In The Conjuncture

Conjuncture: from the Latin conjungere (to bind together, to connect, to join). A combination of circumstances, a convergence of events, an intersection of contingencies and necessities, a complex, overdetermined state of affairs—usually producing a crisis, leading to a breaking point, driving to a historic crossroads …

"In The Conjuncture" is a new thematic section of Cultural Critique, consisting of short pieces meant at once as soundings, interventions, and provocations regarding a cultural and political phenomenon of urgent and topical interest. Straddling the seldom-crossed border between critical–theoretical scholarship and op-ed journalism, this section will focus, each time, on a singular historical conjuncture, whose salient features may resonate with other situations elsewhere, and whose aftershocks may be felt rippling across the global terrain. In this section, we invite public intellectuals to write in the conjuncture.

The editors welcome proposals for this thematic section, which should be addressed to Cultural Critique, Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, 235 Nicholson Hall, 216 Pillsbury Drive S.E., University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, U.S.A., or via email to cultcrit@umn.edu.

Castro, or communism in the vanishing present

Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz died on a Friday last November. That night in and around the Versailles Restaurant on Eighth Street (Calle Ocho) and Thirty-Fifth Avenue in Miami, crowds gathered to supplement their typical dining (Versailles has long characterized itself as the "most famous Cuban restaurant in the world") with an impromptu festival. As predicted. A friend, present and aghast, put it bluntly: "Yes, but what exactly were they celebrating?"

Our question is the reverse: What exactly has been lost?

Perhaps an unbearable urgency has been given to this question by the arrival and slow passing of the past year, 2017, the year during which those of us who still care will mark the one hundred–year anniversary of the two revolutions (the dates vary depending on the calendar one consults) that brought Lenin and the Bolsheviks to power in the former Soviet Union. "Former" here marks precisely the source of the urgency brought to Castro's death, and this despite all of the nuances and subtleties called for by bringing this man and that movement into intimate contact.

The conjoined pieces that follow (we solicited "essays, aphorisms, fragments") variously engage "Fidel" as a portal (had he not given the word gusano its unique, non-zoological meaning, "wormhole" might also work here), the portal through which to ponder, not so much his legacy (although Nimtz, Beverly, and Karl touch on this) but what those of us committed to the cause of the Left risk losing in surrendering such a legacy to the swarm of populisms actively rethinking contemporary global politics in the absence of a concept of revolution (passive or otherwise).

Because Nimtz draws attention to the film Maestra ("teacher" in the feminine), and because, for better and for worse, Cultural Critique is an academic journal, it seems fitting here to cite from Fidel's four-hour improvised speech, "La Historia me absolverá" (history will absolve me), those passages on education. They could not speak to us more resonantly than now.

Finally, a revolutionary government would undertake the total reform of our teaching system (nuestra enseñanza), attuning it with the initiatives discussed earlier, to urgently prepare the generations being called upon to live in a happier country. One must not forget the words of the Apostle: "A grave error is being committed in Latin America: communities (pueblos) who live almost entirely off the products of the land are being prepared for an urban existence and are not being prepared for an agrarian one. The happiest people (el pueblo) are those whose children have been best educated both in the formation of their thought and in the guidance of their sentiments. A well-instructed people will always be strong and free."

But the soul of teaching is the teacher, and the educators in Cuba are paid miserably, yet despite this, no one is more dedicated to his vocation than the Cuban teacher. Who among us did not learn his ABCs (primeras letras) in a small public school? It is clearly time...