Caliban, Why? The 1968 Cultural Congress of Havana, C. L. R. James, and the Role of the Caribbean Intellectual

The 1968 Cultural Congress of Havana brought C. L. R. James to Cuba for the first time, facilitated his first meeting with Aimé Césaire, and, as I suggest in this essay, set the stage for the highly influential anticolonial and antiracist appropriations of the figure of Caliban from Shakespeare’s The Tempest by Césaire, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, and Roberto Fernández Retamar that arose in its wake. C. L. R. James’s congress presentation appears to have been particularly meaningful for Caliban rewrites. In it, James both exults the role of Caribbean intellectuals in European and African histories and calls for abolishing intellectuals. I argue for this curious almost-contradiction as an aperture of meaning-making for the choice to reanimate Caliban in relation to aligned critiques of the post-revolutionary Cuban state.