Every few months, the results of a new global study to measure happiness, well-being, life satisfaction, or affluence is published. In our post-Cold War context, some perceive alternative paradigms to capitalism, such as notions of community or buenvivir (living well), as the best route to happiness, as vital to the survival of our planet and social harmony, others perceive those same paradigms as a reflection of the outdated nostalgia of the middle classes in a time of unrelenting neoliberalization. Cross-cultural comparative measurements, such as the World Happiness Index, are laden with the risk of dissolving difference but, at the same time, are indispensable to a global perspective on human life. Other policy contexts provide alternative perspectives developed from the periphery: Bhutanâs Gross National Happiness Index and Cubaâs ever-changing version of revolutionary development via socialism are examples which are often cited as making a significant contribution to global models of human development, although neither nation professes such global pretensions.
Nevertheless, both Bhutan and Cuba, albeit in very different ways, emphasize the centrality of cultural life to notions of well-being. Many argue that Cuban revolutionary discourse has, from the independence period to the present day, explicitly proclaimed the contribution of culture to processes of individual and national emancipation; on the other hand, many scholars would point out that the role of culture after the 1959 Revolution has not been to enable emancipation but rather to facilitate state control through molding citizens until they become captive minds. This study aims to explore the space between those extremes in the period from 1959 to 2012: the gray areas and quiet everyday activities that also contribute to post-1959 Cuban culture and, indeed, may even go some way in explaining in a more nuanced way the survival of the Revolution.
As always with Cuba, the picture is more complicated than it first seems. On the island, the most frequently cited indicators of well-beingâlos cinco bienes fundamentales of clothing, housing, food, health, and educationâhave for long been presented by the Cuban leadership (especially Fidel Castro) as basic human rights, providing seemingly irrefutable evidence of effective government welfare structures and a commitment to humanist values. Included within those five basic rights, there are three material indicatorsâfood, clothing, and housingâthat have been severely compromised at various periods, and especially so during the worst years of the crisis of the 1990s that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. Especially from the 1990s onward, those who questionedâor outright opposedâthe system used precisely the inability of the government to provide the Cuban population with these indicators, along with the evidence of sustained mass emigration, as evidence not of well-being, but, rather, of an inefficient and outdated system that created more problems than it resolved.
If the debate about how to achieve well-being under a socialist system is polarized by the taking up of political positions regarding the Revolution and its effects, the same can be said for the various approaches toward understanding the now 56-year survival of the Cuban Revolution. Is it the failed and faltering project of a power-mad authoritarian dynasty, supported by complicit bureaucrats and opportunists? Or is it a heroic venture, a collective project for social justice which organically binds the nation through grassroots activity? In either vision of the revolutionary project, how has consensus been achieved? Through repression, complicity, censorship and self-censorship, moral coercion, and top-down implementation of policies or through participation, consensus-building through debate, bottom-up activism, and individual commitment? Here again, this study uses one particular form of cultural lifeâliteratureâin order to examine the gap between government policy and everyday cultural practice, not in terms of the institutions and spaces that fill this gap, but rather in terms of how individuals and the broader context interact.
Equally, depending on the optic that one employs, the Revolution can be understood as endless crisis and rupture or, alternatively, as unbroken continuity, and the crisis caused by the collapse of the Eastern bloc is the clearest example of these divergences of perspective. Many scholars outside Cuba have explored the multiple socio-economic consequences of the crisis in all their contradictions and complexities: they have examined the impact of the economic crisis on emigration methods and figures, on social fragmentation at family and neighborhood levels, on the emergence of social divisions and new forms of (sometimes illegal) economic activity, also on the implications for cultural life, and so on. Some, implicitly articulating their own desire for a long-overdue transition to capitalism, have emphasized the positive impacts of the process of economic liberalization that occurred from 1993 onward: Cubaâs necessary opening up to more efficient market-led mechanisms, bringing with it a cultural apertura (opening), a new tolerance to emigration, and so on.
