The endeavor to include ourselves in the “free world”—the hilarious name that capitalist countries today apply to themselves and bestow in passing on their oppressed colonies and neo-colonies—is a modem version of the nineteenth-century attempt by Creole exploiting classes to subject us to a supposed “civilization”; and this latter, in its turn, is a repetition of the designs of European conquistadors. In all these cases, with only slight variations, it is plain that Latin America does not exist except, at the very most, as a resistance that must be overcome in order to implant true culture, that of ‘ ‘the modern peoples who gratify themselves with the epithet of civilized.”72 Pareto’s words here recall so well those of Marti, who wrote in 1883 of civilization as “the vulgar name under which contemporary European man operates.”
In the face of what the conquistadores, the Creole oligarchs, and the imperialists and their flunkies have attempted, our culture —taking this term in its broad historical and anthropological sense—has been in a constant process of formation: our authentic culture, the culture created by the mestizo populace, those descendants of Indians and blacks and Europeans whom Bolivar and Artigas led so well; the culture of the exploited classes, of the radical petite bourgeoisie of Jose Marti, of the poor peasantry of Emiliano Zapata, of the working class of Luis Emilio Recabarren and Jesus Menendez; the culture “of the hungry Indian masses, of the landless peasants, of the exploited workers” mentioned in the Second Declaration of Havana (1962), “of the honest and brilliant intellectuals who abound in our suffering Latin-American countries’1; the culture of a people that now encompasses “a family numbering two hundred million brothers” and that “has said: Enough! and has begun to move.”
That culture—like every living culture, especially at its dawn—is on the move. It has, of course, its own distinguishing characteristics, even though it was bom—like every culture, although in this case in a particularly planetary way — of a synthesis. And it does not limit itself in the least to a mere repetition of the elements that formed it. This is something that the Mexican Alfonso Reyes, though he directed his attention to Europe more often than we would have wished, has underscored well. On speaking with another Latin American about the characterization of our culture as one of synthesis, he says:
Neither he nor I were understood by our European collegues, who thought we were referring to the résumé or elemental compendium of the European conquests. According to such a facile interpretation, the synthesis would be a terminal point. But that is not the case: here the synthesis is the new point of departure, a structure composed of prior and dispersed elements that—like all structures—transcends them and contains in itself new qualities. H20 is not only a union of hydrogen and oxygen; it is, moreover, water.73
This is especially apparent if we consider that the “water” in question is formed not only from European elements, which are those Reyes emphasizes, but also from the indigenous and the African. But even with his limitations, it is still within Reyes’s capacity to state at the end of that piece:
I say now before the tribunal of international thinkers within reach of my voice: we recognize the right to universal citizenship which we have won. We have arrived at our majority. Very soon you will become used to reckoning with us. 74
These words were spoken in 1936. Today that “very soon” has already arrived. If we were asked to indicate the date that separates Reyes’s hope from our certainty—considering the usual difficulties in that sort of thing—I would say 3959, the year the Cuban Revolution triumphed. One could also go along marking some of the dates that are milestones in the advent of that culture. The first, relating to the indigenous peoples’ resistance and black slave revolts against European oppression, are imprecise. The year 1780 is important: it marks the uprising of Tupac Amaru in Peru. In 1803, the independence of Haiti. In 1810, the beginning of revolutionary movements in various Spanish colonies in America— movements extending well into the century. In 1867, the victory of Juarez over Maximilian. In 1895, the beginning of the final stage of Cuba’s war against Spain—a war that Marti foresaw as an action against emerging Yankee imperialism. In 1910, the Mexican Revolution. In the 1920s and 1930s, Sandino’s resistance in Nicaragua and the establishment on the continent of the working class as a vanguard force. In 1938, the nationalization of Mexican petroleum by Cardenas. In 1944, the coming to power of a democratic regime in Guatemala, which was to be radicalized in office. In 1946, the beginning of Juan Domingo Peron’s presidency in Argentina, under which the “shirtless ones” would become an influential force. In 1952, the Bolivian revolution. In 1959, the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. In 1961, the Bay of Pigs: the first military defeat of Yankee imperialism in America, and the declaration of our revolution as Marxist-Leninist. In 1967, the fall of Che Guevara while leading a nascent Latin-American army in Bolivia. In 1970, the election of socialist president Salvador Allende in Chile.
