In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

1 1 Overture Cuba and the Evolution of Revolution In 1968, celebrated Cuban playwright Antón Arrufat won the José Antonio Ramos prize—the country’s top award for drama—for his play Siete contra Tebas (Seven against Thebes). Highly lauded by UNEAC, the Unión Nacional de Escritores y Artistas en Cuba (Cuban National Union of Writers and Artists ), Arrufat’s adaptation of Aeschylus’s drama garnered substantial literary acclaim. UNEAC published the text, as was customary for that organization. Yet before the play could be staged, it was effectively censored—so harshly that nearly forty years passed before it was performed on the island. Several voting members of UNEAC claimed the depictions in the play were “too alienated for the aims of our revolution”1 and insisted the play’s contradictory ideas were overlooked when it was selected to receive the award. A preface was added to the publication, condemning the play as counterrevolutionary, and its circulation was banned.2 Arrufat and his work were blacklisted; he would not resurface in theatre and literary circles again until the 1980s. Siete contra Tebas is a dialogue-based (rather than action-based) play that describes the fratricidal fight for power between Eteocles and Poly­ nices, cursed sons of Oedipus. The characters explain that, although Eteocles agreed to share power with his brother Polynices by ruling in alternate years, he refuses to step down after his year at the helm. Hence, Polynices has raised an army, with Argive captains prepared to attack the city from each of its seven gates. When Polynices reveals that he will act as commander before the seventh gate, Eteocles resolves to face his brother there to fight him in person. Eteocles and Polynices kill one another in battle, as the brutal conflict decimates both armies and destroys their beloved Thebes. Arrufat’s version could have been interpreted as a dangerous political critique due to the nature of the play’s conflicts—between individuals and the state (capitalism and communism), between outsiders and insiders (exiles and nationals), and between two disagreeing brothers intent on governing (Fidel and Raúl Castro).3 Finally republished on the island in 2001, the play Most documentation in this book is contained in endnotes, but where some works are discussed or quoted extensively, page numbers from the source are given in parentheses. Ov ertu r e 2 featured a new foreword emphasizing the controversy around the original edition. When theatre director Alberto Sarraín and the Mefisto theatre company finally mounted Siete contra Tebas in Havana in the fall of 2007, Cuban newspaper Juventud Rebelde noted that the production of the mythic text settled “an old debt.”4 Arrufat suffered terribly for misinterpreting his moment, for misconstruing the “aims” of the Cuban Revolution and how Cuban artists might work to support them. Fidel Castro iterated Cuba’s policy for the arts in 1961: “Within the Revolution, everything; against the Revolution, nothing.”5 This vague, evolving dictate raises key questions about the definition of revolution and its boundaries: Is political revolution implied? Social? Artistic? All of these? Is revolution a single event or ongoing? Local and/or global? Could its transformations be destructive as well as constructive? And, half a century after the previous government, what might the term “revolución” signify in Cuba now, in a post-Soviet world, for artists there and abroad? Is the idea applied as it was in other countries, such as France, Russia or Mexico, for instance? What about in other disciplines, such as science or industry? Is the idea still applied as it was in Cuba in 1959? In 1975? In 2000? In modern-day Tunisia or Egypt? Neither Cuba nor revolution was my topic of study when I began my research in 1999. I was interested in playwrights who had written under censorship, specifically in the former Soviet bloc countries of Romania, Bulgaria, and Poland. I wanted to know how playwrights said what they wanted to say without actually saying it and how they used theatre to convey the messages in their texts. Sadly, my limited capacity with Eastern European languages was an insurmountable disadvantage, so I began looking for other contexts in which my ideas could apply. Around this time, I started reading plays written by Cubans since the Revolution of 1959. The works were dynamic, startling, and complex. What I found was that I had to entirely reimagine my notions of how both revolution and state censorship function. On my first trip to...

Share