Revolution and Culture in Cuba 
Revolution and Culture in Cuba
Roberto Fernandez Retamar
• Havana
Photos: Kaloian (The Jiribilla) and File
Shortly after the victory of January 1959, on 19 August of that memorable year, published in the Cuban newspaper Revolucion article "Havana, Crossroads of America", where I raised that as of that January in Havana, Cuba ie, had become the crossroads of America, the focus of the continent.
The reasons are obviously political, but I argued that Cuba was forced to fight by becoming, well, intellectual and artistic crossroads. This, I added, not parasitically, dragged from the obvious and powerful political greatness, but by their own merits.
Although time had barely begun to function, had already been created in the country, one in March and in April, two cultural institutions that made roads lead to this purpose: the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC) and the Casa de las Americas, led for years, respectively, by Alfredo Guevara and Haydee Santamaria, emblematic figures of our history.
was organized in 1960 the National Press, whose first and symbolic title, published copiously at a minimum price, was Don Quixote de la Mancha. And in 1961 there was the romantic literacy campaign that made Cuba the first country of our America free of illiteracy. (In recent years, with procedures and sometimes teachers Cuban, Latin American and Caribbean countries are doing similar work in some form.)
From that campaign, and raise the educational level, had full meaning to the phrase of Fidel whereby not tell the people, think, we say: read. To provide the most varied reading materials, led the National Press in 1962, the National Editorial, brilliantly led by Alejo Carpentier. A few years later, in his wake, was created on the Cuban Book Institute.
But in 1961 that Cuba also occurred in other events of different nature. On 15 April of that year were bombed by U.S. aircraft three Cuban airports. It was undoubtedly the prelude to the invasion, like the one in 1954 had crushed the liberal government of Guatemala, where was the young Ernesto Guevara, who has not yet told him Che. April 16, at the funeral of the victims of the bombings, Fidel Castro proclaimed the socialist character he had acquired the Cuban Revolution. And in the early hours of 17 came the invasion.
On 19, 66 hours later, they surrendered their last strongholds.
was for Cubans on the island's feat Playa Giron, name of a victory, and for the Americans and their mercenary leaders, the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs, the name of a defeat.
The socialist character assumed by the Cuban Revolution, While excited, worried writers and artists not hostile to the revolutionary process, but connoisseurs of the deformations imposed on the literature and the arts in almost all socialist countries that were said.
The banning of a documentary made outside the ICAIC rushed things, and in June 1961 several meetings of writers and artists with political leaders led by Fidel.
At these meetings there, word of mouth, many interventions, of which there are apparently no transcriptions. Has retained only the concluding speech of Fidel, called "Words to the intellectuals." In that speech, and other considerations, Fidel uttered the phrase that became famous: "Within the Revolution, everything against the Revolution, nothing."
is said that this phrase has led the cultural policy of Cuba today. But such a phrase, of course, is susceptible to more than one interpretation. I am among those who think that "within the Revolution" to include criticism of what is considered wrong in the revolutionary process.
So understood our great filmmaker Tomas Gutierrez Alea in his films such as Death of a Bureaucrat, Memories of Underdevelopment and Strawberry and Chocolate. This was understood most of our writers and artists, including the current Minister of Culture, Abel Prieto writer and essayist. As a result, Cuba was not implemented anything like the disastrous socialist realism, which Che give the coup de grace in his letter to the Uruguayan Carlos Quijano, 1965 known as "Socialism and Man in Cuba."
In light of those meetings in June 1961, in August of that year, after Congress moved, they created the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba, Nicolás Guillén's head and a direction of forming Part creators as Alejo Carpentier, José Lezama Lima, Juan Blanco, Lisandro Otero, myself.
So far I have limited myself to what happened within Cuba. Known, however, the impact of the Cuban revolution beyond our borders: first, in the other countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, but also the entire planet.
One consequence was the great interest that began to take on the world for our America since 1959.
This interest is directed not only political, but also cultural, in particular, literature. What many consider the greatest Latin American poet of the twentieth century, the Peruvian César Vallejo, died in 1938 in Paris riddled needs.
From the 60's of last century it would be very different. In many parts of institutions were created to study the Latin American and Caribbean realities.
publishers were not back, and made a good pitch, and profitable publishing our authors. He even used the anglicized deplorable boom to refer to a group of good storytellers in the area, implying that had emerged suddenly. It would be foolish to attribute only to the Cuban Revolution vogue since 1959, the Latin American and Caribbean literature.
