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Chapter 2 The Cuban Revolutionary Hermeneutics Criticism and Citizenship U.S. film dominated Cuban screens before 1959. This changed with the advent of the revolution. With Cuba moving away from capitalism and from American cultural products, Cuban movie theaters, to great box-office success , began substituting Hollywood fare with films from other nations and their own (Halperini 1976, 196). On December 12, 1963, the newspaper Hoy, which was considered the official organ of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) and was headed at the time by Blas Roca, published a critique of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) that argued that the film could not be considered wholesome entertainment for the Cuban working class. A scant reply signed by ten Cuban directors affiliated with the Instituto Cubano de Artes e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC) and Alfredo Guevara was printed in the newspaper Revolución. The reply compared the position of Hoy with the censoring activities of the Hayes Code in the United States and the Catholic Church around the world (195). Despite the high rank that Roca enjoyed in the PCC, Fidel Castro supported ICAIC’s position. Regardless of their differing positions on La Dolce Vita, Hoy and ICAIC were two cultural institutions that embraced and championed politicized culture. For those working in these areas of officialdom, the overall goal of film, and of all culture, was to shape the Cuban people into revolutionary citizens. The leadership of Hoy and ICAIC disagreed, however, in their understanding of the best means by which such an ambitious task could be accomplished. Their theoretical positions about the role film played in a revolutionary society made their opinions irreconcilable. Pierre Bourdieu comments regarding the French context: “Specifically aesthetic conflicts about the legitimate vision of the world—in the last resort, about what deserves to be represented and the right 32 S TA G I N G F I L M C R I T I C I S M / R E V O L U T I O N A R Y H E R M E N E U T I C S way to represent it—are political conflicts . . . for the power to impose the dominant definition of reality” (Bourdieu 1993, 101). With Bourdieu, I believe that issues of aesthetics important to Cubans during the period 1960 to 1985 give unique insight into criticism and the way criticism is part of politics. Cuba’s particular history and way of organizing cultural institutions is distinctive , and so are the discourses on culture. Like in American and Western societies, the distinctive set of discourses used in the Cuban cultural field determined a “lifestyle,” a habitus, where criticism and film reception fitted within specific technologies of selfhood (more on this later in the next chapter). Moreover, these discursive spaces shed light on the phenomenological and hermeneutic relationship between films and historically situated official readers and were clues to the power relations in which these readers and the films were immersed. Finally, these spaces helped form specific, politically situated ways of knowing the world and of interpreting culture; the ideas they engendered were used to place limits on the community of cultural workers. For these reasons, ideas about culture and aesthetics can illuminate how cultural workers negotiated self-understanding and how they brokered for positions within the field. In this chapter, I examine seven discourses that deeply influenced the cultural field in general and criticism in particular. These discourses were particularly important because they related to freedom and agency and included definitions of selfhood and individuality based on social practices. That is, they helped individuals evaluate cultural work by providing aesthetic, epistemological , and ethical frameworks. More important, they established that performing such evaluations would bring each individual closer to becoming a new person and a proper citizen. The Politicization of Cultural Work and Workers ICAIC and Casa de las Américas were created during the first year of the revolution , and ICAIC was seen as providing a fundamental link between government and people.1 ICAIC, as described in Law 169, was to serve as an ideological chisel that would shape Cubans into revolutionaries or, at least, supporters of the revolution. Accordingly, film production and criticism were defined as political activities that could further, or hinder, the goals of government. This explains the type of review a film like La Dolce Vita would receive from Hoy and the type of defense that ICAIC had to issue. In framing all culture as po- [18.222.67.251] Project MUSE...

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