Introduction
Two features of Cuban culture since the revolution have attracted particular attention. First, the revolutionary government has long been well known for a general (albeit changeable) policy of restrictions on cultural freedom and for specific instances of persecution of individual intellectuals for homosexuality and/or alleged dissidence.Footnote 2 Second, a remarkable range of Cuba's cultural production has found international success, extending from films such as Strawberry and Chocolate, which achieved both box-office popularity and critical acclaim, to the athletic ballet dancing of Carlos Acosta (whose memoirs were serialised as BBC Radio 4's ‘Book of the Week’ in December 2007), to the songs of Silvio Rodríguez, the detective novels of Leonardo Padura, the poetry of Nicolás Guillén, the plays of Abelardo Estorino (which have been well-received in New York and Miami) and the paintings of Roberto Fabelo,whose graphic representations of human heads fetch high prices in the international art market. It is often argued that such achievements became possible mainly because of changes that took place during the 1990s when the Cuban government, deprived of Soviet subsidies, cautiously opened up to transnational market forces. It has been suggested that Cuba has recently entered – belatedly – into the general postmodern condition, after the failure of the attempt to implement a revolutionary model of modernity.Footnote 3 Emblematic – some would say symptomatic – of the Cuban revolution's inability to retain control of its own cultural capital, is the ubiquity of the iconic image of Che Guevara, comprehensively exploited as a marketing device by an ever-flexible transnational capitalism more than prepared to market visionary idealism if that's what sells.Footnote 4
Without seeking to deny the significance of either the cultural repression or the changes of the 1990s, in this article I suggest that there is still a lot about Cuban cultural production that these two factors do not explain. Footnote 5 Not least is the widespread sense that Cuba's cultural achievements are far greater than might be expected given its size, its population (of some ten to eleven million people) and its gross national product. Cuba has generated a galaxy of internationally renowned film directors, singers, musicians, ballet dancers, poets, novelists, playwrights and visual artists on a par with far larger countries, both in Latin America and in other parts of the world. Is this activity really something which has only happened on the margins of the Cuban revolution? Did it only become possible when the state was obliged to cede its promotional role in culture to the transnational market? Is it really the case that the revolutionary government's cultural policy has always and only been either ineffectual or ill-disposed? As has been recognised, the degree of freedom permitted to artists has oscillated over the years. It is not difficult for the historian to account for any of the specific periods when cultural repression intensified, which tended to occur at times when the government was under particular duress from international pressures and became correspondingly less willing to tolerate any challenges at home. What is harder to explain is the recurrence of periods of official relaxation in cultural policy, easing of censorship and encouragement – or at least acceptance – of experimentation and innovation. Furthermore, perhaps the most important question is: why is it that so many Cuban writers, artists, actors and musicians have demonstrated a commitment to staying and working ‘within the revolution’, despite their various doubts and concerns about aspects of government policy?
A Problematic Periodisation
Analysts of Cuban culture after 1959 tend to concur on a chronology, which in outline proceeds as follows. There was a heady period of unrestricted creativity in the immediate aftermath of the revolution, but this was prematurely brought to an end by the PM affair (the censoring of a film showing hedonistic youth frolicking in night-time Havana), which culminated in Castro's ‘Palabras a los intelectuales’ (Words to the Intellectuals) of April 1961, in the same month as the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. His famous declaration ‘within the revolution, everything, against the revolution, nothing’ had a range of possible meanings,Footnote 6 but was interpreted in an increasingly restrictive way by the state, particularly when Cuba's relationship with the USSR sharply deteriorated in 1967–8.Footnote 7 As a result, even significant advances made by the revolution were deemed to have been undermined by the effects of repression. For example, the dramatic expansion in book production after 1959, which continued into the 1980s, was compromised in 1967 when all publishing was taken over by the state, so that the newly-founded Instituto del Libro became a writer's only possible outlet.Footnote 8 The Padilla Affair of 1971, when Cuba came close to a Soviet-style show trial of poet Heberto Padilla, is customarily represented as the inevitable outcome of a build-up of tensions between the Cuban government and the intelligentsia during the late 1960s.Footnote 9 The 1970s, particularly 1971–6, are widely characterised as el quinquenio gris (the grey years), when Cuban society became more structured along Soviet lines in return for Moscow's agreement to fund a degree of Cuban industrialisation. It was not until the Cuban government abandoned Soviet-style economic policy in the mid-1980s and began a process of ‘rectification’ of previous errors that a cultural revival took place, most notably in experimental art. With the fall of the USSR in 1991, the argument concludes, Cuban culture was even further liberated from the constraints imposed by authoritarian centralism. Despite the material constraints of the ‘special period’, cultural workers were able to carve out new spaces for creative activity and debate, partly helped by greater access to an international market for their products. When the guiding hand of the state was forced to withdraw, a thousand flowers could finally bloom. Thus, the cultural vitality of the post-Soviet age in Cuba is represented as the outcome of a fundamentally ‘liberal’ separation of culture and politics brought about and enforced by globalisation.
