A Refutation of Vitier

(Reply to an article published Sunday, February 22, 1959, in the Sunday magazine of the daily El Mundo, and whose last part was to come out Sunday, March 8)

IN RESPONSE TO MY ARTICLE, "POETRY AND THE CUBAN REVOLUTION," PUBlished in the daily Revolución on the 26th of January, a gentleman named Leonardo Acosta directs a libel at me. In his article he tries to refute everything I say in the above-mentioned article about the work of Lezama and the book Lo cubano en la poesía (What is Cuban in Poetry) by Cintio Vitier. This gentleman, whom I do not even know, begins by saying that "it is a simple pretext to criticize the poets José Lezama Lima and Cintio Vitier and the Orígenes group." It seems Acosta thinks that only under the "shadow" of a pretext is it possible to criticize the work of some of the figures of that group. It could be said, judging by what he affirms, that said group is not like any other core group of poets and intellectuals in the history of the culture of a country, but, rather, that it constitutes the manifestation of a divine message on Earth, that the dogma of the "new church" that said personages embody should be respected and venerated, whatever might be the objective forms that might come out of it, without any other type of consideration.

It should be known that those of us who work in the heights of intellectuality (which Acosta lacks), without aspiring to make an example to nihilists, need no pretext to denounce something that seems to us false or excessive; that we do not believe in arguments based on authority when this authority has not responded to the responsibility that the high level of its own dignity confers on it; that we do not accept any sort of veiled blackmail, nor the laughable insolence of a language whose intellectual clumsiness is evident to anyone who has read his response; that we do not want, finally, to take advantage of a situation that favors us but rather—prevented by persistent threats, persecution, and terror during the years of the past government—could not and would not speak out, saying what we now say, since that was the time for another sort of task. But Mr. Acosta confronts us with his misguided words: to demonstrate his objectivity, the objectivity of his opinions, according to him, he alleges that he does not know me, which is true . . . "for which reason there cannot be enmity between Fernández and myself." It could be said that for Mr. Acosta, the criterion of objectivity (which, in the end, he confuses with that of truth), consists in not knowing me personally and in not being my enemy . . . Tremendous . . . Right away, Acosta makes a closed showing of the encomiastic judgments that the works of Lezama and C. Vitier have deserved on the part of foreign and vernacular writers that remind us of the celebrated argument based on authority which was very frequent in Medieval scholasticism: "Aristotle said it, and that suffices." It could also be said that for Acosta, the criterion of quality is based on the quantity of opinions emitted in favor of a particular poetic oeuvre, without his trying to fundamentally revise the suppositions on which those judgments are based, in spite of the authority that supports them. If this were the case, someone else would be Cuba's best poet, and not the ones accused here. This erroneous approach by Acosta brings us to the most legitimate consideration of the nature of the epochal sensibility, which is, definitively, the one that determines the differentiated forms of expression that prevail in the autonomous stages of objective culture, that is, in history: a radical change in the vital attitude of man...