Literature, Publishing and Nation Building in Contemporary Cuba
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Recovering from crisis?: literature, publishing and nation building in contemporary Cuba Book or Report Section Accepted Version Kumaraswami, P. and Kapcia, A. (2014) Recovering from crisis?: literature, publishing and nation building in contemporary Cuba. In: Brenner, P., Jiménez, M. R., Kirk, J. M. and LeoGrande, W. (eds.) A Contemporary Cuba Reader: The Revolution under Raúl Castro. Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham, pp. 359-366. ISBN 9781442230996 Available at http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/38309/ It is advisable to refer to the publisher’s version if you intend to cite from the work. See Guidance on citing . Publisher: Rowman and Littlefield Publisher statement: All rights reserved. Please contact the publisher for permission to copy, distribute or reprint. All outputs in CentAUR are protected by Intellectual Property Rights law, including copyright law. Copyright and IPR is retained by the creators or other copyright holders. Terms and conditions for use of this material are defined in the End User Agreement . www.reading.ac.uk/centaur CentAUR Central Archive at the University of Reading Reading’s research outputs online Recovering from crisis? Literature, publishing and nation-building in contemporary Cuba Introduction The changes in Cuba which began in 2007 – formalised from 2008 (with Raúl Castro’s election) and 2011 (with the convening of the long-overdue Communist Party Congress) – had inevitable implications for culture. While quite draconian cuts were instituted (or at least threatened and discussed) for so many aspects of Cuban society, welfare, employment and the public sector, it seemed inevitable that culture generally would be expected to bear its share of the burden of economic austerity and streamlining. This was especially perceived from the outside, where it has long seemed that an inordinate amount of always scarce resources have been spent on what is usually, in most western societies, deemed a peripheral or even luxury, item of expenditure. In many Cubans’ eyes, the signal for this development had already been given in 2009, when, following the traumatic and damaging experience of three successive hurricanes in 2008 and the onset of the world financial crisis, it was announced that the annual Havana Book Fair would be reduced in scope. Since 2000, this event had grown spectacularly, the initial 10-day event in Havana being then rolled out in various forms across the island over three weeks, eventually reaching 40 towns and cities and attracting about 5 million Cubans, its sudden reduction was something of a shock to the cultural world. Then, in March 2012, the popular and seemingly influential Minister of Culture, Abel Prieto, retired from office, being replaced by one of his deputies, Rafael Bernal Alemany. Many in that cultural world had long feared the effects of a Ministry without Prieto, since, from the late 1990s, he had successfully argued for a high profile and expenditure for culture and had ensured that Cuba’s artists and writers were protected and materially rewarded, giving them an importance which they had not enjoyed since the early days of the Revolution; moreover, many had hoped that another of the Deputy Ministers would succeed Prieto, and tended to see Bernal’s appointment as something of a demotion of the Ministry, and thus of culture generally. This was reinforced by traditional expectations among some of those artists and writers, who had previously tended to see in Raúl Castro someone a good deal less sympathetic towards culture’s high profile and central importance than his brother had been; they cited Raúl Castro’s position as Defence Minister in 1966 when the Armed Forces magazine, Verde Olivo, launched a campaign against the eventually punished poet, Heberto Padilla (Padilla 1989). They also pointed to the Armed Forces’ presumed role in the 1965-8 creation of the notorious UMAP work (and re-education) camps, where several writers had been interned, mostly for their homosexuality. Finally, in 1996, Raúl Castro had taken the lead in the public criticism and purging of the rather maverick Centre for the Study of America, many of whose members remained influential in Cuban intellectual debates (Giuliano 1998). Hence, by 2012, it seemed that all that they had feared was coming to pass, and that the ‘good times’ for culture and for artists were over. The historical background, 1960s to 1980s To assess how far those expectations and that reading were correct, we should understand this latest development in a broader and more historical context, not least to try to explain precisely why culture generally - and, as it turned out, literature in particular - had always played such an unexpectedly prominent and central role in the Revolution. That role had been evident in the first months of 1959, in the remarkably early creation (March 1959) of the new cinema institute (ICAIC), immediately 1 followed by the influential Casa de las Américas cultural centre, but also in the ambitious mass publication of the novel Don