Gramsci in 1960s Cuba

Why Gramsci in 1960s Cuba? Antonio Gramsci's work had been gaining a wider audience in most nations of the world since the late 1950s, after many years of being excluded or forgotten (except in Italy, where excluding or forgetting Gramsci was impossible). And yet he passed through some valleys in his ascent. These are attributable to his position outside Marxism's dominant current, which was working then for specific political ends—some of them quite spurious—and to the specificity of each audience's context. In Cuba Gramsci was appreciated early, but the context was peculiar in two respects: first, he became known here shortly after the triumph of a profound anticapitalist revolution of national liberation; second, this small, very Western nation, locked in a bitter standoff with the United States, was a country with a colonial and neocolonial past and an entirely homegrown revolutionary process that had nonetheless linked itself, recently and very solidly, to the center of so-called world socialism.

I would like to make a brief and general reference to certain aspects of this revolution, background I believe essential to our topic here. The palpable demonstration of the power of action against limits of the possible hitherto thought intangible was the first great cultural change worked by the Revolution, and it has remained among the most important. Any revolution is a victory against the limits of the possible, and in Cuba this was true to an extreme degree. A political system based on limited sovereignty, on the acceptance of general corruption and the ineffectiveness of democracy, all made even harsher by the installation of a very harsh dictatorship, was laid waste by organized popular action. The most deeply rooted beliefs underlying the acceptance of the social system were swept away when participation reached massive proportions in tandem with the steps taken by the revolutionary power. A community that had great respect for fate but not necessarily for the church, a public whose tendency to place its hopes in individualism and chance had been exacerbated, suddenly realized its own strength and exercised this with exemplary enthusiasm and willpower, not to mention unquenchable optimism.¹

The change that the Cubans operated in themselves was the principal fruit of all this effort and of this exceptional upheaval in people's relationships, ideas, and sensibilities. The Revolution converted the present into change and the future into projects. This profound alteration in the sense of time, as well as the multiplying numbers of participants in the revolutionary events, so transformed daily life that until now only art has been able to transmit these exploits effectively to people who didn't live them. Furthermore, this alteration wasn't brief. Its prolongation ensured the change in lifestyle, in the results of the reproduction of social life, in the country's basic institutions, and even in its customs. The prerequisite for this achievement was a prolonged union of the two principal impacts of revolutions: first, the liberating fervor that unleashes potential, making victory and change possible, and second, the revolutionary power that channels, guarantees, and organizes. The Revolution had to confront extreme situations, to which it reacted in the first decade with successive deepenings of the process. This generated many new situations and problems, in multiple terrains. It is in these fields that the Revolution's cultural problems are found, with “cultural” meant in a broad sense.

In examining the events and situations that marked this process, we see that there were many ideological confrontations. In the years of the insurrectional struggle, then later in victory and in the 1960s, there were countless tensions, differences, and polemics among those involved in the Revolution. For instance, central to the debate from the beginning of the 1960s was the question of whether Cuba would be a “popular democracy” in the Eastern European sense or whether it would create its own kind of revolution. What would Cuban socialism be like? Other points debated included the unity...