed Yt is Yt

P Ft

t

,

(1)

where P is a loading matrix (N 1) and represents the weight of each variable in the common factor Ft . The dynamic factor is given by B Ft

at ,

(2)

where at is the normal multivariate white noise with variance and covariance p matrix . . B I ... and B is the lag operator. The idpB 1B a iosyncratic components may also present a dynamic structure in the form of D B

et ,

t

(3)

where Di B 1 di1 B ... dipi B pi, i 1, 2, . . . m, corresponds to the autoregression structure of each idiosyncratic disturbance represented with the lag operator. et is a zero mean white noise with diagonal covariance matrix. For the specifications of the five indexes, factor and idiosyncratic components follow AR(1) processes, which is feasible since we are dealing with annual data. To estimate the model, it is written in state space form: Yt H z t (4) t zt

G zt

1

vt

(5)

Equation (4) is called the measurement equation which describes the relationship between the observed variables and a vector of the state variables, where H is a matrix (N m), t es (N 1), with t ~ iid N (0, R). Equation (5) is called the transition equation. G is a transition matrix m m, vt es m 1 and also vt ~ iid N (0, Q). It is assumed that the errors in the measurement equation t are independent of the errors in the transition equation vt. The basic Kalman filter relies on an algorithm of prediction and updating of the vector zt , which is repeated for each observation from the beginning to the

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Cuban Macroeconomic Trends : 293 end of the sample using the initial values on the system parameters (matrixes: H, G, R, and Q). The algorithm minimizes the mean square error in a recursive way: each observation zt is updated with the new information contained in the prediction error (Kalman gain). A complete description of the Kalman filter is in Hamilton (1994) and Koopman, Shephard, and Doornik (1999). Then, in the zt state vector and on the H matrix is the most relevant information for the analysis: the common factor or co-movement Ft of the variables (the index) and the weight matrix (P) with which each one contributes to the index calculation. NOTES 1. For extensive analysis of the current reform in Cuba, see the texts by Alonso and Vidal (2013), Brundenius and Torres (2013), Mesa-Lago and Pérez-López (2013), and Vidal (2016). 2. Since 2014, the finance ministry has been announcing the implementation of new ways to finance the fiscal deficit. Seventy percent of the fiscal deficit approved was financed by emitting bonds; only 30 percent was covered through the primary emission of money by the Central Bank. Since then, the ministry has used this funding mechanism. Cuba’s commercial banks will be the bonds’ buyers. The bonds are not offered in a competitive market, but rather through administrative mechanisms. The bond mechanism is only for Cuban pesos, but the deficits in convertible pesos (CUC) continue to be financed with money printing. 3. See Hidalgo and Doimeadios (2016) for a comprehensive analysis of Cuban fiscal policy. 4. The logarithm is not applied to the unemployment rate. 5. INCOM registers the Cuban pesos income that families receive as follows: wages and other payments related to employment in the state sector, the income received by cooperatives, the self-employed, and other private sector workers from their sales to the state sector, and revenues in pesos from selling foreign currency or convertible pesos at exchange houses (Cadeca) and banks (these revenues come from remittances, tourism-related activities, and other sources of hard currency earnings). 6. Others using this method to build economic activity indexes are Angelini, Banbura, and Rünstler (2010) and Camacho and Doménech (2012) who applied a DFM using monthly and quarterly data to predict economic activity in the euro zone and in Spain, respectively. Other models of the euro zone are by Camacho and Perez-Quiros (2010) and Camacho, Perez-Quiros, and Poncela (2013).

REFERENCES Alonso, J. A., and P. Vidal, eds. 2013. ¿Quo vadis, Cuba? La incierta senda de las reformas. Madrid: Catarata. Angelini, E., M. Banbura, and G. Rünstler. 2010. “Estimating and Forecasting the Euro Area Monthly National Accounts from a Dynamic Factor Model.” Journal of Business Cycle Measurement and Analysis 1: 1–22. Brundenius, C., and R. Torres, eds. 2013. No More Free Lunch: Reflections on the Cuban Economic Reform Process and Challenges for Transformation. New York: Springer Science and Business Media. Camacho, M., and R. Doménech. 2012. “MICA-BBVA: A Factor Model of Economic and Financial Indicators for Short-Term GDP Forecasting.” SERIEs 3, no. 4: 475–497.

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294 : Pavel Vidal-Alejandro Camacho, M., and G. Perez-Quiros. 2010. “Introducing the Euro-STING: Short Term Indicator of Euro Area Growth.” Journal of Applied Econometrics 25, no. 4: 663–694. Camacho, M., G. Perez-Quiros, and P. Poncela. 2013. “Short-Term Forecasting for Empirical Economists: A Survey of the Recently Proposed Algorithms.” Foundations and Trends in Econometrics 6, no. 2: 101–162. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). 2000. La economía cubana: Reformas estructurales y desempeño en los noventa. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Cuba Standard. 2015. Cuba Standard Business Confidence Survey. https://www.cubastandard. com/?page_id 12796. De la Torre, A., and A. Ize. 2014. “Exchange Rate Unification: The Cuban Case.” In Cuba’s Economic Change in Comparative Perspective, edited by R. Feinberg and T. Piccone, 103–116. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. Feinberg, R. 2011. Reaching Out: Cuba’s New Economy and the International Response. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. Font, M., and D. Jancsics. 2015. “From Planning to Market: A Framework for Cuba.” Bulletin of Latin American Research 35, no. 2: 147–164. Hidalgo, V., and Y. Cribeiro. 2015. “Estrategia de crecimiento y equilibrio macroeconómico en Cuba.” Economía y desarrollo 153, 30–48. Hidalgo, V., and Y. Doimeadios. 2016. “Sostenibilidad fiscal: Prioridad en la agenda de transformaciones del modelo económico cubano.” Investigación económica 298: 155–184. Hamilton, J. 1994. Time series analysis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Koopman, S., N. Shephard, and J. A. Doornik. 1999. “Statistical Algorithms for Models in State Space Using SsfPack 2.2.” Econometrics Journal 2, no. 1: 107–160. Mesa-Lago, C., and J. Pérez-López. 2013. Cuba under Raúl Castro: Assessing the Reforms. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Mesa-Lago, C., and P. Vidal. 2010. “The Impact of the Global Crisis on Cuba’s Economy and Social Welfare.” Journal of Latin American Studies 42, no. 04: 689–717. National Statistics and Information Office of Cuba (ONEI). Various years. Statistical Yearbook. Havana: ONEI. Torres, R. 2014. “Transformations in the Cuban Economic Model Context, General Proposal, and Challenges.” Latin American Perspectives 41, no. 4: 74–90. Sargent, T., and C. Sims. 1977. “Business Cycle Modeling without Pretending to Have Too Much A-Priori Economic Theory.” New Methods in Business Cycle Research 1: 145–168. Stock, J., and M. Watson. 1991. “A Probability Model of the Coincident Economic Indicators.” In Leading Economic Indicators, New Approaches, and Forecasting Records, edited by K. Lahiri and G. H. Moore, 63–85. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vidal, P. 2016. “Cuba’s Reform and Economic Growth: A Comparative Perspective with Vietnam.” Journal of Economic Policy Reform 19, no. 2: 148–165. Vidal, P., and O. Pérez. 2014. “Monetary Reform in Cuba Leading to 2016: Between Graduation and the Big Bang.” In Cuba’s Economic Change in Comparative Perspective, edited by R. Feinberg and T. Piccone, 85–102. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. Vidal, P., and S. Brown. 2015. Cuba’s Economic Reintegration: Begin with the International Financial Institutions. Washington, DC: Atlantic Council.

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EDUARDO ROCA “CHOCO”

Te estoy mirando

FIGURE 1. Eduardo Roca “Choco,” Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas 2017, Te estoy mirando, 2010, collagraph, 25″ × 18 ″ (63.5cm × 47cm). Te estoy mirando is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

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CHRISTOPH SINGLER

Cartas contra la deriva Universidad del Franco-Condado, Besançon A la memoria de Manuel Gómez, esposo de Antonia Eiriz

Los estudios de períodos particulares de la pintura cubana del siglo XX están emergiendo, pensemos en el volumen que Abigail McEwen publicó sobre la década de 1950.1 Si bien el criterio identitario, martiano, aplicado por McEwen no me convence del todo, más allá de la clasificación por generaciones, comodín de muchas historias, de arte o de literatura, en todo el continente, McEwen tiene el mérito de reconstruir el entramado de los años 50, de modo que por fin podemos pensar que nos vamos acercando a los actores de esta historia. Abrir los archivos personales permitirá dar un paso más en la captación de las estrategias políticas, profesionales y artísticas de las personas e instituciones implicadas. El cambio de escala no solamente arroja luz sobre la vida cotidiana; es un correctivo para los framings tan amplios que dejan apenas ver a “los enanos debajo de la capa gigante,” para decirlo con Shakespeare. “Enanos” no en términos artísticos, se entiende: basta con ajustar el marco al contexto local para que vuelvan a su tamaño humano. Las cinco cartas aquí presentadas confirman las investigaciones recientes a propósito de las prácticas de censura y de represión homofóbica instauradas desde los primeros años de la Revolución cubana, pero dejan entrever varias tramas paralelas más: la disolución de amistades artísticas, el deseo de mantener los lazos más allá de barreras políticas, y se aprende a ubicar la dimensión política del arte donde la política trata de desalojarla, es decir en la defensa de una ética artística personal, desgraciadamente enajenable. No sabemos cuáles son los canales que utilizaban los corresponsales. Las más de las veces son amigos comunes que llevan o traen los mensajes, pero también pasaron por el correo nacional, lo cual explica que no siempre escriban abiertamente. Vaya por delante alguna información sobre Guido Llinás, destinatario de estas cartas. Se exilió en mayo de 1963 rumbo a París, donde murió en 2005. Desde ese mismo momento inició una correspondencia prolija no solamente con la familia sino con sus numerosos amigos artistas, arquitectos, escritores, universitarios, etc. Entre estos, destaca su correspondencia con Antonia Eiriz, amiga íntima desde los primeros años de la década del 50, correspondencia intensa y enjundiosa hasta 1995, año de la muerte de Eiriz en Miami. Con Calvert Casey

301

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302 : Christoph Singler el intercambio epistolar, interrumpido por el suicidio de éste en mayo de 1969, fue más bien angustiante a partir de su exilio en 1966. Y finalmente las cartas de Raúl Martínez, llenas de verdades a medias tintas, de silencios y a veces de juegos de palabras para despistar a los censores. Las dos cartas reproducidas son buena muestra de su estilo. Con el tiempo se van espaciando. A principios de los años 70 ya el contacto se vuelve esporádico, y sólo muy de tarde en tarde llegará una tarjeta postal de Martínez, con ocasión de algún viaje fuera del territorio nacional. Por cierto, para no comprometer a su familia, según el propio Llinás, se fue sin declaraciones estruendosas, con el apoyo de Marta Arjona, entonces directora del Consejo Nacional de Cultura. En los primeros años en París sigue yendo a diversas fiestas de fin de año organizadas por la Embajada, y hasta aparece su nombre en la nómina de una muestra de la pintura cubana que gira por los países socialistas en 1972. De modo que oficialmente no se le podía considerar como opositor, si bien no volviera a visitar Cuba antes de 1979, al cabo de dieciséis años de exilio. Si escribirle no supone pues mantener contacto con el enemigo, el grado de confianza entre Llinás y sus corresponsales varía. Cabe señalar que Llinás tenía fama de ser interlocutor incómodo; sarcástico, y nada acomodaticio. Se exilió cuando consideraba que la situación cubana le iba a exigir demasiados compromisos con respecto a su pintura, sobre todo después de la última exposición en 1963 de los pintores que habían quedado de los Once, grupo del cual había sido cofundador en 1953. En 2003 contó al historiador de arte Juan Martínez su encuentro con los censores en esta ocasión.2 En otro momento, declara en una discusión con Graziella Pogolotti que “la ‘pintura cubana’ [ . . . ] no existía, que había pinturas hechas por cubanos pero que la pintura cubana no existía ni en tubos [ . . . ] te puedes imaginar cómo le cayó.”3 De entre los tres, Antonia Eiriz parece ser quien más se deleita con el estilo irónico del maestro, sus cartas poseen un tono que indica total franqueza. En cambio, Martínez tenía motivos para temer los comentarios de Llinás: éste se mostró bastante severo con respecto a su posicionamiento estético, para él consecuencia de la persecución. Martínez a su vez se quejaría de Llinás, si bien nunca iba a haber explicación entre ellos4. Calvert Casey, por su lado, en una carta a Martínez publicada en Yo Publio, escribe que “veo poco a Guido y trato de no verlo, me desagrada su crueldad y cinismo que aumenta con los años, capaz de burlarse de la gente que ha pasado por la UMAP, desde su seguridad de París, montando toda clase de ficciones con tanta edad.”5 En las Memorias de Martínez la carta figura poco antes de una entrada en el diario donde Martínez se queja de Llinás, haciendo de Casey un aliado de su causa. Si fuera como escribe en estas líneas, habría escogido la figuración pop para deshacerse de la influencia de Llinás. Cuando está en la cima de la gloria en Cuba, en 1963, le escribe “no vengas.” De hecho, afirma que el exilio de Llinás

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fue alivio para él. El 22 de enero de 1965, le escribe: “si algo positivo sucedió pictóricamente en mi vida, fue sacudir tu tutela”. Se comprende entonces por qué Martínez considera su fase figurativa post-Once como más personal, de allí quizás su fidelidad al gobierno a pesar de sus muchos motivos para ser inconforme. Estamos en pleno drama psicológico, pero el pasaje citado señala que estas tensiones surgen a raíz de la situación en Cuba. Entre los tres corresponsales, las preocupaciones son similares: van de la política y la vida cultural a la represión, de la producción artística al estancamiento, de los viajes al aislamiento creciente, de los premiados a los rechazados; en particular las primeras redadas de homosexuales o más bien de los que lo parecieron, desde las zonas nocturnas del Vedado hasta las expulsiones tanto de alumnos como de profesores de la Escuela de Artes Plásticas donde enseñan Antonia Eiriz y Raúl Martínez. La primera escribe en calidad de testigo que va a tomar cartas en el asunto, el segundo como víctima. Calvert Casey hace alusión a la persecución desde 1963: alguien le trae carta de un amigo “pero yo le esquivé el cuerpo porque no es sensato pasear a desconocidos que después no verás más” (carta del 19 de septiembre de 1963); de paso menciona el fracaso de una solicitud de beca (19 de agosto de 1964 o 1965), y en otra misiva comunica su despido del cargo que ocupaba en Casa de las Américas (22 de agosto 1965). De pronto, un pasaje conmovedor: “Te volveré a ver? . . . mucho me temo que nunca más . . . Le cercueil se ferme, le tombeau, le tombeau, le tombeau adieu, adieu. . . . Ami, ami” (23 de agosto 1965).6 Antonia es quien más ahonda en el aspecto moral. Su reacción iracunda muestra que no hay necesidad de bajar la cabeza ante tales atropellos, por más que respondieran a directivas oficiales. Presenta su renuncia, por motivos sencillamente humanos, denunciando la delación, la humillación y marginación a que da lugar la limpieza moralista revolucionaria. En la segunda carta aquí publicada aprendemos un detalle poco conocido: el presidente Dorticós explica a Raquel y Vicente Revuelta que se ha notado un incremento de la homosexualidad en los países socialistas, y Cuba teme el contagio. Podemos preguntarnos si el fenómeno se debe a los progresos económicos socialistas, los cuales habrían llevado a la molicie generalizada, o si se trata de un virus traído por el personal venido del Este. Sea como fuere, al desconocer las causas se combatirán los síntomas. Martínez, por su parte, cuenta desde octubre de 1964 (carta 3a7) las redadas que se hacen en la Rampa y el Vedado, a la salida de los espectáculos, y a principios de 1966 (carta 4ª) describe los UMAP, que se llenaron poco antes del congreso de la Tricontinental en enero. Martínez constantemente conecta las malas noticias con su creación. Primero piensa inspirarse en las redadas para trabajar sobre “las lacras sociales.” No lo va a hacer. En su lugar, termina rompiendo con la abstracción para