Much of this literature was already a high level long before that year. But it was after that date when it began to be taken seriously on a massive scale. Some of the beneficiaries sympathized with the Cuban Revolution is consistent. Others did at the beginning and then it went away. And no shortage of enemies to him, which is perhaps the greatest example of the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, who until 1959 had been an author of minorities, and would become multipublicado, multitraducido, winning, multientrevistado.
(La Casa de las Americas in 1988 published a volume of his Selected Pages.) Curious irony of his own paradoxical spirit, which it largely due to a historical fact that he disliked.
Until then, the Nobel Prize for Literature had only fallen, justly, in our author, Gabriela Mistral. Beginning in 1959 would receive, with equal justice, Miguel Angel Asturias, Gabriel García Márquez, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Derek Walcott, VS Naipaul.
All somehow, like it or not, debtors of the impact caused by the Cuban Revolution.
should return to Cuba. The assassination of Che in 1967 virtually shut down our intense 60's. In 1968 came the first chapter of what would be the infamous "Padilla Case" harsh official merchandise from his books and another writer. In 1971, a new chapter: the poet's prison for nearly a month, and their release followed an alleged self-criticism that was actually a cartoon of the speeches made by victims of the terrible trials in Moscow. In parallel, there was a Congress of Education and Culture, which emerged some guidelines that contradicted what had been until then the cultural politics of the Cuban Revolution.
had begun narrowing the critical appoint Ambrosio Fornet then "Quinquenio Gris (1971-1976). See the excellent conference on the issue read Fornet in 2007 at the Casa de las Americas. At the conference, with which I identified (first appeared in the journal that I lead, Casa de las Américas), refer to my readers. Lived outside Cuba, regarding it, which the admirable Julio Cortazar called "when the jackals." Although there Cubans errors, some scholars took the situation not only to disengage itself from the Cuban Revolution as a whole but to attack and passed on to the enemy ranks.
that are in today, and their names are disseminated by various means hostile or neutral to say. In Cuba, from the creation in 1976 of the Ministry of Culture, Armando Hart to his forehead, made decisions that aired the resumed and enriched environment and positive ways. The fact was accelerated when, starting and mid 80's, started by Fidel himself called error correction process, aimed mainly incorrect economic measures taken in the 70's when the country increased its ties with the USSR. Che had earlier warned about the negativity of these measures, in some ways parallel to those taken in the cultural field.
But just started this process, the consequences of perestroika led to the disappearance of so-called European socialist bloc, and even the implosion of the Soviet Union.
From overnight, Cuba lost more than 80 percent of its foreign trade.
was necessary to bring it into the so-called Special Period, which has led to apply in peacetime planned the drastic austerity wartime.
Raul in a meeting with Cuban intellectuals
at the opening of the International Book Fair of Havana
In this period, which lasted more than 15 years (in his speech on 26 July 2007, Raúl Castro said he would not have left it), have experienced two very different experiences: first, the scarcity of almost everything, including course materials required for cultural production, and secondly, the release of schematic thinking from European socialist countries, especially the USSR.
The Cuban Revolution, which since July 26, 1953 was declared by the mouth of Fidel, directed by José Martí, has strengthened this affiliation, not the quick renounce Marxism, so disfigured in those countries with the results known. Cintio Vitier wrote years ago that Cuba is in effect a Marxism Marti, which illuminates the country's cultural life.
In the darkest moments of the special period, Fidel said that the first he had to save was the culture. Left behind the time, the country has been reborn and life multiplied editorial, art exhibitions, concerts and theater and dance, even film, which had survived through co-productions not always successful, but has a Festival New Latin American Cinema that makes Cuba every December a special place.
as do the annual book fairs that show the island, exhibitions, festivals, ballet, theater and poetry, while preserving prizes and events like those organized by the Casa de las Americas.
The scientific, Cuba now has internationally recognized institutions, and is delivered to a massification of education including university. At the same time, has sent thousands of doctors and other health workers in many Third World countries. This has helped keep Cuba linked to a large intellectuals from around the world.
recently presented the initial number of the literary magazine The Evergreen, the latest of many current Cuban cultural magazine. The title of the magazine, which was already the other appearing in Havana in 1838, could well apply to the Cuban cultural life. Neither
slander, or invasion, or aggression, nor the terrible and intensified blockade, and the enormous difficulties of the special period in peacetime, even our mistakes and shortcomings have prevented it blooms, from bottom to top, the culture of today and tomorrow, the evergreen.
November 20, 2008
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