A Cultural History of the Cuban Revolution

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank their respective institutions for the help provided in producing this book. Firstly, to Aberystwyth University, that has provided the time and space for Dr Baron to conduct his research, and for the funding to allow him to travel to Cuba to conduct research on a number of occasions, and secondly to the University of Havana and the National University of Costa Rica for allowing Dr Antonio Álvarez Pitaluga to develop this joint research project over the last few years.

Introduction

Modern revolutions have shaped much of the social and political structures of today’s world, and the Cuban Revolution could be considered as the dialectical fruit of several revolutions over the last 500 years of human civilisation. From the Dutch Revolt of the Netherlands in the sixteenth century in Europe, through the Bolshevik Revolution and to the Cuban Revolution that triumphed in 1959, all of them were attempts by groups of people to deconstruct their societies and reorder the world around them. The attempt to create new rationalities has characterised all of them, generating at the same time their own irrationalities, this being one of the central problems of modern philosophy for the understanding of societies in general; such is the permanent challenge of revolutions to constantly seek new rationalities according to often diverse and changing objectives and matrices. At the same time, revolutions create a logic that legitimises the new order established by the victors, subverting the previous logic of the dominant forces. A revolution, whenever it happens, penetrates and indefinitely influences the subjectivity of its various actors; as an intangible footprint, it will accompany them throughout their lives. A revolutionary mentality is conditioned and positioned by these new subjectivities and, given time, this mentality can be reproduced from one generation to the next through various legacies throughout its long historical duration.

A revolutionary change generates a subversion of the social and daily representations of reality, articulating a new way of producing and reproducing the social life of each subject. New cultural expressions are created and new cultural patterns are subsequently generated. The energy of a revolution often comes from two great propulsive forces that constantly challenge, dialectically, its own levels of development and achievement. The first of these comes from the transformative beginnings marked by violent and continuous processes of transformation, which in turn de-legitimise old rationalities before legitimising new ones in a radical transformation of the status quo. Once a certain maturity has been acquired, the second force comes into play; the frequent diminution or halting of these same transformative rhythms to the point at which the forces of initial change become the forces of stagnation and stasis in an attempt to maintain the new status quo.

A revolution’s continuity or extinction will often depend on how well it can continuously reinvent itself in a constant dialectical struggle between its internal forces of continuity and change. Although the birth and realisation of a revolution are marked by the challenge to the exogenous and endogenous forces that oppose it, its survival will also be determined in no small measure by a battle with itself against the real or apparent irrationalities that are generated within it. These historical contradictions are part of the logic of social reality, of the action of humankind and of the advances or setbacks therein. It is a classic dilemma of revolutions, that is, the dialectical confrontation of the formal instrumentation of the new rationalities with the argument that their existence, their origin and development, is historically necessary. Its dimension is of such a complex magnitude that sometimes it is so difficult for the revolutionary makers themselves to understand and assimilate that in the daily exercise of these contradictions they can become agents (conscious or otherwise) of their ending when formally their actions are focused on reproducing and prolonging the new, revolutionary social reality.¹ As the history of Cuba shows, in previous revolutions its own creators have consciously or unconsciously contributed to its destruction from the inside.²

No two revolutions are ever the same; their expressions vary, from armed violence to new laws or peaceful reforms that modify or reorder the social system. Economic, demographic, political, cultural, technological, sexual, conservative, moderate or radical, revolutions are social outbursts generated by an accumulation of objectivities and subjectivities that enable cyclical changes in the history of civilisations. Not infrequently they accelerate historical time by breaking the inertia of the course of a society or people in the form of abrupt chronological leaps.

The study of culture in a revolution is to understand the revolutionary whole itself, as the artistic and literary expressions that emerge from them are part of the direct reflection of the subversive whirlwind. Every work usually contains allegories, messages and symbols loaded with historical, social and ideological readings. Decoding them to establish the links between these, the contents and the social context where they were created, is the indispensable work of a cultural historian. One of the objectives here is to try and understand this relationship between the Cuban Revolution and many of its literary-artistic works; to try and uncover the role played by literature and art in the articulation of revolutionary cultural hegemony. This is not to say that this book intends to demonstrate the totality of Cuban society, as the examination of cultural hegemony purely from an artistic and literary perspective would not show its true nature. But the analysis of cultural hegemony, within the general system of social relations, will be undertaken to provide one more perspective on one of the most important revolutions the world has ever witnessed.

Hegemony (and cultural hegemony) are terms that will be used frequently throughout this book and the ideas of the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci in this area are important to understand how the Cuban state and Cuban cultural producers have negotiated the production and distribution of culture from 1959 to 2023. Like most societies Cuba is ordered hierarchically, and Gramsci’s theory of hegemony offers insight into such societies, elucidating the dynamics between dominant and subordinate groups. Hegemony manifests itself when a prevailing value system upholds the dominant group’s interests, accepted by the subordinate group through consent. While typically applied to capitalist contexts, Gramscian ideas have also been extended to socialist settings. For example, as Leger points out, Blecher (1989)³ examined China’s pursuit of hegemony, while Gutiérrez-Sanin (1995)⁴ explored power dynamics in socialist Poland.⁵

It is broadly agreed that the Cuban state during the Revolution, that began in 1959, has exerted significant control over daily life, managing labour, resources, education, healthcare, media access and, as we shall see, all aspects of cultural life. This control primarily relies on manufactured consent, where the state manipulates or coerces agreement. Drawing from Gramsci, ideological dominance coupled with manufactured consent fosters hegemony within the cultural sphere.⁶ However, excessive state coercion can strain civil society, leading to dissent. As we shall see throughout the course of this book, dissent has erupted at certain times since 1959 as a result of excessive state coercion.