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304 : Christoph Singler dedicarse a retratar los personajes míticos de la revolución mezclándolos con caras anónimas en un intento de fabricar un pop tropical socialista. Aquí, sin embargo, confiesa que está “al borde del abismo espiritual.” Viajar podría sacarlo del atolladero, pero el que le promete Mariano, alto funcionario de la UNEAC, se frustrará: no se reunirán en París “la razón, la emoción y la fuerza” —Llinás, Martínez y Eiriz, en este orden. Otra tentativa, para una exposición en México, se frustrará igualmente. En cambio, Hugo Consuegra es autorizado a salir con toda la familia y llevándose diez cuadros nuevos, hecho inusitado. Esta vez Martínez protesta en público de que lo consideren indigno de representar a Cuba (sobre este episodio, ver Singler 2010). Consuegra supo esconder su juego; no volverá. No hay vida justa dentro de lo falso, escribe Adorno en Minima Moralia. Incluso Antonia se interroga seriamente si no está haciendo progresos en la renuncia a sus criterios morales. En 1968 deja de pintar y se retira a Juanelo. La introspección de Martínez lo lleva a tocar fondo. Sin embargo, apenas hace amagos de rebelarse, vuelve a acomodarse, o viceversa. Calvert Casey cuenta a Llinás, en carta del 23 de agosto muy probablemente escrita en 1965, que “el ICAIC encargó a Raúl murales para la Galería esa lujosa e inútil. Raúl se llenó de orgullo y le estampó PM al mural. Alfredo8 escupió sangre e hizo bajar los murales y los devolvió a Raúl. La frivolidad abandona a Raúl, ya [el señor?] no necesita la aprobación social, corretea menos, se queda en casa y lee. Milagros que ocurren.” Guevara se contenta con retirar la obra evitando consecuencias mayores para el artista (sería interesante saber si Martínez conservó la obra). Pero la palabra clave aquí es frivolidad. Si entiendo bien el argumento de Casey, Martínez al presumir declarar su oposición a la política cultural del gobierno, lo que hace es recordar la famosa película sin cuestionar las consecuencias que su prohibición acarreó para el mundo artístico cubano. Frivolidad ya que el acto de rebeldía no pasa pues de ser una provocación gratuita. Puede que Martínez se sintiera protegido por Guevara —craso error: éste no puede permitir que este encargo personal comprometa políticamente a él y a la institución como tal; y puede que pensara incluso que las persecuciones hubieran terminado— por cierto, Ulive, director de la escuela de artes escénicas a y responsable de la represión, había sido destituido; Los mangos de Caín, cuya puesta en escena se había cancelado igualmente, fue publicada en diciembre del año anterior; y la homosexualidad sólo presentaría un problema en la enseñanza, según explicara el presidente Dorticós a los Revuelta. En todos los casos, Martínez se muestra inconsciente. Lo peor del caso es que prepara la necesidad de congraciarse con las autoridades posteriormente. La lucha que lleva Martínez contra el estrangulamiento cultural se convierte en una lucha contra el demonio interior, sincera pero no exenta de pathos y de autoengaño: la persecución no será más que un error, o como dice Antonia en la primera

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carta, “todo se va a disolver en una gelatina”; el artista debe deshacerse de su ideología burguesa para ahondar en los valores colectivos, etc. El resultado en Martínez es un arte donde la memoria individual —la memoria de Martínez— desaparece por completo. La solución estética es finalmente el silencio —Antonia Eiriz, el exilio—, Llinás, Casey, Consuegra, Oliva, en 1993 la misma Antonia; o bien la autocensura, Martínez. Si Antonia —en 1964— piensa dedicar un ensamblaje a una reunión del comité de defensa (CDR), parece compartir con el mural del ICAIC el mismo objeto de crítica. Pero existe una diferencia abismal: siendo partidaria de la revolución, Eiriz mide la nueva realidad con criterios morales personales, de allí su mirada feroz. Por su parte, Martínez cuestiona no su entorno, sino a sí mismo. Esto sí es sospechoso : si el mismo artista duda de sí mismo, ¿cómo no lo va hacer la revolución? Martínez, mientras más combate su ego, más permea éste su obra, formando su revés. Queda otra interpretación, menos especulativa. Tal como Llinás pintó en 1962 un “26” en un mural del cual sólo subsisten fotos, Martínez habrá pintado aquel “PM” como mera cita de una etapa superada. La reacción de Alfredo Guevara sería apenas desproporcionada. Volveríamos entonces al asunto de la memoria, la individual se entiende: los errores de la revolución se borran, y los culpables serán los que la mantengan, por tenue que fuera. Llinás concluirá en la carta de junio de 1971, escrita después del juicio a Padilla: “En cuanto al ‘problema’ cultural, eso es más complejo de lo que parece. Se recoge lo que se sembró, se le dio paso al oportunismo más descarado, se prefirió a los disfrazados de revolucionarios, a los ‘sí señor.’ [ . . . ] no se puede producir ‘artistas’ como latas de leche condensada, se puede crear un clima y quizás se produzca el fenómeno” (carta citada in extenso en Singler 2011, 101–102).

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FIGURA 1. Carta de Antonia Eiriz a Guido Llinás, 1 de septiembre, 1964

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FIGURA 2. Carta de Antonia Eiriz a Guido Llinás, 31 de enero, 1965

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FIGURA 3. Carta de Raul Martínez a Guido Llinás, 30 de octubre, 1964

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FIGURA 4. Carta de Raul Martínez a Guido Llinás, 10 de febrero, 1966

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FIGURA 5. Carta de Calvert Casey a Guido Llinás, 22 de agosto, 1964

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Las dos cartas de Antonia Eiriz pertenecen al archivo de Antonia Eiriz. Agradezco a Beatriz y Susana Barciela, sus herederas, la autorización de reproducirlas aquí. Las otras tres son del archivo de Guido Llinás. El año de la carta de Calvert Casey fue puesto por Guido Llinás, probablemente en la década de 1990, quizás más tarde. Los acontecimientos relatados se produjeron en 1965. Personas citadas (orden alfabético) • Acevedo: Miriam Acevedo (1928, La Habana—2013, Roma), actriz; actuó en el estreno de La noche de los asesinos en 1966. • Amán: Juan R. Amán, fundador del Grupo de Teatro Experimental de Aficionados. • Arenal, Hugo (1926–2012), dramaturgo. • Brene: José Ramón (1927–), dramaturgo. • Buchaca: Edith García Buchaca (1916–2015), vicepresidenta del Consejo Nacional de Cultura (CNC). Junto a Juan Marinello, Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, José Antonio Portuondo y Mirta Aguirre adversaria acérrima del arte abstracto. • Darié, Sandú (1908–1991), pintor rumano radicado en Cuba, miembro del grupo “Diez Pintores Concretos” entre 1958–1961. • Desnoes, Edmundo (1930), amigo de los Once, publica “1952–62 en la pintura cubana” en Oscar Hurtado: Pintores Cubanos, La Habana, Ediciones R 1962. • Díaz Domínguez, Fernando Luis (1932, La Habana; 1983, Miami), pintor. • N. Doll = Nicolás Dorr (1947–), dramaturgo cubano. • Dragún, Osvaldo (1929–1999, Argentina), dramaturgo que vino a Cuba en 1961, donde ganó el premio Casa de las Américas en 1962 y 1966. • Estorino, Abelardo (1922–2013), autor de Los mangos de Caín, publicada en el número 27 Revista de Casa de las América, diciembre de 1964. • Fornet, Ambrosio (1932): autor, investigador, profesor, miembro de la Academia cubana. • Escartín, Adela (1913–2010): actriz española que participó en el renuevo del teatro cubano entre 1952 y 1970. Antonia pudo haberla visto en Casa de muñecas, de Ibsen, estrenada en 1965. • Hugo C. : Hugo Consuegra (1929–2003): miembro de Los Once, emigra en 1966. • Lechuga: Carlos Lechuga (1918–2009): desde 1964 sucesor de Edith Buchaca como presidente del Consejo Nacional de Cultura. • Marta A.: Marta Arjona (1923–2006): desde 1959 directora de artes plásticas del Consejo Nacional de Cultura, más tarde directora nacional de Museos y Monumentos del Consejo Nacional de Cultura (anteriormente miembro de Nuestro Tiempo). • Matalia: probablemente se trata de Julio Matilla (1928), pintor amigo de los Once. • Oliva Raúl (1935–2003): escenógrafo (La noche de los asesinos de José Triana, 25 de noviembre de 1966).

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320 : Christoph Singler • Tomasito: Oliva, Tomás (1930–1996), escultor miembro del grupo de los Once (en los años 60 se convierte en comisario político personal de Raúl Martínez). Se exilia en 1970. • Pablo Armando Fernández (1930): escritor, miembro de la Academia cubana, fue subdirector de Lunes de la Revolución. • “Ramirito”: Ramiro Valdés (1932), Ministro del Interior hasta 1969. • Retamar: Roberto Fernández Retamar (1930): ensayista, Secretario de la UNEAC entre 1961–1964, y cofundador en 1962 de la revista Unión. A partir de 1965 dirige la revista Casa de las Américas. • Revuelta, Raquel y Vicente: Raquel Revuelta (1925–2004, actriz), hermana de Vicente Revuelta, (1929–2012), fundadores en 1958 del Teatro Estudio. • R. Saumell: Manuel Reguera Saumell (1928–), dramaturgo. Se exilió en 1970. • Saura, Antonio (1930–1998), pintor español expresionista. En 1966, primer viaje a Cuba. En 1968 participa en el Congreso cultural de La Habana. • Sergio: Sergio Llinás (1925–1997), hermano menor de Guido Llinás; destacado pedagogo pinareño. • Servando: Cabrera Moreno (1923–), pintor. Inició muy temprano la pintura heroica revolucionaria (ver Hurtado: Pintores cubanos. La Habana, Ediciones R, 1962). • Tapia Ruano, Juan (1914–1980): pintor cubano, muy cercano del grupo de Los Once. Se exilió a mediados de los años 60 en Madrid. • Traba, Marta (1930–1983): escritora e importante historiadora de arte argentina. • Ulive, Ugo (1933): dramaturgo y cineasta uruguayo, director de la escuela de Artes dramáticas desde 1961, destituido de su cargo por Lechuga. • Villita: José Manuel Villa Castillo (1939–2011), diseñador y escenógrafo. • Enrique Zañartu (1921–2000): artista chileno expone en la Casa de las Américas en 1964.

N O TA S 1. Abigail McEwen, Revolutionary Horizons: Art and Polemics in 1950s Cuba (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016). 2. Se trata de “Expresionismo abstracto,” Galería La Habana, 11 de enero a 3 de febrero. Participaron también Antonia Eiriz y el fotógrafo Mayito. J. Martínez (2003): “Al segundo o tercer día de la exposición me convocaron a la galería porque iban a recibir becados, y como me dijo un comisario político, yo tenía que explicar esos cuadros abstractos que nadie entendía. Yo le respondí que eso es como si le dieran un libro escrito en chino y no lo entendía. No quería decir que no tuviera significado, solamente que no entendía el lenguaje. Eso es lo que pasa con esa pintura. Y cuando a esos becados les enseñen sobre el arte contemporáneo lo entenderán. Al comisario no le gustó mi respuesta y escribió un reporte acusándome de enemigo del pueblo.” 3. En carta a su hermano Sergio, 12 de junio de 1971. El contexto en que Llinás se atreve a formular semejante provocación es probablemente la preparación de una gira por los países socialistas en 1962, apenas un año después de las sesiones de la Biblioteca Nacional. 4. En 1983 comenta la visita que Llinás hace a Cuba: “Sus sarcasmos son igualitos a los de la década del cincuenta. Guido es despreciativo hacia todo lo que le rodea. ¿Es una autodefensa? Habló de la pintura que estoy haciendo, se refirió a ‘cuando yo sabía pintar,’ enseñando a los

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amigos uno de mis cuadros abstractos. Lo triste es que cuando yo pintaba ‘uno de esos cuadros’ a él le parecían una obra menor. Fue una etapa de inseguridad en mi pasado en la que sólo pintaba para poder escuchar el juicio fulminante de Guido —quien nunca creyó realmente en mi talento y a quien yo, vanamente, trataba de demostrar que lo tenía.” Termina evocando sus “críticas y observaciones irónicas, en apariencia juguetonas.” En Yo, Publio: Confesiones (La Habana: Ed. Letras Cubanas, 2007), 401–402. 5. Martínez, Yo, Publio, 401. La carta, del 2 de noviembre, no lleva el año, pero señala que acaba de terminar la novela, Gianni Gianni, de la cual sólo sobrevivirá un capítulo. Estaríamos a fines de 1967 o 1968. 6. “El ataúd se cierra, la tumba, la tumba, la tumba adiós, adiós.” 7. Desgraciadamente, sólo se ha conservado la página aquí reproducida en los archivos de Llinás. 8. Alfredo Guevara, presidente del ICAIC desde 1959 hasta 1983. El año no se indica, pero Casey menciona el no. 27 de la revista Casa de las Américas que se publicó en diciembre de 1964.

REFERENCIAS Consuegra, Hugo. 2001. Elapso tempore. Miami: Universal. Martínez, Juan. 2003. “Guido Llinás The Printmaker: An Interview/Essay.” In Guido Llinás: Printmaking, 1964–2002, editado por Ricardo Viera, 17–20. Bethlehem, PA: Dubois Gallery, Lehigh University, 17–20. Martínez, Raúl (2007): Yo, Publio: Confesiones. La Habana: Editorial Letras Cubanas. Pogolotti, Graziella ed. 2006. Polémicas culturales de los 60. La Habana: Editorial Letras Cubanas. Portuondo, José Antonio. 1963. Estética y revolución. La Habana: Ediciones Unión. Singler, C. 2011. “Contra el autoengaño: Guido Llinás en el París de los años 1960.” In Historias enredadas: Asimetrías internas y externas en la circulación del saber: Proyecciones culturales del Caribe, editado por Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger, 83–106. Berlín: Editorial Tranvía. Singler, C. 2010. “Nuevas de la deriva: La correspondencia de Guido Llinás en los años 1960.” In Diasporic Movements / Movimientos diaspóricos, editado por Marta Zapata Galindo, S. Kron, B. zur Nieden y S. Schütze, 85–104. Berlín: Tranvía.