This periodisation is not without foundation, and at least some elements of it seem to command agreement both inside and outside Cuba. Many participants in the events of the 1960s, not only intellectuals but also people experiencing education and culture for the first time, have indeed recalled the aftermath of the revolution as a period of extraordinary creativity marked by a moving sense of common purpose.Footnote 10 Likewise, it is widely accepted – even by the government itself, of late – that the first half of the 1970s were bleak years during which the state sought to enforce a crude version of revolutionary culture, calling upon intellectuals to maintain ‘a vigilant stance against ideas and customs from the past and against any form of revisionism’.Footnote 11 Most Cuban cultural figures seem to agree that the situation improved to some extent with the foundation of the Ministry of Culture in 1976, with Armando Hart as Minister, and that it improved dramatically when Hart was replaced by Abel Prieto in 1997. During the 1980s opportunities increased for cultural producers to travel and publish their work abroad, a freedom previously enjoyed only by the very eminent, such as writer Alejo Carpentier. Equally, in the early 1990s there was a manifest official shift away from a Sovietised version of Marxism-Leninism (back) to Cuban progressive nationalism laced with a dash of Marxism. This change was inscribed in the constitutional amendments of 1992, which established the guiding force of the revolution as ‘the worldview [el ideario] of José Martí and the socio-political ideas of Marx, Engels and Lenin’, instead of ‘the victorious doctrine of Marxism-Leninism’, as in the 1976 version. The revised constitution also stated that thenceforth education and cultural policy would be founded on ‘the advances of science and technology, Marxist thought and the ideas of José Martí [el ideario marxista y martiano], the progressive Cuban pedagogic tradition and the universal pedagogic tradition’ rather than solely on ‘the scientific conception of the world, established and developed by Marxism-Leninism’.Footnote 12 It is also widely agreed that for much of the 1990s the Cuban government was so preoccupied by the economic problems caused by the loss of Soviet aid that it focused mainly on containing political dissension and – whether by accident or design is disputed – left cultural production more or less to its own devices. So far, so much consensus.
Even so, it is worth pausing here to note that there are several features of this periodisation that are not widely accepted among Cuban cultural producers, particularly when evidence from the performance arts is taken into account. The story above is primarily a writer's story. This point comes out vividly in the interviews with thirteen leading Cuban cultural figures recently carried out by John Kirk and Leonardo Padura. For example, Silvio Rodríguez, notoriously banned from performing in the late 1960s for publicly acknowledging the influence of the Beatles on his music, preferred not to draw so stark a contrast between the liberated sixties and the constrained seventies.Footnote 13 Even among writers, a long series of caveats and qualifications would be introduced to reinstate the value of grey as a marker of subtlety, a salutary modifier of the extremes of black and white, rather than as a fixed symbol of suffocating bleakness. A survey of Cuban periodicals over the last decade or so also brings to light many indications of such attitudes. For example, recent articles in Revolución y Cultura, published by the Instituto del Libro, argued that even in the ‘grey years’ of the 1970s the magazine's text might have been conformist but its design was experimental – ‘cross-current [contracorriente]’ – and it was sufficiently attractive to become the most popular magazine of the time after Bohemia.Footnote 14
In their interviews with Kirk and Padura, many cultural figures who remain in Cuba recalled that in any case official control did not always conform to established patterns. Cultural policy operated with various degrees of intensity at different levels of society and in various locations. Besides, there were distinct limits to what the government could achieve. A comprehensive mapping of this complex history is a task for future researchers, probably following whatever kind of transition takes place in Cuba, but pieces of the jigsaw can be collected up from recent interviews and periodical articles.Footnote 15 The Experimental Sound Group, for example, was excluded from television but became known through the film industry: ‘many films had our music. The attempt to marginalize us was as futile as trying to block out the sun with a single finger’.Footnote 16 One of the earliest issues of Temas carried an intriguing discussion of the constraints encountered by the government when it attempted to intervene in theatre.Footnote 17
Arguably, each decade had its instances of repression and its possibilities for liberation. Attention has rightly been drawn recently to the possibilities for critical debate opened up in the new journals of the 1990s, notably Temas and Contracorriente (both dating from 1995), but it is also worth bearing in mind that Pensamiento Crítico, published from 1967 to 1971, developed a comparable reputation;Footnote 18 and Casa de las Américas, albeit not known for debates, has long been renowned for publishing quite a wide range of authors from abroad, especially from Latin America, the extensive cultural presence of which in Cuba is often ignored by critics who claim that the revolution is closed to the outside world.Footnote 19 Moreover, there were also instances of repression during the 1990s: for example, the Centro de Estudios sobre América, established in 1977, was closed down in 1996. In a long history of difficulties, it is hard – and in any case to many Cubans this may seem pointless – to identify the worst of times.