So, Gramsci’s theory of hegemony finds relevance in Cuba’s state-civil society relationship and hegemony operates through consensus, with the subordinate group legitimising the dominant group’s authority. The Cuban state employs the many cultural avenues of cinema, art, music, literature etc. to garner civil society’s support, absorbing resistance into its ideological framework and, as we shall see, just as intellectuals play a pivotal role in Gramsci’s conception of hegemony, organising social hegemony and counter-hegemony, it is intellectuals who are active in the production of both Cuba’s hegemony and counter-hegemony. It is one of the purposes of this book to try and understand this continuous contradiction.

The Cuban Revolution, from the offset in 1959, began to develop a prevailing way of thinking and feeling that became embraced by the people as a revolutionary mentality, a common, popular conception of the world based on historical reality. This prevailing way of thinking was termed by Gramsci ‘common sense’,⁷ shaped by a conscious, hegemonic will, in Cuba’s case created by the revolutionary leaders. So, Gramsci’s notions of hegemony and ‘common sense’ are relevant here as the Cuban government, and the cultural institutions associated with it, attempted to alter the consciousness of its oppressed and colonised people through art, cinema, literature and all forms of cultural existence, in order that they might fully understand the nature of their position in the world and in so doing attempt to change it.

But this is not to say that this book is a Gramscian study of Cuban revolutionary culture, only that an understanding of some of the Gramscian terms used can assist the reader. This is not a text of social theory, but a historical reflection with empirical foundations in which some ideas of various authors, including Antonio Gramsci, on cultural history and culture as a historical phenomenon, may be usefully applied. The book attempts to provide both the specialised and general reader with a global historical interpretation of the cultural history of the Revolution throughout its more than six decades of existence. As such, we have developed a historical interpretation of Cuban culture in the Revolution together with some social aspects related to it from the theoretical foundations of cultural history. Cultural history is not nourished by a single author, but by several who in one way or another have made important contributions to this branch of historical science throughout the twentieth century and the present century. While it is true that Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony is present in our analyses, allowing us to study the relationships between the State, its ideologies, art and literature and its cultural policies, the book should not be considered a Gramscian text. Neither is this book an intellectual history of the Cuban Revolution, nor a book of artistic or literary criticism. Our historical analysis does not seek to establish definitive guidelines on the topics addressed. Instead, we aspire to propose an analytical view to encourage disagreement, variety of opinions, debate and questions that can lead to new proposals for studies on culture in the Cuban Revolution.

To examine culture is to examine all material and spiritual life. It requires the examination of the systems of social relationships and power, the different ways of understanding reality and expressing it. It is an examination of cultural production, not only in an economic but also in a social sense; production as having the capacity to create and interpret the diverse and complex social representations that sustain the hegemonic consensus that is revolution. The history of a revolution structures its own cultural evolution and vice versa; the existence of both cannot be fully understood without analysing in unison their artistic-literary processes and their economic and socio-political development. This approach would be applicable to any time and any society.

The passage of more than half a century of a revolution leads to a plethora of critical studies and reflections on it, often controversial and hotly debated. The triumph of 1959 marked the beginning of an authentic ideological subversion for the Cuban nation that impacted in more than one sense on the socio-historical dynamics of Latin America and other regions of the developing world. This subversion can be understood from two perspectives: internally as a creative process of the development of new realities, values, codes and a hegemony that blew apart the past; and externally, as a capacity to break with the ideas of the international systemic order to which the island was subordinated until the revolutionary victory. This dual perspective should not be ignored because all popular revolutions work from both perspectives to subvert the reality of a people and a nation in its broadest conceptions, and one of the major subversions occurred with the complete rupture in the artistic culture of the nation.

The year 1959 inaugurated a true revolution of Cuban culture in the broadest of meanings. In both artistic and social terms, the role of culture was deeply re-thought from styles of painting, writing and singing, to the everyday assumptions of dressing, feeding, speaking and even concerning certain sexual behaviours of the general population. It was about creating a ‘new man’ and inserting them into the roots of identity of the historical formation of the nation. The axes of transformation revolved around the attempt to develop a humanist culture and reject modern consumer culture. All of this had an impact on the course of social and political events in the Latin American continent, to the point that it can be said that the history of the second half of the twentieth century in Latin America begins with the Cuban Revolution. The Latin American historian Sergio Guerra has synthesised it this way: ‘The triumph of the Revolution in Cuba was a decisive turn in the history of Latin America […] the multiple histories of the Latin American left and right have been influenced to this day, and in different ways, by the continental milestone of the Cuban Revolution.’⁸ Some Latin American intellectuals give the Cuban Revolution even more global significance, to the point of describing it as one of the causes of the beginning of a ‘hypermodernity’.⁹

The Revolution was an erupting volcano that emerged in the midst of an ocean of nationalist, unfinished or aborted governments in Latin America at the beginning of the second half of the twentieth century. To measure its depth and reach one needs to understand the level of social experimentation that took place after 1959 and the attempt to explore and challenge contemporary social structures in order to build a new order. The Republican past (1902–1958) was deconstructed in an accelerated manner and many of its models and values quickly became obsolete. The start of all this was to search for cultural pathways that could legitimise the new society.

Ever since those exploratory beginnings the island’s artistic and literary culture has been characterised by experimentation, the search for new expressive codes, for utopia, for new ideological and aesthetic emergencies, using the convergence of foreign influences of various types that have made it possible to understand and admit various ideo-aesthetic interpretations previously alien to national realities. Undoubtedly, through all of this, the significance of Cuban culture has generated a remarkable international image for the island that vastly outweighs its size.