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Jennifer L. Lambe, Madhouse: Psychiatry and Politics in Cuban History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. 344 pp. When I was growing up in Marianao near Havana in the 1940s and 1950s, Mazorra, the insane asylum, had become part of Cuban folklore as the place where Liborio, the cartoon character of the archetypal white Cuban, would have dispatched every oddball he’d run into during his meandering through the city. That, and the periodic exposés in the Cuban press of the poorly fed, emaciated inmates dressed in rags remained engraved in the memory of my generation. Jennifer Lambe, a young scholar at Brown University, has written a definitive story of the real Mazorra, from its foundation in the colonial Cuba of 1857 until the present, based on a thorough and magnificent job of mining the archives, periodicals, and documents related to that institution. Through Mazorra, Lambe also explores, as the subtitle of the book suggests, the history of mental health in Cuba and its relation to broad social and political processes before and after the revolution of 1959. COLONIAL AND REPUBLICAN PERIODS As Lambe writes, at its mid-nineteenth-century inception, Mazorra was designed as a warehouse for the socially marginalized, and for the emancipated former slaves and other people of color unable to earn a living due to old age or illness. Created by the colonial government as a way to exclude nonpaying inmates from charitable institutions, it featured a long-lasting policy of forced labor by its inmates that continued long after slavery was abolished. From the end of colonial rule in 1898 to the 1959 Revolution, Mazorra went through recurring cycles of reform and regression. The US military interventions of 1899 and 1906 working jointly with enlightened Cuban administrators, such as Lucas Álvarez Cerice, the superintendent of Mazorra, made significant progress in the respectful treatment of inmates, electrification, the installation of new beds and new toilets, the implementation of work therapy, and the replacement of the nuns attending the patients with trained nurses. Conditions worsened considerably afterward, during the early Republican period leading up to the 1933 Revolution, caused by the scarcity of doctors and reduced budgets that brought about considerable overcrowding. The theories of the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso and of American eugenics led to racist notions reflected in the treatment of patients at the institution. For example, criminologists and medical doctors working there argued that white women had more difficulty giving birth because their vulvas occupied a higher location, which “explained” why black women had more children. The mass revolution that overthrew the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado in 1933 awakened great social and political expectations that were for the most

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328 : Book Reviews part frustrated but whose reformist thrust continued unabated up to the 1950s. This was reflected in the advances in social legislation enshrined in the socially progressive and democratic Constitution of 1940. In the specific case of Mazorra, President Ramón Grau San Martín (1944–1948), a university professor of physiology who had been one of the principal leaders of the 1933 Revolution, appointed Dr. Esteban Valdés Castillo, a noted forensic psychiatrist and the director of a well-known private clinic, as the institution’s new director. Valdes Castillo installed a full medical staff, including ninety-six physicians, of which twenty-five were psychiatrists; developed occupational, art, music, gym, and play therapy programs; acquired modern scientific equipment; and erected a baseball stadium and other sports arenas. Most important, he introduced the medical treatment model of inmates as patients, instead of deviants. Unfortunately, his directorship lasted a little more than a year. He was removed after being accused of irregularities in state credits for the hospital budget, but this accusation has been challenged by accounts that have blamed political maneuvering for his firing. Not too long after Valdés Castillo was fired, Grau named Luis Suárez Fernández, a neurosurgeon and brother of Miguel Suárez Fernández, the head of the Senate, to direct Mazorra. With this appointment began the regression phase of the cycle with the implantation of institutional politicking and its reign of firings, sinecures, and no-show jobs (botellas). As in so many other aspects of Cuban life, the effects of corruption at Mazorra worsened under the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista (1952–1958). Batista’s government ran Mazorra on a nepotistic basis: the two people who directed the hospital during his administration were first, Carlos Salas Humara, his former personal secretary married to his sister-in-law. Salas Humara had not yet completed his medical training when he was appointed to direct Mazorra. He was succeeded by Dr. Antonio Lamas Parra, who was married to one of Batista’s nieces. The disastrous record of Batista’s government in Mazorra became evident when in January 1958, the press reported that seventy-three patients had died there in less than two months due to poor living conditions and the effects of a cold front. A little more than a week later, another press organ reported that another nine patients had died in the interim. As conditions in Mazorra kept oscillating between reform and regression, more unambiguous advances were taking place in the fields of psychology and psychiatry in the island. Underscoring the growth of professionalization in those fields, in 1944 the Cuban Society of Neurology and Psychiatry was revitalized followed by the founding of the Cuban Society of Psychotherapy in 1951, the Cuban Society of Psychology in 1954, and the Cuban Psychoanalytic Society in 1955. The reform ambiance strengthened by these developments led to the establishment of outpatient facilities in Havana’s mental hygiene service and, as Lambe points out, to attempts to extend psychiatric care to the urban poor, and to the founding of a psychiatric social worker service and clinical studies in

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Havana schools. She notes, however, that Mazorra continued to play its historic role as the national warehouse for the chronically ill patients as new private sanatoria, accessible only to the more affluent, were built on Havana’s outskirts and no alternative centers to treat the mentally ill were built outside Havana. THE CUBAN REVOLUTION OF 1959 AND ITS AFTERMATH According to Lambe, the Cuban Revolution of 1959 had a major, qualitative impact on Mazorra and more broadly on the treatment of mental illness in the country as a whole. The cycles of reform and regression of the republican past were brought to an end as part of the radical expansion and systematization of the patchy welfare state that had emerged from the frustrated revolution of 1933. Under the long-lasting directorship of Major Bernabé Ordaz, a medical doctor personally appointed by Fidel Castro in 1959, new practices affecting every aspect of the institution were implemented, including the reinstitution of many reforms that had been tried in the past: a renovated pharmacy, a new Department of Identification, baseball fields, music halls, and patient workshops. Generous support from the government made it possible for Ordaz to raise the per capita patient expenditures that had gone down to as little as 12 cents per day. As a result, patient mortality substantially declined from 20.8 percent in 1958 to 5.1 percent in 1960. Occupational therapy became the predominant treatment at the hospital and by 1966 it was utilized almost nine times as often as electroshock. Cane cutting became predominant in work therapy although patients of peasant origin were much more likely to be selected for those agricultural tasks. The extensive reforms carried out at Mazorra justifiably received worldwide praise. THE PACKAGE OF CHANGE The clear advancements achieved in Mazorra, as in other aspects of the improved and expanded Cuban welfare state, were an integral part of a total political package that featured, at its very center, the establishment of a one-party state controlling the whole economy and society through its institutional transmission belts such as the trade unions and women’s organization aided by a monolithic mass media and state security organs. The arbitrary behavior of the authorities disregarding fundamental conceptions of individual and collective rights was an important part of this package, which expressed itself in a number of ways, particularly in the treatment of homosexuality. Defining homosexuals as deviants, the revolutionary government forcefully interned them, from the middle to the late sixties, along with many other Cubans belonging to political and religious minorities, in the labor

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330 : Book Reviews camps known as the Military Units to Aid Productions (UMAP). Lambe gives numerous examples of how the government’s policy affected the therapeutic philosophy and treatment of gay people in Mazorra and in other Cuban mental health institutions. The work of the very influential psychiatrist Edmundo Gutiérrez Agramonte who promoted the Pavlovian method to “cure” homosexuality was a sign of the times. Modifying the aversion therapy practiced by Czech sexologist Kurt Freund, Agramonte developed his “cure” based on electroshock therapy, which he implemented on ten Mazorra inmates being shown a series of erotic images of men and women that the inmates themselves had selected presumably based on their erotic appeal to them. Agramonte claimed promising results for his treatment, reporting “success” in the case of five subjects, no change in four, and a small “improvement” in the other. A different and much less known, but very important expression of the revolutionary government’s disregard for individual and collective rights, emerged in the field of criminal justice where people could—and still may— be imprisoned without trial for being “socially dangerous,” a catch-all vague category that includes behavior ranging from engaging in habitual drunkenness, vagrancy, and drug addiction, to exhibiting “antisocial behavior.” (To make things worse, Cubans may receive an “official warning” for having ties to people who are considered dangerous, a sort of “dangerousness” by proximity or association.) Cuban psychiatric professionals had originally been invited by the government to participate in the process of determining when those behaviors were expressions of mental illness and when they were expressions of criminal behavior. But by 1963, those professionals confronted the fact that they had been effectively marginalized from those decisions. The government had essentially conferred that power to itself through its own Ministry of Interior, which adopted the default assumption that delinquency was not a psychiatric condition (although in some cases it acknowledged that the “socially dangerous” behavior in question had stemmed from mental illness). More generally, by the mid 1970s, the Soviet model of criminology, including its notions of the relationship between crime and mental illness, had been well implanted in the island. Accordingly, as the psychologist Fernando Barral noted, simple penal definitions, and lists of judicial statistics, were inserted in Cuban manuals, replacing a more expansive social analysis of crime and mental illness. Lambe exposes and takes on other serious incidents of abuse of the mentally ill perpetrated by the government. The best known occurred during the 1980 exodus from the port of Mariel when some 125,000 Cubans left the port in the spring of that year. At the time, hundreds of Florida Cubans, who had chartered boats of every size and description to go to Mariel to pick up relatives and friends, were not allowed to leave the island unless they took back with

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them many other Cubans they did not know or were related to. Ever since then, the Cuban government has been accused of—and denied—taking advantage of the situation to get rid of thousands of gay people, common criminals, and mentally ill Cubans. Lambe was not able to obtain direct evidence to substantiate those charges, but she does present substantial indirect evidence that suggests that the accusations against the Cuban government had merit. She cites a study where researchers comparing 452 Cuban refugees with 500 Haitian refugees diagnosed psychosis in 4 percent of the Cuban group, compared to only 0.6 percent of the Haitians studied. In addition, a January 1981 statistical breakdown of the large number of Cuban Mariel refugees (close to six thousand according to press reports of the time) still interned at the Fort Chaffee camp in Arkansas found that 12 percent of the internees had experienced inpatient hospitalization in Cuba, and an additional 6 percent had been treated at outpatient psychiatric facilities. Lambe is less definitive about accusations that in the past the Cuban government had forced political dissidents to undergo psychiatric treatment. In the late eighties and early nineties, independent human rights organizations expressed concerns about the Cuban government sending its political prisoners to psychiatric institutions as punishment. Many Cuban dissidents, including those on the left, such as lesbian writer Ana María Simó and historian Ariel Hidalgo, have gone on record accusing the Cuban government of imprisoning them in mental institutions. But a visit of representatives of Amnesty International to Mazorra in 1988 led to ambiguous findings (because the World Psychiatric Association had not had a member society in Cuba since 1983, it could not examine the complaint appropriately and declined to investigate the charges). Although for Lambe the debate caused by these charges seemed to have ended inconclusively, she insists that “the diffuse line between crime and mental illness shaped the treatment of political opponents in revolutionary Cuba” and that individual dissidents who ended up in certain Mazorra wards “experienced that first-hand. Some of them were indeed mentally ill, but their ‘treatment’ there also responded to political concerns” (210). Lambe argues that the Cuban government’s treatment of various forms of social “deviance” is a result of what she calls an “extended cross pollination between official and popular views on social ‘vices’” (196–197). This assessment may have some merit in terms of common crime where one can find a continuity between the prerevolutionary popular common sense about criminality and the often harsh treatment meted out by the revolutionary authorities as reflected in Cuba’s very high rates of imprisonment. However, that double causation is less helpful in understanding the revolutionary government’s treatment of homosexuality, particularly from the 1960s to the 1990s, where the discontinuities between the prerevolutionary and revolutionary periods are more important than the continuities. Since the earliest

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332 : Book Reviews days of Spanish colonialism in Cuba, gays were victims of deep discrimination and prejudice, but infrequently as a result of open official government policy. The heavy oppression to which gays were submitted before the revolution was, for the most part, carried out by civil society in ways that were rarely expressed in the media (except in depictions of gays as targets of comedic ridicule). Even when the police raided and arrested gay people in public places where they tended to congregate, as happened, for example, under Batista in 1958, it would have been regarded as very unusual if his government would have made a big political issue out of those raids. After the revolution, however, the Cuban government tried to force gays out of the closet and intensely politicized their condition, increasing instead of diminishing their oppression. This policy did not emerge, as many New Leftists in the United States and elsewhere believed, from the old Communists’ pro-Moscow orthodoxy, but from Fidel Castro himself, who as early as 1962 began a strong push for the development of a Cuban version of Sparta where the military values of bravery and patriotic sacrifice would prevail while eliminating the soft “feminine” values and “social decay” that he saw as still having too much influence in Cuban society and culture. This is how, particularly from the early sixties to the nineties, homosexuality became an offence against the Cuban state and not just against Cuban civil society. THE CAPACITY AND IMPACT OF THE CUBAN STATE Jennifer Lambe does a wonderful job of showing how the quality and treatment of mental health in Cuba has been closely tied to the nature and capacities of the Cuban state. After the Revolution, she writes, the state “extended its authority to the most intimate corners of private life” (12), and relegated psychiatrist and other mental health professionals to a handmaiden role, directed to channel, but not to lead, the state’s efforts to which individuals were ultimately beholden. In the process, the state increased “its hegemony to a previously unimaginable degree.” Lambe’s work is an invitation to look into how the mechanisms of control of the Cuban state affect the lives of ordinary Cubans not considered to be mentally ill. One example is employment, an area where even after Raúl Castro’s reforms, 75 percent of Cuba’s economically active population still work for the state without even the minimal protection that independent unions could provide. Another example is access to higher education, which is still subject to political prohibitions. Beyond considerations as to whether the Cuban state has been authoritarian, totalitarian, or “totalizing, but not total” (197), as Lambe describes it, it is important to look at how the daily efforts at survival in that kind of a state affect all of its citizens.

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HAVE THE CYCLES OF REFORM AND REGRESSION RETURNED? The collapse of the Soviet bloc in the late eighties and early nineties had a major negative impact on the Cuban economy and consequently on every aspect of the extensive welfare state that was erected in the sixties. The economic crisis brought about a great increase in corruption throughout Cuban society, as theft of state property became an important part of the economic survival of large numbers of Cubans. As expected, Mazorra was seriously affected by this situation too. In January 2010, twenty-six patients died as a result of one cold spell when temperatures descended to a low of 3.6 degrees Celsius (38.5°F) in the facility. As it was later revealed, hospital employees had stolen food, clothing, and blankets, exposing the patients to hunger and cold. Mazorra’s director and several employees were tried and sentenced to prison terms, but none of the higher functionaries at the Ministry of Health, supposedly supervising and responsible for what happened at Mazorra, were brought to account. The parallel with the deaths that occurred in Mazorra for similar reasons in January 1958 when dictator Fulgencio Batista was still in power is indeed chilling, and raises the question of whether the Special Period that began in the early 1990s brought back the cycle of reform and regression at Mazorra that was such a prominent feature of the prerevolutionary Republican period. SAMUEL FARBER Brooklyn College, emeritus Jason M. Yaremko, Indigenous Passages to Cuba, 1515–1900. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016. 256 pp. In this fairly compact volume anthropologist Jason Yaremko examines the long and varied history of voluntary and involuntary migration of indigenous people from other parts of the Americas to Cuba. Given Cuba’s proximity to Florida and Mexico, especially Yucatan, not surprisingly the largest documented movements to the island came from those places. Indeed, one of the important conclusions this book points to is the long-term strength and historical complexity of Cuba’s ties to Florida and Mexico. The movements of people he discusses were in many respects the product of the nature of Spain’s colonial empire in which administrative, financial, and ecclesiastical structures together with commercial and other economic enterprises and networks connected and integrated various locales. Equally important, he makes a strong argument for the short- and longer-term impact on Cuban society and history of these migrations, although he is careful to point out the difficulty of illuminating many

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HAVE THE CYCLES OF REFORM AND REGRESSION RETURNED? The collapse of the Soviet bloc in the late eighties and early nineties had a major negative impact on the Cuban economy and consequently on every aspect of the extensive welfare state that was erected in the sixties. The economic crisis brought about a great increase in corruption throughout Cuban society, as theft of state property became an important part of the economic survival of large numbers of Cubans. As expected, Mazorra was seriously affected by this situation too. In January 2010, twenty-six patients died as a result of one cold spell when temperatures descended to a low of 3.6 degrees Celsius (38.5°F) in the facility. As it was later revealed, hospital employees had stolen food, clothing, and blankets, exposing the patients to hunger and cold. Mazorra’s director and several employees were tried and sentenced to prison terms, but none of the higher functionaries at the Ministry of Health, supposedly supervising and responsible for what happened at Mazorra, were brought to account. The parallel with the deaths that occurred in Mazorra for similar reasons in January 1958 when dictator Fulgencio Batista was still in power is indeed chilling, and raises the question of whether the Special Period that began in the early 1990s brought back the cycle of reform and regression at Mazorra that was such a prominent feature of the prerevolutionary Republican period. SAMUEL FARBER Brooklyn College, emeritus Jason M. Yaremko, Indigenous Passages to Cuba, 1515–1900. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016. 256 pp. In this fairly compact volume anthropologist Jason Yaremko examines the long and varied history of voluntary and involuntary migration of indigenous people from other parts of the Americas to Cuba. Given Cuba’s proximity to Florida and Mexico, especially Yucatan, not surprisingly the largest documented movements to the island came from those places. Indeed, one of the important conclusions this book points to is the long-term strength and historical complexity of Cuba’s ties to Florida and Mexico. The movements of people he discusses were in many respects the product of the nature of Spain’s colonial empire in which administrative, financial, and ecclesiastical structures together with commercial and other economic enterprises and networks connected and integrated various locales. Equally important, he makes a strong argument for the short- and longer-term impact on Cuban society and history of these migrations, although he is careful to point out the difficulty of illuminating many

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334 : Book Reviews of the questions surrounding the longtime integration and persistence of both island and immigrant indigenous cultures, given what he acknowledges as the “paucity of available evidence” (165). Although the author takes advantage of the work of a number of scholars both within and outside Cuba who have pursued one or another aspect of his subject, by incorporating what have usually been treated as quite distinct and unrelated movements of people (Calusas, Timucuas, and Seminoles from Florida; Mayas from Yucatan; Nahuas from central Mexico; and Apaches from northern New Spain, among others) into his inquiry he offers an original and thought-provoking exploration of a mostly little-known dimension of Cuban history. The book examines the ties that Florida Amerindians formed with Cuba, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the deportation of “indios barbaros” from northern New Spain in the late colonial period, and the mostly (although not invariably) coerced migration of Yucatec Mayas that had its roots in the early sixteenth century and continued through the nineteenth century. Although these separate movements originated in and reflected different circumstances, the existence of early precedents of Amerindian movement to Cuba doubtless contributed to the long endurance of the practice of looking to the peoples of the neighboring mainland to address Cuba’s labor needs. For most scholars probably the least familiar of these movements is the first, the varied contacts that members of various indigenous groups of Florida sustained with Cuba through trade, diplomatic missions, and migration, although some scholars of early Florida such as John E. Worth and John H. Hann have shed light on these connections. The relocation of indigenous immigrants from Florida as the result of the Spanish cession of Florida to Britain in 1763, in which some three thousand people evacuated from Spanish Florida, is well known. Earlier movements, however, such as that of a group of Calusas who in 1711 sought permission to move to Cuba to escape the predations of the British and their Yamasee allies that resulted in the relocation of some 280 people, provided significant precedents. Although the numbers of Amerindians who permanently resettled in Cuba were small, the indigenous connection between Florida and Cuba is notable for its longevity as Creek and Seminole groups became active participants over the course of the eighteenth century. Yaremko notes, for example, that “Seminole delegations were in Havana every year from 1772 through 1778” (52). These contacts involved trade as well as exchanges of intelligence. There also was a reciprocal movement of Cuban fishermen to the Florida Keys, some of whom probably remained and married there. The enslavement and deportation of so-called barbarous Indians from northern New Spain is a more familiar part of Yaremko’s story, thanks to the work of scholars of Mexican history such as Christon Archer. These forcible relocations spanned the latter decades of the eighteenth century and early decades of the nineteenth.

