Culture

As in several aspects of life in Cuba (from foreign policy to medical care to education to athletics), in boxing terms Cuba is like a lightweight who fights in the heavyweight class—punching way above its weight. In terms of cultural expression, this is very clearly the case and has been for decades. In the developing world, Cuba leads the way in terms of the value of its originality and credibility and also in questions of accessibility for the population at large. (By this, we are referring to the availability of culture to the vast majorities of the population at an affordable, usually subsidized price.) Most of this is not reported in Western media, and as a result, the perception remains that Cuban culture is dogmatic and state controlled. Sadly, this bias is widely held; it is also wildly incorrect.

In fact, Cuban culture is alive and well. For instance, the most prestigious literary prizes throughout Latin America and the Caribbean are those granted annually by Cuba’s Casa de las Américas cultural organization. The leading ballet in all of Latin America (and arguably one of the best in the world) is the National Ballet of Cuba. Almost every year, Cuban musicians earn awards at the Latin Grammies. (In the 2012 version, celebrated in Las Vegas, no fewer than fifteen Cuban-born musicians and bands—living both on the island and abroad—were nominated for awards and within eleven of the nineteen categories.) The annual New Latin American Film Festival celebrated in Havana is akin to the Oscar ceremonies—except that the onus in Cuba is on mass participation in the film festival, with tens of thousands of Cubans and foreigners alike lining up to see dozens of films in cinemas throughout the capital. Likewise, the annual Book Fair, which starts in Havana and then wends its way throughout the island, brings millions of people to participate. All of this, it should be remembered, occurs in a country of just 11.2 million. Put simply, Cuban cultural production goes far beyond the pleasant music of the Buena Vista Social Club.

One of the greatest misconceptions about Cuba is that there is no freedom to criticize the government or, indeed, any official aspect of Cuba’s political, economic, or social system. One of the common themes found throughout most of the chapters in this section concerns the different ways in which daily reality (and, yes, criticisms) are addressed within Cuban cultural expression. A secondary theme concerns the different adaptations that have taken place within the cultural realm in response to—or perhaps as part of—the broader changes under way on the island. If one has any doubt about the liberalization of Cuban culture in recent years, it is only necessary to listen to the lyrics of some of the country’s leading rap and reggaeton artists (studied in this volume by Ana Ruiz), to read Leonardo Padura’s searing denunciation of Stalinism (and state control in general) in his superb novel El hombre que amaba a los perros (The Man Who Loved Dogs, recently published in English), or to watch the hilarious zombie movie Juan de los Muertos (Juan of the Dead). Reference is made to these below: there are indeed fresh winds blowing in the Cuban cultural scene.

As we indicated in the earlier edition of this book, there were already clear indications that cultural life was rapidly evolving as the “Special Period” advanced. The reference there to the unveiling of the statue of John Lennon in a Havana park in December 2000 by none other than Fidel Castro (whose government four decades earlier had banned the music of the Beatles for its allegedly decadent Western influence) is a fitting symbol of this fast-paced change. We have kept just a couple of the chapters found in the early edition of the book (by writers Padura and Nancy Morejón as well as the lyrics of two songs by Carlos Varela, the Bob Dylan of Cuba).

A historical note is in order to contextualize these developments. Many changes in cultural activity have taken place, reflecting the fact that Cuba itself has changed dramatically since the implosion of the Soviet Union—a process resulting in the end of generous subsidies. By the mid-1990s, the Cuban government was faced with the sad reality that there was extremely limited funding for anything, as the Cuban Revolution literally scrambled to survive in the direst of circumstances and defying all odds. Given the extremely limited funds available, ensuring a supply of food, fuel, and medical supplies obviously took precedence over the production of books or films, and understandably financial support for the arts was decimated. Newspapers were reduced to a skeleton format, often displayed publicly across the windows of small booths (since there were not enough print copies to go around). Film production dried up, and the number of books published was savagely reduced. Evening baseball games were changed to be played during the daytime—since power for the stadiums’ floodlights was deemed an unacceptable luxury.

To survive, Cuban cultural leaders turned abroad to publish their works, host dance performances, curate art exhibits, and coproduce films. While at first this adaptation to the harsh realities of post-Soviet aid was extremely challenging, eventually Cuban cultural life did rebound—and, in fact, some highly original projects resulted, as this section attests. Cuban artists, dancers, musicians, writers, and film directors dug deeply into the resilient Cuban character and their famed capacity to “resolver” and “inventar” and subsequently delivered some extraordinary cultural productions. One of the best examples of the resulting renaissance of cultural life at that time was Fresa y chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate), directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabío and released in 1993. It was produced as a Cuban-Spanish-Mexican venture and was extremely successful, receiving an Oscar nomination.

It is worth summarizing briefly the plot of the film since in many ways it broke the mold of Cuban films produced until then and set the scene for the continuing cultural liberalization seen ever since. The film pits two characters against each other—David, an introverted university student who defends a rather arid revolutionary position, and Diego, a gay artist who is extremely discouraged by the revolutionary process and longs to leave Cuba and its stagnant, official cultural milieu. Another relevant character is Miguel, a homophobic and dogmatic revolutionary who pressures David to spy on Diego so that he can be punished as an enemy of the state. The film ends with Diego leaving the country and David realizing that many of the ideological positions he had previously held—in particular, his views on the nature of being a true revolutionary and his own homophobia—were simply wrong. After the release of this film, things were never the same.

This section provides insights into the sweeping changes that have occurred in Cuban cultural life in recent years. It is difficult to understand the enormous importance of culture in Cuba—seen most clearly in the 20 percent of the nation’s population who attend the annual Book Fair that starts in Havana and then sweeps for several weeks throughout the island. Daniel Salas González analyzes the phenomenon of an official policy that has as its principal goal ensuring that cultural expression is accessible to all Cubans—in many ways democratizing culture. Literature, he points out, is an important expression of national culture and not merely a commodity. Government subsidies still keep the prices low on cultural performances and on books so that they can be enjoyed by the population at large.

Mention was made earlier about the Casa de las Américas literary prizes being the most significant for writers in Latin America and the Caribbean. This can be judged from the high number of entries in the 2012 literary competition. In all categories, some 770 submissions were received from authors from thirty-seven nations (including 172 for that year’s prize for best novel and 322 for best collection of poetry). In the end, the prize for the novel category was not awarded since none of the entries were considered to be of sufficiently high standard.

Making cinema accessible to all is particularly obvious every December for the ten-day film extravaganza that envelops the nation. In December 2012 (the thirty-fourth year for the festival), some 566 films were shown—mainly but not exclusively from Latin America. There are several categories for films—documentaries, cartoons, and the full-length features—vying for the prestigious Coral awards (twenty-one competed for this award in 2012). There were also special showings of films to honor Kenji Misumi (Japan), Michelangelo Antonioni (Italy), Chris Marker (France), and Jan Svakmajer (Czech Republic) as well as a retrospective of some forty films to commemorate the centenary of the Puerto Rican film industry. In addition, twenty-one films were shown in the Opera Prima section, reserved for young filmmakers. In all, films from forty-six countries were shown throughout the day and night in thirteen theaters in Havana.

To make the films accessible, the prices were reasonable—a “passport” allowing the holder to see fifteen films cost 20 Cuban pesos (the equivalent of 80 U.S. cents). The variety of the films shown is remarkable. The program for December 7, 2012, to take an example from the daily newspaper Juventud Rebelde, lists the titles, nationalities of the director, and locations and times they are to be shown of films from Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Venezuela, Brazil, Cuba-Panama-France, the United States, Canada, Iran-Germany, Puerto Rico, Poland-Germany-Canada, France-Canada, Russia, Ecuador-Venezuela, Japan, Italy-France, Mexico-Holland-Canada, Spain, Germany, Brazil-France, Argentina–Spain–United States, Chile–United States–Mexico, Colombia-France-Italy, Great Britain–India, United States–Palestine–Israel, Czech Republic–Slovakia–Japan, Mexico-France-Spain, Cuba–Great Britain–United States, Colombia–Bolivia–United States, France-Cuba, United States–France, Sweden, Costa Rica, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba.

Accessibility and masividad (mass participation) are common themes of all manifestations of cultural expression. Robert Huish and Simon Darnell study this aspect in their chapter on the development of sport capacity on the island, a program that has brought international respect for its success in competition around the world. The same commitment is found in the annual Latin American Film Festival and the biannual art exhibits (the bienales), at which art is taken from the galleries to the street. As Sandra Levinson indicates, the startling and provocative use of art, as well as the imagination and use of the most varied elements (including prerevolutionary refrigerators), reveals an extraordinarily vibrant cultural reality. Artistic expression is not to be restricted to traditional formats within galleries but instead is to be challenging, lively, and available to all. As a result, public spaces are often used to engage the population, as can be seen most clearly in Fuster’s decoration of the buildings in an entire section of Havana.

The question of freedom of expression is, of course, pertinent to this discussion since often the impression is given (mistakenly) that artistic liberties are totally controlled by the state. Levinson shows that art has, in fact, been in the forefront of this process of adapting a pragmatic approach since many aspects of the Communist Party’s reforms (such as the need for self-employment, the freedom to travel abroad, and the necessity for a rigorous questioning of official policy) had already been well established by artists. Moreover, as is the case in other cultural expressions, artists have been in the vanguard of change since they “began to say in their work what people were saying quietly in their homes.”

In their insightful chapter, Par Kumaraswami and Antoni Kapcia provide an analysis of the evolution of book publishing during the Special Period and the evolving role of writers during this time. As was the case with artists, members of the National Union of Artists and Writers of Cuba stated very clearly in 2007 (following the showing of a controversial television documentary about a purge of writers in the late 1960s and early 1970s) the need for freedom of expression. They condemned in outspoken fashion the many abuses that had been committed against this in the Revolution’s name in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. In essence, they were sending notice that their “principal loyalty to the Revolution continued to consist precisely in their ability to critique and question it from within.” It was a warning to the government of Raúl Castro that cultural figures would not allow themselves to be intimidated as they had been thirty years earlier. As will be noted below, the space to critique the revolutionary process is in fact far greater than is widely thought.

Perhaps the area of cultural expression in which there have been the most rapid changes in recent years is film. Ann Marie Stock analyzes the two focal points in which this can be seen: in the use of technology and in the subject material of the films themselves. The mastery of (increasingly accessible) digital technology as well as the ability to create websites and submit their films to international festivals or upload them on YouTube have combined to create a totally different scenario for filmmakers on the island. Now, for instance, people involved in film production have access to both receive information from abroad and send their own cultural contributions. In terms of the subjects treated in the films, Stock outlines with clarity the previously taboo topics that are now treated in films, including mental illness, underground culture, the emergence of class distinctions, and a variety of social problems (e.g., in housing, employment, and health care). Particularly worthy of note is the masterful (and, for some, irreverent) 2010 film of Cuba’s leading film director, Fernando Pérez, El Ojo del Canario (The Eye of the Canary), about the troubled adolescence of Cuba’s national hero José Martí, a film that illustrates this phenomenon well. It is worth emphasizing the enormous shadow that Martí casts over all things Cuban: Fidel Castro has referred to him as his major inspiration, his bust is found in front of all Cuban schools, his image adorns Cuban 1-peso notes, and the major airport, national library, and Revolutionary Square all bear his name. To produce a film in which this immortal figure is shown to be wracked with adolescent angst illustrates an enormous degree of freedom of expression in the Cuban context.

Common to all of these aspects of cultural expression (even before the significant migration reforms of early 2013) was the element of transculturation, with Cuban artists, musicians, dancers, writers, and film directors coming and going—mainly to the United States and Spain. During the first three decades of the Revolution, this was virtually impossible, whereas now it is common. Indeed, many leading members of the cultural elite maintain homes in Cuba and abroad and travel frequently between both. The end result is a series of cultural influences across borders on what it means to be Cuban. The fact that in 2012 almost 500,000 Cuban Americans (for many seen as “refugees”) returned to Cuba to visit family members illustrates clearly the welcome dropping of barriers and increase in people-to-people contacts. Obviously, this widespread exchange must also have a direct bearing on cultural matters.

On both sides of the Florida Straits, people are now realizing that barriers have to be taken down since, despite profound differences of opinion, all are Cuban. In cultural terms, the same genetic and cultural influences have had a major impact on Cubans from Havana to Hialeah. A symbol of the cultural potential that could be channeled if common sense were to prevail in the relationship between the United States and Cuba was the March 2013 concert given in Havana by trovador Silvio Rodríguez and salsero Isaac Delgado. (Delgado had left Cuba for Miami in 2006.) On a related matter, speaking of the double standard that existed in U.S. policy toward Cuba, rapper Jay-Z noted in his “Open Letter” in April 2013 after being criticized for traveling to Cuba on a cultural exchange program with Beyoncé, “I’m in Cuba, I love Cubans / This communist talk is so confusing / When it’s from China the very mic / that I’m using.”

Since the first edition of this book, there have been several key developments that are in many ways symbolized by three significant examples well worth noting: the publication in December 2009 of Padura’s novel, the release of the zombie film Juan de los muertos in 2011 (both noted above), and the impact on Cuban media of the arrival in January 2013 of the Venezuela-based Telesur television channel. All three illustrate dramatically the changing face of Cuban culture.

Padura’s work deals with topics that had not been examined in Cuba before, steering clear of the rather traditional novelistic fare of the day. The plot for El hombre que amaba a los perros is straightforward. It is the story of a series of reflections that result from meetings on a beach near Havana between a veterinary clinic assistant and a man with two large dogs who turns out to be Ramón Mercader—the person who had assassinated Leon Trotsky in Mexico in August 1940. (After serving his prison sentence, he moved to Cuba for several years before returning to live in the Soviet Union. The book is based on five years of scrupulous historical research by Padura.) There are three stories intertwined, dealing with Mercader, Trotsky, and the veterinary assistant.

The end result of this long (600-page) novel is a strong and irreverent criticism of the abuse of power and the tragic end of utopian dreams. Communism, Mercader had always been told, was supposed to introduce the perfect society, complete with justice and equality for all. This novel shows, however, that justice was perverted under the brutal control of Stalin and, by extension, the totalitarian communist dictatorship. Unquestioning militancy in political organizations and any form of fanaticism are roundly condemned in the novel by Padura, who shows how the “true believers” (such as Mercader) end up being manipulated by those who control the organizations. The end result is the kidnapping and eventual destruction of a beautiful dream by the state bureaucracy and a central dictator. Political purges, assassination, control of the media, and the development of an “Official Truth” all result in the failure of the dreamed-of socialist utopia. Heady stuff, indeed.

Prior to the publication of this novel, Padura’s fame derived largely from his hugely successful detective novels (six in all), which revolved around political crimes set in Cuba of the Special Period. In these works, he also pulled no punches, criticizing the bureaucracy, corruption, double standard in Cuban society in general, and political manipulation that he witnessed in the early 1990s. Padura is hugely popular in Cuba (and is probably the best-known contemporary Cuban writer abroad, with his works translated into two dozen languages), and his novels are by far the most sought after in Havana’s bookstores—when they are available. Indeed, his peers elected him as the recipient of the National Literature Prize for 2012, which in itself is a major significant development—given his penchant for criticism of the government. He has been awarded numerous international prizes. Significantly, however, the official print media on the island have traditionally chosen to downplay and ignore his work, mainly because he chose to challenge the established parameters of what should be published and has been extremely critical of aspects of contemporary Cuba, including the role of official journalism.

Clear evidence of the fast-moving changes in the Cuban cultural scene can also be seen in an unlikely format, the zombie film Juan de los muertos (Juan of the Dead), which was made in 2011 by Alejandro Brugués. This is a full-length film, a Cuban-Spanish coproduction that cost just under $3 million. The film follows the activities of Juan, a slacker played by Alexis Díaz de Villegas who one day discovers that Havana is being overrun by zombies. Nobody is safe from the onslaught, as the epidemic continues to grow unabated. His solution? To use his fighting skills (learned during Cuba’s military intervention in Angola) and to form a business to protect Havana citizens from being turned into zombies. The slogan he chooses for his business is quite direct: “We will kill your loved ones.” This is not a typical zombie film, however, since in the process of following the development of Juan’s entrepreneurial skills, a tremendous amount of in-jokes criticizing Cuban foibles (and, in particular, the revolutionary government) are encountered.

Juan, for instance, refuses to head to Miami on a raft (“Why would I want to go to Miami? I have to work there,” he notes). But in addition to poking fun at the slower pace of life in revolutionary Cuba and developing his skills as a self-employed cuentapropista, Juan viciously skewers government propaganda. Official media are ridiculed for presenting the zombies as counterrevolutionaries, U.S.-funded political dissidents, and, in general, agents of Yankee imperialism. References to the difficulties facing the population during the Special Period after the fall of the Soviet Union abound, and even the government leadership is mentioned critically. Juan defends his call to action in the exterminating business while taking a sly poke at the longevity of the revolutionary process: “What if they go on like this for another fifty years?”

This is an extremely irreverent comedy that is replete with over-the-top humor, faux gory scenes, and some hilarious moments. It is terrific entertainment and well made, with excellent acting and first-rate digital production. The film has garnered several prizes, including in 2013 Spain’s prestigious Goya Award. But it also reveals the burgeoning independence of cultural expression, maturity, and self-confidence found in Cuba. This is seen in the satirical presentation of many of the challenges facing contemporary Cuba, a topic in which Brugués is extremely direct. For, as the director himself noted in a BBC interview on January 17, 2011, in summarizing the film, “It’s . . . about Cubans and how they react in the face of a crisis because we’ve had a lot of them over the last fifty years” (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-11867532).

Another key development in the Cuban cultural scene was the arrival in January 2013 of Telesur, the Venezuela-funded television channel shown throughout Latin America. In many ways a mirror of CNN (except that its focus is clearly left of center), it has proved an extremely important contrast to the boring, one-dimensional, pro-government state channels that have been in place for decades. It is important to note that Cuban state media are generally disappointing and superficial in their news coverage, with a clear lack of balance in their reporting. The daily newspaper Granma (which, in fairness, notes on its masthead that it is the “official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba”) and the slightly less dogmatic Juventud Rebelde have long been the only significant source of print media. Cuban television and radio are little better, generally providing a one-dimensional summary of the news as seen by the government. (A joke about the dogmatic tone of the Cuban media is perhaps pertinent here. It is said that if the French press during Napoleon’s time had been the same as the Cuban press are today, he would never have lost any wars. Why? Because no French person would ever have found out.) The arrival of Telesur has thus provided a major challenge to official media since it has provided a useful and timely alternative to the traditionally insular (and one-dimensional) Cuban media.

On April 19, 2011, President Raúl Castro’s address to the Sixth Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba was direct in its criticism of the same official media: “In this area of work it is also necessary to definitively banish the habit of describing the national reality in pretentious, strident language or with excessive formality. Instead, written materials and television and radio programs should be produced that capture the attention of the audience with their content and style while encouraging public debate which demands greater knowledge and a higher level of professionalism on the part of our journalists [and the] all too common dissemination of boring, improvised or superficial reports” (http://www.walterlippmann.com/rc-04-19-2011.html). In April 2013, Deputy Minister of Culture Fernando Rojas was even more direct, calling current blogs in Cuba “the alternative press that we need.” He added, “I would like us to have an alternative press, one that was revolutionary, socialist, communist, etc. And, as we don’t have one, that role is assumed by the blogs” (http://lajovencuba.wordpress.com/2013/04/29/entrevista-a-fernando-rojas). Yet, while such high-ranking officials clearly saw the need for an alternative to the bureaucratic and simplistic approach to national media, little progress has been made in Cuba. Instead, that badly needed media alternative has come from abroad.