However, many approaches to the 1990s and beyond, a period which is often rather simplistically termed âpost-Soviet Cuba,â frame the decade of the 1990s as one of paralysis in which the order of the previous three decades not only ground to a halt but in fact reversed, deconstructed, and disintegrated. Although the evidence of migration statistics and civil discontent lend evidence to this perspective, less examined outside Cuba is the notion that the crisis of the 1990s was not the end of the ideas of revoluciĂłn (revolution) and patria (homeland), but a significant renegotiation and recalibration of those ideas in order to ensure the survival of their (themselves dynamic) core values, principles, and policies. This negotiation, and the compromise positions on a range of social, economic, and cultural issues that it entailed, was not only a matter for government leaders and policymakers, but also necessitated the recalibration of values, practices, and principles at an everyday level. While the crisis thus left an indelible mark on all sectors of Cuban society, it also added a new range of social positions and discourses, bearing both possibilities and risks, to the dynamic revolutionary repertoire.
In turn, although it is a period which has not been significantly examined on the island, much less off it, the first half of the 2000s, under the policy banner of the Batalla de Ideas (Battle of Ideas), signified to some extent a return to a (transformed) version of the 1960s in order to reinvigorate, reorient, and recalibrate a much-weakened Revolution, especially through reintegrating youth through education, mobilization, and commitment to social and cultural work. And, even more recently, there are strong indications that the Lineamientos (Guidelines) and proceso de actualizaciĂłn (process of updating) undertaken by RaĂșl Castroâs government from 2007 onward, and formalized in 2011, will negotiate a further compromise position to address the ongoing inefficiencies of the economic situation. Once again, current debates center around the key question of what impact these reformsâespecially the expansion of cuentapropismo (small-scale self-employment) and the gradual removal of State subsidiesâwill have on the social revolution and the core values of Cuban society. For cultural life, the question centers not only on the risk of increased social divisions but also the fear that cultural life, for so long linked to an endogenous social good, will fall prey to the exogenous rules and mechanisms of commerce and the market.
In other words, one explanation for the continued survival of many of the core socio-cultural policies of the Revolution is that the process of change has been characterized by constant and gradual change based on the accumulation and recalibration of an underlying hierarchy of types of value; and, since 1990, with the introduction of economic value as a new value in the search for overall well-being.
In more general terms, this book also aims to provide a counterbalance, or alternative perspective, to what has come to be the orthodoxy outside Cuba regarding revolutionary culture and society, 1 and increasingly so under the combined influence of trends of postmodern and globalizing thought. Firstly, it aims to question the assumption that Cuban social and cultural policy are inevitably informed uniquely by socialist/communist principles (until 1989, imported from the Soviet Union), leading to post-1989 Cuba now often being described as post-Soviet Cuba. While of course the imprint of these ideologies on the direction of the Revolution is undeniable, the moral or philosophical orientation and impetus provided by Third World post-colonial nation-building projects is equally evident in the policymaking and theorization of revolutionary ideology. Secondly, the book questions the commonplace that revolutionary cultural practice is determined solely through the implementation of (often highly centralized) cultural policies, and, depending on the ideological sympathies of the commentator, that these top-down policies are either wholly successful or unsuccessful. It need hardly be noted that the assertion that a coherent and consistent cultural policy could be maintained for over five decades (and throughout the acute crisis of the early 1990s) assumes an ability on the part of the leadership to engage at all times with the complexities of socio-cultural change in Cuba and, secondly, that cultural policy necessarily is the only stimulus for, and only arbiter of, culture. Thirdly, this book questions the much-repeated orthodoxy that the Cuban social subject is coerced or, alternatively, educated or liberated into responding appropriately/homogenously to policy and practice. This study engages specifically with the flawed notion that messages and ideas are received homogenously or identically by a population, whether for good or for bad, by examining the reception and experience of literature in post-1959 Cuba. Fourthly, this study questions the assumption that the role of culture is uniquely to offer agency via resistance, contest dominant political views, or act as a catalyst for dissension, and that this role is fulfilled more authentically (for the reasons outlined above) for those living outside the island as Ă©migrĂ©s and exiles. Thus, following a very particular paradigm of the arts and civil society, the conclusion prevails in orthodox approaches to Cuba that there is no space for resistance or dissension on the island and that the only available responses are emigration or withdrawal/internal exile (insilio). Again, the inability to recognize forms of debate and disagreement unless they are formulated or performed in terms familiar to First World Western democracies means that Cuban society is most often perceived as univocal, uncritical, blindly loyal, or silenced and lacking agency. Finally, this book interrogates the assumption often applied to Cuban literature that cultural production and reception are subject to political and ideological forces but are shaped significantly less by socio-economic motors. Although the social consequences of the economic crisis are well understood by the majority of scholars, a more materialist approach to cultureâand specifically literatureâis rarely sustained in scholarly work.