The real difficulty with the story told above, however, is not the debateable accuracy of its precise contours, but the problematic assumptions upon which it is based. These are two standard Anglo-American liberal nostrums: first, that cultural production should be autonomous from politics;Footnote 20 and, second, that civil society and the state should be thought of as two distinct entities that are in constant tension. Yet there is a long history in Cuba, dating back at least to the late nineteenth century, of a different understanding of the relationships between culture and politics and between civil society and the state, an understanding of both relationships as more intertwined than in the liberal ideal.Footnote 21 The Cuban historian Rafael Hernández has convincingly argued that in Cuba civil society is not conceptualised either as liberal (as an economic sphere) or as conventionally Marxist (as the sphere of political institutions) but rather in Gramscian terms that leave open the possibility for creative overlap – rather than opposition – between civil society and the revolutionary state.Footnote 22 Especially in the 1960s, it was not only the Cuban government that was uncertain about the appropriate role for art and culture in a revolutionary society, but also many writers and artists themselves, as shown in Andrew Salkey's reportage of the 1968 Cultural Congress in Havana.Footnote 23 At this event, Julio Cortázar was adamant that the ivory-tower intellectual was dead, and C. L. R. James went even further to propose that intellectuals should stop seeing themselves as the embodiment of culture, provoking a defence by several Cuban delegates of the value of the independent intellectual as a potentially distinguished contributor to a collective patrimony.Footnote 24 The issue was an international one, but it took on special resonance in relation to Cuba, which was widely seen – and represented itself – as an alternative model to the Eastern bloc. Debates about the extent to which culture should or could aspire to be independent from ideology and politics were by no means straightforward clashes between a government insisting on political commitment on the one hand and artists and writers demanding independence on the other.
This article is based on the premise that, as argued by Rafael Hernández, to categorise all Cubans as either fidelista or dissident is to underestimate the extent to which meaningful debate has taken place in Cuba, and ‘an autonomous, critical, and organic’ revolutionary tradition exists.Footnote 25 Sujatha Fernandes, also adopting a Gramscian perspective and looking mainly at the 1990s, found evidence for what she called ‘artistic public spheres’, not bounded in the Habermasian sense, but overlapping with both state institutions and market forces, as ‘sites of interaction and discussion among ordinary citizens generated through the medium of art and popular culture’.Footnote 26 As was also noted by Fernandes, Cuban scholars have approached state/civil society relations in this way, showing the various ways in which ‘cultural contestation came to be situated within the socialist state apparatus rather than in opposition to it’.Footnote 27 Building on these findings about civil society and the state, this article sketches out some ideas for rethinking the relationship between culture and politics in Cuba. It makes no claim to be comprehensive; indeed, it could not possibly be so, because many of the areas indicated have yet to be fully researched. Drawing mainly on an extensive survey of Cuban periodicals, particularly from the 1990s onwards, it works towards a possible explanatory framework for understanding the extraordinary fertility and appeal of Cuban culture since the Revolution.