In January 2013, Telesur started its daily twelve-hour broadcasts to Cuba. They have been a revelation in Cuba, where boring, simplistic coverage on the nation’s airwaves has been in place for over five decades—until now. Instead, a multitude of different stories, images, and techniques have now been presented to the Cuban audience. The inaugural speech of U.S. President Barack Obama, interviews with opposition candidates in recent elections in Venezuela and Ecuador, parliamentary discussions from several countries in the region, reports on Major League Baseball games in the United States, and widespread access to the Internet are just some examples of these novelties. Slick global news gathering, state-of-the-art technology, and the more balanced and nuanced news reports have had a major impact in Cuba, where state control of the media is complete. Undoubtedly, the concerns expressed by Raúl Castro and Fernando Rojas are significant, expressing the need for a more dynamic level of political discourse in the Cuban media. The daily broadcast of Telesur programs has now provided an alternative window on the world, and official Cuban media coverage loses badly in any comparison. It is hoped that Cuban journalists will start to emulate the more balanced view of their Latin American counterparts.

The vibrant, questioning nature of Cuban culture is illustrated throughout this section, from the insightful analyses of Cuban cultural icons such as Nancy Morejón and Leonardo Padura and the songs of Carlos Varela to the chapters of our contributors. Readers who have been brought up to believe that cultural expression on the island is one-dimensional, state controlled, and dogmatic will be surprised at the rich and varied mosaic that is analyzed here. And while state-run news media remain one area where there is indeed limited expression, it is clear that this process has to adjust to the new reality—as both the president and the deputy minister of culture indicate. Cuban cultural expression under Raúl Castro has continued the fast pace of societal change that was initiated by his brother in the early 1990s but that has developed even more rapidly—and indeed with a greater quality.

Living and Creating in Cuba

Leonardo Padura Fuentes

Risks and Challenges

One of the problems facing Cuban culture is that it is significantly greater than the country from which it springs. This gigantic culture, whose origins can be traced back to the nineteenth century when national culture as such was just beginning, has been with us Cubans for so long that we scarcely notice it now.

And so, when the Revolution of Fidel Castro succeeded in 1959, Cuba was already an important cultural presence in the Western world, with its creators and protagonists receiving recognition in the most diverse artistic circles. There can be no doubt that, from that point on, this solid artistic potential and this major cultural thrust received a tremendous boost in their development in Cuba. Government support helped to multiply that potential, turning it into a clear cultural reality that spread rapidly. Moreover, because of government support, culture was now available to all levels of society (as producers and consumers of our culture) and it achieved new levels of international prestige.

Other measures taken by the government helped to support and develop this new cultural reality. The 1961 Literacy Campaign was key to cultural development in the 1960s, as were the creation of schools of art and cinema, the production of books, and the development of music and theater. That decade had as its backdrop the cultural policy drawn up by Fidel Castro: “Within the Revolution, everything is possible; against it, nothing is,” he noted in October 1961. An atmosphere of genuine creativity exploded full of enthusiasm and massive participation. Its first discordant note sounded with the closing down of the weekly cultural supplement Lunes de Revolución, its first major schism came with the Padilla affair, and the process of officially imposed “cultural parameters” that ushered in a period of profound dogma following the 1971 Congress of Education and Culture.

If the 1960s was a decade of expansion, vitality, renovation, and open commitment with the revolutionary process on the part of Cuban artists, the 1970s have been judged as a dark, repressive period, one in which numerous cultural figures (the most notable being Lezama Lima and Virgilio Piñera) were officially marginalized. Artistic parameters similar to the inauspicious dogma of socialist realism were imposed in a more or less visible fashion. It is not by chance, for example, that out of nowhere there should appear the new genre of the “revolutionary police novel.” This tendency was of dubious artistic value, presenting everything in terms of us versus them, and clearly written with the intention of defending the goals of the Revolution while ignoring general aesthetic principles.

In the second half of that dark and somber decade, the Ministry of Culture was created to redirect Cuban culture. This came in the wake of several grave political errors by the government, both in the treatment of intellectuals and in the very definition of what artistic expression should be. Just a few years later, however, these new state structures began to assimilate the need for a more profound change of policy. This was not the result of a new interpretation of the cultural phenomenon per se. Rather, it was demanded by the artists themselves, who expressed their feelings clearly in their work.

As a result, from the early 1980s on, we can see the definitive rehabilitation of so many artists who had been marginalized by Cuban officialdom for almost ten years—and for a variety of reasons (perhaps because they were practicing Christians or homosexual; because their art was more of a questioning nature than one that reaffirmed official positions; or because in their literature they included clear social criticism). It was a time when a generation of Cuban cultural figures emerged. They brought a new approach to the traditional insular reality. They also felt relatively angst-free, an important development, since many of their predecessors felt burdened with the original sin of not having fought more directly in the Revolution.

If the Cuba of the 1960s was a country in the midst of social and political effervescence, a country in which socialist institutionalization was taking its first steps in the midst of the struggle for control over the cultural apparatus, the 1970s was a period when the socialist cultural project was implemented with few concessions upon a population that had mainly shown its support for the evolutionary struggle. The result of this approach, however, wreaked havoc in cultural circles: artists were repressed, and culture was taken over by an official bureaucracy.

Despite this current, however, the internal dynamic of the country, together with its deeply rooted, potent culture, ended up showing a fair degree of independence in the 1980s. At that time painters, writers, dramatists, and even dancers and people involved in the cinema took fairly substantial risks and began opting for a less inhibited cultural expression. This decision was based more on identification with the aesthetic function of art than on any direct political expression of the content.

The maturation of this process took place during one of the most convulsive social and economic periods of Cuban history and indeed the most dynamic era of the revolutionary history since the 1960s. It constituted the first clarion call, and a dramatic one at that, of significant change in Cuba. This led to the dramatic 1989 court trials that would end in the execution of important figures of the armed forces and the Ministry of the Interior, the imprisonment of other officials, and the firing of dozens more.

As the Berlin Wall was tumbling down and the Soviet Union was collapsing, Cuba experienced a terrifying political and economic solitude. The government introduced the “Special Period in a Time of Peace,” a title with which it baptized the harshest economic crisis that the country had ever lived through. Just a few years later, as the crisis worsened, the government felt obliged to introduce major economic changes—with immediate social repercussions—changes never before imagined.

Many of these benefits also brought significant social change. Prostitution and a network of pimps reappeared; some social sectors suddenly became extremely wealthy; Cuban society became divided between those holding dollars and those without; an exodus of professionals moving to work in the tourist sector became visible; Cubans moved to the far corners of the earth; and religious faith and religiosity noticeable increased, as did violence and delinquency. Symbolic of these changes was the disappearance of the term compañero (denoting solidarity and classlessness) in favor of the more traditional expression señor. All of this occurred in a society that lacked the most basic materials and where the U.S. embargo had drastically affected the economic and social life of the country.

In such a convulsive (and truly special) period, artistic and literary productive could be no less convulsive and special—as in fact proved to be the case. As a result there was a distinctive change in the relationship between the cultural creator and the state. If I were asked to define the cultural characteristics of the 1990s, I would name three: the crisis of cultural production, the winning of space by the creators to express themselves, and the massive (voluntary) exile of Cuban artists.

The first of these factors has been analyzed on several occasions. It includes a drastic reduction in the number and types of Cuban books published, television programming and films produced, art exhibitions mounted, and plays staged. It is true that in the late 1990s these difficulties were steadily overcome. Nevertheless, we have been faced with a crisis of such magnitude, a crisis in which institutions were simply unable to respond with support to the productive demands of culture. This had a special connotation in a country like Cuba, where government support had been crucial. It provoked stagnation and a fundamental rupture of the artistic growth in quantitative, and indeed qualitative, terms in several areas of cultural expression.

Closely linked to these economic difficulties of the 1990s is perhaps the factor that had proved most important of all the cultural changes of this decade—namely, the necessary opening up of space for artistic expression. It is true that there was always a certain level of ideological support for this phenomenon, and not for reasons solely linked to the economic crisis. Institutions like the Ministry of Culture, the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC), and the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC) have traditionally supported the need for their members to have access to a greater space for reflection, analysis, and criticism of themes that previously had been either censored or treated in a superficial manner.

With the economic crisis, however, the lack of institutional support to finance their projects meant that cultural figures actually gained in independence. This allowed them greater freedom of expression, and they responded with the badly needed sounds to fill the silent void that existed before. Their situation had cried out for artists and writers, film directors and singers, to voice their feelings. Yet in the midst of the previous institutionalization, this had been impossible. Now things had changed.

As a result, several alternative projects have emerged and have dealt head-on with areas previously ignored. This is seen most clearly in the Cuban cinema. To appreciate this development, one must remember that since the historic scandal surrounding the 1961 documentary “P.M.,” the cinema industry has been centralized under the auspices of ICAIC and two or three similar production houses controlled by trusted institutions such as the Ministries of Education and the Armed Forces. Now that these state institutions were unable for financial reasons to take on any further projects, this created the possible space for some initial efforts by independent filmmakers—a phenomenon that previously would have been inconceivable—to produce their work in video format. Just as important, however, is the fact that even within the traditional structures Cuban cinema has developed an aesthetic vision of reality that it has been struggling to present for many years. In short, it now dealt openly with themes that it would have been impossible to examine even a decade earlier.

One film in particular clearly revealed Cuban filmmakers’ urgent need to express themselves: Fresa y Chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate). This film, directed by veteran Tomás Gutiérrez Alea in collaboration with Juan Carlos Tabío and based on a script of Senel Paz, has proved to be a truly significant aesthetic benchmark. It has staked out, like no other film, the claims and possibilities of Cuban art in the 1990s, one that is very different from the epic romanticism of the 1960s, the simplistic ideological presentation of the 1970s, and the critical stammering of the 1980s.

It is around this film that several others have developed, such as the controversial “Guantanamera” (at which Fidel Castro publicly lashed out), also made by Alea and Tabío; the most recent films by Fernando Pérez (Madagascar and La Vida es Silbar (Life Is to Whistle), both of a distinctly existentialist flavor); Amor Vertical (Vertical Love) by Arturo Soto; and what was without a doubt the film that generated the bitterest controversy in recent years, Alicia en el Pueblo de Maravillas (Alice in the Town of Wonder) by Daniel Díaz Torres. Alicia was condemned in the local media as a counter-revolutionary work and snatched from Cuban cinemas just three days after its premiere. Even during its limited showing, the cinemas were filled with “revolutionaries,” sent there to avoid any demonstration that might support a film with such perverse political intentions.

Something similar happened with Cuban literature. Again, the lack of editorial support because of the economic crisis, changes in mentality in certain spheres of the state direction, and the need for writers to reflect upon a complex and difficult reality have all combined to mold a new form of literary production. This is particularly evident in the narrative, which has contributed to the destruction of several literary taboos, as well as to the literary treatment of several topics which previously had been totally disregarded or not “well regarded.” It was thought in official circles that there was never an opportune moment to deal with such themes, including exile, narcotics, homosexuality, corruption, desperation, and suicide. What is curious about many of these works is that they arrived on the Cuban scene already possessing the pedigree of recognition from several international, and occasionally national, literary competitions. As a result, they were well known before they were distributed on the island.

And so what in happier economic times (albeit under more rigid ideological parameters) would have caused rumors and quarrels (if not full-blown scandals and possible punishment) has now been accepted as being a natural ingredient of a more open and flexible creative environment in Cuba. Perhaps the best adjective to describe this new policy is intelligent. And significantly all of this has come about despite the position of political protagonists (both outside and within the so-called cultural sector) who have openly expressed their opposition to this form of reflection and cultural expression, which to a certain extent they consider alien and indeed harmful to the goals of the Cuban government.

None of this means that the traditional phenomena of censorship and self-censorship have disappeared from Cuba. The freedom for all cultural figures on the island as (Cuban novelist and dramatist) Antón Arrufat explained, is conditioned by the political and social reality of the country, which in turn imposes rules of game that those in the cultural world have learned well. That said, it is indeed true that the levels of permissiveness and the ceiling of tolerance have grown. Now, thanks to the economic crisis of the 1990s, Cuban culture has gained space: cultural workers now possess increased possibilities both to reflect and to express themselves, possibilities that simply did not exist before. These possibilities now extend as far as dealing with the thorny ideological and aesthetic challenges of working “within the Revolution,” a process which for many years had been reduced to working “in favor of the Revolution”—and nothing else.

The economic context has also brought about another feature of Cuban culture that previously did not exist: the possibility of commercializing Cuban cultural work. As a result, several writers now publish their manuscripts in Spain, Mexico, and Italy before they appear in Cuba. Dozens of artists hold exhibitions of their work throughout the world and sell it before foreign galleries, often without the slightest involvement of the state apparatus. And Cuban actors work abroad for international companies.

The most complicated and heartrending of these end-of-the-century problems, however, against which the only bureaucratic measure has traditionally been repression, is undoubtedly the mass exodus of members of the cultural sector. This has notably impoverished Cuban cultural life. This fact of life, which, given the significance of the numbers involved, could be perhaps compared with the 1959–1961 exodus, is really quite different. Early in the revolutionary process, several key figures in the cultural realm left Cuba, including Jorge Mañach, popular singer Celia Cruz, ethnologist Lydia Cabrera, and television magnate Goar Mestre. The political process at that time, however, produced a dynamic of such tremendous growth, supporting the development of a radically new culture, that it was possible to overcome the loss of these figures.

The exodus of the 1990s was very different, however. It was produced by people who had been formed within the revolutionary cultural tradition, and it included some of its most notable representatives (the great historian Manuel Moreno Fraginals, the novelist and film director Jesús Díaz, the extremely popular painter Tomás Sánchez, musicians like Arturo Sandoval, the journalist and writer Norberto Fuentes, almost the entire generation of plastic artists trained in the 1980s, and finally a legion of television and film actors including Reynaldo Miravalles).

It is worth noting, however, that for the first time since 1959, cultural workers have left for both economic and cultural reasons. This is also seen in the public attitude toward the revolutionary process of these intellectuals. The “economic” exiles are able to maintain links with Cuban cultural institutions, to enter and leave the country, and to exhibit their work here in Cuba, a development which has meant that they have not broken completely with Cuba, even if their work for the most part is produced and distributed outside Cuba. By contrast, their “political” counterparts, definitively distant from the Cuban system, have become the last legion of political dissidents who are officially recognized as such. A significant part of their work—if not all of it—supports this definitive rupture, since it appears irreconcilable, at least given the parameters being debated at present.

Within the island an attempt has been made to build bridges between state institutions and Cuban exiles who do not maintain political positions that are hostile to the government. An example of this happens with the so-called Cuban Americans who left the island during their childhood. On the other hand, the tension is maintained, and indeed it has sharpened, between Cuban authorities and those who could be considered political dissidents. The official position toward them is the same as it has always been: to ignore them totally and, if possible, to alienate them from their cultural roots. Such an approach goes above political affiliations or political will. Guillermo Cabrera Infante is clearly a Cuban writer, even though government officials may not admit it, publish the fact, or even recognize him in Cuba. And even though Cabrera Infante himself might state that he doesn’t want to be considered a Cuban writer, or denies the fact (as he has done), he is clearly a Cuban writer.

The basic option of these dissidents, meanwhile, has been more or less the same: They increase their political opposition to the government in response to the system. In some cases, too, in works of doubtful artistic merit, they have condemned the Cuban government. This tactic is clearly the quickest way to develop an audience, and it is an approach that has led to their work being distributed widely, and to a fairly substantial income.

It is a fact that, for any nation in the world, the departure from circulation of a notable percentage of those working in the cultural sector leads to a serious loss for the country’s spiritual life. And Cuba is clearly no exception. The surrounding cultural atmosphere is made up of figures who grow in that country, producing work that is inspired by daily experiences there, and leaving a legacy through their words, their work, by means of a necessary accumulation of visions and opinions. The absence of such figures, whatever their cultural stature, produces a vacuum that is combined with the other vacuum stemming from the crisis of production by national institutes. The end result is that Cuban culture is suffering from the presence of both these blows, different but at the same time complementary.

Despite the complex and dramatic features of the actual situation of Cuban culture, I believe that the country is living through a period of special creative effervescence. We see in Cuba today the flowering of the results of this small space that is now available for reflection, for creation, and for debate. If it is true that some sectors, and especially the newspapers and television, are little more than instruments of propaganda instead of information, we also need to recognize that today many people in the cultural sector are expressing themselves with greater depth within the space of “conditional freedom” that they have been winning in recent years. Doing so, of course, is not without risks (which can range from censorship to deliberately ignoring them or their work in the media). That said, risks and censorship can also be a challenge to the imagination.

Because of this complex context, it is no coincidence that Cuba has once again created a culture that is so much larger than the small insular territory from which it springs. People in several Spanish-speaking nations are increasingly speaking about the boom of the new Cuban novel, thanks to the work of a dozen or so authors from several generations whose work has received a number of prizes in international competitions. In addition, Cuban music (both traditional and modern) is at a peak in terms of creativity and financial return. This can be seen in international prizes being awarded at the highest levels, concerts given at the most desirable venues in the world, and impressive record sales, even in the United States.

The Ballet Nacional de Cuba has recently celebrated its fiftieth anniversary by touring Europe and North America, revealing in its productions its continuing vitality. The plastic arts, too, are now obligatory points of reference on the artistic and commercial circuits in Paris, Geneva, and New York, with Cuban artists increasingly winning international competitions. And finally the Cuban cinema, still badly affected by the economic crisis, continues to produce miracles, with prizes piling up in many international film festivals.

And so, in the midst of tensions and risks, with artistic expression produced both in Cuba and abroad, often with virtually no resources, Cuban culture has returned, larger in so many ways than the relatively small country that produced it. This process over the last forty years has been hard and complex. The rigors of censorship, the effects of being marginalized, and the current presence of a voracious marketplace for these talents—all have blazed the trail for today’s cultural expression. Above all, however, and with so many of its talents living abroad, the cultural creativity of this small Caribbean island continues to be one of the greatest riches of the Cuban nation and, why not, of the entire world.

Note

Leonardo Padura Fuentes, “Living and Creating in Cuba: Risks and Challenges,” in Culture and the Cuban Revolution: Conversations in Havana, by John M. Kirk and Leonardo Padura Fuentes (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001). Reprinted with permission of the University Press of Florida.

A Black Woman from Cuba, That’s All

Nancy Morejón

An Interview with Nancy Morejón

Kirk: Does the fact that you are a poet and a black poet mean that you have more responsibilities than a white woman?

Morejón: I am always fearful of stereotypes. Of course, the very notion of being a white writer in Cuba is an exceptionally abstract concept. To a large degree, my analysis is based on the fact that every Cuban is a person of mixed cultures and diverse racial origins. Every Cuban is a true cultural blend. I have read many books on feminist philosophy, and I think that we have to proceed with great caution when analyzing any stereotypes. At the same time, I believe that, as a black woman, yes, indeed, I do have things of value to say. Because of those origins, I come from a history of suffering, and I always have to be alert, to share that history, to have it felt by others. At the same time, I don’t have to exaggerate.

Morejón: Yes, because eradicating it is an extremely slow process. For me, racial discrimination is the exercise of those racial prejudices. To stop that, I believe that making people aware of their conduct, developing an ideological understanding of the problem, is far more effective than resolving the abuses solely through legal means. This does not mean that there should not be laws against discrimination—only that we also need to channel the true spirit of the Revolution to all sectors. Some people here say, “Don’t talk to me about the race question.” But we do have to examine this again because it is an important matter here in Cuba. At times, people have been afraid to talk openly about it and have not known how to deal with it as they should. And that is why there are such gaps in our understanding, gaps which we hear more about all the time. That is why we need to reconsider so many facets of our revolutionary traditions because this problem of racism is a universal problem, one affecting all humanity and not just Cuba. For example, if we analyze what has happened since 1989 in the former socialist community, we can see how the question of ethnic identity has been revisited. The proof of this can be seen in Bosnia-Herzegovina or in Chechnya. If we don’t address this factor, if we do not study it and seek to resolve it, we may ultimately face unwelcome surprises. And so I think that we should examine in more detail the question of race relations.