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The largest and most sustained movement and the one for which there is the largest amount of evidence is that of Yucatec Maya, who were present in Cuba in the early sixteenth century; the Maya barrio of Campeche in Havana dates back to before 1564, when the city council first officially recorded its existence. The author, however, focuses principally on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although most of the movement entailed the deportation of Yucatec Maya as slaves and later as indentured workers, it was large enough to create a sustained and substantial Maya presence in the island that over time attracted voluntary migrants as well. The book is thoughtful, accessible, and mostly well documented, although in places citations are minimal and there are some redundancies in the discussion of the Mayan impact on the island. Although the author does well in establishing Cuba’s connections with nearby mainland sources of migrants, Florida and Yucatan, the Caribbean context somewhat eludes him. He refers to Cuba as “homeland to the first indigenous culture to meet Columbus, imperial Spain’s second colony in the ‘New World’” (5), minimizing the crucial importance of Hispaniola as the first site of sustained European-Amerindian interaction and ignoring Puerto Rico altogether. On page 94 he refers to “Spain’s first two Caribbean colonies, Cuba and Hispaniola,” even though Spaniards began to occupy Puerto Rico in 1508, before any serious campaign to conquer Cuba got under way. The book makes a valuable contribution in demonstrating that Cuba’s diverse ethnic and cultural mix is far more complex than is usually understood. IDA ALTMAN University of Florida

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Juan Carlos Flores, The Counterpunch (and Other Horizontal Poems) / El contragolpe (y otros poemas horizontales). Translated by Kristin Dykstra. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2016. 208 pp. Juan Carlos Flores: El mal vidriero. Como al personaje de Baudelaire, muchos lectores podrían reclamarle al poeta cubano no habernos entregados en su libro cristales bellos para ver la vida. Pero él no vendía sueños, de hecho, quizás si hubiera podido guardar alguno suyo intacto no hubiera tenido que escribir su obituario en el mes de septiembre del 2016. No le conocí. No pertenecemos a la misma generación; es en los años 90 que Flores acapara la atención de la crítica literaria (“Premio David de poesía,” 1990; “Premio de la Crítica,” 1994), para entonces, ya yo la ejercía fuera de la isla que abandonamos los artistas y escritores de los años 80 por esas terceras opciones que inauguraron el nomadismo que hoy domina el arte cubano. Flores quedó en La Habana del período especial escribiendo una extraña poética del contragolpe, de la resistencia humana y artística, que llevó a sus extremos. Este poemario es una muestra de ella. Empecemos celebrando el hecho de la traducción, privilegio del que traduce y el traducido. Flores lo ha sido y con excelencia por Kristin Dykstra, quien se ha dedicado a divulgar la obra de otros premiados escritores cubanos, de poéticas también renovadoras: Ángel Escobar, Omar Pérez, Reina María Rodríguez. Esto pudo haber facilitado en mucho su adentramiento de la poesía de Flores, su previo contacto con la obra de estos autores que comparten una experiencia que marca por igual la vida y la escritura: crear en Cuba, crecer en Cuba como artistas. En la presente obra, la traductora ofrece un pórtico de doce páginas compuesto por observaciones y juicios sobre la vida y la obra de Flores que resulta verdaderamente imprescindible. Así se nos ofrece información sobre las condiciones sociales que rodean y condicionan la gestación de estos poemas, algunos de los vectores de su difusión como fue la pertenencia de Flores a un grupo de artistas con base en Alamar, OMNI-Zona Franca, o la creación de un DVD que aparece online (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v+cKbjdJ3Ar-U-U). Sobre algunos aspectos se ofrece también una interpretación. Uno de ellos, al que se le dedica importancia, quizás demasiada, es a la residencia del poeta en Alamar, ese barrio construido en La Habana del Este, en los años 70, emblema de la utopía revolucionaria, así como de su distópica puesta en práctica. Para la traductora, la vitalidad y las penas de los habitantes de ese ambiente uniforme que es Alamar “puede haber influido/may have influenced” (xv) en la construcción de espacios poéticos repetitivos que caracterizan la poética del libro. Pero Dykstra también nos deja saber que el poeta no se refería de esta forma sobre su trabajo, sino que insistía en los aspectos de simplicidad y humildad que caracterizaban su vida cotidiana. Este dato contribuye a mi reserva sobre acentuar las analogías entre espacio físico y espacio estético en esta particular obra. Las repeticiones de líneas completas dentro de un mismo poema, bloques

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340 : Book Reviews de palabras casi idénticas que regresan para imponérsenos, tienen, sin lugar a dudas, un efecto muy semejante al que puede tener el paisaje arquitectónico de Alamar. Esos amasijos de cemento cuentan como una primera referencialidad. Pero también cada verso repetido deviene —por eso mismo— un signo que puede connotar el cansancio vital del autor o del presumible lector, o la puesta en práctica del poder de las palabras como mantras, o un efecto estilístico paródico en contra de la estrofa típica —y con ello del canon— o una inversión del recurso de la isotopía —buscando amplificar sin añadir nada nuevo— o la irreverente creación de otro tipo de anáfora, esta vez sin musicalidad alguna, casi desatendiendo la atención del lector o violentando sus límites. ¿Quién sabe? Mal vidriero y provocador este poeta nuestro. Además de esa horizontalidad hay también en este libro una tendencia al minimalismo que podemos asociar con una inconsciente herencia literaria de Flores de algunos maestros del realismo cubano. En las entrevistas mencionadas por la traductora, el poeta no se reconoce como heredero de ninguna escuela cubana en particular sino que alude al confort que siente frente a la música de John Cage o al arte pictórico abstracto. Pero es bueno recordar que existe en nuestras letras una fuerza de la que pocos escapan y que ha movido del péndulo entre Villaverde y Mesa, o de Lezama a Piñera como también viceversa. Es decir, hemos pecado de exuberancia pero luego de crudeza y así seguimos. ¿Pero contra quien se mueve Flores? ¿Se mueve acaso? ¿O su ideal estético es la Fijeza, la resistencia, el cavar con la uña contra los muros de su apartamento en Alamar, suerte de tokonoma en el espacio urbano habanero en el que se refugia de ese sol que tanto odiaron la Condesa de Merlín como Nivaria Tejera? Sugiero entonces que vayamos con cautela y añadamos al menos otra capa de lectura recomendando que el lector que se aventura a explorar esas preocupaciones “cósmicas” que mencionan muchos de los obituarios hechos por sus amigos cercanos (https://www.cubanet.org/noticias/sesuicida-el-poeta-cubano-juan-carlos-flores/ ) y que están en los versos mismos en diferentes momentos de modo explícito o de modo más alegórico, o simplemente oblicuo. Invito entonces a incursionar en la lectura de esos versos con un universo abierto que incluya referentes filosóficos, religiosos y éticos —de implicación intemporal— que interesaban a Flores según indican sus textos. Galerías llama a las divisiones que establece para los personajes que deambulan por el libro. ¿Herencia de los pequeños poemas en prosa de Baudelaire? ¿Homenaje al museo como sitio de memoria? Exponer aquello que no debe ser olvidado, galerías las suyas que excavan entre las calles de Alamar para desenterrar al buzo (7) al niño Rachiel convertido en “Pequeño Calibán” (9); pero también entre los leitmotivs de la literatura universal para retomar a las putas (41), las locas (43), el bobo (119). Galerías que son ecos de los temas que obsesionan a la especie humana (las guerras (148), el viaje interior (120), o sus pequeños homenajes a las mujeres que quiso: la madre (36), la novia (63), la

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mentora (61), o premoniciones sobre su muerte, (74, 86, 130), o simplemente espacio abierto para un manifiesto implacable del artista cubano en estos tiempos (91). Otro de sus temas que no podría más que insinuar en estas líneas es la sed por algo trascendente que creo leer en esta poética, aparentemente árida. Claro, siempre con pudor, por eso sólo menciones breves a Jah, Rasta (114), la Sutra del Loto (30), pero sabemos que Flores era un buscador, aplicado al Oráculo de Delfos, que comenzaba por tratar entenderse a sí mismo: “Estuve en el pudridero de los hombres y encontré la Avenida,” confiesa (114). Ojalá así haya sido, pero el encuentro con lo divino —o con una fuerza a la que atribuimos esa condición— no siempre es soportable, Rilke lo advirtió de alguna manera. MADELINE CÁMARA University of South Florida Tanya L. Saunders, Cuban Underground Hip Hop: Black Thoughts, Black Revolution, Black Modernity. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015. 368 pp. In Cuban Underground Hip Hop, sociologist Tanya Saunders combines an abundance of information about the heyday of an Afro-descendant arts-based social movement in the Americas with a political urgency that centers on the decolonization of the hemisphere. She tells the story of the Cuban underground hip-hop movement (CUHHM) from 1998 to 2006, a group of DJs, MCs, and graffiti artists that leveled a “transnational Afro-diasporic challenge to the coloniality of American culture” (8). Through participant observation, interviews, and analysis of song lyrics and Cuban legal documents, Saunders gives an exhaustive and heterogeneous account of the movement, acknowledging its importance to Cuban cultural politics while also highlighting its shortcomings, not least in certain artists’ inability to make adequate room for feminist criticism. In her introduction, Saunders characterizes the CUHHM as a response to colonial histories of racialization in the Americas. Dividing her attention between race and cultural production in Latin America, hip-hop studies, and black feminist and queer-of-color critique, she situates the CUHHM in larger transnational currents of black consciousness in the hemisphere. Over the following two chapters, Saunders specifies the relationship between the CUHHM and black cultural movements in Cuba and the Americas. In chapter 2, Saunders gives an overview of the history of arts-based movements in Cuba since the Revolution, particularly those that used music as their primary medium, as Saunders asserts these have been understudied. In relation

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mentora (61), o premoniciones sobre su muerte, (74, 86, 130), o simplemente espacio abierto para un manifiesto implacable del artista cubano en estos tiempos (91). Otro de sus temas que no podría más que insinuar en estas líneas es la sed por algo trascendente que creo leer en esta poética, aparentemente árida. Claro, siempre con pudor, por eso sólo menciones breves a Jah, Rasta (114), la Sutra del Loto (30), pero sabemos que Flores era un buscador, aplicado al Oráculo de Delfos, que comenzaba por tratar entenderse a sí mismo: “Estuve en el pudridero de los hombres y encontré la Avenida,” confiesa (114). Ojalá así haya sido, pero el encuentro con lo divino —o con una fuerza a la que atribuimos esa condición— no siempre es soportable, Rilke lo advirtió de alguna manera. MADELINE CÁMARA University of South Florida Tanya L. Saunders, Cuban Underground Hip Hop: Black Thoughts, Black Revolution, Black Modernity. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015. 368 pp. In Cuban Underground Hip Hop, sociologist Tanya Saunders combines an abundance of information about the heyday of an Afro-descendant arts-based social movement in the Americas with a political urgency that centers on the decolonization of the hemisphere. She tells the story of the Cuban underground hip-hop movement (CUHHM) from 1998 to 2006, a group of DJs, MCs, and graffiti artists that leveled a “transnational Afro-diasporic challenge to the coloniality of American culture” (8). Through participant observation, interviews, and analysis of song lyrics and Cuban legal documents, Saunders gives an exhaustive and heterogeneous account of the movement, acknowledging its importance to Cuban cultural politics while also highlighting its shortcomings, not least in certain artists’ inability to make adequate room for feminist criticism. In her introduction, Saunders characterizes the CUHHM as a response to colonial histories of racialization in the Americas. Dividing her attention between race and cultural production in Latin America, hip-hop studies, and black feminist and queer-of-color critique, she situates the CUHHM in larger transnational currents of black consciousness in the hemisphere. Over the following two chapters, Saunders specifies the relationship between the CUHHM and black cultural movements in Cuba and the Americas. In chapter 2, Saunders gives an overview of the history of arts-based movements in Cuba since the Revolution, particularly those that used music as their primary medium, as Saunders asserts these have been understudied. In relation

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342 : Book Reviews to her project, she describes Cuba’s politicized cultural sphere as emerging from generations of negotiations between cultural workers and the Cuban state. Saunders broadens her scope in the third chapter to consider the relationship between the CUHHM and transnational black anticolonial movements. Reviewing existing literature on race and cultural production in Cuba, Saunders asserts the mutuality of black consciousness in Cuba and the United States and points out formative similarities between the respective birthplaces of hip-hop in the two countries: the Bronx in the 1970s and 1980s and Havana during the Special Period. In her fourth chapter, Saunders gives an intersectional account of racial formations in Cuba since the Revolution and during the Special Period with an emphasis on the meanings of whiteness, mulat@ness, and blackness within the CUHHM. She makes a significant contribution to the study of race in Latin America through her thoughtful discussion of competing understandings of racial fluidity in the United States and Latin America and the Caribbean. Saunders argues that scholars have focused too much on the language of race and racism and not enough on what people do locally with that material. She suggests that to deny the salience of race in the region because of its supposed fluidity is to “truncate the ability of marginalized populations to . . . make sense of their particular experiences with race and racialization” (164). Saunders analyzes the lyrical content of the music of CUHHM “artivists” (Saunders’s description of these artist-activists) in chapter 5, specifically their use of the terms revolution and revolutionary, activism and activists, poverty and marginalization, and underground and commercial. Through this final pairing, Saunders describes instances in which the Cuban state censored the movement by classifying its artists as amateur enthusiasts. This was addressed partially through the eventual creation of the Agencia Cubana de Rap (ACR) in 2002, which received ambivalent support from CUHHM artists. In chapters 6 and 7, Saunders examines the feminist and queer dimensions of the movement. She explores the meaning of feminist identity for members of the CUHHM in chapter 6, emphasizing its tension with the Cuban government’s insistence on revolutionary-citizen discourse since 1959. Saunders gives a thorough account of Magia MC’s time as the head of the ACR and critiques the lack of women-only spaces within the CUHHM and in Cuba’s political structures more generally. In chapter 7, Saunders tells the story of Las Krudas CUBENSI—which she describes as Cuba’s first out lesbian group—from the group’s work as part of the arts collective Topazancos to its beginnings in the CUHHM and eventual departure to the United States. Her close ethnographic engagement with the group is a high point of the book, as is her description of their discourse as a specifically Krudas brand of queer-of-color critique that emerges from their positionality as “Black feminists, Cuban revolutionary subjects, and queers of color” (251).