A Useable Past
It is well known that the close relationship between culture and politics in Cuba dates back to the early nineteenth century. The onset of modernisation towards the end of the colonial period brought a degree of institutional separation, but differentiation between the two spheres never became as marked as in Western Europe, the English-speaking liberal democracies or some other parts of Latin America. Nor was it seen as desirable in Cuba that it should do so. Indeed, it is arguable that during the 1920s an alliance was forged between revolutionary intellectuals and organised workers in Cuba that was the most enduring and successful in Latin America. In the founding of the Cuban Communist Party (1925) by student-intellectuals Julio Antonio Mella and Rubén Martínez Villena, alongside workers' leaders such as Fabio Grobart, Cuban intellectuals enacted what José Mariátegui envisaged, but was unable to achieve in Peru, namely a lasting political relationship between intellectuals and the masses. Students and intellectuals played an important part in bringing about the first Cuban Revolution, in 1933, which briefly brought a government led by intellectuals to power. One legacy of 1933 that has not received sufficient attention is that it cemented the importance of culture in Cuba's radical tradition. The revolutionary leaders of the 1950s – most of whom were university graduates – drew upon this element as a source of legitimacy just as much as they drew upon others that have been more extensively researched, namely Martí's thought; cubanía; or the anti-colonial wars.Footnote 28 Official revolutionary discourse has often made reference to the 1920s, not least in the preface to the Constitution of 1976, which hailed ‘the workers, peasants, students and intellectuals who struggled for more than fifty years […]’ (after the aborigines, the slaves and the patriots of the two independence wars) in its invocation of those who had contributed to Cuba's ‘traditions of combativity, strength of purpose [firmeza], heroism and sacrifice’.Footnote 29
It has often been remarked that the Cuban Revolution of 1959 was the self-declared revolution of the intellectuals, with Martí adopted by Castro as its ‘author’. A fundamentally liberal discourse about the supreme value of education and learning imbues Cuban revolutionary rhetoric, from ‘History Will Absolve Me’, in which metaphors of teaching and learning echo throughout,Footnote 30 to the Constitution of 1976, which noted that ‘the members of the vanguard of the generation of the centenary of Martí’s birth led their people to victory ‘nourished by their teaching [magisterio]’.Footnote 31 The idea that socialism is cultural opportunity as well as social justice and equality became a leitmotiv of Cuban revolutionary discourse.Footnote 32
Why does any of this matter in relation to an analysis of cultural policy after the revolution of 1959? After all, we know that intellectuals have not played a leading role in the Cuban revolution, either as policy-makers or as opinion-shapers. As even an intellectual sympathetic to the revolution noted: ‘The political vanguard set the terms of debate, including those of intellectual content, in areas ranging from the reinterpretation of Cuban history to ideas about imperialism, Latin Americanism, and revolutionary culture’.Footnote 33 The lack of access to mass media or scope to debate ideas freely at universities has meant that ‘no mechanisms have emerged to give intellectuals an influence in national politics that would make full use of their capacities’.Footnote 34 Indeed, it was only logical that this should be the case, because by the time that they came to power the revolutionary leaders themselves had founded their legitimacy on the promise to deliver access to culture for all. In consequence, their rhetoric about the importance of culture should not be dismissed as so much bad faith, not least because, in the delicate political process of sustaining legitimacy, rhetoric in itself constrains actions to some extent (too great a gap between stated values and policies implemented cannot be sustained even under an authoritarian system when the regime in question relies, as the Cuban government has done, on a strategy of popular mobilisation to overcome recurrent hardships). Moreover, as will be illustrated in the following section, there is a good deal of evidence that more often than not policy converged with rhetoric to a degree sufficient to command support, if not uncritical approbation, from many people in the cultural professions.
Culture Matters, or What has the Revolution Done for Us?
When the comandantes came to power, culture had long been embedded in Cuban concepts of what it is to be fully a human being and a citizen. As noted above, the revolutionaries themselves grew up in the context of this tradition, and their own political views had been shaped by it. Thus the revolutionary government did not so much try to found a wholly new culture as seek to connect the radical elements of Cuba's existing cultural traditions to the revolutionary project of cultural decolonisation. Just as the revolutionary leaders found many useable elements in pre-revolutionary historiography – predominantly but by no means only in revisionist history – so did they identify several key features of Cuban culture that complemented their political aims.Footnote 35 The revolution's modernising project assumed ‘a rational and well-ordered approach to building a society, which goes beyond the merely political to be expressed in ethical, ideological and aesthetic modes of behaviour, codes of practice and values that shape a particular way of being and becoming a citizen’.Footnote 36 The government's proclamation that the revolution was the culmination of Cuban history paved the way for it to appropriate a variety of aspects of the country's past. Paradoxically, although 1959 is widely seen by historians as a moment of absolute rupture, the revolutionary government itself has consistently made (selective) claims to continuity in Cuban history. Cultural policy was central to this endeavour.