Kirk: Do you, as a black woman, feel any responsibility to help in this process?

Morejón: Yes, I do, and also from my perspective as a writer. But it has to be by means of a high-quality artistic expression because no matter how good the message may be, it will be useless unless it is done well, but I also need to speak with others in the cultural milieu. I have already spoken with film directors and have suggested the need to make a film about this very issue. We cannot simply forget the racial question. We also need to see black characters somewhere other than in films about slavery. We badly need something more contemporary and more pertinent.

Kirk: A question on the concept of utopia, which you describe well in your poem “Divertimento” (Amusement). In it, you refer to Cuba in the following manner: “Between the sword and the carnation / I love Utopias / I love an island which lies piercing the throat of Goliath / like a palm tree in the center of the Gulf / I love a David / I love everlasting freedom?” How do your feelings of evident nationalism react to the “pact with the devil” that the Cuban government has undertaken in order to survive? How do you feel when you are faced by the near realities of tourism, prostitution, search for the dollar, and foreign investment?

Morejón: It is a reality that in many ways is upsetting, in part because it was so unexpected. We need to be audacious if we are to function properly in this new context. We are convinced about what we need in order to survive. We also know well that the process cannot be stopped since otherwise Cuba would remain completely isolated. In essence, we have witnessed several developments over which we had no control, and as a result we had to reconsider many things. Now that tourism has returned to play such a major role in the economy, we have the opportunity to receive a fair amount of income for the national economy. At the same time, we have to be careful about the type of tourism that we seek to develop. We can’t develop the form that they have in Barbados, for example. We can have, for instance, a positive kind of tourism, one that does not need to use the bodies of our women as a hook to bring in male visitors. It is fair to say that we have been surprised by the kind of tourism that has sprung up in certain sectors. It has been painful for us in many ways. At the same time, I don’t believe that this situation will be resolved by repression. Rather, we need to reflect upon the whole issue of tourism in order to see how it can be useful for our country and also what we need to confront in a vigorous fashion. We have discovered a very serious phenomenon, but again it seems to me that this cannot be resolved through repressive means.

Morejón: No. And that is not because I haven’t wanted to because I have thought a lot about this new reality (which in many ways I dislike). Rather, I haven’t written anything because I don’t want any of my comments to be misinterpreted. At times, if you say something controversial, people think that you want to become some kind of famous dissident. And that is definitely not my case. I believe that I have had many opportunities to play the role of dissident, but I’m not the slightest bit interested in that game. At the same time, I do believe that it is necessary to have a space where you can air concerns. We have to encourage people to study this reality and to be honest when facing the problems that we have. If that’s not the case we are in trouble.

Kirk: In your opinion, what have been the major cultural successes of the Cuban Revolution? And what have been the failures?

Morejón: Often we see errors, but we don’t realize just how serious they are until later. And we regret that they were made in the first place. But let’s start with the positive elements. One can note there the tremendous potential which we came to see in ourselves. The Revolution opened doors for us and allowed an enormous social mobility. Many walls that blocked communication were demolished, and taboos were cast out. At the same time, there came a certain point when the idea of massive numbers of people pursuing cultural interests became a priority of the government, often above everything else. They forgot that, in order to appreciate art, people have to have some basic ideas about the need to recover the essence of beauty. It is very true that liberating social sectors as well as progress and social mobility clearly need not be limited to the individual. Just the opposite: they have to reaffirm it. The problem was that, often, closely connected with this emphasis on such a massive approach to culture there came the accompanying practice of justifying mediocrity, often in the name of a supposed form of equality. As a result, we have often protected mediocre cultural expressions, and I believe that we should be more rigorous.

Kirk: In every society, there are absolute and limited freedoms. How would you describe the freedom that currently exists in the Cuban cultural forum?

Morejón: I think it’s important to take into account our reality. We are a country that is still under siege and one that has never been alone. We must always remember the hostility to which we have been subjected. There are other limitations that need to be considered. In this “Special Period,” we have had limited paper and, of course, all sorts of limitations on cultural resources. This country has a very high level of education, and much of the money that we could have used for cultural purposes has instead been used to buy textbooks. We simply don’t have the resources to do both. Very often, people abroad see us talking about our free education as some sort of empty political slogan, but in fact it is a reality and a priority. This element in the midst of the Special Period has limited literary life enormously, and as a result there are fewer journals, literary competitions, publications, et cetera. We need to recover all the lost terrain in this matter. I feel that Cuban writers today are demanding things that simply cannot be conceded in a period like this since we are facing difficulties as critical as the Bay of Pigs invasion or the missile crisis. This country has to survive. Moreover, “freedom” has many facets, and many people think that they have to make demands on the state for their freedom. I think that there are, in fact, several “freedoms” and not just “freedom” in absolute terms. And freedom here has to be conditioned, or affected, by the hostility that we have encountered in the last forty years. Now it is practically a psychological phenomenon. We are all subjected to the same tensions. I personally believe that a writer has to feel a major responsibility, resulting from the nation’s identity, as well as a major ethical responsibility in regards to the community. As a result of those twin factors, one needs to know that there are things that can and cannot be done because the Revolution has the right and the duty to exist. Of course, there have been many errors here, basically because we all have limited conceptions of what the Revolution should be. To give you an idea, my parents had a utopian idea of the Revolution. They would argue, for example, that a revolutionary shouldn’t drink Amaretto liqueur. . . . As you can see, we have come to accept many stereotypes, and we badly need to struggle against that. We need to respect differences and diversity, and precisely because of that fact, I am certain that there were errors in cultural matters. Che, too, was a declared enemy of socialist realism, and I believe that we should respect his honesty. By all means, we should have the freedom to criticize dogma and stereotypes, but we must always bear in mind the reality of our history.

Note

Nancy Morejón and John M. Kirk, “A Black Woman from Cuba, That’s All,” in Culture and the Cuban Revolution: Conversations in Havana, by John M. Kirk and Leonardo Padura Fuentes (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001). Reprinted with permission of the University Press of Florida.

Two Songs

Note

The lyrics for “William Tell” and “Tropicollage” are reproduced with the permission of Carlos Varela.

Culture for the Masses?

Daniel Salas González

Some in Havana still remember the unusual cry of street vendors: “¡El Quijo! ¡El Quijo for just a quarter!” This was in 1960, days after the first anniversary of the Revolution, and the Quijo refers to the most illustrious of Spanish novels, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, which is precisely the first book title the new government printed at the recently created National Publishing Office. The idea was the result of discussions between then Prime Minister Fidel Castro and novelist Alejo Carpentier and led to an edition of 100,000 copies that, because of its low price, were meant to reach even the most humble of readers. At first glance, it doesn’t seem very rational to produce such a large number of copies of an important but difficult book in a country of somewhat under 7 million habitants at the time and with more than a million people totally illiterate (and whose population over age fifteen barely had on average a third-grade education).

However, the solution for that low level of literacy was soon to be found. The Revolution committed itself to build a huge public education system that had as its cornerstone the Literacy Campaign, which was launched in 1961. In December of that year, Cuba declared itself to be a country free of illiteracy. How could it accomplish this? The campaign was carried out in a simple yet radical way: whoever knew how to read and write taught those who did not. Teenagers and youngsters in junior high and above enlisted in massive numbers, received elementary training in teaching literacy, and set out to battle ignorance, sometimes in their neighborhood, and often in faraway areas where there never had been a school at all.

In one of his best-known phrases, the nineteenth-century Cuban intellectual and independence hero José Martí noted that being cultured was the only way to be truly free. Based on this idea, the Revolution attempted to place what Fidel Castro once called “the great heritage of mankind, culture” in the hands of the masses. In a speech in 1960, he noted, “Any worker or child of a poor family can take part in that heritage. To do so they just needed one thing to be able to achieve something that took millions of people and thousands of years to develop: to know how to read” (Castro 1960).

Over four decades later, Castro’s time as a head of state was coming to an end. It was a time of far-reaching social problems that resulted from more than ten years of economic crisis after the demise of the Eastern bloc in 1989. Many students were already deciding to leave high schools and universities because of the few opportunities for making a decent living based on continuing formal studies. It was then, after 2000, that the “Battle of Ideas” unfolded. This process involved a large state and social movement in the fields of education, communication, and propaganda with the goal of turning Cuba into the most educated country in the world.

Beyond the hyperbole, the basis for this massive effort in promoting education was a fundamental goal of contradicting the principle that material conditions determine culture. Conventional wisdom says that, if you are poor, you have fewer opportunities and that those that come to you are harder to seize. But the Revolution claimed to find a way out of this vicious circle by offering a basic cultural and spiritual enrichment as a means of overcoming the scarcity of material conditions that resulted from constant difficult economic times and U.S. government hostility.

There was a fundamental ambiguity in the early government approach to cultural expression, summed up in the famous quotation of Fidel Castro, “Within the Revolution, everything goes; against the Revolution, nothing” (Castro 1961). Yet who knew where the dividing line between these two concepts was? Despite the ambiguity, it is clear that Cuban cultural policy of this time cannot be properly understood without paying attention to this mass process of providing culture to all. The democratization of culture and the stimulus to popular participation are two key factors in this process.

The basic government formula consisted of placing national cultural heritage within easy reach of the majority. In doing so, it blurred the frontiers between cultural expressions of the elite and access to the popular arts by the masses of people traditionally excluded from enjoying these. As a result, we find the development of a culture that was perceived as being new, not so much because of its contents but rather because of the radically democratic way in which it was now made accessible to the masses, and was seen as one of the pillars for reshaping society. To strengthen this process, there was a dramatic expansion of high-quality art education programs on the island. The two best-known institutes are the National Art School (founded in 1961) and the Superior Art Institute (established in 1976).

It is not an exaggeration to say that this fundamental cultural program of making cultural expression accessible to all Cubans is one of the main legacies of the Cuban revolutionary process. As Cuba becomes a more complex society and the social and ideological project faces transformation amid the reform launched by Raúl Castro, it is important to reflect on how this approach continues today. To illustrate this phenomenon, an analysis of the most important examples is provided next.

Three Events

Events such as the International Book Fair, the New Latin American Film Festival, and the Havana Biennale of visual arts, among the most relevant of the cultural schedule in today’s Cuba, are useful illustrations of this process of democratizing culture while at the same time indicating contemporary challenges.

The Book Fair, which celebrated its twenty-second anniversary in 2013, attracts the largest crowds of all cultural events in Cuba. Initially, it was organized biannually, but since 2000 it has been held annually. Its main location is La Cabaña, a monumental colonial fortress opposite Havana harbor. Other spaces for sales, promotion, and panel discussions of literary topics are held in bookstores and other central locations in the city. The events last about ten days in the capital and then start a journey lasting various periods of time across the island, visiting perhaps a dozen cities and towns. The fair is usually dedicated to one or more Cuban writers and countries, a tradition that has included Mexico, Germany, Italy, Russia, and Argentina, among others. The fair also brings a noticeable number of publishers and provides meeting opportunities to many writers and intellectuals (Cuban and foreigners) and receives extensive media attention for several weeks.

In 2012, more than 2 million people attended the different activities of the fair, which also includes concerts and lecture series. This is a significant statistic considering that Cuba has a population of roughly 11 million people. At the 2012 Book Fair, readers bought more than 1.5 million books, 40 percent of that number in Havana alone.

Foreigners often regard as curious the way that events such as the Book Fair and the Film Festival become the central stage for a kind of “culture fever” on the island. “The world’s newspapers speak very little, and often in negative terms, about this island, but they should know that people here flood to the Book Fair to buy sonnets—and this in the middle of a storm,” noted Joaquín Sabina, a famous Spanish musician, when he introduced a book of his poetry in 2006 (“Sabina se declaró” 2006).

Maybe the underlying principle that permits such popular support for the fair is a deliberate policy by the government to present books and literature as important cultural expressions and not as commodities. Maintaining a price scale that keeps books affordable is a laudable goal that requires a substantial subsidy by the Cuban state. Even after prices have risen in recent years, most of the titles still cost the equivalent of between $1 and $2 dollars for paperbacks.

In a phenomenon related to large cultural expressions such as the Book Fair, the expansion of Cuban literature has also been benefited in the past decade by the establishment of regional publishing houses. This process consists of having about twenty modules of semi-industrial presses in several provinces that deal with the task of supporting a local literary scene and that have promoted the work of literally hundreds of authors who otherwise would not have the opportunity to have these works published.

Economic dictates are key factors in the austerity policy promoted by Raúl Castro. At the same time, the government has made clear that it will continue to support publishing but within rational limits. Book publishing is thus now largely dependent on the interests of the population, with presses adjusting their print runs according to demand. As the director of the Cuban Book Institute noted in 2011, “We can’t continue producing 10,000 copies of a book that probably does not have six thousand readers” (Romay 2011).

Despite official statements of support for this wide-ranging process of Cuban cultural democratization, it is clear that economic concerns are becoming increasingly important in the publishing industry. In his inaugural speech at the Book Fair in 2012, the writer Ambrosio Fornet, to whom the event was dedicated, noted, “We are concerned that socio-economic changes, the acceptance by some of market values, and the inexorable passage of time, may well dissolve or reduce drastically this process of affirming our identity or, if you prefer, this rejection of cultural colonization—which has characterized our quest for identity in the past” (Fornet 2012). Fornet’s concerns are well founded. It is true that a small but valuable number of Cuban authors have achieved considerable market success. Their work is published outside of the island, mainly in Spain. Until now, Cuba’s publishing industry has remained an enclave oblivious to economic reality, but that is changing.

The New Latin American Film Festival in Havana has much in common with the success of the Book Fair. Because of its hugely popular level of participation, the festival—born in 1979 and held annually—generates a sort of winter excitement that turns the landscape of Havana into one of crowded movie theaters that lasts until late at night. The fact that a ticket is just two Cuban pesos (about ten American cents) is no doubt a key factor. Some people even take their vacations at this time in order to see some of the dozens of films being shown, mainly from Latin America. Mass participation is again very noticeable.

Initially, the festival’s goal was to promote a clearly Latin American cinema movement with a distinctive social and aesthetic political commitment. With the passage of time, however, the choice of films has evolved: indeed, today, a diversity of films from all over the world is shown. What has not changed, however, is the passion of the Cuban people for the cinema. The festival, held in December every year, remains as popular as ever—with tens of thousands of fans attending the scores of film showings.

Somewhat different is the underlying principle of the visual arts Havana Biennale. This art festival relies less on the mass involvement of the public in cultural expression than on the strength of a national artistic movement supported by a vigorous system of art schools. A key factor underlying this festival is a vision based on an antihegemonic cultural policy projected from the South that pioneered a form of globalization of cultural practices of recognition and decolonization. By “South,” I mean a geopolitical concept that is an alternative to the powerful and rich global “North.”

Starting in 1984, there had been eleven biennales by 2012. They have included artists from Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, and in recent years European and North American artists have also participated. Organized by the Wifredo Lam Center of Contemporary Art, the biennale has traditionally aimed to support the artistic expression of the so-called Third World. Its aim is to generate alternative legitimacy in a forum different from the main centers of art in developed countries. In recent years, the biennale has been transformed from substantive Third World–related concerns to more universal social and aesthetic issues of our time. For example, under the basic goal of supporting “artistic practices and social imaginaries,” the 2012 edition of the event spilled out of museums and galleries to transform iconic spaces of Havana, such as the Malecón and the Prado Avenue.

Official support for these events results in a notable level of promotion in all media and massive public attendance. Government television channels usually publicize these activities. However, as is the case with many events in Cuba, resource support is always precarious, and as a result, the biennale has at times become in fact a triennial after being postponed because of insufficient support. They remain extremely popular, however, and although it is a challenge to become “literate” in matters of contemporary art, it is worth noting that available data indicate that 1.4 million Cubans (approximately 10 percent of the population) attended professional art exhibits in 2011.

In terms of the process of democratizing art and making people appreciate/participate in related functions, perhaps the most relevant factor is the remarkable system of finding and training talents through a “pyramid” of different art schools, ranging from the elementary to the university level (all of which is at no cost to the student). This system continues to supply professional artists to the local scene as well as to the international stage. For example, the Superior Arts Institute has graduated more than 650 in the field of visual arts since its founding in 1976, while a significantly higher number have graduated from the professional midlevel National School of Art.

All of this said, hard questions remain: Is not this laudable intention of democratizing culture a smokescreen for ideological control by the government over the creation, production, promotion, and popularization of the various forms of expression? Are cultural policy and its institutions just tools to stifle creative freedom and nullify the very condition of the artist? The truth is that the reality of Cuban culture, while not resembling a fairy tale by any standards, is also far from being a Caribbean remake of an Orwellian script. It is very clear that throughout this history, one can indeed trace the attempts by the bureaucracy to minimize, contain, silence, or discredit the social and political criticism made in the languages of art or intellectual work. At the same time, creators in all areas of cultural expression have had access to and have created spaces to legitimately develop their activity (often promoted by the official institution itself). Moreover, when they were deemed to have strayed from the revolutionary path, the “punishments” (when applied by the state) have often been caricatures of the punishments of Stalinism. In general terms, this process can be seen not as a struggle between the Revolution and members of the cultural field but rather as one between the dogmatism and censorship wielded by orthodox bureaucrats and the legitimate right of criticism—all under the umbrella of the Revolution.

Precisely because they enjoyed a fair degree of autonomy, most Cuban creators, even when clear elements of criticism or dissidence concerning the official accounts can be found in their work, remain “within the Revolution,” as defined by Fidel Castro in 1961. It is inside this accommodation in the larger context that their work acquires immediate social relevance, which is one of the aspects that, in addition to its own aesthetics, seduces and magnetizes the public in the island.

What Is the Future?

More than a decade after the call for the Battle of Ideas, the fire of the campaign to ensure access to culture for the masses and to make education available to all has died down. There are no longer speeches—often lasting hours— at rallies, and the corresponding discourse is much calmer. Arguably, these themes are just as essential for the survival and promotion of cultural values within the revolutionary process as they were more than half a century ago. The efficiency of institutions, the drastic reduction of the influence of the bureaucracy, and the search for self-financing are among the major issues now being discussed.

Myriad closely linked phenomena must be closely monitored to update this path for cultural democratization, especially when social inequalities are accentuated. The impact of technology on consumption, the characteristics of communities, the linkage with tourism, the cultural policy instruments with which to access the expanding private and cooperative sectors, the quality of education, and many other aspects all deserve to be taken into consideration. Instead of a vertical top-down government policy, we increasingly encounter the desire to promote horizontal coordination and greater participation based on the knowledge of the concrete reality of each place, its history, its traditions, and its needs.

If culture is the object of close attention by the government, it is not just for the sake of cultural expression per se—but also because it can foster solidarity, civility, and humanism. In his speech at the Book Fair in 2012, Fornet noted, “We are not satisfied with knowing that books are published, exhibitions are inaugurated, that plays and ballet performances take place, and that the most authentic expressions of our urban and rural societies are divulged. We also need to know to what extent machismo and homophobia have been reduced, how we are going to deal with the confusion, social problems, racial prejudice, administrative corruption, the viscous waste that the crisis of the 1990s left us” (Fornet 2012).

