Introduction

The intention of this collection is to run the U.S. economic blockade of Cuba, which is also a kind of cultural and intellectual blockade. Anyone in this country who has had anything to do with Cuba—journalists, scholars, professionals, students, artists, film producers, executives, sports figures, politicians, ordinary tourists—is aware of the major and minor inconveniences the embargo, now over forty years old, imposes. To put this issue together, even the simplest thing, such as calling up a contributor to check on a passage, meant finding inventive and often devious ways of getting around obstacles. To obtain copyright releases, for example (not something the Cuban contributors cared much about, since intellectual work in Cuba has traditionally been in the public domain, but a sine qua non for boundary 2's publisher, Duke University Press), required asking friends (and in one case, even strangers) who were visiting Cuba for one reason or other to try to locate the parties whose signatures were needed and bring the signed permission forms back with them, since mail service between the island and the United States is at best erratic. Without e-mail, in fact, the collection would have been impossible. But even e-mail to and from Cuba suffered inexplicable crashes and blockages. E-mail messages to someone in Cuba or from someone in Cuba to me not getting through? Well, then, one could triangulate via so-and-so in New York, whose e-mail—for some reason—to so-and-so in Havana, who was in contact with that someone you wanted to reach in the first place, was getting through. And so, months behind schedule, little by little, one way or another—de cierta manera—the material for this collection began to accumulate.

But it goes without saying, of course, that one of the unstated aims of the embargo is precisely to make it difficult for U.S. citizens to have access to what Cubans are thinking, writing, creating, and arguing in Cuba today. Successive U.S. administrations have justified the embargo in part on the grounds that genuine freedom of speech is not possible in Cuba. But it is the relative silence imposed on Cuba by the embargo that makes it seem that there is only one voice in Cuba—the voice of the party, or of Fidel Castro—that "civil society" exists only in opposition to the regime and the goals of Cuban socialism, that the only ethically and intellectually honest positions in Cuba are those of "dissidents," that ideological pluralism and independence of thought exist only among those who have left Cuba. In this way, the defense of intellectual freedom can and has been mobilized against the Revolution, at the same time that the effects of the embargo include a coercive restriction of our own intellectual freedom and access to information in this country.

No one denies that Cuba has one of the most educated populations in the Americas, a population, moreover, that, whatever the controls on news and information it has to put up with (and they are extensive), has because of Cuba's own modern history and global role a broad and sophisticated grasp of what is going on in the rest of Latin America, the United States, Africa, the Middle East, China, Vietnam, Japan, the former Soviet Union, and both Western and Eastern Europe. This is, in other words, not a population that lacks the wherewithal to think for itself. Yet the dominant assumption is that because of repression, Cubans in Cuba cannot think for themselves (this is not to say that it is always easy or possible to speak freely in Cuba).

During the pre-1989 golden age of Cuban-Soviet relations, Cubans, perhaps to mark a distance from their erstwhile ally, were fond of so-called Popov jokes. Popov is the stereotypical earnest but dim-witted Soviet Party hack. Thus, for example (question in a course on Marxism-Leninism course for party cadre that Popov has been obliged to attend): "Popov, what do you call the period of transition between feudalism and capitalism...