This study questions all of these common assumptions and presents a new reading of the place of Cuban literature in the Revolution by shifting the perspective in a number of ways. Like many studies of culture, it sets out to analyze policy and practice relationally, but rather than following the textual analysis-based approach that characterizes the vast majority of work on literary productionânamely, that an analysis of literary representation can shed light on social changeâthis book aims to show that literature itself has social functions beyond the representation of subjective or objective reality. It examines this relationality by revisiting the agency/structure or voluntarist/determinist debate and using its insights to formulate a relational approach to the question of literature and the context in which it is produced and consumed. Most importantly, the perspective taken here is firmly based on the lived experience of, and participation in, the production and consumption of literature, rather than the texts that are produced or the individuals, institutions, and policies that both enable and constrain the circulation of literature.
The Special Place of Literature in the Cuban Revolution
A brief survey of the scholarship dedicated to Cuban literature makes abundantly clear that this cultural form has had a special place in Cuban cultural and political life since independence, and especially since 1959. The multiple activities of key and unique figures of independence such as JosĂ© MartĂânot only as statesman, soldier, but also as translator, journalist, and writer (Lomas 2009)âunderline the centrality of literary production to the political project of Cuban independence, while, in the first half of the twentieth century, individuals such as Juan Marinello, Jorge Mañach, RenĂ©e MĂ©ndez Capote, and Manuel Navarro Luna continued the tradition of combining political activism and literature. However, the decades preceding 1959 gave the writer little power with which to effect social or political change. This period is important for two reasons: not only did it provide a background against which one can measure the nature of literature and revolutionary change, but it also provided many of the models (material, ideological, and moral) which constituted one side of the debate over the new socio-cultural ideas and forms that revolutionary Cuba might develop. In the first decade of Revolution, at least, recollections, reinterpretations, and rearticulations of the past (whether for the collective or the individual), provided the poles around which revolutionary Cuba measured its progress. Many models from pre-revolutionary life served either as a heritageâa set of traditions which sometimes proved difficult to abandon with the triumph of the Revolutionâor as reference points to reject vehemently in the search for a more socially just and unified nation.
The pre-1959 cultural identity can best be characterized as a colonized one, fraught with insecurity, inequality, and fragmentation. A sense of inferiority born from the political, social, and economic realities of US neo-colonialism was combined with a moral outlook that favored individualism, perpetuated social inequality and division, and fostered corruption. This colonial mentality, now familiar to Latin Americanists as a form of schizophrenia (a constant vacillation between advance and retreat), has been understood as a state of alienation, as a void, or as a state of rootlessness. Antoni Kapcia described in detail the process of cultural invasion by which the Cuban people became convinced of their inherent inferiority, and turned to North American and European models in order to fill the void of cultural and moral identity (Kapcia 1979, 10â26). Roberto GonzĂĄlez EchevarrĂa, in his analysis of academic and journalistic criticism in revolutionary Cuba, characterized pre-revolutionary Cuba as lacking in shared values, tradition, and intellectual maturity, and depicted the demise of the newspaper Lunes de RevoluciĂłn and the caso Padilla (the Padilla Affair) as emblematic responses to this void, concluding: âThough there are many other factors involved, in my opinion a great deal of the acrimony was due to the lack of experience with this sort of polemicâ (GonzĂĄlez EchevarrĂa 1985, 159).
Against a backdrop, then, of neo-colonialism and insecurity, one can also highlight socio-cultural phenomena which provided the impetus for revolutionary change. In relation to educational provision, Rolland G. Paulston detailed the obstacles to educational change in pre-revolutionary Cuba (Paulston 1971). He described an educational philosophy (again, borrowed from Western capitalist and liberal models which were incongruent with the social and economic development of Latin American nations) which emphasized the theoretical and humanistic aspects of learning and which naturally led to an appreciation of education as a symbol of either economic or cultural status or a means of access to power, thus perpetuating elitism and failing to meet the needs of the nation at large.
Despite periods of modernization and reform in education and a relatively low illiteracy rate (prompted in the first half of the twentieth century by the North American presence on the island, alongside the linguistic homogeneity that Cuba presented compared to other areas in Latin America), Cuban society of the 1950s was one of rigid social stratification where the upper and middle classes opted for...