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Saunders concludes by examining the accomplishments and legacy of the CUHHM, countering the prevailing notion that the movement has simply ceased to exist. Instead, she details the transformation of the CUHHM following an exodus of artists in 2006 and suggests that underground hip-hop remains a vital site for feminist critique in Cuba. In doing so, Saunders opens up room for future studies of this and related performance art scenes in Cuba and on the capacity and limitations of performance as a vehicle for social change more generally. This ought to encourage further work from both the social sciences and music studies that take seriously the political dimensions of performance and the role of cultural workers in movements toward social justice. In the end, Saunders characterizes her project as a case study in the next phase of decolonization in the Americas, which will destabilize Eurocentric aesthetic ideals and epistemologies and assert the central role Afro-descendants have played in both constructing Euro-American modernity and imagining alternative possibilities. As such, Cuban Underground Hip Hop is an indispensable book and a required read for those interested in black/queer cultural production, arts and revolution in the Americas, and Afro–Latin American studies more generally. MATTHEW LESLIE SANTANA Harvard University Roberto G. Fernández, El príncipe y la bella cubana: Los amores de don Alfonso de Borbón y Battenberg y doña Edelmira Sampedro y Robato. Madrid: Verbum, 2014. 318 pp. El autor de El príncipe y la bella cubana (Verbum, 2014), Roberto G. Fernández, nació en Sagua La Grande, Cuba, en 1951. Su familia llegó a Estados Unidos en 1961, cuando él autor tenía diez años, asentándose en Miami. Se puede considerar, pues, a Fernández como un escritor de la generación 1.5, término popularizado por Gustavo Pérez Firmat en Life on the Hyphen (1994). Esta generación consiste en aquellos cubanos que tuvieron su niñez en Cuba y se hicieron adultos en Estados Unidos (como el mismo Firmat), y han sido estudiados bajo diferentes puntos de vista: desde el influyente estudio de Isabel Álvarez Borland, Cuban American Literature: From Person to Persona (1998) hasta el más reciente de Iraida H. López, Impossible Returns (2015). Entre las obras de Roberto G. Fernández se encuentran Cuentos sin rumbo (1975), La vida es un special (1982), La montaña rusa (1985), y más adelante cambia su trayectoria de publicación de español a inglés con Raining Backwards (1988) y Holy Radishes! (1995). Vuelve a su idioma natal con En la ocho y la doce (2001) y a la publicación de cuentos con Entre dos aguas (2008) y otras his-

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Saunders concludes by examining the accomplishments and legacy of the CUHHM, countering the prevailing notion that the movement has simply ceased to exist. Instead, she details the transformation of the CUHHM following an exodus of artists in 2006 and suggests that underground hip-hop remains a vital site for feminist critique in Cuba. In doing so, Saunders opens up room for future studies of this and related performance art scenes in Cuba and on the capacity and limitations of performance as a vehicle for social change more generally. This ought to encourage further work from both the social sciences and music studies that take seriously the political dimensions of performance and the role of cultural workers in movements toward social justice. In the end, Saunders characterizes her project as a case study in the next phase of decolonization in the Americas, which will destabilize Eurocentric aesthetic ideals and epistemologies and assert the central role Afro-descendants have played in both constructing Euro-American modernity and imagining alternative possibilities. As such, Cuban Underground Hip Hop is an indispensable book and a required read for those interested in black/queer cultural production, arts and revolution in the Americas, and Afro–Latin American studies more generally. MATTHEW LESLIE SANTANA Harvard University Roberto G. Fernández, El príncipe y la bella cubana: Los amores de don Alfonso de Borbón y Battenberg y doña Edelmira Sampedro y Robato. Madrid: Verbum, 2014. 318 pp. El autor de El príncipe y la bella cubana (Verbum, 2014), Roberto G. Fernández, nació en Sagua La Grande, Cuba, en 1951. Su familia llegó a Estados Unidos en 1961, cuando él autor tenía diez años, asentándose en Miami. Se puede considerar, pues, a Fernández como un escritor de la generación 1.5, término popularizado por Gustavo Pérez Firmat en Life on the Hyphen (1994). Esta generación consiste en aquellos cubanos que tuvieron su niñez en Cuba y se hicieron adultos en Estados Unidos (como el mismo Firmat), y han sido estudiados bajo diferentes puntos de vista: desde el influyente estudio de Isabel Álvarez Borland, Cuban American Literature: From Person to Persona (1998) hasta el más reciente de Iraida H. López, Impossible Returns (2015). Entre las obras de Roberto G. Fernández se encuentran Cuentos sin rumbo (1975), La vida es un special (1982), La montaña rusa (1985), y más adelante cambia su trayectoria de publicación de español a inglés con Raining Backwards (1988) y Holy Radishes! (1995). Vuelve a su idioma natal con En la ocho y la doce (2001) y a la publicación de cuentos con Entre dos aguas (2008) y otras his-

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344 : Book Reviews torias cortas. Fernández es conocido por las sátiras y el estilo caricaturesco que da a sus personajes y sus historias, miembros de la comunidad cubanoamericana. Especialmente en sus novelas de 1988 y 1995, que supusieron una ruptura con la narrativa tradicional de su generación, crea personajes que se expresan en un inglés casi traducido del español y que mezclan referencias culturales e idiomáticas para proyectar una atmósfera caótica. Así mismo, el entorno y los hechos por los que transcurren sus novelas se convierten en un espejo en el que se refleja lo absurdo de la situación de sus personajes, desde el punto de vista de estar perdidos en una realidad incomprensible. Por ejemplo, en Raining Backwards, “Fernández creates a collective conscience of the Cuban community in Miami Dade County and utilizes the carnivalization of the literary discourse to attack the most venerated icons, customs and traditions enjoyed and preserved by Cubans in South Florida.” (López Cruz, 87). El argumento de Humberto López Cruz en “Cuban; American Literature” es que la narrativa de Fernández apunta a una forma diferente de integración, a una identidad cubanoamericana que va dejando atrás la parte cubana y al mismo tiempo la va visualizando distorsionada, proponiendo una nueva realidad o identidad como miamense, con recuerdos desfigurados en la memoria, y a la vez existiendo en un territorio nuevo donde se crean nuevos modelos, incluso paródicos, de asimilación. “The novel projects a view of demythification and, at the same time, vaticinates a gradual assimilation of Little Havana’s residents into the American melting pot” (López Cruz, 88). O como mencionaba Álvarez Borland, Raining Backwards describe una generación “caught between two cultural worlds that they do not fully understand and to which they do not fully belong” (Cuban American Literature of Exile, 99). Teniendo en cuenta esta trayectoria rompedora, en 2014, Fernández publica El príncipe y la bella cubana: Los amores de don Alfonso de Borbón y Battenberg y doña Edelmira Sampedro y Robato, basado en personajes históricos y en el hecho cierto de la boda del Príncipe de Asturias con la cubana Edelmira Sampedro, cuyo origen es el mismo que el del autor, Sagua la Grande. La historia doblemente real (verdadera, por un lado, y perteneciente a la realeza, por otro) de esta pareja es tomada como referencia para construir una narración contada desde el punto de vista de la novia. El acontecer de este idilio lleva al autor a explorar estilos literarios inusuales en sus otras obras, y al mismo tiempo, los distorsiona para hacerlos producto de su singular pluma. Con este motivo, la novela de los amores de estos dos protagonistas pasa por las etapas comunes de romance, matrimonio y desencanto, hasta desembocar en el divorcio. Y continúa con la vida de la novia después de la separación y muerte del príncipe, construyendo un mundo ficticio que se va acercando al estilo más habitual del autor. Álvarez Borland ha identificado tres etapas fundamentales en la crónica de esta historia: una primera de estilo costumbrista paródico (13–141), una segunda parte más sobria y realista (152–243), y una tercera parte de sátira

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posmoderna (247–313). El sutil análisis de Álvarez Borland describe acertadamente estas tres partes y transiciones en la narración y subraya una característica del estilo de Fernández: la parodia. De hecho, comenta la investigadora que la primera parte “es un estilo hiperbólico que fácilmente podemos asociar a una parodia del Romanticismo.” Continúa diciendo que la segunda parte esta “narrada en un sobrio estilo que ahora parodia el Realismo.” Y que la tercera y última parte “abandona la parodia de la narrativa tradicional decimonónica . . . y se transforma en una sátira posmoderna que raya en el absurdo” (en La Habana Elegante, 2014). De este modo, Fernández crea tres entornos diferentes en su novela, y los desfigura con momentos de exceso y humor, de viajes y relaciones, mezclando párrafos en varios idiomas y registros, confundiendo referencias históricas y populares, extendiendo su estilo paródico, y al decir de López Cruz, desmitificador. Siguiendo este bien trazado esquema, la primera parte consistiría en los capítulos que van desde “El viaje” hasta “Los nubarrones.” En ellos, la narración se centra en el viaje de Edelmira con su madre y hermana hacia Suiza y el encuentro entre ella y D. Alfonso de Borbón y Battenberg en Lausana. En estos capítulos la historia avanza con velocidad y humor, salpicada por pequeños eventos sociales que recogen esa esencia absurda del quehacer narrativo de Fernández. Además, emplea un lenguaje ampuloso y exagerado para hablar del romance desde el punto de vista de las damas, estrechando la parodia del estilo romántico hacia un límite absurdo. De hecho, más que un estilo romántico literario, nos encontramos con una sentimentalidad excesiva. Los pequeños cuadros costumbristas que aparecen en esta primera parte, representando, por ejemplo, las diferencias al llegar a Europa, o las reuniones sociales y fiestas de la élite en Suiza, conforman una imagen en la que prima el exceso, como en el capítulo titulado Nuit de américains. En éste, se mezclan personajes pintorescos, referencias culinarias, medicinales, culturales, idiomáticas, etc., que acaban, como es menester en el autor, en caos. La segunda parte, que comprendería los capítulos “Empire State” hasta “El huracán,” se centran en la vida de la recién casada pareja, primero en París y Nueva York, y finalmente en Cuba. Al ser ésta una etapa de corte más realista, se encuentra el lector ante una tragedia que no por ello deja de ser sarcástica, o al menos aderezada con episodios que rozan la parodia más aguda (como el vómito del heredero) y que señala y relata la desilusión y desencanto temprano en la relación de la pareja. También se hace un recuento casi costumbrista de la vida de la élite social en París y Nueva York. Esta parte presta atención al retrato de las costumbres típicas de estos lugares, y el autor utiliza la historia para presentar particularidades del carácter de los protagonistas, de sus rutinas y debilidades, de las diferencias entre Europa y América, y aprovecha para introducir una crítica sutil de las clases sociales y de sus disímiles mentalidades en los dos continentes y latitudes. Si el género costumbrista, como relata Daylet

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346 : Book Reviews Domínguez, proveía “un instrumento analítico para estudiar las prácticas, las tradiciones y los hábitos de la población” (133), Fernández duplica su intención al imitar este género y distorsionarlo. La tercera parte, desde “Rábanos” hasta “Bonito día,” mucho más sombría en cuanto al destino de Edelmira y los demás protagonistas, retoma la narrativa típica de Fernández y su descripción caótica de la realidad en una pequeña comunidad de Miami, donde se ven desplazadas Edelmira y su hermana, viviendo “en un horroroso exilio” (Álvarez Borland, 2014). También da continuación a la historia vital de Edelmira, y resucita algunos personajes de sus obras anteriores, para recrear ese ambiente de parodia absurda del estilo de Fernández. De hecho, esta tercera parte se asemeja al mundo ficticio creado en Holy Radishes!, donde los protagonistas de clase social alta trabajan en una fábrica de rábanos en el exilio del sur de la Florida. Y se crean a la par ocasiones, como la del supermercado transformista, donde la realidad y la ficción, los personajes reales y plebeyos, comparten un destino agónico, incoherente, incluso esperpéntico. Así, la obra va desde el esplendor romántico de la primera parte, pasando por el periodo más realista-costumbrista de la segunda parte, hasta desembocar en el ocaso absurdo de la tercera. Dicho de otro modo, desde la alianza (entre las dos personas y estilos literarios a reflejar) y la disonancia y ruptura con los mismos. Todo ello, subrayado por la marca identificadora de la narrativa de Fernández: la parodia disonante. Y al estar centrado en una historia de amor decimonónica, es también una narración que puntualiza lo absurdo, satirizando los valores reinantes, incluso los adelantos científicos de la medicina y el transporte de la época. Fernández, quien quería haber titulado la obra “Sangre y rábanos”1 crea, pues, una novela a caballo entre la realidad y la ficción y, por ende, puede aplicar sus juegos narrativos a placer en todos sus capítulos hasta representar la marginalización de los personajes como destino común. Jorge Febles se refiere en su reseña de 2014 a la manera en la que Fernández se hace eco “del consabido esquema historicista” y también “impone un criterio desvalorizador del mismo, subvirtiéndolo al tiempo que lo calca” (ver https://www .cubaencuentro.com/cultura/articulos/el-principe-y-la-bella-cubana-ultima -novela-de-roberto-g-fernandez-319617). Gregory Helmick ha documentado una emergente literatura cubana en Estados Unidos que identifica como post-exílica “published in Spanish and English, which is connected intertextually with broader Caribbean and Latin American literatures rather than oriented toward US ethnic politics” (2). Lo interesante de esta propuesta, en la que se incluye a Fernández, es la idea de una identificación cultural más allá del nacionalismo cubano o norteamericano, aproximando los temas de estas narrativas post-exílicas hacia el desplazamiento, la marginalización social e incluso la pobreza urbana (Archival Dissonance, 2016). Siguiendo la reflexión de Helmick, un autor como Fernández utiliza la disonancia para

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contribuir a la confusión de referencias históricas, a las versiones contradictorias de los hechos y a la creación de personajes que parecen históricos, pero presentan una gran discordancia con la realidad (6). De ahí que califiquemos el estilo de este autor, y de esta obra, como de parodia disonante. De este modo, la narrativa de Fernández ha sido diferente a la de otros autores de la generación 1.5, pues carece de nostalgia por, y obsesión con, la nación de origen, para centrarse en la forma de integración, si es que existe, de sus personajes en el nuevo entorno. Como argumenta Helmick, ni se da importancia a la protesta política, ni a la nostalgia, en esta narrativa “post exílica cubana en los Estados Unidos” (6–8), identificando esta variedad como “outlier” dentro del corpus de la ficción histórica cubanoamericana (197). Outlier, o elemento disonante, valor atípico —el de Roberto G. Fernández y su escritura— dentro de la narrativa cubanoamericana actual, y caso aparte como autor con una riqueza genérica, humorística y paródica sin parangón. BELÉN RODRÍGUEZ MOURELO Penn State Berks N O TA S 1. El autor reveló esta intención durante su participación en la conferencia “Reading Cuba,” celebrada en Florida International University en noviembre de 2017.

