Havana beyond the Ruins: Cultural Mappings after 1989

6. The Illegible City: Havana after the Messiah

................ 6 ................ The Illegible City: Havana after the Messiah rafael rojas Translated by Eric Felipe-Barkin Is there history after the messiah? How should one think about the historical period that follows the messianic kingdom? As leftovers of the past? As child abandonment? As a new Fall of humankind that will reinitiate its growth? In his book La potenza del pensiero, Giorgio Agamben returns to Walter Benjamin ’s philosophical thesis to investigate the type of sovereignty that is established after all the means of a utopian state have been left behind by history (Agamben 1999, 160–77). Reading his work may prove useful in thinking about the tribal Havana that is beginning to survive Fidel Castro, the Revolution , and socialism—three symbols of Cuban power over the last half century. Agamben does not accept Derrida’s belief that posthistorical time is that point where events do not take place. Following his line of reasoning on the quotidian nature of the state of exception, he asks what kind of sovereignty could be imagined in the rabbinical tradition of the messianic kingdom, as reformulated by Benjamin in his philosophy of history. The Italian philosopher finds the answer in the political theology of Carl Schmitt: the sovereignty of the utopian state is nothing but a dictatorship (Agamben 1999, 161). When the sovereign places himself above the law to decree a permanent state of emergency, establishing that ‘‘there is no law’’ beyond its own power, we are clearly in the messianic realm. A realm, as Agamben says, that is double, triple, or multiple, and, therefore, paradoxical. 120 rafael rojas One of the paradoxes of the messianic kingdom is that another world and another time must make themselves present in this world and time. This means that historical time cannot be simply canceled, and that messianic time, moreover , cannot be perfectly homogeneous with history: the two times must instead accompany each other according to modalities that cannot be reduced to a dual logic (this world / the other world). (Agamben 1999, 168) The question could be shifted to the Cuban issue to explore the moment in which the messianic kingdom—the Revolution—is exhausted and historical time ceases to coexist with its ideal future. The product is then a volatilization of destiny, as explored by José Quiroga in Cuban Palimpsests, and manifests itself in nostalgia for the three pasts of the island: colonial, republican, and revolutionary (Quiroga 2005, 197–205). In the works of some writers from the late 1970s and 1980s (Senel Paz [2007], Leonardo Padura [2005], Marilyn Bobes [2005], Abel Prieto [1999], and Artura Arango [2001]) there is nostalgia not for the republican era but for the first decades of the Revolution, when the people were guided by the cultural values of socialist ideology and not money, individualism, or the popular culture of the 1990s or 2000s. The Sum of Times For writers who define themselves in their intellectual politics as ‘‘revolutionaries ’’ or ‘‘socialists,’’ it is also evident that the time for the Revolution and for socialism is over. Their novels refer to the revolutionary period in the simple past or historical past tense, even if ‘‘reality’’ is presented at times inside a temporal ambiguity that confuses the present with the past. Since these authors are individuals shaped by the first decades of the Revolution, their reporting of the social change that occurred in the post-Soviet period takes the form of the general denunciation of today’s decadence and egoism, set against the epic and glorious past. This alienation from the present often results in the counterpositioning of literature (the past) and the market (today ) or intellectual culture and popular culture, which marks their discourse with a melancholic and conservative tone. The juxtaposition of characters like Jacqueline, the mature and well-versed writer, versus Benvenuta, the young and postmodern jinetera in Bobes’s novel, or like Little Marco Aurelio and Freddy Mamoncillo in Prieto’s novel, reveal a certain kind of ‘‘criticism’’ of the Special Period’s present time (1992–2008), articulated as a restorative thrust for the stable and Soviet socialist period (1961–1992). In this narrative time is guided by well-established and hierarchi- the illegible city 121 cal aesthetic and ideological values, while the post-Soviet period is associated with the fracturing of the national literary canon, the emergence of multicultural subjects, the invasion of the market, and a flood of popular culture. The market, as Esther Whit...