A Clean State

READER, I GIVE YOU CICLON, THE NEW JOURNAL. WITH IT, WE WIPE THE SLATE clean with one stroke. Erasing Orígenes, which, as everyone knows, is currently no more than dead weight after ten years of effective service to culture in Cuba. Let it be stated at the outset, then, that Ciclón wipes away Orígenes with one stroke. As far as the Orígenes group is concerned, we need not repeat, a long time has passed since it was eaten by its own father, just like the children of Saturn.

"What has happened?" the sympathetic reader may ask. "Has a state of war just been declared?" No, kind reader. War was already declared a long time ago: we have made war and we have won. We confess to you that it has been a short war, almost a military walk in the park. How could we not win it if we had a secret weapon, the new journal, Ciclón, at our disposal? At the moment in which the enemy felt most secure, we let "our bomb" fall, which, as you see, wipes away Orígenes with one stroke.

But since we have the obligation of informing the reader, not succinctly but exhaustively about the conflict, we are going to narrate the genesis, development, and consequences of this war, maintained between the army of the past and the host of the present.

It was, as always is the case, a chance incident which unleashed said war, throwing a revelatory light on the two vices of intellectual conformity of Orígenes of 1954: cultural inertia and absolute inanity of the group in the face of the ukases of José Lezama Lima.

The facts are the following: the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez publishes in Orígenes number thirty-three an article in which he alludes to the poet Vicente Aleixandre: Lezama (one of the directors of the journal) inserts said article without consulting the opinion of José Rodriguez Feo (the other director) who, logically, asks for an explanation from Mr. Lezama. Heated discussions, secret conferences, and little acts of vengeance take place after this incident. The picture fills out with diligent emissaries, kind negotiators, and subtle messengers.

Nevertheless, no reconciliation is possible; on the contrary, a break has taken place along the whole line of encounter. Lezama, set in his infallibility, requires of Rodríguez Feo a grave decision: nothing less than putting Orígenes out on his own. Since he considered himself as much a director of the journal as Lezama, Rodríguez Feo was forced to save two very important things: the continuity of Orígenes and his own diminished authority.

The eternal superficiality, in his turn, has indulged himself by disclosing that his decision was the work of whimsy, but whoever penetrates a bit deeper will see the background of the question. The fact of having dedicated ten years of his life to said journal annuls all suspicion of whimsy or vain arrogance. If he could not, because of the situation at hand, continue to be co-director of Orígenes, he had to be director of another Orígenes, since he understood that a dedication of ten years does not end of necessity just because someone comes to tell him that he should renounce it if he does not accept the ukases of the other director.

If it is said that Lezama had the sacred trust of pursuing the publication of Orígenes, it should also be said that Rodríguez Feo had this same trust. Of course, the situation was a Gordian knot, and it is well known how such knots are cut . . . He cut it with one stroke. He put out, to say it with the same phrase that the superficial explanation uses, "his Orígenes." Rodríguez Feo's [End Page...