An unavoidable reality is that the environment that allows and encourages cultural development has an economic basis. After all, in the same article that launched the important concept that real freedom required a true and solid foundation of culture, Martí also noted (although the concept is less quoted) that in the common realm of human nature, it is also necessary to be prosperous in order to be truly good. Perhaps a key issue for the future of cultural democratization in Cuba is that we can no longer choose between these two sentiments of Martí—instead, we now need both.

References

Castro, Fidel. 1960. “Discurso por la entrega del antiguo cuartel Goicuría convertido en centro escolar Mártires del Goicuría, al Ministerio de Educación, el 29 de abril de 1960.” http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1960/esp/f290460e.html.

Nationhood and Identity in Contemporary Cuban Art

This generation of Cuban artists is the most educated, the most worldly, and probably the most recognized of any generation since 1959. In many ways, the artists are Cuba’s superstars, equal to musicians and sports figures. At the end of this chapter, I have listed two books and several websites and urge those of you interested enough to explore Cuban art to go to these sites: first, to see the art, and, second, to learn more about what can only be touched on here: the enormous influence that the Cuban Revolution has had on every aspect of the visual arts and the way in which the artists’ search for their own identity is inextricably bound up with that of their “patria.”

“Socialism with salsa” is what Newsweek once called Cuba—and that was the Cuba I first met in 1969. While Fidel Castro and his compañeros/as were the socialism, the artists, writers, dancers, and musicians were the salsa. These artists played a crucial role in the developing Revolution. Their art provided the words, sounds, and images that would explain the revolutionary process to the world. More than 300 trips later, I am still stunned by the energy, passion, and creativity of Cuba’s artists.

Art lost its innocence with the Revolution. The social function of art changed. No longer was it simply an aesthetic commodity to be produced for and sold in the marketplace. Art instead had an essential role in transforming the island and transmitting the ideas of the Revolution. It became a way of teaching, of persuading, and of inspiring. It taught revolutionary ideals. It persuaded Cubans to value the community over the individual. It inspired Cubans to emulate the best among them. Socially and politically engaged art was itself revolutionary.

The flourishing of the arts in Cuba that came with the Revolution is one of its most lasting legacies and one that should not be considered “secondary” to political and economic changes. The culture of the Revolution and the forced separations from the traditional—politically, culturally, and economically—has shaped something marvelously new, with more depth and breadth, a more informed art. The revolutionary years have added special ingredients to the mix. What has captivated me about Cuban art is how deeply its themes, techniques, and imagery have been affected by aspects of the Revolution and the radical changes in society. And unlike Eastern Europe, where the communist countries demanded that art conform to realism in style and socialism in content (i.e., “socialist realism”), Cuban artists were mostly free to express themselves in their own ways. This does not mean that there have not been tensions—and strong ones—between artists and government bureaucrats over the years; that is also an effect of the Revolution to be discussed later.

The changing profile of the arts kicked in almost immediately following the revolutionary victory, and all of the traditional art forms—such as photography, graphic design, painting, and printmaking—came to be used for new purposes. The great photographer Alberto Korda, who had always shot for commerce, especially in the world of fashion, now began shooting new models, Fidel and Che. Portrait photographer Osvaldo Salas and his teenage son, Roberto, returned from living in New York City, and together with Korda and Raúl Corrales, captured the life and times of Fidel and Raúl Castro, Che Guevara, and other young leaders of the Revolution.

Photography may have changed most radically, moving quickly from its early documentation of revolutionary activities to more personal work as photographers turned their lens on ordinary people going through daily life routines. Today, a new generation of conceptual artists sees photography as one more tool in their art choices, as in the works of Carlos Garaicoa and Cirenaica Moreira. Liudmila Velasco and Nelson Ramírez de Arellano Conde (he is the director of the Fototeca, started by Marucha as a repository and exhibition space for photographic work) work together under the collective name of Liudmila & Nelson. They explore Havana in a series of layered photographs, sometimes beautiful and sometimes sad or depressing, often documenting a possible future Havana. At the Eleventh Havana Biennial in 2012, their exhibit consisted solely of a huge wall-size video that showed their photograph of the José Martí monument with a gently rolling sea covering the Plaza de la Revolución, complete with the soft sound of lapping waves. Visitors stood before the wall mesmerized—and sad.

Graphic design before the Revolution was used almost exclusively to sell cigarettes, clothing, automobiles—anything. Now, design had a new purpose: to sell ideas and the new ideals—save water, save electricity, study, struggle, and emulate while also promoting the new cultural life of the Revolution, especially in film. All of the young government offices hired their own designers to publicize their work. The new posters warned against smoking, urged recycling, taught history lessons, fought absenteeism in the workplace, and urged the shaping of a collective consciousness. Throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, many of the best graphic designers worked on posters to show Cuba’s solidarity with burgeoning revolutionary forces, from Vietnam to Chile to South Africa. Today, a new generation of poster artists has taken all of these themes and is turning out exciting, edgy posters that persuade—use condoms to prevent AIDS, for example—and posters promoting revolutionary ideals fight for space alongside those that advertise the latest theater, film, dance, music, or art production. The poster is in Cuba to stay and is recognized worldwide as a uniquely Cuban contribution to graphic design.

Raúl Martínez (1927–1995), a well-known abstract painter and photographer when the Revolution came to power, exemplifies how it affected transitional art figures. The Revolution inspired Martínez: “It was important to me that my art spoke to ordinary Cubans,” he once told me, and to reach those ordinary Cubans, he started with an image familiar to everyone: painting multiple images of their greatest hero, José Martí, in a pop art style.

Martínez continued painting multiple images of heroes, including Fidel Castro, and painting historical and contemporary figures together. His 1972 painting Rosas y Estrellas shows Simón Bolívar, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Camilo Cienfuegos, Máximo Gómez, Antonio Maceo, and José Martí in blues, bright reds, and oranges. These images differed radically from the macho way these heroes were usually depicted. Che Guevara is wearing an enormous white rose boutonniere and has his arm draped around Martí, who is holding a bouquet of white roses, an allusion to Martí’s famous poem.

At the same time that Martínez was creating these images of larger-than-life heroes, he began painting multiple images of ordinary Cubans whom he also portrayed as heroes owing to their dedication to creating a new society. One, simply called Cuba, was covered with small rectangular portraits of Cuban workers (one was himself) and, as with all of his pop images, painted in flat, bright colors. His models were his Vedado friends and neighbors. Art, which in capitalism had been private, expensive, and elitist, was now to be public and accessible to all. These goals inspired many artists to bridge the gap that had existed between high art and the larger community.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the subsequent economic hardship, many artists turned their attention to collective and community endeavors—as a way to survive artistically and as a way to support one another, their families, and their communities financially.

José Rodríguez Fuster (b. 1946) turned an entire working-class town into an act of creation—paintings and ceramics splashed with vibrant oranges, reds, purples, blues, yellows, and greens cover the town. Ceramist, painter, engraver, and sculptor, Fuster lives in Jaimanitas, a seaside village outside of Havana. His life work, like that of many artists, is intertwined with the Cuban Revolution, and his community projects are financed only through the sale of his art. His fluid, linear style and Cubist-like way of incorporating a profile into a full-faced figure led “Zippy” cartoonist Bill Griffith to dub him the “Picasso of the Caribbean.”

Beginning in 1994, during the worst of the “Special Period,” Fuster started a community project in Jaimanitas that has completely transformed the town by extending his art works from his own home to those of neighbors and entire streets. If a neighbor needs a roof repaired, Fuster will repair it and decorate it, perhaps with an iconic rooster. If a neighbor needs a new gate, Fuster will design one with her image and a special text in ceramic. There is a permanent ceramic chess table and chairs, filled day and night with local players; a ceramic horse that every visitor feels the need to sit atop; and an entire wraparound wall of the town dedicated to Gaudí with a giant ceramic crab crawling over the wall. Fuster’s neighbors have internalized his belief that his art belongs to them. In 2008, Fuster inaugurated a three-story ceramic monument to the five Cubans who have languished in U.S. prisons for fifteen years. Fuster also cajoles other well-known artists to contribute to the community. Many of them painted murals on the walls of a newly built local day care center. In September 2012, in gratitude to the hospital and doctors who saved his leg following a deadly infection, Fuster unveiled a wall-size ceramic homage to Yemayá, the Santería orisha, who is the protector of children. Not incidentally, the project provides employment for many of the townspeople.

Working collectively is not confined to artists in rural communities doing folk art or what the Cubans call “arte popular.” In 2012, the curator-artist Mayito (Mario González) started a new collective in Havana on the site of an old industrial laundry. Introduced as an exhibit space in the May–June 2012 Havana Biennial, the Lavandería’s huge space is ideally suited to what Mayito wants: a place where serious artists can work together as a group. Occasionally, the Lavandería will present exhibits, but its real intention is to provide a stable and collective working environment for artists.

Mayito had engineered two previous group exhibits working with large numbers of artists that were enormously successful and inspired him to build a more stable collective. Most spectacularly, in 2006, as old American refrigerators were being turned in to the government to be replaced by energy-saving Chinese fridges, Mayito and artist Roberto Fabelo got the idea to make art of these old refrigerators and persuaded the government to give the first fifty-two turned in to Cuban artists. During the IX Havana Biennial in 2006, the fifty-two recycled refrigerators were moved into the Convent of Santa Clara, one of the most spectacular and funny group shows in recent years. The first one I saw as I entered the convent was a fridge that had been designed as a confessional.

Many of the refrigerators had become commentaries on daily life in Cuba: the contents so sacred that one fridge had become a safe; another’s freezer was now an oven; artist-actor Jorge Perugorría turned the fridge named Rocco from “Strawberry and Chocolate” into a coffin, complete with a final eulogy; Kcho continued his theme of emigration by putting oars on his fridge and calling it Objeto soñado (Dream Object). Abel Barroso filled his fridge with woodcuts of tanks, bombs, aircraft carriers, and satellites and called it Se acabó la guerra fría, a gozar con la globalización (The Cold War Is Over, Now to Enjoy Globalization). Nelson Domínguez’s fridge became a warehouse of Cuban cigars. Luis E. Camejo turned his fridge into a car called Fast Food. René Peña covered all four sides with photographs of his own beautiful black naked body.

In addition to strengthening the sense of community, the Revolution gave value to the importance of the African heritage in Cuba. The slave trade brought Africa to Cuba and left a huge imprint. Manuel Mendive (b. 1944) is a painter, sculptor, and performance artist who grew up in a spiritual family. Instantly recognizable, he dresses entirely in white, befitting his commitment to African religious practices, his gray hair in long tresses. He is a santero, and much of his art reflects the influence of both slavery itself and the cultural and religious life brought to Cuba by the slaves. The first of Mendive’s paintings acquired by the Museo de Bellas Artes was of a finely detailed slave ship in muted colors. One of his signature styles is poetic and dreamlike, tapping into realms of the unconscious; another is graphic and primitive. His haunting works draw on symbols and ceremonies of Santería and the mestizo culture of the Caribbean. In exploring his Yoruba roots, he captures the vibrant richness of Cuba’s African culture and his belief that it has shaped Cuban national identity.

Mendive’s performance pieces involve painting dancers’ naked bodies (always black) and creating theatrical backdrops and environments. His performances for the 2009 and 2012 Havana Biennials shocked audiences with their graphic display and inspired wonder and admiration too. (Invited to perform at the Kennedy Center in 1999, his dancers were not allowed to perform naked, and Mendive was forced to paint their nude bodysuits rather than their flesh.)

The best of the younger artists influenced by African culture and by Mendive work with a solid conceptualism: artists such as Kcho (b. 1970), Alberto Casado (b. 1970), and Juan Roberto Diago (b. 1972). They are strongly affected by their African heritage, but whereas Mendive created his own world using elements of that heritage, Kcho, Diago, and Casado start from there to explore the society in which they live. (Kcho, whose father was a carpenter, uses the most ordinary materials for his large sculptural works and installations.)

Casado mixes elements of the Abakuá religion with political imagery, commentary on the art world, and whatever else catches his fancy. He uses a popular Cuban glass-painting technique, almost unheard of for use by trained artists. Imagery drawn in black ink on the reverse side of a sheet of glass (he told me that he often uses glass from old bus windows) is placed on top of crumpled aluminum foil painted with translucent colors, creating the effect of stained glass and precious metals. His works combine painting, collage, and mixed-media techniques, exploring themes of his identity as a contemporary Cuban and as a man of African ancestry, steeped in the Abakuá religion. Diago says that he thinks of himself as an art “fighter,” and indeed his preference for raw materials and tough subject matter make one think of a fighter—for his art and against injustice. Slavery is a theme that runs through his work, and although he loves drawing and does it every day, the lack of good art materials in the 1990s during the Special Period turned him on to a new kind of art. He makes paintings and conceptual installations with things he finds around his neighborhood—bits of wood, plastic bottles, and rusty metal. The economic hardship faced by artists and other Cubans in the early 1990s exercised an enormous influence over their work. Driven by necessity, they began using different materials and less traditional methods; they found new and creative ways of expressing themselves.

The Revolution affected the arts in another way, too. The new society made it respectable to be both worker and artist. There was a liberating effect to the Revolution; it changed people’s perspectives on what their professional lives should be and none more so than those who saw themselves as artists.

The Cuban Revolution had a profound effect on the lives and work of women artists whose number grew exponentially once they began to enter San Alejandro and later ISA art schools. The Revolution itself created an atmosphere in which exploring their liberation as women became part of the natural landscape. Sexuality, feminism, identity, and sociopolitical commentary found their way into women’s art. For example, they are found in the work of contemporary artists such as Alicia Leal (b. 1957), whose work combines feminist themes with Afro-Cuban mythology; Marta María Pérez-Bravo (b. 1959), whose conceptual black-and-white photography plumbs her inner being in stark self-portraits; Sandra Ramos (b. 1969), who creates an artistic identity tied to the island and its symbols and to emigration; Tania Bruguera (b. 1968), whose performances, videos, and installation art take on power and control issues, both political and personal; Cirenaica Moreira (b. 1969), a performance artist whose photographs of her own body explore her inner self in the context of her created environment; and Mabel Poblet (b. 1986), a mixed-media artist whose work closely examines her own life and is intensely personal, even emotional, but never sentimental.

Rocío García (b. 1955) startles and provokes. Her paintings are large, tough, gorgeously colored, and, to some, scary. Women are often the protagonists or men showing off their power. Rocío often depicts the human body as a sexual object and by demystifying the body strips out all the myths of sexuality. She attacks the world of sexual repression; much of her work deals with male dominance in its ugliest form. Critics sometimes find her work too strong, too intense, and too violent, but she says that “life is more intense than my art. I play around with ambiguous situations, soft lines, hedonistic, sensual, dealing with subjects that everyone practices, not taboos exactly but sexuality in general. It seems not so easy to talk about sex in other countries. In Cuba, within five minutes of starting any conversation, you are talking about sex and violence. Love is the primary focus of my work, and eventually it leads to violence. It’s a thesis: love is the perfect assassin” (interview with the author).

Sandra Ceballos (b. 1961) may be the one Cuban woman artist whose work and life are most closely linked to, identified with, and affected by the Revolution, often in a provocative, even antagonistic way. She lives in a tiny house with a small separate space and a little garden in the Vedado neighborhood, surrounded by a low wall that for years was covered with words from Fidel Castro speeches in her own handwriting. She has been a thorn in the side of officialdom for years. In 2003, the Aglutinador Laboratory was born in her small space, and a group of artists began doing more experimental shows without curatorial selection. In 2008, they did one called “We Are Porno,” the first show of pornographic art in Cuba. Rocío was one of the participating artists. Sandra invited anyone to participate, and “when there was no more space on the walls, that’s when we turned away the artists” (interview with the author).

In 1984, the first Havana Art Biennial debuted before biennials became popular in many countries around the world. Although it has seldom been celebrated every two years, the Havana Biennial has become a major showcase for “Third World” art, an incredible accomplishment and commitment given Cuba’s financial constraints. The Eleventh Biennial took over most public and private art spaces in 2012 to exhibit every imaginable kind of Cuban art as well as the art of Latin America, Asia, and Africa.

In the 1980s and 1990s, a few provocative exhibits were censored; artists considered too outrageous were not included in important exhibits either because their erotic work was interpreted as pornographic or because their work seemed excessive in criticizing political figures or ideas/ideals. Volumen I was a groundbreaking 1981 show that introduced the first generation of artists completely shaped by the Revolution: eleven artists with new content and different forms—minimalist, conceptual, performance, and pop. In other words, they presented a Cuban art completely different from what had come before. Important exhibits in 1988–1989 were held, with the support of the Ministry of Culture, at the Castillo de Real Fuerza specifically for shows that were unwelcome in Havana’s official galleries. This turned into an authentic, critical reflection on contemporary Cuba.

That series of shows turned out to be a catalyst for several of the artists. Many artists of this so-called 1980s generation chose to leave Cuba in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Their motives varied. Some have said it was because of censorship; others admitted to being unable to deal comfortably with the huge economic hardship after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They took advantage of every possible invitation abroad, made possible largely because of the growing fame of artists shown in the Havana Biennials and some foreign exhibit spaces.

In sum, the Special Period was exceptionally difficult. Materials were unavailable, it was difficult to mount exhibits, and there was growing discord between some of the feistier artists and the government. Art became more controversial, as artists began to say in their work what people were saying quietly in their homes. When so many artists started leaving, doomsday predictions were rampant: all the good artists were leaving Cuba, and there were no others to take the place of those who left. It did not take long, however, for everyone to realize that, first, most of the artists remained in Cuba and that, second, younger artists almost immediately took the places of those who left. The art scene remained as vibrant as ever, just different. Indeed, while many of the reforms introduced by Raúl Castro have been acclaimed as illustrating his pragmatism, many of these—such as self-employment and traveling abroad and a plea for a more rigorous questioning—were already established for artists.

Today, even many of the well-known 1980s-generation artists who left during that time return to Cuba to participate in exhibits or the biennial; some consider themselves residents of both Cuba and a second homeland. The government itself now takes for granted that artists will do anything for their art, and, mostly, leaving artists alone is a win-win situation. Cuban artists, whether in Cuba or abroad, are artists whose lives and work have been profoundly affected by the Revolution itself and whose art would have been considerably less interesting without the drama of the Revolution.

Appendix

I am most grateful to Corina Matamoros, curator of contemporary art at the Museo de Bellas Artes, for sharing with me her profound knowledge and friendship. Clearly, she is not responsible for any of my conclusions about Cuban art.

The best current book about contemporary Cuban art in English is Rachel Weiss’s To and From Utopia in the New Cuban Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). Luis Comnitzer’s New Art of Cuba (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003) is the best study of art since 1959 and especially about the 1980s generation of artists.

There are several excellent websites with information on contemporary Cuban artists. The website http://www.cubanartspace.netprovides details on galleries with dozens of recent exhibits and biographies of artists. The single best website for current news about Cuban art is http://www.cubanartnews.org, sponsored by the Howard and Patricia Farber Collection. In addition, the website of the Farber Cuba Avant Garde collection, http://www.thefarbercollection.com, allows you to browse this excellent U.S. collection and has well-written biographies of the artists in the collection. The best website for interviews with Cuban artists is http://www.havana-cultura.com. In New York, you can visit the Cuban Art Space of the Center for Cuban Studies (231 West 29th Street, fourth floor), which has more than 10,000 works of art on-site. The Shelley and Donald Rubin Collection of Cuban art can be visited on the eighth floor at 17 West 17th Street.