O B R A S C I TA D A S Álvarez Borland, Isabel. 2014. “El príncipe y la bella cubana de Roberto G. Fernández: Identidades rotas y costumbrismo.” La Habana Elegante, volumen 56, otoño–invierno de 2014. http:// www.habanaelegante.com/Fall_Winter_2014/Invitation_Alvarez.html ———. 1998. Cuban American Literature: From Person to Persona. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Domínguez, Daylet. 2016. “Cuadros de costumbres en Cuba y Puerto Rico: De la historia natural y la literatura de viajes a las ciencias sociales.” Revista Hispánica Moderna, volumen 69, número 2, Diciembre, pp. 133–149. http://muse.jhl.edu/article/643476 Febles, Jorge. (2014). “El príncipe y la bella cubana: Última novela de Roberto G. Fernández.” http://www.cubaencuentro.com/cultura/artículos/el-principe-y-la-bella-cubana-ultima -novela-de-roberto-g-fernandez-319617. Helmick, Gregory. (2016). Archival Dissonance in the U.S. Cuban Post-Exile Novel. New Castleupon-Tyne, Inglaterra: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. López, Iraida H. (2015). Impossible Returns: Narratives of the Cuban Diaspora. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. López Cruz, Humberto (2010). “Cuban; American Literature: Suspicion of a Rupture in the Assimilation Pattern?” The Hyphenated Writer and the Legacy of Exile, edited by Paolo A. Giordano. Nueva York: Bordighera Press, pp. 85–97. Pérez Firmat, Gustavo (1994). Life on the Hyphen. The Cuban-American Way. Austin: University of Texas Press.

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348 : Book Reviews Rafael Rojas, Velia Cecilia Bobes y Armando Chaguaceda, coords. El cambio constitucional en Cuba. Actores, Instituciones y Leyes de un proceso político. Ciudad de México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2017. 256 pp. Pocas veces un libro puede llenar las expectativas de un grupo amplio de lectores. En el libro que recién se publica por el Fondo de Cultura Económica de México encontramos esa realidad. Un lenguaje ameno y científicamente profundo es lo que caracteriza esta edición que, sin duda, será un referente obligatorio para todos aquellos que se interesan por las cuestiones sociopolíticas de la Cuba actual. El lector que se adentra en él no sólo tendrá en sus manos una lectura amena sobre temas actuales del imaginario y el contexto cubano, sino también reflexiones diversas sobre la construcción de una nación, el análisis histórico preciso sobre la constitucionalidad cubana y el surgimiento de nuevas formas de entender a la nación cubana. Ocho autores analizan desde diversas perspectivas disciplinares el desarrollo y futuro de la nación cubana. El núcleo del texto es la relación entre la constitucionalidad y los derechos en sus distintas dimensiones (política, económica, social y cultural). La primera parte de los textos, con un marcado carácter histórico, sitúa las causas, características e influencias de los distintos procesos constitucionales cubanos. En el centro del libro, los tres siguientes textos discuten sobre la caracterización de la constitución cubana posterior a 1959, el tipo de régimen vigente y los derechos. Los tres últimos ensayos discuten sobre las perspectivas culturales y sociológicas en el entendimiento de los derechos de cuarta generación y la construcción sociológica de los nuevos actores en el proceso cubano posterior a 1990. Los coordinadores agruparon en este texto a un grupo heterogéneo de investigadores sobre el tema “Cuba en una época de cambios”. Los autores reconocen que Cuba es un caso peculiar frente a la ola de cambios constitucionales ocurridos en América Latina desde 1990, pues una transición democrática en América Latina no se produjo en Cuba. La pregunta que gira en torno a esta cuestión radica en las características del régimen cubano y en las contradicciones entre la realidad política y la interpretación de la norma jurídica de alcance internacional. Cuando en América Latina el discurso por los derechos humanos y el reconocimiento de derechos de cuarta generación es una realidad constante, en Cuba todavía se debate sobre la viabilidad del socialismo, sin permitir cambios en la política interna. No obstante, los ensayos respecto a los nuevos actores en el contexto actual revelan la conciencia aparente del gobierno cubano acerca de la necesidad por reformular el texto constitucional cubano. De forma general lo que debaten estos analistas en el libro es el complejo entramado de relaciones sociales emergentes en la Cuba actual y el orden constitucional. Ese debate es abordado por historiadores, politólogos y sociólogos. La cohesión estilística hace que

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la lectura no encuentre rupturas en ningún capítulo, sino que la obra sea una presentación científica y amena sobre el constitucionalismo cubano desde sus inicios hasta la actualidad y el proceso de construcción e interpretación de derechos, subjetividades y realidades sociales y políticas. Así, el texto no peca en ser etiquetado desde una u otra posición ideológica. La perspectiva imparcial de los análisis permite abordar una mirada sobre Cuba como pocas veces ha sido presentada en una obra multidisciplinar como esta: la isla no se agota en sus fronteras. Los dos primeros textos del libro titulados “Del constitucionalismo republicano al autoritario en el siglo XX cubano” de Carlos Manuel Rodríguez Arechavaleta y “la tradición constitucional hispanoamericana y el excepcionalismo cubano” de Rafael Rojas, describen y analizan los procesos constitucionales cubanos desde el siglo XIX hasta la contemporaneidad. Situar a la Constitución cubana como centro de análisis implica un conocimiento vasto de la historiografía cubana y de aquellos referentes que dan al proceso constitucional cubano características variadas respecto a las constituciones liberales, sobre todo la norteamericana. En el primer texto, Arechavaleta analiza las constituciones cubanas a la luz de los procesos independentistas cubanos. Con profundidad jurídica se describe cómo las constituciones civiles cubanas del siglo XIX (Guáimaro y La Yaya) situaron los derechos liberales como centro en el ideario nacional de la República en Armas. En este capítulo, el lector avezado en la historia cubana hubiese deseado un análisis más pormenorizado de las constituciones de Baraguá (1878) y de Jimaguayú (1895) donde el marco militar tuvo un aspecto fundamental, pero debemos recordar que el interés del libro en general es mostrar cómo la construcción de derechos cubanos, a pesar de las guerras, no implicó el desconocer los derechos ciudadanos y civiles de la naciente ciudadanía insular. Por su parte, Rafael Rojas caracteriza el proceso constitucional cubano en tres momentos: liberal (siglo XIX), republicano (1901–1976) y socialista (1976–2016). Rojas encuentra rasgos comunes en cada uno de los periodos y reconoce que el constitucionalismo cubano no puede analizarse sin entender los referentes internacionales que moldean el ideario cubano de nación y de patria. El capítulo de Rojas es de un excelente lirismo histórico. Las constituciones cubanas no fueron en modo alguno creaciones particulares sino que siempre tuvieron un referente externo del que interpretaron la implementación de los derechos liberales o sociales. No en balde, Rojas sitúa el periodo republicano hasta 1976 a pesar de que en los primeros quince años de revolución la Constitución cubana de 1940 fue sustituida por una Ley Fundamental que rigió la vida nacional. La visión de Rojas es que en 1976 los derechos ciudadanos fueron trastocados por una formulación excluyente de los derechos sociales que —si bien son importantes para comprender el funcionamiento del régimen revolucionario— limitó el ejercicio de libertades ciudadanas, en aras

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350 : Book Reviews de una ideología que marcaba los contornos de lo permitido. De esta forma, al analizar el contexto actual del constitucionalismo cubano, Rojas encuentra una paradoja explicada a partir de una premonición entre el funcionamiento del mercado actual y el mantenimiento del compromiso socialista liderado por Raúl Castro. Para Rojas, el funcionamiento actual del gobierno cubano sólo podrá ser recreado a partir de una reformulación de la Constitución de 1992, ya que norma jurídica y contexto económico no van paralelos sino en direcciones diferentes. En un tercer capítulo, Marlene Azor Hernández en el texto “La constitución de la República de Cuba y los Derechos Humanos Universales” analiza la representación de los derechos humanos en la constitución cubana. Pareciera una apuesta analítica complicada en el sentido del discurso social cubano sobre su carácter humanista y la esencia de los derechos humanos. La investigadora enuncia cada uno de los derechos humanos en contraste con lo expuesto en la constitución cubana y su práctica social, para permitirle al lector o investigador tomar postura respecto al cumplimiento o no de los mismos. Para Azor, la constitución cubana perdió el sentido republicano una vez que el régimen cubano ocupó el lugar que por derecho le correspondía al pueblo. Siguiendo este posicionamiento respecto a la interpretación de la Constitución cubana, Armando Chaguaceda en “Constitucionalismo autocrático en Cuba: mito y realidad” se plantea la pregunta de cómo entender la Carta Magna cubana actual. Analizando las diferentes interpretaciones de la ciencia política, Chaguaceda se pregunta si en verdad podemos encontrar rasgos de democracia, de socialismo o de republicanismo en la Constitución cubana. Es un texto claro en el posicionamiento analítico: la Constitución cubana no es en sentido alguno democrática o republicana, sino una constitución de corte estalinista, propia de un Estado postotalitario. En el análisis de Chaguaceda la utilización de autores centrales de la ciencia política (Juan Linz, Carl Schmidt y Gianfranco Pasquino) permite al lector comprender las deficiencias de la Constitución cubana respecto a los derechos ciudadanos y el compromiso con la democracia. Para el autor, Cuba se ha quedado retrasada en materia política no por cuestiones de su ciudadanía sino por el control férreo del aparato gubernamental en función de la postura amigo-enemigo smichtiana. El autor durante todo el análisis propone conceptos interesantes para identificar al régimen cubano respecto a lo planteado en su constitución. Cada concepto es una propuesta específica a problemas de gobierno del régimen cubano. En tal sentido la propuesta de Chaguaceda es que en Cuba asistimos a un momento crucial respecto a años pasados; según el analista el horizonte de expectativas se sitúa en el 2018, no como una realidad invariable sino como una promesa de reforma constitucional que debería avanzar respecto al camino y las trasformaciones perdidas desde hace más de medio siglo.

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Yvon Grenier en “Derecho del Estado. Participación cultural y parámetros” realiza un análisis de los derechos culturales de los cubanos y el proceso de captura del poder por los gobernantes revolucionarios. Para Grenier, si bien en Cuba se ha permitido un reconocimiento de la cultura como derecho social universal, en la práctica aquel es un derecho que no oculta la utilidad política detrás de cada discurso o libertad cultural. El hecho de que la cultura fuera un instrumento para vincular al pueblo cubano según las directrices del gobierno es analizado en este texto con el concepto de parámetros. Con esta propuesta, Grenier describe todas aquellas iniciativas del gobierno cubano mediante las cuales se censuran y limitan los derechos culturales de los artistas y del pueblo cubano. Para Grenier en la Revolución todo acto es permitido puertas adentro, puertas afuera nada. Por cultura Grenier entiende la utilización del espacio público como el marco donde se aplica la dinámica política. Frente a la pretensión gubernamental de crear en Cuba una nación cultural en sentido amplio, Grenier observa que para el gobierno cubano la cultura no es más que un instrumento de utilidad política. Es en este sentido donde el autor se cuestiona abiertamente el papel de los intelectuales cubanos, la esfera civil y el papel del gobierno como censura. Para Grenier el papel de los actores culturales ha estado limitado en grado sumo durante todo el tiempo de construcción del ideario revolucionario. Los tres últimos capítulos son muy relevantes. El primero de ellos es de Ramón I. Centeno “El nuevo postotalitarismo cubano: un balance del raulismo”. Centeno realiza una nueva clasificación del tipo de régimen político cubano: postotalitarismo en maduración.1 El análisis aquí realizado pretende homogeneizar de alguna manera las diferentes clasificaciones respecto al gobierno cubano utilizando la propuesta analítica de Linz y Stepan de 1996. Centeno contrasta así el escenario político cubano a la luz de las nuevas transformaciones ocurridas bajo el mandato de Raúl Castro. Lo que describe Centeno es la relación entre las reformas económicas acaecidas en Cuba desde 1991 pero magnificadas en alguna medida bajo el gobierno de Raúl Castro y la evolución del tipo de régimen. Con este capítulo el autor intenta sintetizar el debate, sin excluir otras clasificaciones, respecto al tipo de régimen cubano. Para esto utiliza las dimensiones analíticas que definen un gobierno postotalitario pero sin excluir las características económicas, políticas e ideológicas que todavía permean la institucionalidad y la ciudadanía cubana. El segundo de esos últimos ensayos está escrito por la investigadora Velia Cecilia Bobes. El título es representativo de una preocupación de los investigadores cubanos en los últimos años: “Veinte años después (actores del cambio constitucional; retrospectiva y escenarios futuros)”. Bobes se cuestiona sobre la agencia de los actores sociales en el debate sobre el futuro constitucional cubano; actores cuya existencia refiere a sujetos colectivos para intermediar

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352 : Book Reviews en la relación respecto al Estado y a los propios individuos. Bobes propone una matriz analítica para analizar a esos nuevos actores: un marco normativo institucional, una dimensión estructural y la constitución de actores propiamente. Bobes propone entender la reconfiguración del contexto cubano a partir de las reconfiguraciones constitucionales como marcos de homogeneización del consenso ciudadano en manos de un portador universal: el Estado cubano. También propone entender cómo la apertura cubana a las iniciativas privadas fue una condicionante importante en la creación de nuevas experiencias sociales respecto al papel ciudadano en la transformación de la sociedad. El análisis pormenorizado de cada legislación respecto a la participación y la extensión de permisos contribuye a evidenciar una reconfiguración del ideario social, a la vez que presenta las tensiones de esas aperturas contra el sistema social socialista del gobierno cubano y sus preocupaciones por blindar la constitución frente al temor del capitalismo. No obstante, tres consecuencias observa la investigadora producto de estas aperturas: diferencias de ingresos, desigualdad en el consumo y aumento de la pobreza. En este capítulo Bobes teoriza sobre las características de los actores cubanos: repertorios simbólicos, identidades y organización de la sociedad civil. En este sentido Bobes comienza a enumerar aquellas tensiones entre la aplicación y demanda del derecho por esos actores. Existe un empoderamiento de nuevos sectores sociales que antes estaban excluidos y obviados del panorama social cubano. En los nuevos tiempos esos sectores comienzan a reclamar cada vez con más fuerza y mecanismos, espacios incluyentes dentro de la sociedad cubana. El reto fundamental radica en el cambio constitucional. Haroldo Dilla en colofón del libro señala algunas de las promesas y retos que tiene el gobierno cubana vísperas de 2018. En su texto “La cuestión constitucional en Cuba: una discusión sociológica” destaca las debilidades de la constitución cubana actual frente a los desafíos que significan las reformas económicas y los cambios sociales en Cuba. Dilla señala como cuestiones centrales a resolver por el gobierno cubano es el monismo ideológico y político, la centralización económica y política y la exclusión de la migración del proceso de cambios en Cuba. No obstante, Dilla reconoce algunos de los aspectos a rescatar y mantener de la constitución actual cubana: los derechos sociales universales, los derechos ambientales y la rendición de cuentas. Aspectos centrales que lejos de desvincular al pueblo con sus elegidos podría representar una nueva experiencia democrática. Este último texto es una reflexión hacia una Cuba de cambios y también un cambio en Cuba. De forma general el libro aquí presentado es una mirada multidisciplinar sobre el problema del constitucionalismo y los derechos en Cuba. Los temas abordados por los investigadores en este libro se pueden agrupar en torno a preocupaciones actuales de los cubanos, donde quiera que estos se encuentren,

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y como pasos necesarios para crear una nación “con todos y para el bien de todos” (Martí, 2000). LEDUAN RAMÍREZ PÉREZ Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO) México NOTES 1. Es interesante que en su clasificación, Centeno discrepe levemente con Chaguaceda, quién concuerda en clasificar al régimen vigente como postotalitario, pero identificándolo en una fase temprana de su desarrollo.