As elsewhere in Latin America, where there has historically been a restricted market for cultural goods, Cuban cultural producers (many of whom returned from exile in 1959) were predisposed to welcome a role for the State in promoting culture, a role which already had quite a long history. The Constitution of 1940 – which Castro and other revolutionary leaders repeatedly declared their intention to restore – stated (article 47): ‘Culture in all of its manifestations constitutes a primary interest of the State’,Footnote 37 a claim echoed in the Constitution of 1976: ‘The State guides, encourages and promotes education, culture and the sciences in all their manifestations’.Footnote 38 The majority of cultural producers identified with the aims of the Consejo Nacional de Cultura, established in 1961 to ‘work on the recovery of our traditions and the dignifying of artistic and literary work’.Footnote 39 Most shared the government's conviction of the urgent need for cultural decolonisation and the confronting of what just a few years earlier the poet Cintio Vitier had publicly condemned as ‘the most corrupting influence that the Western world has ever suffered’, namely ‘the so-called American way of life [orig. in English]’, with its capacity to ‘drain to the roots all the values and essences of everything it touches’.Footnote 40 Many people were prepared to accept the government's argument that authentic universalism could only be embraced by those who were able to enjoy a strong sense of the local, something which had been impossible for Cuba under neo-colonialism.Footnote 41
What culture meant under the Cuban Revolution was broadly conceived from the outset. All the results of creative activity geared towards aesthetic, ethical or spiritual expression – artistic, literary, musical, theatrical – professional or amateur, artisanal or industrialised, individual or collective, were brought in under the umbrella of the government's commitment to culture. Culture was seen as a powerful integrating force, one which could reconcile the individual with society; a commitment to a rational approach to life with personal impulses and collective norms; values with ideas and imaginings.Footnote 42 The new man, declared Che Guevara, would achieve ‘full realisation as a human being, having broken the chains of alienation […] by means of liberated work and the expression of his own human condition through culture and art’.Footnote 43 A distinction was drawn between ‘the multiple forms of traditional, routine, settled activity, the function of which is the continuation of social processes, the connection of the past with the present and the stability of the social system’ and ‘the active, revolutionary element, which provokes both quantitative and qualitative change in society and makes it progress’. The latter, culture, was hailed as ‘the permanent and dynamic connection between the present and the future of society’.Footnote 44 For the Cuban revolutionaries, the impulse to artistic experimentation was a manifestation of the urge for freedom, so experimentation of form – if not always of content – was deemed to be essential to a revolutionary culture. Che Guevara famously condemned socialist realism,Footnote 45 and one of the crucial contexts for understanding the cultural policy of the revolutionary government is the relationship with the Soviet Union. Culture became one arena in which the Cubans could and did assert their independence, their greater capacity for tolerance, their commitment to an authentically revolutionary culture. It was not just capitalist alienation against which the Cuban revolutionaries rebelled, but also Soviet-style communist culture.
The idea that the whole range of cultural production should be available to everybody was a constant tenet of official policy.Footnote 46 Even in one of the most restrictive government statements on culture (declaring that aesthetic values could not be separated out from ideological content), it was emphasised that: ‘the best cultural works, the best artistic creations of humanity must be available to the people’.Footnote 47 As discussed above, the vision of a new kind of culture – no longer elitist and alienated – that was articulated in official discourse drew upon well-established Cuban values and was widely supported. Although it was certainly promoted and to an extent steered by the regime, most culture professionals and a variety of other social actors were eager to contribute. This helps to explain why the revolutionary government built up a reserve of legitimacy during the early 1960s that for many people has never been exhausted.
The incoming revolutionary government moved quickly to establish an abundance of cultural organisations. It is worth listing these together here to convey the sheer range of the initiatives undertaken. During this exhilarating time, when it seemed to intellectuals that anything was possible,Footnote 48 a National Theatre and a National Art School were founded, both of which had branches throughout the island, along with Casa de las Américas,Footnote 49 UNEAC (the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba), ICAIC (the Cuban Film Institute), two national dance companies, a national symphony orchestra, a national choir and an Institute of Ethnology and Folklore. Alicia Alonso, founder of the first Cuban ballet school in 1948, recalled how the new government took great interest in developing her work, supporting ‘a series of tours around the island, continuously talking about ballet’, which helped to create the climate in which the newly-founded Ballet Nacional de Cuba developed its reputation.Footnote 50 University extension programmes were also introduced, making use of existing educational buildings around the country,Footnote 51 and public libraries opened. Later in the 1960s a series of music projects got underway: the Cuban Orchestra of Modern Music in 1967, incubator of the famous Afro-Cuban jazz group Irakere, and the Grupo de Experimentación Sonora (Group of Sound Experimentation), founded by Leo Brouwer in 1969 and linked to ICAIC. The self-declared ‘mission’ of this group was ‘to transform the repertory of Cuban popular music as much as possible’, trying to transcend the problem that all popular music tends to be imitative. Participants recall this as a transformative time in their lives.Footnote 52 The blurring of boundaries between state and civil society certainly generated tensions at times, but many of these experiments in cultural decolonisation were experienced by participants as immensely creative.
