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................ 11 ................ Touring Havana in the Work of Ronaldo Menéndez laura redruello Translated by Robert Nasatir The term city brings to mind other expressions like urbs, polis, and civitas from ancient Greek and Roman civilizations. For the great philosophers of Athens and Rome, the city represented the peak of cultural progress. Aristotle a≈rms in the first book of the Politics that the city was created principally to make mankind happy and truly fulfilled. While man began his development in the world of the family, he could only achieve maturity in the city. Cicero reasoned along similar lines. For the great orator, men left behind barbarity as they discovered the art of community life and created the first cities in which they learned civilization and cultivated the liberal arts. For both philosophers, man found a true sense of grandeur in the civitas or city. As much for the Greeks as for the Romans, the idea of the city brought a collective consciousness of unity in which particular interests were superseded by those of the community; in essence, it was viewed as a common project in which there existed a pact of mutual assistance. This consciousness encouraged them to develop a sense of belonging, which in turn encouraged them to improve their living conditions and, thus, helped them to reach a higher level of development . The ultimate goal of the polis was not just the survival of towns; rather, the polis also reflected the goals of human coexistence and human perfection. That is, the polis was conceived as a kind of community and, as any com- 230 laura redruello munity, was inherently constituted in order to achieve some good (Orozco Orozco 2003). Today, the city is conceived as a symbol. It references a collective representation that evokes the aspirations or the anxieties of man, aspirations and anxieties that are constantly changing and evolving. Along those lines, several contemporary Cuban writers have varied understandings of the polis. This chapter explores the work of one such author, Ronaldo Menéndez, and demonstrates how in his narratives the city moves away from the noble ideal it represented in its genesis and is transformed into a symbol of the decadence of man, finally becoming a space of human degradation. I move away from the Aristotelian conception of the city as a political community, and instead I emphasize its relational character as a model of intersubjective action constructed upon e√ects: the city as a community of ends and values, and the incontestable hope of loyalty and of reciprocity (González 1988, 13). Beginning with this understanding, I consider how in Menéndez’s works the degradation of the city as the ideal space for communal living brings with it the end of the community as an example of the ideal type of social action. I propose an itinerary through three Havanas and three types of communities represented in the works of this author. Each one appears in a di√erent decade. The Havana of Menéndez’s first stories is the city at the end of the 1980s, a polis that provides adequate space for debate, dialogue, and polemics. Nonetheless, this image of the city from which political ruptures are proposed will disappear in a posterior narrative, stepping aside for another kind of polis, the mercantile city of the 1990s, where the U.S. dollar becomes the only motivating force for the citizenry. The mercantile Havana also cannot endure and disappears, leaving behind Menéndez’s last Havana and the last stop on this urban walking tour: the non-city, where the community is dehumanized, and its habitat approximates a Hobbesian state of nature rather than an Aristotelian polis.∞ This tour begins with an exploration of the first Havana—impugning and nonconformist—clearly reflected in two of Menéndez’s stories: ‘‘Tocata y fuga en cuatro movimientos y tres reposos’’ (Tocata and fugue in four movements and three reposes) and ‘‘La culpa’’ (guilt), both included in the book Alguien se va lamiendo todo (Someone goes around licking everything) by Ronaldo Menéndez and Ricardo Arrieta (1997a; 1997b). The book takes place in Havana during the 1980s. During those years, against the backdrop of the recti fication process or ‘‘proceso de rectificación de errores,’’ there arose in Cuba new artistic creations in response to the immobility of institutions that were either unable or uninterested in recognizing a new generation. They were years in which the visual arts boldly transformed into one...

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