Quijote, distributed and sold at low subsidised prices across the island, an exercise which seemed eloquent proof of a high-level commitment to culture. Indeed, it soon transpired that the rebels’ pre-1959 public commitment to the need to create a ‘new’ culture for revolutionary Cuba was not words alone, and that large amounts of money and energy would be expended on various projects to realise that: most obviously the ‘piracy’ campaign in the mid-1960s, which brought to all Cubans the best of world literature by purchasing textbooks and literary works abroad and then illegally reprinting and selling them cheaply inside Cuba (Rodríguez 2001). That campaign was actually part of a wider debate going on inside the cultural and political worlds of the Revolution, from early in 1959, about the role and form of culture inside a revolution. Broadly, the three sides of the debate were as follows. On the one hand, many intellectuals – prominent in some areas and linked to projects such as the influential cultural supplement Lunes de Revolución – argued that the Revolution meant the obligation to give Cubans the best culture that the world could offer and to educate them all systematically in order to appreciate it (Luis 2003). The ‘piracy’ campaign was part of that argument, since it followed the Literacy Campaign of 1961 and the resulting realisation that an expanded readership needed an expanded literary production. Meanwhile, others – usually closely attached to, or members of, the pre-1959 communist party (the PSP) - argued that some of that world culture was inappropriate for a revolutionary society, being decadent, escapist, irresponsible and bourgeois; they attempted to influence the new culture towards a ‘socialist realism’ which echoed some of the Soviet Union’s earlier ideas (Pogolotti 2006). A third tendency, however, argued that ‘cultural revolution’ had to mean cultural democratisation if it were to mean anything, by which they meant facilitating the release of the innate cultural talents of all Cubans, to be realised through the ambitious campaigns of the cultural teachers’ movement (the cultural equivalent of the 1961 literacy workers) and the resulting amateurs’ movement, which flourished from the late 1960s and spawned the ubiquitous writing workshops (Kapcia 2005a: 135 passim). That debate was never really settled, each of the three tendencies in turn sometimes controlling the cultural apparatus and influencing policy and at other times being marginalised, depending on the internal politics of the Revolution. However, it all produced a visible cultural renaissance in Cuba, which saw a massive expansion of publishing, writing, artistic production, film-making and cultural activity, alongside the aspect of the ‘cultural revolution’ which caught the world’s attention most, namely the alienation, disaffection and eventual self-exile of some of Cuba’s more prominent writers and artists, especially in the ‘grey five years’ of 1971-6. In a sense, the coexistence of these two experiences – expansion and effervescence, on the one hand, and alienation on the other – was not coincidental, for many of those who left felt increasingly at odds with a system which seemed to them to determine what sort of art should be produced and sought to make artists and writers into ‘functionaries’ of a political system which wanted them to serve ‘the collective’ rather than their individual ambitions. What was actually happening, however, was not necessarily the ‘Stalinism’ which many then saw – although those who directed the ‘grey years’ were often closely associated with more dogmatic Soviet ideas of culture and the role of the intellectual – but rather a sustained process of change which had revolutionised Cuban society since 1959, but which also meant a parallel and intimately related process of nation-building. 2 For one way of reading ‘the Revolution’ is always to see it as a long delayed process of the nation- building which Cuba never experienced in the early 1800s (when the rest of the former Spanish colonies gained independence), nor after 1902 (when a highly conditional and constrained Cuban independence was granted by the United States), nor even after the revolution of 1933 created a ‘new’ republic and much hope. Hence, by 1959, what many Cubans, and certainly many rebels, wanted was not just a dramatic improvement of Cuba’s social provision, but also real sovereignty and a sustained process of building a national identity around a national project. Culture was always seen as fundamental, and not peripheral, to that, as the key to unlocking the talents, willing participation and collective and individual self-fulfilment which national unity and progress demanded. That was precisely why so much effort was put into film (able to communicate easily with hundreds at a time), into literacy and then literature, and into all manner of cultural awareness and activity. It was also why Cuban artists were redefined as state employees – not only because they had a key role in this process of cultural liberation and nation-building but also because, by receiving a steady income, they would be freed from the vagaries – and often poverty - of the market.