Moreover, the government continued to generate new initiatives, tending to concentrate on different areas of culture in different decades. Another cluster of organisations was established along with the Ministry of Culture in 1976, designed to renew cultural activity after the ‘grey years’: the Instituto Superior del Arte, later credited with creating ‘a space for artistic speculation and experimentation’ where ‘the proposals of a newer generation made themselves heard’, thereby contributing to the revival of Cuban visual arts in the 1980s;Footnote 53 the Teatro de Arte Popular; the expansion of UNEAC to include theatre and cinema, television and radio as well as literature, the plastic arts and music;Footnote 54 and, in 1979, the first Bienal Internacional de Humorismo y Gráfica Militantes (International Festival of Political Cartoon and Graphic Art), which represented an important albeit little known part of Cuban culture. After 1959, photographers played a key role in creating the iconography of the revolution, especially the paradigmatic Guerrillero Heroico and images of Fidel and Martí. Later, the work of photographers acquired a more popular dimension: in the 1980s José Figueroa became well-known for his photographs of wall slogans – not only those dedicated to ‘exaltation of the government, but also those that demonstrate popular wisdom, in all its mixture of humour and double meaning, written on spaces that are often not photogenic.’Footnote 55 The Cuban Revolution is also famed for its poster art and for the high quality of graphic design – inspired by ‘Western modernism’ – on the vallas (billboards) that replaced commercial hoardings around Cuban towns.Footnote 56
In the 1980s, Cuba developed its renowned annual Latin American film festival, followed in the 1990s by its now equally prestigious Arts Biennale and a well-established International Book Fair, which – like the film festival – is held throughout the provinces as well as in Havana. More recently, Cuba held the 2003 International Festival of Hip-Hop and established a record label, Colibrí (Hummingbird) intended for music that would not readily find a commercial audience.Footnote 57 Through these festivals and events, which have been well-attended by people from throughout Latin America, some parts of Africa and elsewhere in the developing world, the government has allowed certain foreign ideas and influences into Cuba, even if the flow has certainly not been unrestricted and Cuban intellectuals, in particular, have often complained about the lack of contact with ‘Western’ cultures. The government has also thereby justified its claims to be the cultural champion of Latin America, ‘safeguarding the best’ of ‘our common heritage’,Footnote 58 and – again drawing on a long tradition that it is Cuba's role to act as a bridge or door to other worlds – opening up connections with other countries of Latin America, the Caribbean and, in the 1970s, with Africa.
Another key aspect of government policy mentioned by virtually everybody, when asked by Kirk and Padura why they still supported the revolution into the twenty-first century, was the successful implementation of mass education. The initial aim was to remove previous inequalities of opportunity, particularly between the urban and rural areas (where there was little schooling before the revolution) and between different districts within urban areas. Resources were devoted to teacher training and, furthermore, the general policy of fixing incomes, so that there was little variation between workers and professionals, made teaching a desirable profession which the government took care also to make a prestigious one.Footnote 59 By 1980, all Cuban children had access to ten years of education.Footnote 60
Martin Carnoy's recent research found that what he called ‘state-generated social capital’, that is the state's role in creating a context in which educational achievement is highly valued, played an important, although not all-determining role in explaining why it was that Cuban children from all backgrounds consistently did better at school than their counterparts in either Brazil or Chile.Footnote 61 In similar vein, Sheryl Lutjens has argued that Cuban evidence provides examples of a more participatory civil society being promoted by state education policy.Footnote 62 As has often been pointed out, there are authoritarian aspects to the Cuban education system, but the research findings we have available indicate that Cuban pedagogy has been more imaginative than is implied by those who portray it primarily as a means of indoctrination. Russian child-centred educational philosophy fed into Cuban policy, not only in the insistence that children at all levels spend time doing manual work every week, but also in the policy that a child should have the same teacher throughout primary school and – more recently – in lower secondary too.Footnote 63 So did the work of Paulo Freire – with his emphasis on the importance of dialogue – and Frantz Fanon's ideas about critical acumen being crucial to decolonisation of the mind.