Questioning Authority

Ana M. Ruiz Aguirre

Cultural Expression of Contemporary Cuban Youth

Cuban youth have grown up immersed in a deeply cultural realm. While Statistics Canada reports that only 19 percent of Canadian citizens attended a culture or heritage performance during 2012 (Petri 2012), an estimated 6 million Cubans, representing approximately 60 percent of the population, attend the National Book Fair every year (Reyes 2011). Indeed, the revolutionary government of 1959 insisted on the creation of a number of programs and institutions with the objective to promote and regulate cultural production in Cuba. Casa de las Américas, founded on April 28, 1959, through Law 299, remains one of the most important cultural institutions on the island, playing a decisive role in the promotion of art not only in Cuba but also in the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean (Fornet et al. 2011). Also in 1959, the National Ballet of Cuba, headed by prima ballerina Alicia Alonso, was recognized, and only eighty-three days after the establishment of the new government that same year, the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (Cuban Art and Cinematographic Industry Institute [ICAIC]) was created. The formation and government support given to these cultural institutions allowed for a Cuban national culture to emerge beyond the tourist kitsch so prevalent in previous years. Most important, however, the formation of these institutions and the importance placed on national cultural production throughout the revolutionary period allowed for the creation of a propitious cultural environment in which young artists could develop and thrive.

In this context, the cultural production emerging from the island has developed greatly during the past decade. Cuban artists have made their mark internationally and are highly sought after in the realms of visual arts and performance art, music, and ballet. Indeed, Cuba has become a cultural leader in the world, a statement that can be easily supported by mentioning ballet dancers Carlos Acosta and Viengsay Valdés, jazz musician Chucho Valdés, and visual artists Los Carpinteros and Alexis Leiva Machado (Kcho). Cuban youth are immersed in this rich and easily accessible creative environment, where they can attend shows by painters auctioned at Sotheby’s for free and watch world-class ballet performances for eleven Cuban pesos (less than fifty American cents).

The complete accessibility (the result of a policy of masividad) granted to cultural production and the population’s involvement with the arts is one of the main objectives of the Cuban government, represented not only in the low admission charges for cultural events but also in the effort to educate and encourage artistic creation at the neighborhood level through organizations such as the Asociación Hermanos Saíz. Formal art education is also easily accessible in Cuba, where schools such as the Instituto Superior de Arte, the Escuela Nacional de Arte, and the San Alejandro Academy allow for youth to study any art discipline free of charge. In this context, Cuban youth today have virtually unlimited access to all types of cultural expression and are able to participate in the Cuban art world extensively and actively. Given the emphasis that Cuban society places on cultural production and its enjoyment, it is not surprising that during the past five years, Cuban youth have visibly adopted art in all its forms not only to enjoy themselves but also to actively engage in as a political and social statement. Indeed, young Cubans employ music, film, visual arts, and a number of other disciplines as a means to engage, portray, and challenge the society in which they live.

The art disciplines employed in the creation of cultural products by Cuban youth have been greatly influenced by the “Special Period” and the consequent opening of the Cuban economy to foreign markets. Tourism in particular has become central to youth in order to emulate, challenge, or fuse foreign aesthetic elements, themes, and modes of production with their own creations. Tourism introduced the general population—and youth in particular—to artists, images, music, and production concepts that previously had been difficult to attain (Spencer 2010). Further, the opening of the Cuban economy meant that Cuban artists could travel abroad to present their work and consequently be influenced by the aesthetic qualities and the cultural characteristics of the art they encountered. This process can be understood as one of transculturation, further enriching the ajiaco (cultural stew) that is Cuban culture and that was outlined by Ortiz and Barreal (1993).

Indeed, despite its drawbacks, the influence of foreign elements resulting from tourism and the opening of the Cuban economy have contributed to the enrichment of Cuban cultural traditions and allowed for the youth to engage in new forms of expression through art. For instance, the appearance of hip-hop and reguetón on the island, the use of independent strategies in order to produce and distribute art, and the introduction of horror films as a new Cuban film genre can all be linked to this process. Here it should be noted that, as argued by prominent cultural theorist Roberto Fernández Retamar (1989), to doubt the validity of Cuban culture is to doubt its very existence and, further, to relegate the Cuban cultural realm to a mere echo of its colonial condition. Cuban culture, as expressed by youth today and influenced by a colorful heritage of nations, including Spain, the Yoruba of Nigeria, France, China, and the United States, cannot be understood as “pure” and singular. Instead, its traits of cultural blending, or mestizaje, and its constant processes of transculturation are precisely what define Cuban cultural production today.

Although the exchanges established between Cuban artists and foreigners have undoubtedly enriched Cuban art, they have also created disruptions in the cultural processes of the island. The emergence of reguetón as one of the most popular music genres among Cuban youth is a particularly illustrative example.

Reguetón first appeared in the eastern portion of the island, specifically in the provinces of Santiago de Cuba and Guantánamo. In this area, commonly referred to as Oriente, the Caribbean airwaves playing raggamuffin, dance hall, and reggae are easily accessible to the general population and allowed youth in this portion of the island to become acquainted with this musical genre as early as the 1990s (Bello 2012). Candyman, one of the original exponents of the genre in Santiago de Cuba, argues that reguetón’s main function is to make the listener dance, usually through the inclusion of mildly sexual or picaresque elements in the lyrics with the objective of maintaining the public’s interest (Hernández and Ventana 2008). This feature is still central to the production of reguetón in Cuba, although the center of production has moved from the eastern to the western provinces—particularly Havana—during the past five or six years. Indeed, with the exception of Kola Loka and a handful of less well known groups, the most popular reguetón artists live and produce in Havana.

These artists include Osmani García, El Chacal, and El Micha. Young reguetón artists use references to daily life in Cuba in their songs and, like many other musicians in Cuba—including hip-hop artists and young trovadores—make use of a localized language in order to engage Cuban youth and assert themselves as part of it (Lavielle-Pullés 2011). For instance, in a recent collaboration between Kola Loka and El Micha titled “Se Extraña” (Kola Loka 2010), the singers refer to the common phenomenon of a Cuban woman deciding to live abroad but missing Cuba constantly. Referring to the motives compelling Dorotea to emigrate, they sing,

While the statement translates to “Dorotea went to Yuma to fight her yucca,” it means that Dorotea moved to the United States in order to make more money. The meaning is thus lost to anyone who is not immersed in the constantly evolving street language of Cuban youth, even if they are Spanish speakers. The same can be said of a number of reguetón artists in Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic who use localized slang terms, such as guasa guasa (coward), abayarde (a type of annoying insect), or corillo (a group of friends) (Wood 2009). In the same manner, the use of local phrases and street slang is common in music performed by Cuban youth, and it can be understood as a form of rebellion: when only a specific group of people understand the meaning of the song, anything can be said.

Young Cuban reguetón artists are usually immersed in the same daily dilemmas as the rest of the Cuban population. Thus, this commentary and their constant reference to known spaces of association and rituals, spoken in a recognizable localized slang over danceable beats, have made them increasingly popular with youth. However, the most distinguishable trait of Cuban reguetón today—and one that has caused controversy—is the use of explicit sexual references both in the lyrics of songs and in the visual content of the music videos (Hernández and Ventana 2008). The use of picaresque language has been a main staple of reguetón since its introduction in Cuba and has been part of the discourse of reguetón singers elsewhere, such as Tego Calderón in Puerto Rico. However, the Cuban press and many Cuban intellectuals have recently engaged in debates regarding the sexist connotations of a number of reguetón songs and the objectification of women in them (Bello 2012). Indeed, the genre has been termed a “musical massacre” by a number of commentators (Lavielle-Pullés 2011). Perhaps the song that has garnered the most negative attention is “Chupi Chupi.” In the song—a collaboration between a number of some of the most popular reguetón singers in Cuba, including Osmani García, El Chacal, and El Príncipe—the male singers demand oral sexual favors from the female listener, who is supposed to acquiesce to the demand through dance.

“Chupi Chupi” (García et al. 2011) is not the only song in which outright sexual references are made in Cuban reguetón, and recent examples include “El Pudín” (García et al. 2011), featuring Osmani García, El Chacal, and Kola Loka, and “El Calentico” (Kola Loka 2012), featuring Kola Loka. However, none of these songs achieved the notoriety of “Chupi Chupi” or provoked the same amount of heated debate on the island. The popularity of reguetón singers has also allowed for cultural exchanges between Cuban youth living on the island, such as the artists themselves, and Cuban youth living in Miami and elsewhere in the United States. Recent international tours by Osmani García, Kola Loka, and El Chacal in both the United States and Canada have been immensely popular among Cuban youth notwithstanding the quality of the music (Vazquet 2012). In Florida, for instance, they have garnered the attention of club promoters, record producers, and video producers not only from the United States but also from Canada and Italy.

Even though reguetón has grown in popularity among young Cubans, it is by no means the only popular musical genre on the island. Historic salsa and timba bands, such as Los Van Van and La Charanga Habanera, continue to be favorites. Further, new musical forms of expression, such as hip-hop, have transitioned from a purely entertainment-oriented realm into social and political commentary. Hip-hop initially appeared in Cuba through radio waves, received on the northern coast of Havana during the late 1990s. Early rappers and emcees in Cuba sought to copy the music they listened to and regularly used the backgrounds of Notorious B.I.G., Public Enemy, or Tupac Shakur in their songs and emulated their lyrics (Fernandes 2003). During the early 2000s, hip-hop lyrics concentrated largely on topics such as violence in the streets, themes that were not regularly experienced by Cubans but that appeared constantly in the work of U.S. hip-hop artists. Today, Cuban rappers, especially those who have adopted the contestatario (or critical) moniker, make the center of their discourse the challenges that Cuban youth like themselves face every day. Groups such as Free Hole Negro, for instance, debate extensively the role of Cubans of African descent in society and government institutions, while Los Aldeanos discusses Cuba’s slow bureaucratic structure and the perceived competition between Cubans and tourists for access to specific spaces and economic resources (Fernandes 2003). It is important to point out that young Cuban artists are part of the general Cuban population: they do not appear in the tabloids or have above-average incomes as a rule. In fact, in many instances, they work day jobs in order to support their artistic creation. This is true of a number of musicians in the contestatario movement, such as Escuadrón Patriota and Los Aldeanos, but it is also true of many of the young filmmakers and visual artists that are discussed later in this chapter. Their social standing as regular youth who also engage creatively allows these artists to truly engage with their peers and, most important, reflects their concerns, social views, and political attitudes through their artistic creation.

Hip-hop contestatario culture and a number of other emerging musical genres and artistic disciplines have received little support and distribution from the government institutions in charge of promoting and producing Cuban cultural production. Whereas reguetón has been distributed widely in the media, notwithstanding the recent controversy over “Chupi Chupi” and other such songs, hip-hop, punk, and a number of experimental visual arts have not been so lucky. The reason is both cultural and economic: cultural institutions such as ICAIC and Casa work within a specific government budget and thus prioritize more established artists and genres, such as trova or traditional Cuban music. In recent years, the lack of institutional support has not posed a prohibitive challenge to young artists in Cuba. Abel Prieto—Cuban minister of culture from 1997 to his reappointment as adviser to the president in 2012—strongly promoted investment in Cuban cultural production, attracting a wealth of foreign producers, promoters, and artists to Cuba. Throughout the past six years, independent cultural production in Cuba has exploded, including a number of disciplines, such as film, visual arts, and musical production. Indeed, hip-hop and electronic music have been at the forefront of the independent production of art in Cuba. In the case of hip-hop, it has been pointed out by Roberto Zurbano that the lack of institutional support has allowed Cuban rappers to retain full autonomy not only in the form of their creations and their performances but also in the content of their music (Pedrero 2009). Not having to comply with the requirements of a producer (whether in Cuba or abroad) grants them the ability to overcome any boundaries in what they are able to say in their music or what language is used. Thus, the discourse can remain largely localized and relevant to the listeners and use all the curse words and slang that are part of being young in Cuba. In the same way that rappers have created their own recording studios, production houses, and distribution channels, deejays in Cuba have managed to become indispensable not only to the independent music industry but also to event organizers and independent venues presenting all sorts of cultural disciplines.

Although there are a number of independent venues and events throughout the island, the most descriptive example of the trend toward Cuban youth’s independent cultural production is Festival Rotilla. Taking place in Rotilla beach in Santa Cruz del Norte, Mayabeque, from 1998 to 2011, Rotilla organizers included in their roster very few established musicians, partly because of their limited budget as an independent event without institutional support and partly because of the effort to showcase new talent and emergent artistic genres (Historia 2012). Rotilla was not only a musical festival, as it also regularly included the work of visual artists, such as Iván Lejardi, as well as social projects and performance collectives, such as Gigantería Habana and OMNI Zona Franca. Furthermore, it can be argued that beyond the neighborhood of Alamar—the cradle of hip-hop in Cuba—it was in Rotilla where Cuban hip-hop and electronic music started developing and interacting with Cuban youth. In fact, the unprecedented independence in the organization of Rotilla, as well as the large number of emerging art disciplines included in the festival, created the basis for increased attendance every year until 2011, when the organizers refused to comply with the requests for the inclusion of more established artists by Cuban institutions and decided to cancel the festival (Historia 2012).

Filmmaking is another visible and challenging cultural expression of Cuban youth today. La Muestra de Jóvenes Realizadores, organized throughout the past eleven years by ICAIC, is but one of the events in which the talent of young filmmakers is presented. The documentaries and films that are usually exhibited at La Muestra touch on subjects that, while relevant to Cuban youth, do not receive much attention in the Cuban media. Further, many of the films make fun of the official government discourse or present satires of government and society alike. This is the case for Comité 666 by Arturo Infante (2011), a film presented during the festival’s 2011 edition. The film can be seen as one example of the recent interest in the creation of horror films set in Havana, such as Juan de los Muertos by Alejandro Brugués. In Comité 666, Infante presents a satire of the Comités de Defensa de la Revolución (Committees for the Defense of the Revolution [CDR]) through their story of a group of people in Havana immersed in preparations for the arrival of Satan. In the film, many of the elements that are central to the functioning of the CDRs are extrapolated to fit the satanic cult. For instance, the communal cauldron in which caldosa (stew) is collectively cooked during national festivities becomes a witch’s cauldron in the movie, and the regular meetings attended by all CDR members once a month become meetings to worship Satan and prepare for his arrival. Furthermore, the promotional poster for the movie showed a machetero (sugarcane cutter) unusually brandishing a bloody machete and adorned with a set of horns, undoubtedly referencing Satan. The film exhibits an explicit questioning of the authority of the CDRs in Cuba and makes a joke of their role as the neighborhood organizations in charge of the defense of the revolutionary process.

Comité 666 is not the only example of film made by young Cuban directors in which satire and questioning of the status quo appear. Recent films also include La Segunda Muerte del Hombre Útil by Adrian Replanski (2010) and Revolution by Mayckell Pedrero (2009). In La Segunda Muerte (New Clocks for the Wasted Hours), Replanski presents a lugubrious show of old Soviet refrigerators dancing in an abandoned warehouse. The background is provided by the voice of a man speaking in Russian (a clear allegory to the influence of the Soviet Union), while a remainder of Cuba is presented in the background through the barely noticeable images of the Cuban flag and Che Guevara painted on the wall of the warehouse. The film can be interpreted as a reference to the Cuban economy after the fall of the Soviet Union, when the hardships made a significant dent in the day-to-day activities of Cuban society.

In the case of Revolution by Mayckell Pedrero, the fusion of different art disciplines in Cuba is clearly outlined. The documentary was presented in the 2010 edition of La Muestra, causing significant debate. In it, Pedrero interviews the hip-hop duo Los Aldeanos about their daily struggles to continue creating their music. The comments made by the duo were not censored in the documentary, making clear that Los Aldeanos had nothing positive to say about the Cuban government or the cultural institutions sponsoring hip-hop and youth cultural creation in Cuba, including the Agencia Cubana de Rap (Cuban Rap Agency) and the Asociación Hermanos Saíz. Nevertheless, Revolution won the award for Best Documentary in the 2010 edition of La Muestra (Selección 10ma 2012). Furthermore, although both Comité 666 and New Clocks also caused great debate both in the Cuban press and in artistic circles in Cuba, they still garnered a number of awards during the 2011 edition of La Muestra, including Best Animation, Best Direction, and Best Score for New Clocks and Best Photography for Comité 666 (Selección 11na 2012).

Reguetón, hip-hop, independent musical and film production, and art festivals are but a few of the many examples that illustrate Cuban youth’s cultural expression. Throughout these disciplines, a constant pattern of rebellion and questioning of authority can be found, from the sexual lyrics of reguetón to the political commentary of the hip-hop contestatario movement and the social satire present in the work of young filmmakers. While a number of commentators have stated that these can be seen as symptoms of the Cuban youth’s disillusionment with the Cuban Revolution, it could also be argued that these forms of cultural expression are representative mainly of both the commitment of the Cuban government to the creation of a vibrant cultural environment on the island and the inherent rebellion that is characteristic of youth the world over. Notwithstanding the chosen argument, it can be concluded that young Cubans’ cultural production is vibrant and challenging, and it should be recognized as such.

References

Fernandes, S. 2003. “Fear of a Black Nation: Local Rappers, Transnational Crossings, and State Power in Contemporary Cuba.” Anthropological Quarterly 76, no. 4: 575–608.

Fernández Retamar, R. 1989. Caliban and Other Essays. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

García, Osmani, Blad MC, Cholocate, William “El Magnífico,” Eri White, El Principe, Patry White “La Dictadora,” Yulien Oviedo, Nando Pro, DJ Conds, and El Macry. 2011. Chupi Chupi. Video file. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywoC2damVmU.

Hernández, T. M., and L. Ventana. 2008. “La violencia de género en la construcción social de la feminidad a partir del discurso de cantantes cubanos de timba y reguetón.”

Lavielle-Pullés, L. 2011. Seducidos por el Reguetón. Aproximación a un estudio del producto musical desde sus consumos en la juventud santiaguera. Santiago de Cuba: Centro de Estudios para el Desarrollo Integral de la Cultura.

Ortiz, Fernando, and I. Barreal. 1993. Etnia y sociedad. Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales.

Wood, A. E. 2009. “El Reguetón: Análisis del léxico de la música de los reguetoneros puertorriqueños.” Modern & Classical Languages Theses 6.

Zooming In

Ann Marie Stock

Making and Marketing Films in Twenty-First-Century Cuba

A raft floats in a tranquil sea. On it, a man lays face up with arms outstretched as if to embrace the brilliant sun. Cut to an underwater space, where low light and turbulence occlude the raft, making it difficult to discern. This opening sequence from Juan de los Muertos (Juan of the Dead, 2011), the highly acclaimed zombie film directed by Alejandro Brugués, can serve as a metaphor for filmmaking in Cuba in recent years. The audiovisual scene in twenty-first-century Cuba is composed of brightly lit spaces with great potential as well as some dark tones and difficulties.

Two forces collided in the early 1990s that dramatically changed filmmaking in Cuba. When the breakup of the Soviet Union unmoored the island from its principal ally, trading partner, and symbolic model, Cubans were left to float freely. Reverberations were felt in virtually every sector in Cuba—economic, political, social, and cultural. At the same time, the forces of globalization—greater interdependence and connectivity, expanded communication networks, multinational financial structures, and new technologies—were impacting the island and posing challenges to the nation. As Leonardo Padura Fuentes asserts in chapter 27 in this volume, “In such a convulsive (and truly special) period, artistic and literary production could be no less convulsive and special.” And it was arguably the world of cinema that experienced the most convulsive and special shift of all: from this moment onward, films would be made and disseminated in markedly different ways.

