In Medias Res Publicas

In the midst of public things: that is where intellectuals are called upon to carry out their roles in their respective countries. But, as the authors of the Prince Claus Fund document The Role of the Intellectual (2000, 3) state, “in a number of respects the role of intellectuals differs from country to country,” and the “material, cultural and political constraints” that they experience “differ from situation to situation.” These differences must be taken into account if we are to avoid falling into illicit extrapolations, unfounded generalizations, and ethnocentrisms. Hence, as the document adds, “there is a need to understand the role of intellectuals in these contexts and to discuss key dilemmas.”

The following observations and reflections attempt to contribute to the understanding of the role of the artistic intelligentsia in the public sphere in revolutionary Cuba, that is, in the last forty years of my country's history. This text deals with a long and complex period of Cuban culture that is still awaiting monographs of historical synthesis, and which would be impossible to present and analyze meticulously within this article's narrow framework. This is the reason for its sketchy nature and for the minimal exemplification of the following historical background.

In June 1961, in a famous meeting with some of the most important personalities of the Cuban intellectual scene, Comandante Fidel Castro (1961, 11) uttered a phrase that, because of its brevity, construction, and categorical nature, has functioned, from that moment until the present, as a summary of the Revolution's cultural politics: “Within the Revolution, everything; against the Revolution, nothing.” Taken out of context and in the hands of circumstantial hermeneutists and exegetes, this versicle, part of a speech known since as “Palabras a los intelectuales” [Words to the intellectuals], proved to be extraordinarily polysemic, which allowed it to become the guiding principle for the successive periods and tendencies in struggle.¹

The country's cultural and social life would repeatedly bring up many more specific questions that never got a well-developed, clear, and categorical answer: Which events and processes of Cuban social and cultural reality form part of the Revolution and which do not? How can one distinguish which cultural texts or practices act against the Revolution? Which act for it? And which simply do not affect it? Which social criticism is revolutionary and which is counterrevolutionary? Who decides what is the correct answer to these questions? How and according to what criteria is this decision made? Does not going against the Revolution imply silence on the social ills of the prerevolutionary past that have survived or on the ills that have arisen due to erroneous political decisions and unresolved problems of the revolutionary period? Doesn't being for the Revolution imply publicly revealing, criticizing, and fighting these social ills and errors? And so on.

After the 1959 revolutionary victory, and especially after the 1961 proclamation of the socialist nature of the revolution, relations between the political avant-garde and the intellectual or artistic avant-garde—to use designations of the time—experienced strong but localized and passing tensions in matters of cultural politics (for example, in regards to the prohibition of the public showing of the Sabá Cabrera Infante film P.M. or the sectarianism of 1961–62). Nonetheless, the intellectual avant-garde widely adhered to the decisions and projections of the political avant-garde in all the other spheres of national public life. On the other hand, in September 1966 Roberto Fernández Retamar (1967, 186), one of the most outstanding thinkers of the intellectual avant-garde, still could present the critique of the politicians' errors as a duty that is consubstantial to the intellectual's adherence to the Revolution, and as a diagnostic and corrective factor that the “actually existing” Cuban politicians of the time took into account:

A theoretical error committed by someone who can turn his or her...