One other feature of government cultural policy that has perhaps not received the attention it warrants is the use of language. Changing the language was deemed by the government to be a necessary part of decolonisation. From Cuba's formal independence in 1902 until the revolution, claimed Nicolás Guillén, US imperialism had not only exploited the Cuban economy but had also imposed ‘a particular sort of language, a sort of slang [in English in orig.] riddled with barbarisms’.Footnote 64 Beginning with the Literacy Campaign of 1961, a set of common referents were created that enabled the poor ‘[to appropriate] the realms of language from which they had been barred, and [to make] them part of their culture’.Footnote 65 Music played an important role in this transformation: Silvio Rodríguez recalled deliberately setting out to extend the parameters of what could be included in song lyrics.Footnote 66 It was also the explicit aim of Leo Brouwer's Grupo de Experimentación Sonora to extend the range of references and vocabulary employed in the lyrics of Cuban popular songs. In general, Brouwer argued, ‘The generation of the Revolution … changed the language and the people [continue to] do so, not by mechanical changes but by transformations within their society’.Footnote 67
In sum, the revolutionary government has cumulatively done a significant amount to promote cultural production far beyond the imperatives of propaganda and indoctrination, consistently investing in institutions, organisations and initiatives for both professionals and amateurs. In its pursuit – at times rather relentless – of democratisation of both production and consumption, quality of output sometimes suffered. Some initiatives have been criticised for acquiescing in mediocrity, as Nancy Morejón put it, ‘in the name of a supposed form of equality’. One salient example was the ‘new theatre’ of the 1970s, when almost all resources for drama were directed towards collective, participatory theatre rather than traditional theatre.Footnote 68 Furthermore, there have been times of great material scarcity. Overall, however, the Cuban government has sustained a commitment to allocating resources for cultural activity and has endeavoured continually to distribute them around the island. Where its record has been less impressive, as is well known, has been in allowing access to information and cultural products from outside Cuba. Many people would argue that production and reception are inextricably linked and that opportunities to encounter ideas and images from elsewhere are crucial to creativity. Nevertheless, in order to understand why many cultural professionals remain prepared to give the revolution the benefit of the doubt, policies of state control and repression have to be set in the context of five decades of investment in an extensive network of cultural activities and organisations.
Conclusions
In an intriguing article published in the Communist Party journal Cuba Socialista in 1996, shortly before he left office, Minister of Culture Armando Hart set out a critique of Western modernity that would strike a chord across much of Latin America. Reason and science had brought great benefits, he argued, but at the expense of underestimating the importance of spirituality and myth in human practice. Spirituality had been relegated to the category of the metaphysical, whereas in fact, he claimed, it has materialist roots, arising as it does out of human activity. Marx, Lenin and all the East European socialist regimes of the twentieth century had taken a reductionist view of the superstructure, which was, Hart stated, ‘their most important theoretical error’, because it meant that they had been unable to harness ‘the best in people’ to the creation of socialism. Indeed, in the many articles in Cuban periodicals analysing the collapse of socialism in the Eastern bloc, there is repeated criticism of their cultural repressiveness,Footnote 69 which is seen as indicative of ‘an anti-humanism founded in over-theoretical positions and dogmatic practices’ rather than lived experience.Footnote 70 Humanism, which Cubans often make synonymous with anti-dogmatism, has often been proclaimed as the central value of Cuban culture, both before and after the 1959 Revolution.
Hart's article went on to claim that the Cuban government took particular pride in having incorporated ‘an ethical sense of life and of history’ into its own concept of revolution. Such a set of ethical principles could not be derived, he suggested, from reason alone. Reasoning played an important part in the process, but a full grasp of the message of human liberation could only come through complementing it with ‘our feelings, emotions and actions’. The lack of ‘an ethics worthy of the level of knowledge and information reached by humanity’ was ‘the great deficit of modernity’. In order, then, for reason to achieve ‘a definitive victory’, ‘it had to be strengthened and crowned with ethical principles’. In other words, in order for the European Enlightenment truly to fulfil its goals, its ideas had to be complemented by ‘the political vision and the human sensitivity of the culture of our America’, which in turn required an appreciation of the value of subjectivity, spirituality and myth. The article explicitly echoes Mariátegui's thought and links it to that of Gramsci and Che Guevara.Footnote 71 As I have argued elsewhere, a variety of Latin American thinkers have emphasised these elements as crucial constituents not only of a distinctively Latin American culture but also of an alternative Latin American model of modernity that began to be worked out explicitly in contrast to the US model during the early twentieth century, and reached its most elaborated form in the work of Mariátegui.Footnote 72
The enduring strength and appeal of this alternative version of modernity that finds space for an ethical approach to life is one reason, I suggest, why Cuba still has such a substantial and successful community of cultural producers, despite all the material and political difficulties life on the island entails. Cuban conceptions of how to be modern have traditionally (the word is used advisedly) consisted less of a master narrative and more of a series of mises en scènes: ‘Since the nineteenth century, the crystallization of our national consciousness had required us to rummage around in history in order to collect up all the loose pieces of the jigsaw puzzle’.Footnote 73 The government has at times encouraged this tradition – which in many ways suited its own purposes, at others tolerated it, at others sought to impose a Marxist-nationalist master narrative upon it – but, I would suggest, only with partial success. Like all grand constructivist projects, the Cuban government's master narrative worked only to the extent that it resonated with people's existing ‘spaces of experience’ and ‘horizons of expectation’.Footnote 74 When UNEAC, in the midst of ‘the grey years’, called upon writers to create ‘works in which shone a love of life and the justice typical of a new world in constant progress’,Footnote 75 the exhortation lacked plausibility, not least because it contradicted the Cuban government's own discourse, which was not one of an uninterrupted movement of progress towards a bright and shiny, squeaky-clean (US-style) future, but instead of recurrent apocalyptic renewal based on the regenerating powers of youth.