The history of Cuba’s revolutionary cinema goes back more than half a century. The establishment in 1959 of the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC) was key to engendering a dynamic filmmaking industry. For the next thirty years, this state organization would train and support its artists, many of whom created award-winning films and earned international recognition. All of this would change, however, with the “Special Period,” when island filmmakers began telling their stories with little or no support from the Cuban government. What these artists lacked in infrastructure they made up for with ingenuity. But what these artists lacked in infrastructure they made up for with ingenuity. Adapting to their changing circumstances and taking advantage of new opportunities, these audiovisual artists began working outside of official channels—on “the streets”; they employed emerging technology and partnered with a variety of individuals and institutions so as to create and market their work. (For readers of English, this rich tradition is outlined in two key texts: in Cuban Film, Michael Chanan [1985] treats the first three decades of revolutionary cinema, and in On Location in Cuba: Street Filmmaking during Times of Transition, Ann Marie Stock [2009] focuses on more recent developments in the audiovisual sphere—the impact of the turbulent 1990s and the early twenty-first century.)

Influences, Experimentation, and a Plethora of Creative Possibilities

Cuban films made in the first decade of the twenty-first century vary greatly in style, subject matter, and technique. They include features, animation, documentaries, experimental projects, and video clips or music videos. If there is any single defining characteristic of this generation of filmmakers, it is that they are intent on pushing the limits. Today’s audiovisual artists employ genres heretofore absent in Cuba. They remix and mash up a variety of cultural forms, and they address social problems as well as personal concerns. Rather than staying on the well-traveled path, they venture forth to explore new territory.

These artists often try their hand at genres that have pleased audiences far beyond Cuba. Ernesto Piña Rodríguez recasts Japanese mana to comment on the uniquely Cuban transportation mode, the camello, or camel-backed trailers, in eMm-5 (M-5, 2004). Juan Carlos Cremata and Alfredo Ureta employ road movie conventions in their respective features, Viva Cuba (2005) and La Mirada (The Gaze, 2010). Pavel Giroud nods to the gangster movie in Omertá (2008). Increasingly, Cuba’s young filmmakers bring to the screen mobsters, monsters, and other B-movie material. Followers and fans of world cinema and expression from distant cultures, they experiment with a variety of forms.

Some of these talented creators quote and combine material from diverse sources. By borrowing and blending, they demonstrate their mastery of digital technologies of production, their capacities to reuse, and the vastness of their cultural repertoire. Esteban Insausti crafts an innovative portrait of the musician Emiliano Salvador in Las manos y el ángel (The Hands and the Angel, 2002). With quotes from the pages of Rolling Stone magazine, archival footage of concerts by the ICAIC-hosted Grupo Experimental, and interviews filmed recently for this project, he produces a film layered like an extemporaneous, playful, intertextual jazz riff. The same filmmaker relies on remixing in another of his works, Existen (They Exist, 2005). By incorporating sequences from the innovative Desde La Habana Recordar 1968 (From Havana Remembering 1968, 1969) by Nicolas Guillén Landrián, Insausti recuperates, recirculates, and reintroduces the work of his talented predecessor. Susana Barriga quotes another innovative film by Guillén Landrián, Ociel del Toa (Ociel of the Toa River, 1965). In structuring her critique, titled Patria (Homeland, 2007), she replicates the rhythm and juxtaposes image and text just as Guillén Landrián did some forty years earlier.

For Miguel Coyula, it is the work of master filmmaker Tomás Gutiérrez Alea that inspires his feature. Memories of Development (2010), with its collage aesthetic, draws inspiration from its precursor, Memorias del Subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment, 1968), both of which were scripted by Edmundo Desnoes. It bears mentioning that this mode of remixing is not new in Cuban film; Guillén Landrián, Santiago Álvarez, Marisol Trujillo, and a host of others employed pastiche to tell their stories on film. Images from Life and Look magazines and footage from U.S. television broadcasts and films made their way into early Cuban films. What distinguishes these recent efforts are the new modes of storytelling made possible via the employment of emerging technologies of participation. Whereas Cuban films once combined a sampling of a handful of images and sound bites from other sources, they now take shape within a new universe of creativity made possible by everything from high-definition cameras and mobile phones to editing software programs, permitting amateurs to generate and bend musical compositions and rearrange narratives. Even some of the cultural expression created by Cubans—particularly in the 1960s and 1970s—is now being used as raw material. These new mash-ups attest to this generation’s engagement with world music, graphic arts, advertising, and audiovisual culture as well as to their appreciation of their nation’s strong cinema tradition.

Increasingly, Cuban films tackle topics not widely treated in ICAIC productions before the Special Period. Recent works explore subjects once considered taboo in island cinema: mental illness (Existen, Esteban Insausti, 2005), censorship (Zona de Silencio, Karel Ducasse, 2007), underground culture (Revolución, Mayckell Pedrero Mariol, 2010), the emergence of class distinctions (Habanastation, Ian Padrón, 2011), the challenge of finding meaningful work (Cómo Construir un Barco, Susana Barriga, 2007), drug use and abuse (Todo Por Ella, Pavel Giroud, 2002), inadequate housing (Las Camas Solas, Sandra Gómez Jiménez, 2006), the shortcomings of public health (Protectoras, Daniel Vera, 2006), la doble moral (hypocrisy) (Utopía, Arturo Infante, 2004; Monte Rouge, Eduardo del Llano, 2005), cruelty (La Guerra de las Canicas, Adrián Ricardo Hartill and Wilbert Noguel, 2008; Camionero, 2011), and so on. In focusing on the island’s disenfranchised sectors, these works illuminate Cuba’s darker side. They offer a stark contrast to many—but certainly not all—of the early ICAIC films celebrating the Revolution’s achievements. Films like these pose a challenge to official discourse in that they expose that which often goes unreported in the national media.

In the same way that the shortcomings of the Revolution are depicted, so, too, are the imperfections of individuals. In a poignant scene in La Vida es Silbar (Life Is to Whistle, Fernando Pérez, 1998), one character comments to another, “Nadie es perfecto.” The fact that “nobody is perfect” has made its way into recent films; the tendency in Cuba at this juncture is to present people as they are, replete with defects, rather than as exemplary human beings. This allows filmgoers to recognize and reckon with their own imperfections.

These up-close-and-personal stories feature well-known figures as well as ordinary people. Perhaps the most notable film of this kind in recent years is Fernando Pérez’s portrait of José Martí. This hero is larger than life in Cuba, where busts of him mark the entrance of every elementary school, his face graces countless billboards across the island, and monuments honoring him abound. Rather than perpetuate this heroic image, however, Pérez opted to depict Martí in more human terms. He carried out extensive research—reading Martí’s writings, visiting relevant sites, and studying period photographs. Despite the filmmaker’s exhaustive investigation into his subject’s life, gaps remained. So Pérez decided to focus on the lacunae, creating a “fictionalized biography” of Martí’s childhood and adolescence. His film Martí: El Ojo del Canario (Martí: The Eye of the Canary, 2010), displays the protagonist’s human qualities: the young José Martí is fearful and frustrated, he urinates and masturbates, and his actions sometimes result in others being hurt. This humane portrayal renders the iconic figure accessible to present-day viewers. Eduardo del Llano has managed something similar in creating a nuanced portrait of another familiar historical figure, Leonardo da Vinci. His film Vinci (2011) emphasizes the legendary man’s youth, including time spent in prison, rather than his widely heralded accomplishments later in life.

Many other recent films present ordinary men and women living ordinary lives. With sensitivity and subtlety, director Alfredo Ureta creates a character that is anything but exemplary. In La Guarida del Topo (The Mole’s Den, 2011), Daniel, rendered expertly by actor Néstor Jiménez, sips coffee, cooks and eats simple fare, and watches television before calling it a day. He is a homebody who goes about the business of living. And even when circumstances require him to give shelter to his neighbor’s niece, we appreciate him as a loner in search of human warmth rather than as a Latin lover. In Oda a la Piña (Ode to the Pineapple, 2008), the protagonist (Limara Meneses) is a dancer whose elaborate “tropical” costume cannot cover up the fact that she’s missing the proper dance moves. Director Laimir Fano deconstructs stereotypes in this exploration of what it means to lose one’s rhythm, to be out of step; the film parallels the experience of many Cubans—including Fano’s—during this time of accelerated change. Another film in this vein is the highly successful and exceedingly moving film La Piscina (The Swimming Pool, 2011). Director Carlos Quintela limits the scope of the action to one place, the swimming pool, and introduces viewers to four adolescent swimmers—each with a disability—and their coach. Works like these mark a contrast to earlier revolutionary films that celebrated the heroic and exceptional—whether adolescents combating illiteracy (Historia de una Batalla, 1965), athletes winning Olympic medals and international competitions (Nuevos Hombres en el Ring, 1974; Juantorena, 1978; Mundial de la Dignidad, 1974), or a dairy farmer breaking all records in milk production (Pedro Cero Por Ciento, 1980). Films in twenty-first-century Cuba reflect present-day circumstances; they probe the challenges of living in—and surviving—this moment. And they continually remind viewers that “nobody is perfect.”

Migration, Movement, and the Emergence of New Audiovisual Spaces

Another characteristic of this moment—one driving the narrative of films as well as the experiences of filmmaker—is the prevalence of border crossings. The phenomenon of migrancy dates back centuries, and movement characterizes the entire world in this global era. Yet the subject of emigration resonates uniquely for Cubans, for virtually all of them have had to reckon with the decision of staying or going—whether personally or through the experience of a family member or friend. Not surprisingly, recent films made by Cubans, regardless of where they make their home, explore this topic. Humberto Padrón broaches the subject in Video de Familia (Family Video, 2001); he effectively uses the trope of a video camera to scrutinize family dynamics and dysfunction, the latter exacerbated by a family member’s desire to reside outside Cuba. ExGeneración (Generation X, 2009) tackles the subject from Mexico City. Aram Vidal, while pursuing a master’s degree there, expanded on his earlier documentary about Cuban youth in Havana (De Generación, 2006) to focus on Cubans living in Mexico’s capital. In Todas Iban a Ser Reinas (All Were Going to Be Queens, 2006), director Gustavo Pérez and writer Oneyda González treat emigration—but with a twist. They probe the experiences of six Russian women who fell in love with Cuban men visiting their native country, all of whom subsequently emigrated so as to live with their husbands on the island. Alina Rodríguez frames the issues in yet another way when she takes on internal migration to expose the plight of Cubans who move from the provinces to the island’s capital; Buscándote Havana (Searching for You, Havana, 2006) reveals makeshift dwellings on Havana’s periphery to parallel their occupants’ marginal position in the country. And Esteban Insausti devotes his first feature, Larga Distancia (Long Distance, 2010), to the impact on those affected by remaining behind in Cuba after their family and friends have dispersed.

This theme of migration on-screen has its parallel in the creative community. In recent years, “round-trip-ticket” filmmaking has become an increasingly common practice. During the first three decades of the Revolution, to leave Cuba for an extended period (unless sponsored by the Cuban government) was to relinquish one’s citizenship and lose the right to return. Film specialists who opted to live outside Cuba—editor Jorge Abello, animation artist Hernán Henríquez, and director Jesús Díaz, to name only a few—left the island with little if any hope of returning. And once outside of Cuba, they lost professional momentum. More often than not, their film careers stalled out. Today, this has changed. It is now possible for many directors, actors, editors, and other artists to come and go, working sometimes in Cuba and sometimes abroad.

Round-trip-ticket scenarios have become increasingly common as this new generation explores opportunities and seeks greater financial stability. Actress Zulema Clares debuted in “Luz Roja” directed by Esteban Insausti (a work comprising the final third of Tres Veces Dos/3 X 2). Shortly thereafter, she moved to New York in hopes of developing her acting skills in theater. All along, Clares planned on returning to Cuba to star in another film. Esteban Insausti had envisioned her playing the lead role in his first feature, Larga Distancia (Long Distance); the director had, in fact, scripted the part of Ana with Clares in mind. So when it came time to begin shooting, the actress relocated to Cuba until the filming was complete. Filmmaker Sandra Gómez Jiménez constitutes another example. She made Las Camas Solas (Lonely Beds, 2006) in Havana before moving to Europe to make her home. She returns frequently to Cuba, however, and has participated in various installments of the Muestra Joven ICAIC, an annual festival featuring the work of young filmmakers. Still another case is that of Miguel Coyula, who graduated from the Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión (EICTV) outside of Havana and then moved to New York, where he made Cucarachas Rojas (Red Cockroaches, 2003) and then Memories of Development. As Memories was beginning to circulate at international festivals, Coyula returned to Havana. From his base in his bedroom studio, in the home he shares with his parents in the El Vedado district, he travels frequently to participate in international film events and offer workshops beyond the island. The possibility of coming and going has expanded the conception of “Cuban” in the island’s film world; it is not so much geopolitical locale—one’s rootedness on the island—that constitutes the identities of Cuban filmmakers but rather their self-identification as such. (The renowned Cuban intellectual Ambrosio Fornet first insisted on defining Cuban culture as including the diaspora. Others, including Ana López and Juan Antonio García Borrero, have built on his formulation in their respective discussions of contemporary Cuban film.)

Although many audiovisual artists of Cuban descent have preserved their connection to the island regardless of their home base, they do not necessarily consider themselves to be part of a defined movement. Unlike their predecessors—the revolutionary filmmakers working in the ICAIC between 1960 and the late 1980s—these creators emphasize their individuality and value their autonomy. Most participate in securing funding for their projects. They have assumed responsibility for pitching their ideas and garnering the financial support necessary to make their films. They procure their equipment and learn how to use it. These artists increasingly manage multiple aspects of their projects. Jorge Perrugoría, known for his acting in Fresa y Chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate), Guantanamera, and other award-winning films, has ventured into directing with such works as Habana Abierta (Open Havana, 2003) and Afinidades (Affinities, 2010, codirected with Vladimir Cruz). The accomplished scriptwriter Eduardo del Llano has directed numerous popular shorts—among them Monte Rouge (2004), High Tech (2005), Photoshop (2006), Ache (2010), Pravda (2010), and Exit (2011)—and more recently the feature film Vinci. Aram Vidal constitutes yet another case of this self-reliant filmmaking mode; his Bubbles Beat (2012), begun while he was serving as an audiovisual artist in residence in the United States and completed as he earned his MA degree in Mexico, engaged him in virtually all aspects of its creation and production. It premiered on Vimeo in November 2012. New technologies and shifting production practices have permitted Cubans to engage more fully in the entire filmmaking enterprise. As a result, the auteur paradigm is being employed with greater frequency—by critics as well as by the filmmakers themselves. No longer is filmmaking in Cuba considered primarily through a national lens.

Another shift has to do with where filmmaking activity is centered on the island. Whereas Havana was once the exclusive purveyor of filmed images, new spaces have opened up for filmmakers outside the capital. The Televisión Serrana, founded by Daniel Diez Castrillo in 1993 in the remote region of the Sierra Maestra, has become a significant media-making site. Pockets of filmmaking activity have developed in other regions as well. In Camaguey, Juan Antonio García Borrero led efforts to establish the Taller Nacional de la Crítica, an annual event convening critics and film aficionados. From their base in this provincial capital, Gustavo Pérez and Oneyda González have teamed up to make several films, and Eliécer Jiménez developed a portfolio of work impressive enough to gain him admission to the prestigious EICTV in San Antonio de los Baños. Camaguey is also the site of the Festival Internacional de Video Arte, a showcase of innovative works that also foments creativity. In Santa Clara, Ivette Ávila Martín has developed her animation activity; the quality of her shorts is as impressive as her commitment to educating and empowering children through workshops. And in Santiago de Cuba, where Carlos Barba first tried his hand at making documentaries, others have followed. Working far from the urban center has not been easy, for distances are great, communication can be difficult, and shortages are widespread. There is no doubt that the impediments to creativity experienced by habaneros are much more pronounced in the provinces. Still, these filmmakers from across the island have become adept at resolviendo, or making do. They have procured support from the ICAIC and other state and nongovernmental organizations in Cuba, and they have managed to establish alliances with international partners in order to develop their projects. The expansion of filmmaking efforts has resulted in a broader depiction of the lives of Cubans. Portraits of the rural experience, as told by those living it, are augmenting the island’s images.

Festivals, Flash Drives, and the Circulation of Cuban Films

Shifts in the making of films in Cuba have been accompanied by an evolution in the marketing and circulation of these products. ICAIC once took sole responsibility for promoting Cuban film—making multiple copies; circulating them across the island on cinema screens, at schools, and in video clubs; creating press packets and publicity materials and submitting the most promising works to international festivals; and securing international distribution. Since 1990, the state’s role in film distribution has changed due to an altered audiovisual landscape.

One of the forces driving this shift is the increasingly common practice of coproduction. Collaborative creation and distribution has become a standard the world over, particularly where local markets are too small to recoup initial investments and broader audiences are sought. The combining of currency and talent has become the norm rather than the exception in Cuba. Most of the recent ICAIC productions and many of the “street” projects have benefited from joint financing and collaborative marketing. So, for example, if Wanda Films helps produce a film by Fernando Pérez (which it has on several occasions), the Madrid-based producer will also play a significant role in the promotion and placement of the film outside of Cuba.

Another factor has to do with the development of new spaces for circulating audiovisual production. In recent years, ICAIC and various Cuba-based festivals (e.g., Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano, Muestra Joven ICAIC, Cine Pobre, and a host of others) disseminate opportunities and information via listservs. Cuban filmmakers can—and do—create personal websites, upload their work on YouTube, and submit their films over the Internet using festival websites and clearinghouses, such as Withoutabox. In this era of global networks, paper forms and physical copies of films have given way to electronic submission and communication. This is not to say that all obstacles have been overcome. In fact, Cuban filmmakers still struggle to develop the skills necessary to navigate the global marketplace, to access a connection fast enough to upload a film, and to pay festival application fees that are exorbitant by island standards. Yet they are managing to disseminate their work widely by activating alliances and mobilizing connections—human as well as virtual.

New festivals on the island have also played a role in moving Cuban films into the marketplace. Recent years have seen the creation of a series of events across the island that promote homegrown projects and introduce Cubans to their international counterparts. Among these are Cine Pobre in Gibara, the Festival Internacional del Video Arte in Camaguey, and the Festival Internacional del Documental, Santiago Álvarez en Memoriam, in Santiago. Arguably the most significant for this new generation of filmmakers is the annual Muestra Joven ICAIC (ICAIC’s Showcase of Young Filmmakers), which had its first installment in 2002. The importance of this event, held in Havana each year and sponsored by ICAIC, cannot be overstated. Many filmmakers—whether from Havana or from the provinces—cite this space as pivotal in their formation; the Muestra inspired them to bring their story to the screen. The event features the work of creators under the age of thirty-five and also engages young Cubans as jurors, organizers, and critics. In a country where many state agencies are directed by individuals in their seventies and even eighties (consider the Casa de las Américas or the Ballet Nacional), opportunities for young people are all too scarce. Many state organizations and cultural institutions have resisted succession—the tendency is to retain founding directors rather than pass on leadership responsibilities. The Muestra, in contrast, is managed, for the most part, by individuals in their forties, thirties, and even twenties. Cuba’s culture workers of the next generation are the protagonists.

Whereas the Muestra and other domestic festivals constitute important spaces, they are by no means the only way for circulating and consuming local films. Entrepreneurial Cubans have become unauthorized distributors of films made at home and from abroad. A few years back, the standard office of a “distributor” in Cuba looked like it occupied one corner of a room outfitted with a monitor and two VHS players, a box of blank tapes, and a backpack. Films on video could be copied, lent, and sold. Knocking on doors and teaming up with others in the trade, these bootleggers did a brisk business providing aficionados with contemporary and classic films from Cuba and around the world. A satellite dish, perhaps tucked in a water tank or camouflaged by vegetation, ensured a constant stream of new material. In the past few years, this practice has evolved along with technological innovation. Distribution has become even more streamlined as flash drives and hard drives get passed back and forth in an ongoing exchange of audiovisual offerings. Cuba’s filmmakers note with amusement their own role in “pirating” their work. The goal is not so much to make money, they say, as to get their films in front of viewers.