Elías Miguel Muñoz, Diary of Fire. Maple Shade, NJ: Lethe Press, 2016. 333 pp. In his most recent novel, Diary of Fire, Elías Miguel Muñoz tells the story of Camilo Macías, a graduate student and professor of Spanish who later decides to leave academia in order to focus on his creative writing. Beginning with a fire which the narrator is not yet prepared to discuss, the story recounts various memories of Camilo’s life through letters, diary entries, descriptions of photographs, and excerpts of his novel, Cuba in Silence. By piecing together these stories, which are divided into five sections, Camilo seemingly seeks to discover himself. Through vignettes on love, loss, and survival, Diary of Fire chronicles Camilo’s search for identity. Beginning during his days in graduate school and ending with the realization that he has lost the home he shared with his wife and daughter to fire, we follow Camilo’s journey of self-discovery. It is impossible to read this novel without considering the autobiographical nature of it. Within the novel, as Camilo writes his own book, we see how much of himself he puts into the story. In Camilo’s case, he does not even change the names of many of his characters and openly admits (at least to the readers) that this is his story and he feels that he must tell it. But Muñoz also seemingly inserts aspects of his own life story into the novel as well. Early on, I struggled to separate the narrator (Macías) from the author (Muñoz), continuously reminding myself that this was a work of fiction and that while the novel itself was told as a memoir, it did not mean that it was the author’s memoir. However, after reading Muñoz’s biography page on his website (www.eliasmiguelmunoz. com/bio), it was apparent that my thought process was justified. Among the many identical parallels that exist between Muñoz’s life and Camilo’s story, we see that both the author and his character left Cuba in 1969 and moved with their parents to Los Angeles instead of Miami. Both earned

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y como pasos necesarios para crear una nación “con todos y para el bien de todos” (Martí, 2000). LEDUAN RAMÍREZ PÉREZ Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO) México NOTES 1. Es interesante que en su clasificación, Centeno discrepe levemente con Chaguaceda, quién concuerda en clasificar al régimen vigente como postotalitario, pero identificándolo en una fase temprana de su desarrollo.

Elías Miguel Muñoz, Diary of Fire. Maple Shade, NJ: Lethe Press, 2016. 333 pp. In his most recent novel, Diary of Fire, Elías Miguel Muñoz tells the story of Camilo Macías, a graduate student and professor of Spanish who later decides to leave academia in order to focus on his creative writing. Beginning with a fire which the narrator is not yet prepared to discuss, the story recounts various memories of Camilo’s life through letters, diary entries, descriptions of photographs, and excerpts of his novel, Cuba in Silence. By piecing together these stories, which are divided into five sections, Camilo seemingly seeks to discover himself. Through vignettes on love, loss, and survival, Diary of Fire chronicles Camilo’s search for identity. Beginning during his days in graduate school and ending with the realization that he has lost the home he shared with his wife and daughter to fire, we follow Camilo’s journey of self-discovery. It is impossible to read this novel without considering the autobiographical nature of it. Within the novel, as Camilo writes his own book, we see how much of himself he puts into the story. In Camilo’s case, he does not even change the names of many of his characters and openly admits (at least to the readers) that this is his story and he feels that he must tell it. But Muñoz also seemingly inserts aspects of his own life story into the novel as well. Early on, I struggled to separate the narrator (Macías) from the author (Muñoz), continuously reminding myself that this was a work of fiction and that while the novel itself was told as a memoir, it did not mean that it was the author’s memoir. However, after reading Muñoz’s biography page on his website (www.eliasmiguelmunoz. com/bio), it was apparent that my thought process was justified. Among the many identical parallels that exist between Muñoz’s life and Camilo’s story, we see that both the author and his character left Cuba in 1969 and moved with their parents to Los Angeles instead of Miami. Both earned

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354 : Book Reviews their PhD in Latin American literature, wrote their dissertations about Manuel Puig, and began their teaching careers in Kansas. Muñoz, similar to his protagonist, felt suffocated by academia and wanted to focus on his creative writing instead, choosing to leave teaching and return to California to write. While these parallels may seem broad, it does raise the question of how much more of Camilo’s story is also Muñoz’s story. While this does not hinder one’s enjoyment of the story being told, it did linger in the back of my mind as I read it, and in fact, furthered my consideration of the major theme of the novel—one’s search for identity. Diary of Fire explores issues related to cultural, sexual, and individual identity. Camilo’s journey evokes memories of his childhood in Cuba, as well as those created in the United States, and how that reflects who he is now. Throughout his exploration of self-identity, Camilo finds that he really does not fit anywhere—he is not Cuban enough, he is not American enough, and, not being from Miami, he’s not even the right kind of Cuban American. And according to his friends, he is neither gay nor straight enough. In the story, Camilo identifies as bisexual, but even that identity marker is met with questions and doubt by many other characters. Just as his cultural identity is simultaneously both and neither, so too is his sexual identity. Even as he settles down and starts a family, Camilo struggles with his identity as a parent—his substantial involvement in raising his daughter leaves him feeling ostracized from the other fathers and mothers in the community who do not see him as fitting the “proper” parental mold. Diary of Fire reflects a journey of self-discovery for its protagonist (and perhaps its author?). The novel suggests that it is the individual identity that matters most. Camilo can be categorized under all and none of these labels, but he is always Camilo. He has been shaped by the many events in his life and, while his past has made him who he is, the future is yet to be determined. After the fire, which he returns to at the end of the novel, Camilo loses so much, but he also recognizes that he must still move forward. Just as his parents sacrificed part of who they were when they moved him to the United States, so too does Camilo feel as though he is giving up part of who he is after the fire. It is only in his awareness that he has found his true home with his wife and daughter that he discovers what truly makes him happy. Camilo claims that he does not wish to tell the story of his own life, but eventually he recognizes that he must recall these memories in order to move forward. And just as Camilo must tell his story through fiction, perhaps, Muñoz also must tell his story in a similar fashion. Diary of Fire strikes me as a memoir that tries to escape being a memoir despite its presentation as a novel. While the parallels between author and narrator may end with those I have listed, it is clear that this is a novel of the discovery of identity, for author,

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narrator, and even reader. Although the novel focuses on Camilo’s individual experiences, Diary of Fire seemingly speaks to much more than just one man’s search for self. REBECCA L. SALOIS City University of New York, Graduate Center Samuel Farber, The Politics of Che Guevara: Theory and Practice. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016. 192 pp. Ernesto Che Guevara, a cincuenta años de su muerte A la ya voluminosa literatura sobre la vida y el pensamiento de Ernesto Che Guevara se une el reciente libro The Politics of Che Guevara: Theory and Practice, del reconocido intelectual y sociólogo Samuel Farber. Probablemente sea este uno de los análisis más equilibrados y objetivos que se hayan realizado sobre el mítico guerrillero argentino en los años más recientes. El texto recorre ágilmente desde la infancia y formación de Guevara hasta su muerte en Bolivia. En el volumen se nos ofrece un análisis de las principales ideas de izquierda de Guevara en permanente interacción con la época y el contexto sociopolítico. Guevara desde la formación como rebelde, defensor elemental de la justicia social y aventurero, hasta el revolucionario graduado en la Sierra Maestra en el oriente cubano. El autor no desconoce errores del revolucionario argentino, los examina, pero a la vez pondera y reconoce lo que él aportó al extraordinario movimiento antisistema que se produjo en la década de los sesenta del pasado siglo, tanto en Cuba como en el mundo, principalmente por su voluntad de practicar un internacionalismo militante a favor de los procesos emancipadores surgidos entonces en el denominado Tercer Mundo. Farber sitúa con acierto cómo las ideas socialistas de Guevara no lograron una cristalización práctica en la Cuba de los sesenta, al entrar en contradicción con las interpretaciones canónicas de los comunistas del viejo partido (PSP), cumplidores estrictos de la línea de Moscú, los que finalmente impusieron, tras duros pulsos, sus concepciones sobre la economía, el vanguardismo o centralismo autoritario, el papel sumiso de los sindicatos y las controladoras y reductoras políticas culturales (léase el realismo socialista). En tal línea de análisis, el autor establece la diferencia existente entre Guevara y Trotsky (símil alimentado por algunas tesis esencialmente especulativas), a pesar de la proximidad del comandante argentino con trabajadores y directivos del Ministerio de Industrias, militantes del reducido partido trotskista cubano (POR-T), existente hasta 1965, a los que Guevara aceptó y toleró, con los cuales trabajó

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narrator, and even reader. Although the novel focuses on Camilo’s individual experiences, Diary of Fire seemingly speaks to much more than just one man’s search for self. REBECCA L. SALOIS City University of New York, Graduate Center Samuel Farber, The Politics of Che Guevara: Theory and Practice. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016. 192 pp. Ernesto Che Guevara, a cincuenta años de su muerte A la ya voluminosa literatura sobre la vida y el pensamiento de Ernesto Che Guevara se une el reciente libro The Politics of Che Guevara: Theory and Practice, del reconocido intelectual y sociólogo Samuel Farber. Probablemente sea este uno de los análisis más equilibrados y objetivos que se hayan realizado sobre el mítico guerrillero argentino en los años más recientes. El texto recorre ágilmente desde la infancia y formación de Guevara hasta su muerte en Bolivia. En el volumen se nos ofrece un análisis de las principales ideas de izquierda de Guevara en permanente interacción con la época y el contexto sociopolítico. Guevara desde la formación como rebelde, defensor elemental de la justicia social y aventurero, hasta el revolucionario graduado en la Sierra Maestra en el oriente cubano. El autor no desconoce errores del revolucionario argentino, los examina, pero a la vez pondera y reconoce lo que él aportó al extraordinario movimiento antisistema que se produjo en la década de los sesenta del pasado siglo, tanto en Cuba como en el mundo, principalmente por su voluntad de practicar un internacionalismo militante a favor de los procesos emancipadores surgidos entonces en el denominado Tercer Mundo. Farber sitúa con acierto cómo las ideas socialistas de Guevara no lograron una cristalización práctica en la Cuba de los sesenta, al entrar en contradicción con las interpretaciones canónicas de los comunistas del viejo partido (PSP), cumplidores estrictos de la línea de Moscú, los que finalmente impusieron, tras duros pulsos, sus concepciones sobre la economía, el vanguardismo o centralismo autoritario, el papel sumiso de los sindicatos y las controladoras y reductoras políticas culturales (léase el realismo socialista). En tal línea de análisis, el autor establece la diferencia existente entre Guevara y Trotsky (símil alimentado por algunas tesis esencialmente especulativas), a pesar de la proximidad del comandante argentino con trabajadores y directivos del Ministerio de Industrias, militantes del reducido partido trotskista cubano (POR-T), existente hasta 1965, a los que Guevara aceptó y toleró, con los cuales trabajó

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356 : Book Reviews armoniosamente y a los que, en el momento de su supresión como organización, ayudó.1 Che Guevara no fue el Trotsky de la Revolución cubana, certidumbre a la que contribuye el libro de Farber. Se trata de una comparación que se expone a gruesos errores historiográficos. El libro examina la complejidad del pensamiento de izquierda de Guevara, sus inicios bohemios y la mutación que se fue operando en sus concepciones socialistas, desde la inicial simpatía por la Unión Soviética y las políticas de corte estalinista, hasta la crítica abierta al papel internacional de la URSS en su intercambio comercial con los países subdesarrollados (cómplice con la de los países capitalistas, según dijo), hecha pública en Argel, en 1965, en el célebre discurso que fue su última actuación como dirigente cubano. Esta evolución pasó por sus críticas al dogmatismo y al marxismo de mente estrecha que circulaba por los manuales soviéticos, aunque simultáneamente Guevara apoyara zonas de la política económica y las estructuras políticas propias del socialismo burocratizado de la Unión Soviética y del denominado campo socialista. En este sentido, no puede menos que evaluarse la dirección de las transformaciones personales de Guevara ante las tendencias de las izquierdas del momento, así como su actitud igualitaria personal que probablemente hubiese chocado con las incipientes manifestaciones de privilegio de miembros de la dirección cubana, llaga sobre la que el autor pone su dedo. Farber señala, a mi juicio con tino, las ausencias de mecanismos de control, democráticos e institucionales, desde abajo, en el proceso cubano de esa década crucial, al demorarse la realización de elecciones (hasta 1976) y mantenerse una dirección cuasi personal del proceso. A pesar de que Guevara apoyaba resueltamente el sistema soviético de partido único, adoptado en Cuba tempranamente, Farber plantea la idea de que Guevara hubiese sido un opositor y no un dirigente en el caso hipotético de haberse mantenido en Cuba. Una especulación histórica, sin dudas. En cuanto al desenlace en Bolivia, una vez recuperado Guevara del fracaso en el Congo, Farber toma partido sobre las diferentes versiones que apuntan a un abandono del guerrillero y su guerrilla por parte de la dirección cubana, al retirar sus fuentes de contacto y apoyo en La Paz, algo sobre lo que varios biógrafos han coincidido. Farber expresa que “las evidencias para apoyar tal afirmación, están lejos de ser conclusivas” y sigue, en este punto, la sugerencia de la biografía de Castañeda (Compañero: La vida y muerte de Che Guevara). Farber piensa más en las tensiones que pudieron haberse producido entre Guevara y fuerzas conservadoras dentro de la dirección cubana, que en una ruptura con Fidel Castro.2 A lo que habría que añadir, según su análisis, lo que pesó en dicho desenlace el curso de realpolitik que el líder cubano siguió para poder mantener a flote el proyecto cubano, sostenido económicamente por la Unión Soviética, a la par que mantuvo el apoyo y entrenamiento de las fuerzas revo-

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lucionarias del continente (aunque ralentizado después del fracaso en Bolivia). Es muy interesante esta zona del libro, pues indaga en las complejas relaciones de fuerzas políticas que se manifestaron entre 1966 y 1968 entre cubanos y soviéticos y a las que la muerte del Che puso un punto y aparte. La estructura del libro permite un análisis ordenado y natural de la vida de Guevara, sus ideas en desarrollo y las circunstancias que lo llevaron a sacrificar su vida. El libro posee una bibliografía amplia y diversa, en la que se pueden encontrar las fuentes más plurales y útiles sobre el tema en cuestión. Un cuerpo de notas al final ayuda a la comprensión de muchos de los aspectos abordados, a veces muy rápidamente; el libro se inicia con una cronología de la vida de Guevara en la que obviamente sobresalen los aspectos políticos y militares. En las conclusiones, Farber examina similitudes y diferencias entre Guevara y los hermanos Fidel y Raúl Castro como hombres y como políticos, el hipervoluntarismo de Guevara y su creencia genuina en la idea de un “hombre nuevo” necesario para poder construir la sociedad socialista en la isla. Hacia estos polos de análisis nos mueve el libro que nos ocupa. Como sucede en todo libro de tesis, como este, no necesariamente el lector coincide con todos los análisis y propuestas del autor, sin embargo, quedan a salvo el rigor y la agudeza autoral. The Politics of Che Guevara: Theory and Practice es un libro muy interesante y ameno, escrito con una prosa rápida y eficaz, que se sumerge en uno de los contextos más complejos de la Revolución cubana, la década fundacional de los sesenta, y en una de las personalidades más atractivas y polémicas de ese proceso. Samuel Farber atraviesa los temas asociados a la vida y pensamiento de Ernesto Guevara con una mirada alerta y crítica y somete a cuestionamiento algunas tesis anteriormente consideradas como intocables, a la vez que se permite hacer las más arriesgadas conjeturas. Son tan apreciables los juicios y análisis sobre Guevara como los que dedica a Cuba y su revolución. Este diálogo entre contexto y personaje enriquece al libro notablemente. Concluye el autor el volumen con su propia idea sobre el socialismo, ese que no se ha aplicado aún en ninguna parte. El libro se publicó por Haymarket Books el pasado año, víspera del medio siglo de la muerte de Ernesto Che Guevara, lo que lo convierte en un texto oportuno y abierto al debate. Debate, es bueno decir, con el que se ganan tanto adeptos como opositores, críticos parciales o totales, pero esto es absolutamente lícito en el universo científico y académico. Sugiero encarecidamente su lectura. El último libro de Samuel Farber, autor acucioso y polémico, especialista en temas cubanos por demás, es una búsqueda del equilibrio y la objetividad que tanto se aprecian y necesitan en las ciencias sociales. RAFAEL ACOSTA DE ARRIBA La Habana

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358 : Book Reviews NOTES 1. En este sentido, puede ayudar la lectura del ensayo “El fin del trotskismo organizado en Cuba,” de mi autoría (en proceso de publicación por la revista Temas). En el mismo analizo, entre otros temas, la dificultad de considerar a Guevara como trotskista, a pesar de lo ya dicho más arriba y de que sabemos por colaboradores cercanos (Orlando Borrego principalmente) que Guevara leyó a Trotsky profusamente (“toda su obra” dice Borrego). No es lo mismo que Guevara buscara en el revolucionario ruso ideas que sirvieran a su estrategia continental, a que se le considere un troskista militante. Más bien puede considerársele un simpatizante del maoísmo. 2. En esta discusión es muy útil el libro de Régis Debray, Alabado sean nuestros señores: Una educación política, del Taller de Muchnik, Madrid, España, 1999. En el mismo, Debray considera que (Debray fue le último interlocutor y mensajero entre ambos revolucionarios) la amistad, respeto y estima mutuos entre Castro y Guevara duraron intactas hasta el minuto final del guerrillero argentino.

