Cubalogues: Beat Writers in Revolutionary Havana

Introduction: The “Stranger Relations” of Beat

Introduction The “Stranger Relations” of Beat On June 30, 1961, Fidel Castro delivered his now infamous address, “A True Social Revolution Produces a Cultural Revolution” (or “Words to the Intellectuals ”). Offered in the wake of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, Castro’s address represented a pivotal moment in Cuban intellectual and cultural history as his revolutionary government attempted, for the first time, to provide its national artistic policy with a more refined ideological blueprint. This newly pronounced ideological turn brought a decisive end to what Guillermo Cabrera Infante identified as a post-Batista “Cuban cultural renaissance,” in which Havana had momentarily served as a vibrant and international cultural center for some of the most notable artists, writers, and thinkers of the mid-twentieth century.1 Castro himself admitted as much in his June 30th address, in which he claimed that if Cuba’s revolutionary leaders “were to review our efforts” toward culture “with a critical eye” they would soon admit that they had allowed Havana to become dangerously tolerant of outside political and cultural influences.2 Castro attributed the presence of these influences—who ranged from Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and C. Wright Mills to Maya Deren and the Maysles brothers—to the “improvised” fashion in which the early revolution had unfolded, leaving Cuba momentarily open to a host of politically progressive intellectuals from throughout the Americas and from across the Atlantic, thinkers whose commitments to actually existing socialism were ultimately suspect.3 He further admitted 2 Introduction that while he had just recently engaged in spirited exchanges with both Sartre and Mills on the importance of illimitable cultural freedom to his still-burgeoning revolutionary movement, the time for such conversations had come decisively to an end. Officialdom typically moves a pace or so behind the trajectories of culture. But by June of 1961, Castro had finally found his legs in the stretch, using his ideological second wind to engage in some breakneck cultural maneuvering. One of the most significant outcomes of the June 30 address was the disbanding of Lunes de Revolución, the Cabrera Infante–edited journal which had anchored Cuba’s new literary and artistic scene since the earliest days of Castro’s revolution. As Cabrera Infante explains, once Castro openly declared his allegiance to the Soviet sphere (in April 1961) he simultaneously began to assert the revolution’s newly pronounced socialist ideals as the only proper subject matter for Cuban artists, initiating a period of pronounced meddling in the island’s cultural sphere. In turn, the content of Lunes was eventually denigrated as “decadent, bourgeois, avant-gardist and, the worst epithet in the Communist name-calling catalogue, cosmopolist.”4 According to Cabrera Infante’s perspective , the initial years of the revolution were equivalent to the early years of the Weimar Republic, an incredibly brief yet incredibly prolific cultural upheaval that, in an earlier time and place, had left Germany’s political reactionaries bemoaning the dangers of cosmopolitanism and the avant-garde within the midst of a momentarily bohemian Berlin. In Castro’s Cuba, “avant-gardist” and “cosmopolist” tendencies would soon meet a similar fate as Lunes, which had published works by Sartre and a number of other writers from throughout the Americas since 1959, and was soon after replaced by the more politically orthodox Union and La Gaceta de Cuba at the center of the revolution’s artistic culture. But while the “cosmopolist” interactions fostered by the literary, artistic, and intellectual culture of the early revolution may have proven transient and fleeting , they nevertheless had tangible effects on the direction of Castro’s cultural policy and especially on the evolution of literary, intellectual, and political culture within the Cold War United States. At the center of this cultural and intellectual history were the Cubalogues, an explicitly political subgenre of Beat travel narrative which included works such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Poet’s Notes on Cuba,” Amiri Baraka’s “Cuba Libre,” and Marc Schleifer’s “Cuban Notebook.”Driven by a profound skepticism concerning the negative portrayal of Castro’s revolution within the mainstream U.S. media, each of the Cubalogue writers decided to witness the revolution firsthand, recording their experiences of Cabrera Infante’s “cultural renaissance” in works of autobiographical journalism which opened a revealing window into the earliest moments of revolutionary culture. The Cubalogues, in other words, Introduction 3 are best understood as a politically engaged form of literary reportage in...