Leonardo Padura argues that the policy reorientation signalled by the founding of the Ministry of Culture in 1976 was the outcome of the state beginning ‘to assimilate the need for a more profound change in policy’ after ‘several grave political errors […], both in the treatment of intellectuals and in the very definition of what artistic expression should be’. The shift did not originate from within the government, but ‘was demanded by artists themselves, who expressed their feelings clearly in their work’.Footnote 76 Similarly, Roberto Fernández Retamar argues that the Ministry of Culture ‘took over the best traces of the cultural work accomplished by the revolution and found strength and support in the institutions and personalities that had rejected (and in different ways, suffered) the mediocrity of the Grey Quinquennium’.Footnote 77 Cuba's tradition of transculturation and heterogeneity was strong enough – partly because it had been encouraged (albeit intermittently) by the government itself – to survive attempts to harness it at moments when the government was in thrall to cruder concerns. More often than not, the state proved flexible enough to respond to criticism, and indeed to incorporate it successfully so that its own hegemony was reproduced.Footnote 78
Thus, the picture of a regime that failed to implement a modernist project succumbing to postmodern pressures over which it has little control does not strike me as a persuasive one. Instead, I would argue that the Revolution has overseen the continuation of a long Cuban history of elaborating an alternative version of modernity. This alternative entails a keen awareness of all the dangers of excessive rationalisation pointed out by postmodernists, but it strives to maintain, nonetheless, the sense of agency and history that many Cuban intellectuals see as having been lost in postmodernism.Footnote 79 In the context of international debates about whether the Enlightenment should be rejected or reformulated, it is worth pausing to think about the record of the Cuban experience of trying to develop an inclusive modern culture.
If, as Mona Rosendahl has suggested, the widespread experience of participation in the Revolution is one of the main reasons for its survival,Footnote 80 then it is worth noting that many people's experiences of participation would have been cultural as well as economic, social and political, including, for example, the rituals, ceremonies and performances associated with the new revolutionary order. To a considerable extent, it is genuinely plausible for Abel Prieto, currently Minister of Culture, to claim:
With the Revolution […] for the first time Cubans had access to the whole of their historical and artistic inheritance. Not only was there an intensive process of rescuing and promoting the art and literature produced by intellectual minorities throughout our history, but also the popular traditions were trawled through by researchers, and the authentic crucible of cubanía, in its many and varied nutrients, was placed at the disposal of the great masses.Footnote 81
Solitary cultural consumption was not a priority for the government, but then neither had it been so historically.Footnote 82 Rafael Hernández has argued that the survival of the Cuban Revolution ‘was not thanks to economic riches or political agility but thanks to its “cultural capital” – [dating back to] the eighteenth century – of which the revolution may be seen as both inheritor and promoter’.Footnote 83 Likewise, he argues that the gains of the Revolution have not only been material but also cultural, including ‘social and national consciousness’.Footnote 84 Far more research needs to be done, but evidence is already accumulating in support of this argument. By selectively drawing upon Cuba's pre-revolutionary cultural traditions and by supporting a wide range of cultural initiatives, the revolutionary government succeeded to a significant extent in overseeing the consolidation of a sense of what modern culture can be that has resonated widely among both cultural producers and their audiences. A national culture that is ‘non-alienating’ and non-North Americanised has not been peripheral to the Revolution's self image but central to it; indeed – despite all the problems – it has perhaps been its lasting achievement.