Cubans and tourists alike have access to films on DVD. Would-be buyers can, for two Cuban convertible pesos (the equivalent of U.S.$2.50), purchase a combo, a DVD with four or five feature films made by Cuban directors. Sales take place outside paladares, at used-book stalls, and in craft markets. A cardboard box or attaché case contains new releases from Cuba along with international blockbusters. If a desired title is not among those available, the salesperson generally offers to locate the film, make a copy, and deliver it—often the next day. So pervasive is this new mode of distribution in Cuba that ICAIC officials and filmmakers alike joke about providing these entrepreneurs with good copies of their films. “If they’re going to reproduce and sell the works,” the pragmatic professionals say, “let’s make sure they’re working with high-quality copies and not some inferior version filmed using a cell phone.”

Additional opportunities exist for experiencing Cuban film beyond the island. Even in the United States, where the blockade has limited the movement of goods, people, and information between the countries, there are now numerous annual events featuring Cuban films. Among these are the Havana Film Festival in New York and the New England Festival of Ibero-American Film. With increasing frequency, universities host Cuban filmmakers as part of their programs in film studies, Latin American studies, and other academic areas. In addition, partners from beyond the island have teamed up to market Cuban films. There are the coproducers, of course, but also such grassroots initiatives as Cuban Cinema Classics (http://www.cubancinemaclassics.com), Film Movement (http://www.filmmovement.com), and the Americas Media Initiative (http://www.americasmediainitiative.org)—all committed to circulating films from Cuba across the United States and beyond. These are in addition to Amazon, Netflix, and other online sources.

The contours of Cuba’s audiovisual landscape continue to change. There is a great deal of uncertainty at present as Cuba’s master filmmakers age and ICAIC’s equipment becomes obsolete. What is certain is that the future of Cuban cinema will look decidedly different from the past. Just as thirty-five millimeter gave way to other formats and truckloads of heavy equipment were replaced by lightweight handheld cameras, so, too, have state-sponsored film practices had to shift. While change has been slow and sometimes painful, ICAIC is now positioned to accommodate a multiplicity of modes for creating and marketing films. And as new filmmakers continue to come on to the scene, their innovative ideas will help chart new directions. So while there are no guarantees, it does seem that a bright future beckons. The magical and the marvelous persist in Cuba’s film world. In a 2006 interview, having just completed their first feature titled Personal Belongings, director Alejandro Brugués and producer Inti Herrera expressed their desire to make, of all things, a zombie film. And within the space of a few years, they had accomplished that—a first in the illustrious history of Cuban filmmaking. This is proof, it seems, that dreams can come true for Cuban filmmakers. Juan de los Muertos once again resonates when the protagonist, having struggled and overcome all kinds of obstacles, asserts in the final sequence, “Voy a estar bien. Sólo necesito que me den un filo.” There is hope that Cuban film, too, will “be all right” if just given “a chance.”

References

Chanan, Michael. 1985. Cuban Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Stock, Ann Marie. 2009. On Location in Cuba: Street Filmmaking during Times of Transition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Recovering from Crisis?

Par Kumaraswami and Antoni Kapcia

Literature, Publishing, and Nation Building in Contemporary Cuba

The changes in Cuba that began in 2007—formalized in 2008 (with Raúl Castro’s election) and 2011 (with the convening of the long-overdue Communist Party Congress)—had inevitable implications for culture. While quite draconian cuts were instituted (or at least threatened and discussed) for so many aspects of Cuban society, welfare, employment, and the public sector, it seemed inevitable that culture generally would be expected to bear its share of the burden of economic austerity and streamlining. This was especially perceived from the outside, where it has long seemed that an inordinate amount of always scarce resources have been spent on what is usually, in most Western societies, deemed a peripheral or even luxury item of expenditure.

In many Cubans’ eyes, the signal for this development had already been given in 2009 when, following the traumatic and damaging experience of three successive hurricanes in 2008 and the onset of the world financial crisis, it was announced that the annual Havana Book Fair would be reduced in scope. Since 2000, this event had grown spectacularly, with the initial ten-day event in Havana being then rolled out in various forms across the island over three weeks, eventually reaching forty towns and cities and attracting about 5 million Cubans. Its sudden reduction was a shock to the cultural world. Then, in March 2012, the popular and influential minister of culture, Abel Prieto, retired from office, being replaced by one of his deputies, Rafael Bernal Alemany. Many in that cultural world had long feared the effects of a ministry without Prieto since, from the late 1990s, he had successfully argued for a high profile and substantial expenditure for culture and had ensured that Cuba’s artists and writers were protected and materially rewarded, giving them an importance that they had not enjoyed since the early days of the Revolution; moreover, many had hoped that another of the deputy ministers would succeed Prieto and tended to see Bernal’s appointment as something of a demotion of the ministry and thus of culture generally.

This was reinforced by traditional expectations among some of those artists and writers who saw Raúl Castro as being less sympathetic toward culture’s high profile and central importance than his brother had been; they cited Raúl Castro’s position as defense minister in 1966 when the armed forces magazine Verde Olivo launched a campaign against poet Heberto Padilla (Padilla 1989). They also pointed to the armed forces’ presumed role in the creation in 1965–1968 of the notorious work and reeducation camps of the Military Units to Aid Production, where several writers had been interned, mostly for their homosexuality. Finally, in 1996, Raúl Castro had taken the lead in the public criticism and purging of the independent Center for the Study of America, many of whose members remained influential in Cuban intellectual debates (Giuliano 1998). Hence, by 2012, it seemed that all that they had feared was coming to pass and that the “good times” for culture and for artists were over.

Since 1959, culture was always seen as fundamental and not peripheral, in many ways the key to unlocking the talents, willing participation, and collective and individual self-fulfillment that national unity and progress demanded. That was precisely why so much effort was put into film (able to communicate easily with hundreds at a time), into literacy and then literature, and into all manner of cultural awareness and activity. It was also why Cuban artists were redefined as state employees—not only because they had a key role in this process of cultural liberation and nation building but also because, by receiving a steady income, they would be freed from the vagaries (and often poverty) of the market.

Hence, it was this imperative—of tying the new culture to the whole nation-building project—that drove most of the campaigns, ideas, and experiments of the first three decades of Revolution. This had led to a massive expansion of production and consumption that was subsequently seen as something of a “golden age” of high expenditure, multiple opportunities for would-be artists and writers, substantial availability of books and films—and clear-cut but occasionally resented notions of what art and artists should be like. In this renaissance, literature boasted a paramount role, seemingly privileged above all other genres.

The Crisis of the 1990s

This relatively coherent drive to create and sustain a dual notion of literary culture that could create and sustain publishing opportunities for established writers while at the same time providing greater mass access to literature in terms of writing workshops, affordable books, and literary events was severely damaged by the economic collapse of the 1990s. The impact of the “Special Period” on literature was wide ranging and profound. Along with ordinary citizens, many writers emigrated and sought their fortunes outside the island, while many of those who remained in Cuba were obliged to curtail their literary careers and seek employment in sectors that could guarantee some hard-currency income. For all Cuban citizens, including writers and artists (who were, after all, state employees), daily life entailed the search for basic goods and services, a search often undertaken with no public transportation available. In these conditions, the mental and material conditions required to write literature were rarely available (Davies 1997; Whitfield 2009). Some writers, nevertheless, drew on their writing as a form of psychological release in the midst of personal and national crisis. The publishing industry for literature was virtually paralyzed as a result of shortages of necessary commodities, such as oil and paper; any available publishing outlets prioritized the national press (Granma, the newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party) over other text types. And, in the absence of an effective state infrastructure for culture, many of the municipal, provincial, and national events that made up the literary calendar were simply suspended. As for readers, here too the well-established patterns of access and participation that had sustained the everyday enjoyment of literature for thirty years were largely paralyzed. Indeed, given the need for hard currency and the scarcity of commodities, many Cubans sold their books to secondhand peso bookshops or, more lucratively, to the hard-currency booksellers in the Plaza de Armas of La Habana Vieja who attracted tourists in search of well-known literary and political texts.

For the first time since 1959, then, the literary environment was closely tied to economic concerns, and the effects on literary production and consumption were experienced in often dramatic terms by those writers whose work was “scouted” by foreign publishers, and who were awarded often minimal sums of money in exchange for their manuscripts (including translation and reproduction rights). This last aspect should not be underestimated, as it created a new globalizing tendency not only in the mechanisms for publishing literature but also in the subject matter that these new texts covered, in effect constructing a canon of 1990s Cuban literature that ran alongside and sometimes in opposition to the canon for national readerships that had been developed for the previous three decades (Kumaraswami 2012). This new focus often highlighted the themes of national and personal crisis, dystopia (rather than the utopia of the Revolution), the marketization of Cuban life (including hustling and prostitution), and nostalgia for a lost era (Casamayor Cisneros 2012; Whitfield 2008).

Many texts dealt even more explicitly with the collective moral crisis of the failed revolutionary project, with sordid descriptions and scatological references and an underlying narrative structure where the individual was isolated—and often mistrustful of—the collective context. This thematic strand—known more generally as “literatura del desencanto” (literature of disillusionment) (Fornet 2003) or “narrativa de la interioridad” (narrative focusing on subjective realities)—stood in sharp contrast to the collective and constructive thrust of literary texts until 1989 and itself created an assumption among external commentators that all post-1989 Cuban literature inevitably dealt with the exotic, the erotic, the decadent, or the dissident. Indeed, a more general observation could be that the incursion of foreign publishers into the Cuban literary scene itself promoted a certain vision of life on the island, and, with the national publishing industry unable to compete in terms of offering other visions, the trend of “realismo sucio” (dirty realism) became a powerful new current of post-1990 Cuban literature.

As always with Cuba, however, the picture is far more complex. While it is undeniable that the Special Period presented a moment of rupture with the previous thirty years and with the largely coherent thrust of the cultural policies of the revolutionary government, it is also important to note that signs began to emerge of the gradual recovery of publishing. The mechanisms for this renaissance were complex: local communities and individual actors in the literary scene worked together to create the phenomenon of plaquettes, or minibooks created from the offcuts of the large printing presses still functioning to publish Granma; editors of literary magazines accepted financial and material help from supporters in Latin America and beyond, negotiating terms whereby their publications could appear, albeit in diminished or less frequent forms, through being printed abroad; and, similarly, publishing houses in allied countries in Latin America were able to fund modest literary prizes, such as the Colección Pinos Nuevos, which provided some publishing opportunities for writers on the island.

For a country whose literary production had been exclusively state sponsored for three decades, the need to seek financial backing in order to see work in print must surely have come as a rude awakening to many writers and publishers. More crucially, the generous print runs of the 1970s and 1980s now gave way to minimal runs of 500 copies, creating a situation where the reading public’s access to Cuban literature was severely compromised. Also important in the early 1990s was a state-level decision to accept the Japanese government gift of hundreds of photocopiers to the Cuban government. The copy machines, known by their brand name RISO, were distributed by the Cuban government to every province in the country, thus creating a network of small-scale provincial publishers across the island. This provided opportunities for writers to publish and for readers to read and, crucially, was able to publish texts more quickly than the larger national publishing houses had been able to; in addition, and even more important, it decentralized the publishing industry, which had hitherto been based principally in Havana (with some larger publishers in Santiago de Cuba).

What is clear, then, is that, at least in terms of the production of literature, the mid- to late 1990s saw a slow and partial recovery of the publishing industry, which, combined with opportunities from abroad, provided some outlets for writers on the island. Less successful, however, was the other strand that had characterized cultural policy until 1989: the notion of cultural participation as a route to individual and collective development within the larger nation-building project of the Revolution. While many of the actors in literary culture had attempted to resurrect the notion of literature as participation through reading initiatives and literary workshops in Havana, the economic hardships and daily struggles of the Special Period, the lure of mass culture such as television, and the appeal of the cultural products and services being offered to tourists all made participation in literature seem irrelevant, especially to Cuba’s youth.

Recovering from Crisis: The Battle of Ideas

The Batalla de Ideas, announced in 2000, was, like “Rectification” in 1986, a multilayered campaign with various motives designed to address a great many problems. By addressing “ideas,” its scope inevitably included culture and specifically literature. Indeed, once it became clear that its main purpose was to revive ideological commitment, especially among the young, and to reinvigorate Cubans after the ravages, disillusion, and demoralization of the Special Period and against the corrosive effects of the post-1993 economic reforms, it was obvious that culture would, as in the 1960s, lie at the heart of this initiative. For, just as culture had, from the outset, been seen as central to the Revolution’s underlying project of nation building, so too now, as Cuba emerged from the “darkest days” of the post-1990 crisis—buoyed up by the pope’s visit in 1998 and the exciting youth mobilizations of the 2009–2010 campaign for the return to Cuba of Elián González—was it again central in this new process. This process essentially meant rebuilding not only a damaged Revolution but also a severely damaged nation. Therefore, it was inevitable that some of the same mechanisms that had worked in the early 1960s would be used now to invigorate and possibly enlist a new generation of young Cubans.

There were three basic elements to the Batalla de Ideas: a focus on mobilization once again (since the 1980s had seen a steady decline of what had been characteristic of the early days of a new Revolution and since the Special Period had allowed little time, energy, or resources for anything other than the most essential or cursory mass mobilization) (Kapcia 2009); an educational campaign that focused on both old Cubans (offering them the chance of lifelong learning and greater involvement) and young Cubans, especially those perhaps dangerously left on the sidelines by the 1980s shift from mass higher education to a much more selective university entrance system (Kapcia 2005); and a new campaign to emphasize reading and to expand book publishing.

The latter element, especially its focus on publishing, actually grew out of another seminal experience of the 1990s—namely, the evolution of a new “localism” as a response to the weakening and stagnation of the Cuban state during the worst days of austerity and specifically of provincial publishing, which, as we have seen, began to flourish in its scope if not ever reaching the levels of production of the 1980s. It was, however, the focus on reading that was deemed to be vital, an emphasis that probably owed much to the collaboration between Fidel Castro and Prieto and to the dynamism of the new generation of young activists then leading the Union of Communist Youth (UJC), steeled in the heady days of the Elián campaign.

That they should focus on reading was logical for two reasons. First, the material deprivations of the Special Period, coupled with the temptations of a new opening to globalization and, with it, the world of the Internet and DVDs (not to mention the effects of decades of exposure to television), had created a visible decline in young people’s interest in and practice of reading, lacking the books, the time, and the disposition to do what their parents and grandparents had done with such energy in earlier decades. This was certainly lamented in the media, in the education ministries, and in political circles, where it was seen as a serious problem for a nation whose system and processes of popular involvement had been built partly on the premise that an educated and reading populace was fundamental to a “new” consciousness.

The second reason for the new focus on reading was the awareness that, just as the 1961 Literacy Campaign and the subsequent campaigns on “piracy” and writing workshops had been basic blocks in the process of building the nation after 1959—that is, all focusing on the written word and imagination through writing and reading—so too now might it be possible to repeat the impetus of those campaigns to the same effect in a new rebuilding process. The essential dilemma, however, was that it was impossible to repeat the 1961 campaign since all Cubans could now read; the problem lay in getting people to read extensively once again.

Part of that campaign therefore could be addressed by boosting the production of books, repeating the impetus of the “piracy” campaign and building on the flourishing of provincial and local publishing. The strategy employed was to repeat the scale and the dynamism of 1961 in another way: by expanding the Havana Book Fair and taking it out across the island and then following it up with a number of smaller follow-up campaigns (not unlike the post-1961 campaigns to follow up new literacy with a drive to improve the levels of reading). The fair had existed since the early 1980s but had been a small, biennial, writer-focused, and publisher-focused event; its creation at that time owed much to the 1981 UNESCO designation of Havana as a World Heritage Site and was then focused on Havana as a city and the habaneros as citizens, hoping to rebuild a city identity and collective morale through physical improvement and cultural celebration. However, relatively few people attended those events, which were held mostly in the somewhat inaccessible far west of the city suburbs in one of the convention centers located there.

From 2000, however, the Havana Book Fair became the focal point for the whole cultural campaign. It became an annual event, located near the Old City (in the vast and imposing Cabaña fortress, which dominates the eastern shore of Havana Bay), which was given over to this large event. The fair also ceased focusing so much on writers, especially overseas writers and publishers, and focused instead on Cuban publishing, national and provincial, and on publications from each year’s designated “country to be honored.” Everything possible was now done to attract as many Cubans as possible to the event: free buses were provided, schools and workplaces organized outings to the fair during the workweek, prices were kept low, musical and other entertainment and fast food were made available throughout (giving the event the atmosphere of a U.S. state fair), and there was a ten-day parallel program of literary activities (book launches, award ceremonies, seminars, and round-table discussions) aimed at writers but open to the public, who now had the opportunity to meet their favorite authors.

The most ambitious element of this drive to attract numbers was the decision to follow the Havana event by taking elements of the original fair to the provinces, where a smaller version would be staged in significant provincial cities. This became so integral a part of the new initiative that it soon became crucial to continue to increase the geographical reach of the fair, progressing rapidly from seventeen cities and towns visited in 2002 to thirty-nine visited in 2007. As a result, the attendance figures soared from 200,000 in 2002 to 5.6 million in 2006, spectacularly realizing its aim of reaching as many Cubans as possible with as many books as possible (Instituto Cubano del Libro 2009), and the fair soon became a fixed and long-awaited event on the social as well as cultural calendar of each locality. Moreover, the characteristic energy of this success was already being followed up by those other drives: the September “Book Night” events in Havana (when unsold fair books were again promoted in an evening-long minifair on one of Havana’s main streets), the “Book in the Sierra” campaign to take books to the most isolated parts of Cuba’s mountain regions, and all manner of similar drives to sustain the enthusiasm that the fair had generated.

Recent Debates and Reforms

Despite the seemingly constant expansion of the cultural calendar for literary culture, a combination of internal and external forces began to emerge that would start to exert a significant influence on the UJC-driven cultural campaigns and spending under the Batalla de Ideas. As already mentioned, the costs of posthurricane reconstruction and the impact of the global recession on Cuba’s principal income sources were onerous. However, political factors also played a role. The ongoing illness of Fidel Castro starting in 2006 was a reason for concern on several levels: with implications for maintaining public loyalty and confidence in a clearly aging leadership and for managing a transition to a successor, the period 2006–2008 was key, when change was inevitable but potentially dangerous for the revolutionary project, not least bearing in mind the constant threat—both real and imagined—from the U.S. administration. In this context, Raúl Castro’s interim role as president in 2006–2008 allowed old fears and anxieties to resurface among intellectuals and artists regarding the directions that Cuban culture would take, and soon an intellectual debate was in full swing (Kumaraswami 2009).

This debate was prompted by and crystallized around the television screening in January 2007 of the weekly cultural series Impronta, which appeared to be an homage to Luis Pavón Tamayo, the former president of the Consejo Nacional de Cultura between 1971 and 1976 and thus a central figure in that nefarious period for Cuban culture later termed the quinquenio gris (gray five years). The program, produced by the state broadcasting institution, the Cuban Radio and Television Institute, omitted all reference to this period of cultural repression, and within a matter of days Cuban intellectuals and artists began to articulate their fears and concerns that Cuban cultural life might once again turn gray. Initially taking place as a national (but also quickly international) electronic debate, the state cultural infrastructure, under Prieto, responded by acting quickly to organize a series of meetings where those artists and intellectuals who had personally suffered the repressive effects of the quinquenio gris in the 1970s (and sometimes 1980s) could be allowed an institutional and public space to recount their experiences. Under the auspices of one of Cuba’s most prominent cultural theory magazines, Criterios, and at a series of locations in Havana, the meetings, or Encuentros, took place in the first six months of 2007.