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Carmelo Mesa-Lago, Voices of Change in Cuba from the Non-State Sector. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. 176 pp. El libro Voces del cambio en el emergente sector no estatal en Cuba, coordinado por el prestigioso profesor Carmelo Mesa-Lago en el que participó un colectivo integrado por Roberto Veiga, Lenier González, Sofía Vera y Aníbal Pérez, es una investigación seria, donde se utilizan instrumentos de medición para un tipo de resultados que es una práctica corriente en las ciencias sociales. Aunque hubiera sido interesante haber obtenido una mayor muestra, el haber realizado ochenta entrevistas para esta obra no lo demerita, los que hacen este tipo de trabajo saben los obstáculos que se atraviesan cuando se intenta hacer una encuesta en Cuba. La obra mencionada es de gran utilidad para los que se adentran en este importante tema, y ha servido de guía para los trabajos que se han elaborado con esta temática. El desarrollo del sector no estatal en Cuba es una necesidad para el desarrollo que se pretende obtener en el documento aprobado por las autoridades cubanas acerca de las líneas estratégicas de Cuba hasta el 2030. Es harto conocido y demostrado en la realidad contemporánea que la discusión no estriba ya en dos conceptos que se presentan como antagónicos, el capitalismo y el socialismo. Hay ejemplos notorios de países de economías de mercado, donde las empresas públicas han resultado ser muy eficaces, y otros de economías socialistas, donde el mercado y las empresas privadas han resultado decisivos en los resultados económicos previstos, como son los casos de China y Vietnam. No hay que satanizar más lo privado o más ampliamente lo no estatal, en el futuro económico de Cuba, como muchos autores o políticos lo siguen presentando así en la actualidad. Lo esencial es coordinar todas las fuerzas posibles que contribuyan a la creación de riquezas, que repartidas entre todos, si el Estado es capaz de hacerlo, puedan contribuir a incrementar el bienestar de todos. Si se sigue en esa discusión del papel omnipresente de la empresa estatal como la única capaz de llevar a Cuba hacia el desarrollo económico, nos quedaremos mucho tiempo en esa discusión, olvidándonos de tantos años de quehacer económico. En las más de 200 páginas de la obra, divididas en cada uno de los actores del sector estatal como los cooperativistas, cuentapropistas, arrendatarios, se ofrecen opiniones muy certeras de la realidad actual cubana y salen conclusiones acertadas de las dificultades que atraviesa este sector para su desarrollo, sesgadas por la opinión de los hacedores de política, que hay que evitar la concentración de la propiedad y de la riqueza de estos actores. Como expresó el colega y economista Pedro Monreal, “ en Cuba parecería ser que el combate es a la riqueza y no a la pobreza, como es habitual en el mundo actual.” Coincido plenamente con una de las conclusiones que expresa la obra

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362 : Book Reviews “Probablemente, la reforma estructural más importante de Raúl Castro ha sido la apertura del sector no estatal en Cuba,” donde ya tienen una participación del 30 por ciento de la fuerza laboral del país y probablemente aporten al presupuesto nacional el 10 por ciento de los ingresos al mismo. Se demuestra en el libro que las llamadas cooperativas no agrícolas (CNA) —llamadas así para distinguirla de aquellas que existían antes en la agricultura—, aún tenían una poca participación en la economía cubana, con sólo 367 entidades operando, la mayor parte en la parte occidental, y casi todas en los servicios tales como restaurantes y servicios de reparación de enseres o técnicos, muy pocas en la industria o en la construcción, y plagadas de enormes dificultades para conseguir los insumos que necesitan. En general esta obra debe leerse con detenimiento, y además pensar que la historia sí cuenta, y debe reanalizarse el papel de la pequeña y mediana empresa cubana privada o cooperativa en el futuro mediato, y además es necesario someter a debate nacional todo este tipo de alternativas, pero debemos evitar que nuestras jóvenes generaciones tengan como expectativa de vida contribuir al desarrollo de otras naciones, porque no ven en su país una alternativa a su formación laboral por las trabas a que están sometidas la creación de una empresa para ver realizados sus sueños. Una de las frases más elocuentes que ofrecen los entrevistados en esta obra colectiva es la siguiente: “Me gustaría que quienes gobiernan comenzaran a pensar en cómo hacerles la vida más sencilla a los ciudadanos y menos en como preservar los preceptos que se han demostrado ofrecen no más que penurias.” El libro que se analiza es de lectura obligada para una parte de nuestra sociedad, por los resultados que se presentan, y espero sea motivadora a que muchos otros investigadores emprendan proyectos similares para la formación integral de los académicos y lectores en general. OMAR EVERLENY PÉREZ VILLANUEVA

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Contributors Michael J. Bustamante is assistant professor of history at Florida International University. He earned his PhD from Yale University in 2016. Together with Jennifer Lambe, he is coeditor of The Revolution From Within: Cuba, 1959–1980 , forthcoming from Duke University Press. His scholarly writings have appeared in Journal of American Ethnic History and Latino Studies, among other publications. María A. Cabrera Arús, PhD (New School for Social Research, sociology), is a postdoctoral fellow at New York University. Cabrera Arús’s research focuses on the impact of fashion and domestic material culture on regime stability and legitimation. Her manuscript “Dressed for the Party: Fashion and Politics in Socialist Cuba” presents fashion both as a mechanism of social engineering oriented to produce a socialist “new man” and legitimize the state socialist regime and as a means of protest and resistance. Cabrera Arús is currently studying the relationship between domestic space and political discourses and ideology in the Hispanic Caribbean. Dr. Carmen Diana Deere is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Latin American Studies and Food & Resource Economics at the University of Florida. Formerly director of the UF Center for Latin American Studies, she is a past president of the Latin American Studies Association. She has carried out research on Cuban agriculture since the 1980s, most recently as part of the UF and University of Havana collaborative research project on the agricultural sector and the international economy. Jorge I. Domínguez is the Antonio Madero Professor for the Study of Mexico, Emeritus, in the Government Department at Harvard University. He is a former university vice provost for international affairs and a former president of the Latin American Studies Association. His first book on Cuba was Cuba: Order and Revolution (Harvard University Press, 1978); his most recent book, this time coedited with O. Everleny, and L. Barberia, is The Cuban Economy in a New Era: An Agenda for Change towards Durable Development (Harvard University Press, 2018). Christina García is a doctoral student in the Spanish and Portuguese Department at the University of California, Irvine. She examines friendship and hospitality as minor and extrainstitutional political practices in literary and visual works from Cuba. Her work concerns itself with corporeality, materiality, and disarticulations of the human in a postrevolutionary context. Cary Aileen García Yero is a PhD candidate at Harvard University’s History Department. Her research focuses on how interpretations of cubanidad were negotiated and

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364 : Contributors contested through artistic practices in Cuba from 1938 to 1963. She is also managing editor of Cuban Studies and Cuba Studies Program Fellow at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. García Yero completed her MA at the University of British Columbia. Her thesis, “Is It All about Love: Filin and Politics in Pre-Revolutionary Cuba,” was published in the Studies in Latin America Popular Culture (2012). She has taught history courses at Simon Fraser University and University of the Fraser Valley. Yvon Grenier (PhD, Université Laval) es profesor de ciencia política a la universidad St. Francis Xavier en Nueva Escocia, Canada. Es autor de Culture and the Cuban State: Participation, Recognition, and Dissonance under Communism (2017), Gunshots at the Fiesta: Literature and Politics in Latin America (con Maarten Van Delden, 2009), From Art and Politics: Octavio Paz and the Pursuit of Freedom (2001; Spanish trans. 2004), The Emergence of Insurgency in El Salvador (1999) y Guerre et pouvoir au Salvador (1994). Es editor (selección de textos y prólogo) de una colección de ensayos políticos de Octavio Paz, Sueño en libertad, escritos políticos (2001). Grenier fue director de la Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies y es contributing editor de la revista digital Literal, Latin American Voices. Julio César Guanche Zaldívar es doctor en historia y miembro de la Unión Nacional de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba. Ha dirigido varias publicaciones y editoriales nacionales. Trabajó por varios años en la Casa del Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano. Ha publicado prólogos y capítulos en más de 20 volúmenes. Son de su autoría los libros La verdad no se ensaya: Cuba: el socialismo y la democracia y La libertad como destino; y Valores, proyectos y tradición en el siglo XX cubano. Lillian Guerra is the author of four books of history, including three books on Cuba as well as several books of poetry and a book of short stories. Her most recent works include Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption and Resistance, 1959 to 1971, recipient of the 2014 Bryce Wood Book Award from the Latin American Studies Association, its most prestigious prize for a book on Latin America across all fields; and Heroes, Martyrs and Political Messiahs in Revolutionary Cuba, 1946–1958, published by Yale University Press in 2017. Guerra is currently completing a fifth book with Duke University Press, titled Patriots and Traitors in Cuba, 1961–1981: Education, Rehabilitation and Vanguard Youth. She teaches Cuban and Caribbean history at the University of Florida, Gainesville. Jennifer Lambe is an assistant professor of History at Brown University. Her first book, Madhouse: Psychiatry and Politics in Cuban History, was recently published with the University of North Carolina Press. Together with Michael Bustamante, she is also coeditor of a volume, The Revolution from Within: Cuba, 1959–1980 , under contract with Duke University Press. Carmelo Mesa-Lago is Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Economics and Latin American Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, and has been a visiting professor, researcher or lecturer in thirty-nine countries. He is author of ninety-four books

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and monographs and 318 articles or chapters published in seven languages in thirtyfour countries, half of them on Cuba; his most recent book (coauthored) is Voices of Change in Cuba from the Non-State Sector (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018). He was president of the Latin American Studies Association, the founder and editor for eighteen years of Cuban Studies, has received the ILO International Prize on Decent Work (shared with Nelson Mandela), and was selected among the fifty most influential Hispanic intellectuals in 2014. Elizabeth Mirabal es licenciada en periodismo en 2009 por la Universidad de La Habana. Autora de la novela La isla de las mujeres tristes (Premio Iberoamericano Verbum 2014). Compiló y prologó la Poesía completa (Verbum, 2016) de Juana Borrero. Adriana Novoa is coauthor, with Alex Levine, of two books about Darwinism in Argentina, From Man to Ape (University of Chicago Press) and Darwinistas! (Brill). She is a cultural historian specializing in evolutionary science in Latin America during the nineteenth century. She has published articles in several journals and edited volumes, and is currently working on a book manuscript that analyzes evolutionism and masculinity in Argentina, “From Virile to Sterile, Darwinism and Masculinity in Nineteenth Century Argentina.” Silvia Pedraza is professor of sociology and American culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She holds a PhD in sociology from University of Chicago, where she specialized in demography as well as stratification, and in Latin American studies. Pedraza has been elected to numerous positions in the American Sociological Association and the Social Science History Association. From the Latino/a Sociology Section of the ASA she received the Julian Samora Distinguished Career Award. She is the author of three books and numerous articles, including Political Disaffection in Cuba’s Revolution and Exodus (Cambridge University Press, 2007). She is currently working on a book on Cuba and Venezuela, together with Professor Carlos A. Romero, from the Universidad Central de Venezuela. Marysol Quevedo is an assistant professor of musicology at the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami. She holds a PhD in musicology with a minor in ethnomusicology from Indiana University. Her research interests include contemporary classical music by Latin American composers and film music composed for the Cuban Film Institute during the 1960s and 1970s. Rafael Rojas es doctor en historia por el Colegio de México. Profesor e investigador del Departamento de Historia del CIDE en la Ciudad de México. Miembro del Consejo de Redacción de la revista Letras Libres. Su último libro es Traductores de la utopía: La Revolución Cubana y la nueva izquierda de Nueva York (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2016). Elizabeth Schwall is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in dance studies at Northwestern University, where she is working on her book Political Moves: Dance and

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366 : Contributors Power in Revolutionary Cuba. She earned a PhD from Columbia University in 2016. Her academic writing on Cuban dance has appeared in Hispanic American Historical Review and is forthcoming in an edited volume on histories of the Cuban Revolution, as well as an edited volume on the futures of Dance Studies. Her book reviews have appeared in Cuban Studies, Dance Research Journal, and New West Indian Guide. Christoph Singler es catedrático de literatura y artes plásticas en la Universidad del Franco-Condado (UBFC) Besançon, Francia. Ha publicado sobre novela histórica, ficción y antropología, relaciones entre texto e imagen y artes visuales cubanas. en particular una monografía sobre la obra de Guido Llinás. Se ocupa del legado artístico parisino de este pintor, y ha curado varias exposiciones de su obra, en Toulouse y Paris. Actualmente investiga sobre las artes visuales del Atlántico Negro. Mirta Suquet, PhD (Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, comparative literature), is visiting assistant professor of literature at Williams College. Suquet’s research interests focus on the representations of conflicts of the body and subjectivity (e.g., illness, mourning, loss) in Latin American and Caribbean literatures and cultures. Her manuscript “Faces of HIV/AIDS: Disease and Identity in Latin American Narratives of Self: A Transatlantic Perspective” traces the changes in the representations of HIV/ AIDS over three decades of Latin American literature. The research delves into the representations of prejudices about disease and sexuality, in dialogue with the political contexts of the region. Carlos Velazco es licenciado en periodismo en 2009 por la Universidad de La Habana. Coautor de la selección Regreso de Ricardo Vigón (Oriente, 2015). Ha publicado Desnudo de una actriz. Ingrid González: la viuda de Reinaldo Arenas (Hypermedia, 2016). Pavel Vidal-Alejandro (PhD) is professor at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana Cali in Colombia. He received training from many central banks in Latin America (1999–2006). Previously he was professor of the Center for the Study of the Cuban Economy at the University of Havana (2006–2012) and worked as an analyst in the Monetary Policy Division of the Central Bank of Cuba (1999–2006). He served as a visiting researcher at Harvard University, Columbia University, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and the Institute for Developing Economies (Japan External Trade Organization). He has been a consultant to the World Bank, Brookings Institution, and Atlantic Council.

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On the cover William Hernández (1971, Perico, Matanzas). A graduate from the Escuela Nacional de Arte (National Art School), William, as he is commonly known in the Cuban art world, began his artistic career in the difficult years of the so-called Special Period in the 1990s, when the Cuban economy and society experienced a deep crisis. In 1997 he obtained the Grand Prize of La Joven Estampa, a national competition of emerging artists working on engraving, sponsored by Casa de las Américas in Havana since 1987. Like many artists of his generation, William’s work reflects on some of the changes that Cuban society experienced in the 1990s, when the island nation became increasingly inserted in global networks of trade and tourism. In Cuba this insertion had a sense of déjà vu, as official narratives had disparaged for decades the social and cultural ills associated with the tourist economy of the 1950s. But as the past became suddenly the future in the 1990s, some artists began to develop a personal catalog of visual references (consider the work of Sandra Ramos, for instance) to capture these contradictions and ambiguities. William did so by cannibalizing—in the best tradition of Latin American art—figures and images from Western masters of the Baroque and the Renaissance that he inserted in compositions of unmistakable Cuban flavor. This flavor is frequently shaped by his roots in rural Matanzas, a place that William holds dear and from which he derives much of his creative energy. Much of his initial woodcut prints were produced at the Taller Nacional de Gráfica in Havana, however, which was then under the direction of Cuban painter José Omar Torres. José Omar captured what the young artist was trying to do. He described William’s work by stating that it is as if Albrecht Dürer had been born in Perico. During the past few years, William has been working and exhibiting in Ecuador, where he obtained the Second Prize in the Third Biennial of Painting in Guayaquil (2012). William Hernández, La vírgen de los barquitos, 2004, oil on canvas, 47″ × 37″.

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