In hindsight, the virtual and real exchanges of 2007 clearly revealed the crucial hand of Prieto in being able to defuse tensions between the fields of politics and culture, and the exchanges assumed several functions at a key moment of political change. First, they served to publicly reincorporate once-marginalized artists and intellectuals but also to remind the leadership more generally of the crucial role of the cultural field in maintaining and renewing the revolutionary project. Second, their effect was to send an early warning to the interim political leadership, under Raúl Castro, that Cuban intellectuals’ and artists’ principal loyalty to the Revolution continued to consist precisely in their ability to critique and question it from within. Finally, given the recent reputation of the armed forces in several areas of public life—in dealing effectively with the economy in the wake of the economic collapse of the 1990s but also perhaps in underestimating the value of cultural life and for intervening in open sociocultural and political debates—underlying fears resurfaced that the “good times” of the 2000s, largely under the leadership of leading UJC figures, would give way to two unwelcome new directions: first, a period of economic disinvestment in culture, and, second, a more instrumentalist understanding of the function of culture.

With Raúl Castro elected as president in 2008, and subsequently elected as first secretary of the Cuban Communist Party at its Sixth Congress in 2011 and with the inevitable change of personnel that any change of political leadership implies, the changes for culture have been far reaching. Indeed, anxieties about the implications of cultural policy changes have been felt most acutely by the generations of cultural figures who “cut their teeth” in the Revolution in the 1960s and 2000s.

Furthermore, the initial publishing of the new economic guidelines (and their relevance to political, social, and cultural life) in the summer of 2011, followed by an intense consultation process through mass organizations and labor unions and the ratification and publication of the final policy reforms, the Lineamientos, at the Sixth Cuban Communist Party Congress in April 2012, indicate that while the political leadership perceives change as urgent, it is also aware of the sensitivity of many of the changes proposed, not least for the future of cultural life on the island. The congress also ratified a change of cultural leadership that has similarly created suspicions and debate among cultural communities, many of those debates summarized as position pieces at http://www.cubadebate.com. Abel Prieto, having served as minister of culture since 1997, was replaced by Rafael Alemany Bernal, former minister of education but also one of Prieto’s deputy ministers during the period 1997–2012. One interpretation among many for this change of cultural leadership (with Prieto being promoted to the role of adviser to the Council of State and Council of Ministers) is that the age of protection—or spoiling—of artists and intellectuals by allowing them relative autonomy to function largely outside the rules of the market has come to an end.

While the limited liberalization of the 1990s allowed artists to ply their trade outside the island (not forgetting that they were taxed accordingly), these new reforms point to a further level of financial accountability and responsibility for cultural producers. Recent changes indicate that individuals and cultural groups who had hitherto used the state infrastructure of theaters, public squares, and cultural centers to provide events such as concerts and literary readings to the public in the peso currency might now be required to generate extra peso returns in order to cover some of the costs of maintaining the infrastructure, costs previously assumed (often in hard currency) by the Ministry of Culture. It is, however, crucial to recognize that this new understanding of the cultural economy still allows substantial potential for cultural agency, introducing a new aspect of nonsubsidized activity that is still facilitated but no longer determined by state structures. Early reactions from cultural producers and promoters indicate that this new “hybrid” cultural economy is a mixed blessing, allowing for greater freedom and agency but also removing important protections from cultural projects.

Although the implications of this model for cultural production are impossible to predict with any accuracy, the indications from contemporary debates point to two specific concerns: first, culture’s position within the hierarchy of policy and spending priorities is set to suffer through the leadership perceiving cultural life as peripheral to more important and urgent concerns, and, second, and equally significant, the concern is being expressed that culture will gradually transform into an activity whose value is measured largely in economic terms—in short, that culture will become commercialized and that, given the necessary continued reliance on tourism as a hard-currency income stream, cultural projects will become increasingly targeted at foreign visitors. This not only will emphasize well-established stereotypes that accentuate the exotic and the tropical but also will make culture as everyday activity inaccessible to the domestic population. Especially in light of the geographical and cultural proximity of contemporary capitalist cultural models in the United States and in globalized Latin American cities, cultural figures are keen to remind the political leadership that the hard-fought national development achieved by the sustained subsidy of culture should not be abandoned. They stress the centrality of culture to social integration—to definitions of well-being and development—and, above all, they stress that the twin aspirations behind cultural policy—to massify participation in high culture and to provide the conditions for cultural producers to work within the revolutionary project—should not be dismissed as peripheral to that project. Perhaps the most crucial question for the issues raised in this chapter is how literary culture, evidently less “marketable” than other, more popular forms of culture, such as dance or music, will both respond to and be shaped by the recent reforms.

References

Casamayor Cisneros, Odette. 2012. “Floating in the Void: Ethical Weightlessness in Post-Soviet Cuban Narrative.” In Rethinking the Cuban Revolution Nationally and Regionally: Politics, Culture and Identity, edited by P. Kumaraswami, 38–57. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Davies, Catherine. 1997. A Place in the Sun? Women Writers in Twentieth-Century Cuba. London: Zed Books.

Fornet, Jorge. 2003. “La narrativa cubana entre la utopía y el desencanto.” Hispamérica 32, no. 95 (August 2003): 3–20.

Giuliano, Maurizio. 1998. El Caso CEA: Intelectuales e Inquisidores en Cuba. ¿Perestroika en la Isla? Miami: Ediciones Universal.

Instituto Cubano del Libro. 2009. Resumen estadístico 2009. Havana: Instituto Cubano del Libro.

Kapcia, Antoni. 2005. “Educational Revolution and Revolutionary Morality in Cuba: The ‘New Man,’ Youth and the New ‘Battle of Ideas.’” Journal of Moral Education 34, no. 4 (December 2005): 399–412.

———. 2009. “Lessons of the Special Period: Learning to March Again.” Latin American Perspectives 36, issue 164, no. 1: 30–41.

Kumaraswami, Par. 2009. “‘El color del futuro’: Assessing the Significance of the Encuentros of 2007.” Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research 15, no. 2: 103–20.

———.2012. “Peripheral Visions? Literary Canon Formation in Revolutionary Cuba.” In Rethinking the Cuban Revolution Nationally and Regionally: Politics, Culture and Identity, edited by P. Kumaraswami, 91–109. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Whitfield, Esther. 2008. Cuban Currency: The Dollar and “Special Period” Fiction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

———. 2009. “Truths and Fictions: The Economics of Writing, 1994–1999.” In Cuba in the Special Period: Culture and Ideology in the 1990s, edited by A. Hernández-Reguant, 21–36. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Cuban Sport Development

Robert Huish and Simon C. Darnell

Building Capacity from el Parque to the Podium

In 1991, Cuba hosted the Pan-American Games. In preparation, the Cuban government built stadiums, dug swimming pools, and constructed hotels in order to host athletes from thirty-six nations in Havana between August 1 and 18. Such investment in new sports infrastructure constituted an enormous undertaking by the standards of any low- or middle-income nation; for Cuba, it was arguably even more significant given that the country was about to face near total economic collapse. Indeed, on December 26, 1991, the Soviet Union officially dissolved. This occurred just after Cuba had committed enormous resources to the construction of sports infrastructure and to the establishment of elite sport training centers.

Yet, even though food was strictly rationed and sporting equipment scarce during the “Special Period,” public sport programs continued in communities across the island, and public schools remained open, providing sport and physical education opportunities. In addition, the Instituto Nacional de Deportes y Educación Física (INDER) continued to offer training programs and dedicated sports schools for elite athletes that produced international results. Cuba went on to place an astounding fifth overall in the final medal count at the 1992 Olympics, even outperforming Spain, the host country. Four years later, and still deep within the worst stages of the Special Period, Cuba finished eighth in the medal table at the 1996 Summer Olympics held in Atlanta. Indeed, in every Olympics and Pan-American Games since 1992, with the exception of 2008, the only countries to outperform Cuba in total medals have had a higher total gross domestic product. Cuba clearly bucks the trend of what Bernard and Busse (2004) see as the requirement of a strong economy in order to obtain Olympic success.

In this chapter, we explore how and why Cuba, despite such obvious economic shortcomings, has invested heavily in both elite sport as a cornerstone of national pride and mass participation sport as a mode of community-based development. Cuba’s continued investment in sport is grounded in history, tradition, and revolutionary values and also in the pursuit of various economic and political opportunities. In this way, the investment in sport, representative of the late Special Period, can still be seen within processes of Cuban sport development in the new millennium. Such investment in community-based sport programs and international cooperation alongside elite training aligns in many ways with trends in global sports policy and organizing, which increasingly position sport as a means of social and economic development (Darnell 2012). At the same time, given its explicit connections to revolutionary values of social development and equality, Cuba’s approach to sport needs to be contrasted against the commercialization, privatization, and corporatization that remain hallmarks of the global sports-industrial complex (Maguire 2011).

The Right to Sport in Cuban Society

In 1961, the Cuban government established INDER as an overarching ministry of sport that would coordinate elite training and competition alongside public access to sport programs. Sports such as baseball were effectively nationalized, and sport became nonprofessional. Generous remuneration for top athletes disappeared, and the government introduced a system of moral incentives that adhered to revolutionary values (Huish 2011). The effects of this revolutionary ethos in Cuban sport can still be seen today. Recently, in addressing the Nineteenth UN Council on Human Rights, Cuban ambassador to Switzerland Rodolfo Reyes declared that “sport is a human right.” He added that sport and, more important, access to sport stand as a fundamental human right given that sport builds “individual capabilities and enriches societies by strengthening solidarity and friendship between peoples” (Granma 2012).

At the same time, while Cuba clearly promotes sport as a human right and a means of securing development across a variety of contexts and geographic and political scales, the Cuban approach differs significantly from many sport-focused development projects that tend to align with and even secure the commercialization and privatization of sport. The Cuban government approaches sport as part of social and community development that is distinct from corporatization, whereas many international-development-through-sport programs offer opportunities for corporate expansion and branding (Hayhurst 2011) and/or the enactment of corporate social responsibility programs (Levermore 2010). Indeed, even though there are commercial undertones to sport and sport development in Cuba, the pursuit of moneymaking activities does not necessarily restrict participation and access to sport within the nation (Carter 2008).

In addition, rather than promoting sport as a “tool” to facilitate individual development within the structures of inequality, the Cuban government arguably encourages a more holistic approach to development through sport. Wide participation in sport is encouraged based on universal access but done so alongside other programs focused on health, education, and economic development. Cuba has thus emphasized sport not as a tool for development but as a key pillar to its own social development strategies since the 1960s, and today the place of sport remains strong as a fundamental dimension to Cuba’s development initiatives both at home and abroad. In this way, the political subtext of Reyes’s statement to the United Nations can be read as support for sport as a public good facilitated through universal access rather than sport as a means of producing citizens within the logic of competitive capitalism and/or offering opportunities for corporations and supranational organizations, such as the International Olympic Committee, to “give back” to the less fortunate.

Indeed, Cuba has continued to ensure access to sport alongside other sectors of social programming and resources. Within elementary schools in Cuba, sport is included within the mandatory curriculum from first grade up until twelfth grade. In addition to in-school sport programs, INDER also organizes a wide range of community-based youth sport programs in both recreational and competitive fields. The range of sport programs for youth includes but is not limited to baseball, volleyball, basketball, football, tennis, handball, boxing, tae kwon do, judo, karate, swimming, synchronized swimming, gymnastics, and chess. Such priorities have resulted in estimates that over 90 percent of Cubans have participated in some form of sport or community-based recreation (Huish 2011).

This does not mean, of course, that elite sport is no longer a priority in Cuba. In all of the sport programs listed above, there is clearly an opportunity for youth to advance to elite levels. While this is not distinct in and of itself—the development of youth sport as a feeder to elite sport is a recurring model around the world—of note is that the entire participation and training process of athletes in Cuba is handled within the public sector as a universally accessible good. While for youth in many countries in the world the pathway to elite sport performance comes with high financial costs, in Cuba these costs are absorbed largely by the state. In this regard, Cuba offers a rare case where elite sport development is not only entirely funded by the state but also directly linked through policy and structure to the promotion of sport at the community level.

Good for You, and Good for All

Striking a balance between elite sport and development and mass participation has been and continues to be an issue of central importance for sport policymakers in many countries around the world (De Bosscher and Van Bottenburg 2011). Cuba is no different in facing this basic conundrum. In July 2011, officials from INDER explained to us that the ministry views its success in elite sport not only as a product but also as evidence of the broad participation in sport by Cuban citizens. In this sense, while not perfect, the traditional pyramid model remains largely intact in Cuba given its insularity from privatization. That is, unlike contemporary elite training programs in other countries through which youth are more easily able to develop into elite athletes given access to private resources or because they have privileged access to facilities, Cuba continues to develop its elite athletes largely from a broad pool of participants. Within elementary schools, students participate in sport activities from which teachers and INDER coaches select students who demonstrate advanced ability for elite training. Some may question the opportunity costs of such attention paid to elite training, as it potentially compromises resources that would otherwise be available for other community-based participation programs. Still, the point remains that INDER does not appear to be willing to compromise community-based participation in sport for the sake of elite development; while specialized programs exist throughout the country, so too do recreational programs for youth, adults, and seniors.

That said, although INDER clearly supports broad participation with the search for elite athletes in mind, the emphasis on universal participation does not cease once Cubans pass the age of elite performance. Indeed, the active participation of seniors in sport and recreation programs is evident throughout the country. For example, within barrios across Havana and the countryside, seniors regularly assemble in public parks and squares for morning exercise and calisthenics coordinated by INDER. For seniors, sport and recreation offer a hub for community cohesion but also an opportunity to promote health and healthy aging.

An example of such programming can be found within the Wushu Institute in Havana’s Barrio Chino (Chinatown). This institute for tai chi, dance, martial arts, and Confucius studies was founded in 1994 at the height of the Special Period crisis with assistance from the Confucius Institute in China and INDER. The institute is open to public participation and is meant to promote and maintain traditional Chinese martial arts and dance. The institute runs daily classes with the specific mandate to promote and maintain the health of participants (Salud y Vida 2012). The school is open to anyone in Havana or across Cuba to attend daily classes beginning at 7:30 a.m. and concluding at 9:00 p.m. There are over 4,000 students enrolled in the school and more than 100 instructors. In addition, the school hosts an annual festival that is open to the public in order to demonstrate various martial arts and dance techniques.

Members of the Wushu Institute also participate in numerous INDER-organized events and rallies, such as the annual Terry Fox Run for cancer research, which takes place in Havana in March of each year. In keeping with the Cuban approach to elite performance and mass participation, even though the Wushu Institute engages in internationally recognized elite performance, it remains centered on broad community participation in sport for health and well-being, based on an understanding of the health benefits of martial arts, including tai chi. The Wushu Institute advertises its programs as having benefits for people suffering from high blood pressure, arthritis, diabetes, immunity disorders, and heart conditions (Escuela Cubana de Wushu 2012).

In many ways, the approach illustrates the Cuban approach to community-based physical activity. As it is tied directly to the health system—with physicians prescribing participation to their patients—the Wushu Institute is representative of Cuba’s intersectoral approach to health and sports (Spiegel and Yassi 2004). Since the exercises are open and accessible to all, there is no prohibitive cost that restricts patients from seeking out and accessing these activities. In Cuba, through organizations such as the Wushu Institute, sport is positioned as an integrated part of the development of health, community participation, and advanced training. Perhaps most important, in this system sport is a right rather than a privilege for those able to pay or a benefit conferred on the less fortunate by advantaged organizations or charities.

Cuban Sport and Cooperation Abroad

While Cuba’s program of international medical cooperation is gradually being recognized, little is known about its sports cooperation abroad. The Cuban approach that distinguishes sport from private sector interests and that facilitates community health also connects to its approach to facilitating sport for international cooperation. Cuba has established sport cooperation partnerships with more than 100 nations, and it has offered full scholarships for students from seventy-one low-income countries to train in sport and physical education in Havana (Huish 2011). The Escuela Internacional de Educación Física y Deporte (EIEFD) now has over 1,000 students from sixty-eight countries studying sport and physical education under the agreement that they will return to their home countries in order to help bring sport into marginalized communities within their nations. The school’s mandate is not only to train low-income students as coaches and athletes but also to “train professionals in the essential values of solidarity and humanity with the capacity to positively transform sport and physical education in their home countries” (EIEFD 2012). Such capacity building is at first glance not unusual, as many nongovernmental organizations, corporations, and charities offer programs for athlete training, coaching development, and even elite performance. However, these organizations perpetuate and solidify traditional flows of development aid from North to South. They rarely question global structures of inequality and may even tacitly encourage individual development over community needs (Darnell 2012). By contrast, EIEFD’s mandate to offer training to foreign nationals from poor countries suggests a commitment to development based on South-South cooperation as well as a political use of sport to promote Cuban values of self-sufficiency and universal access.

Cuban Sport Development: Challenges Ahead

Even though Cuba has achieved success by embracing sport as a human right and supporting universal access, significant challenges lie ahead. Chief among these is that professional sports leagues—which enjoy an increasingly global reach—are more willing and able than ever to pay astronomical salaries for top athletic talent. Indeed, in recent years, many Cuban professionals have left INDER to play professional sports in the United States, particularly in Major League Baseball. INDER recognizes these pressures as well as the need to develop clear strategies regarding how best to negotiate the tension between individuals seeking prestige and generous salaries against those willing to serve sport as public goodwill. Cuba has entered into dialogue with the United States on how to negotiate the pressures of elite players hoping to go to the U.S. major leagues (Univisión 2012b), an indication that Cuba may be changing its attitude about the place of sport against the enormous pressures of privatization and globalization of sport (Univisión 2012a). However, no forms of cooperation have emerged between INDER and the U.S. majors. As a result, Cuba has sought to tighten control of the athletic exodus from the island by requiring letters of permission for athletes to go abroad for fear of desertion to the United States (Calgary Herald 2012; Nuevo Herald 2013).

Also of note, Cuba has increasingly found opportunities to capitalize on sport to its own benefit. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cubadeportes, INDER’s for-profit wing, sold sporting equipment to other Eastern bloc countries. Today, Cubadeportes works with INDER to arrange contracts of Cuban coaches traveling to other nations to train elite-performance athletes. The host country is expected to pay INDER directly for their services, and these coaches also receive a higher salary in local currency than they would receive working in Cuba. The idea behind these exchanges is that the hard currency gained abroad by the some 600 coaches working in 100 countries can fund the development of sport programs within Cuba at both the elite and the recreational level. While the international cooperation of these coaches, trainers, and professionals may help to integrate Cuba into a global sports community and contribute to economic development for the state, tensions for recruitment into the professional ranks will remain, and it will be a delicate balance to find the means of ensuring the right to sport while furthering solidarity and cashing in on economic opportunities abroad.

In sum, we do not see these future challenges as fundamentally contradictory or even impossible to overcome for INDER and Cuba. In part, this is because of the Cuban record in sport, in which a progressive commitment to sport as an integrated pillar of development, even during extreme economic crisis, has resulted in levels of participation and elite success that are enviable by even the standards of rich countries. While the continued privatization and commercialization of sport on a global scale presents its own unique set of challenges to countries such as Cuba as well as to the belief in rights-based sport for development more broadly (Maguire 2011), this by no means spells the end of sport as a public good in Cuba. Indeed, as long as the Cuban government remains committed to ensuring that access to sport be secured as a human right and one to be facilitated primarily in and by the public interest, it is likely that sport will remain an important holistic element of Cuban development domestically as well as in its international solidarity and outreach.

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———. 2012b. “Cuba dispuesta a dialogar con EEUU sobre robo de talentos en béisbol.” January 13.