These dates, seen superficially, might not appear to have a very direct relationship to our culture. But, in fact, the opposite is true. Our culture is—and can only be—the child of revolution, of our multisecular rejection of all colonialisms. Our culture, like every culture, requires as a primary condition our own existence. I cannot help but cite here, although I have done so before elsewhere, one of the occasions on which Marti spoke to this fact in the most simple and illuminating way. ‘‘Letters, which are expression, cannot exist,” he wrote in 1881, ‘‘so long as there is no essence to express in them. Nor will there exist a Spanish-American literature until Spanish America exists.' ’ And further. ‘ ‘Let us lament now that we are without a great work of art; not because we do not have that work but because it is a sign that we are still without a great people that would be reflected in it.”75 Latin-American culture, then, has become a possibility in the first place because of the many who have struggled, the many who still struggle, for the existence of that “great people” that in 1881, Marti still referred to as Spanish America but that some years later he would prefer to name, more accurately, “Our America. ”
But this is not, of course, the only culture forged here. There is also the culture of anti-America, that of the oppressors, of those who tried (or are trying) to impose on these lands metropolitan schemes, or simply, tamely to reproduce in a provincial fashion what might have authenticity in other countries. In the best of cases, to repeat, it is a question of the influence of
those who have worked, in some cases patriotically, to shape social life in accordance with models of other highly developed countries, whose practices are the result of an organic process over the course of centuries [and thus] have betrayed the cause of the true emancipation of Latin America.76
This anti-America culture is still very visible. It is still proclaimed and perpetuated in structures, works, ephemerides. But without a doubt, it is suffering the pangs of death, just like the system upon which it is based. We can and must contribute to a true assessment of the history of the oppressors and that of the oppressed. But of course, the triumph of the latter will be the work, above all, of those for whom history is a function not of erudition but of deeds. It is they who will achieve the definitive triumph of the true America, reestablishing—this time in a different light—the unity of our immense continent. “Spanish America, Latin America—call it what you wish,“wrote Mariategui,
will not find its unity in the bourgeois order. That order divides us, perforce, into petty nationalisms. It is for Anglo-Saxon North America to consummate and draw to a close capitalist civilization. The future of Latin America is socialist.77
Such a future, which has already begun, will end by rendering incomprehensible the idle question about our existence.
And Ariel Now?
The Ariel of Shakespeare’s great myth, which we have been following in these notes, is, as has been said, the intellectual from the same island as Caliban.78 He can choose between serving Prospero—the case with intellectuals of the anti-American persuasion—at which he is apparently unusually adept but for whom he is nothing more than a timorous slave, or allying himself with Caliban in his struggle for true freedom. It could be said that I am thinking, in Gramscian terms, above all of the “traditional" intellectuals: those whom the proletariat, even during the period of transition, must assimilate in the greatest possible number while it generates its own “organic" intellectuals.
It is common knowledge, of course, that a more or less important segment of intellectuals at the service of the exploited classes usually conies from the exploiting classes, with which they have broken radically. This is the classic, to say the least, case of such supreme figures as Marx, Engels, and Lenin. The fact had been observed already in The Communist Manifesto (1848) itself, where Marx and Engels wrote:
In times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the process of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact, within the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its bands . . . [S]o now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat and, in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.79
If this is obviously valid with regard to the most highly developed capitalist nations—the ones Marx and Engels had in mind in the Manifesto—something more must be added in the case of our countries. Here that “portion of the bourgeois ideologists” to which Marx and Engels refer experiences a second form of rupture: except for that sector proceeding organically from the exploited classes, the intelligentsia that considers itself revolutionary must break all ties with its class of origin (frequently the petite bourgeoisie) and must besides sever the nexus of dependence upon the metropolitan culture from which it has learned, nonetheless, a language as well as a conceptual and technical apparatus.80 That language will be of profit, to use Shakespearean terminology, in cursing Prospero. Such was the case with lose Maria Heredia, who exclaimed in the finest Spanish of the first third of the nineteenth century, “The vilest of traitors might serve him,/ But the tyrant’s passion is all in vain./ For the sea’s immense and rolling waves/ Span the distance from Cuba to Spain.” It was also the case of Jose Marti. After spending fifteen years in the United States—which would allow him to become completely familiar with modernity and to detect within that country the emergence of North American imperialism— he wrote: “I have lived in the monster, and I know its entrails; and my sling is the sling of David." While I can foresee that my suggestion that Heredia and Marti went about cursing will have an unpleasant ring in the ears of some, I wish to remind them that “vile traitors” and “monster’ ’ do have something to do with curses. Both Shakespeare and reality would appear to argue well against their objection. And Heredia and Marti are only archetypal examples. More recently we have not been lacking either in individuals who attribute the volcanic violence in some of Fidel’s recent speeches to deformations—Caliban, let us not forget, is always seen as deformed by the hostile eye—in our revolution. Response to his address at the first National Congress on Education and Culture is one example of this. That some of those shocked should have praised Fanon (others, perhaps had never heard of him, since they have as much to do with politics, in the words of Rodolfo Walsh, as with astrophysics), and now attribute an attitude that is ai the very root of our historical being to a deformation or to foreign influence, might be a sign of any number of things—among them, total incoherence. It might also be a question of total ignorance, if not disdain, regarding our concrete realities, past and present. This, most assuredly, does not qualify them to have very much to do with our future.
The situation and tasks of the intellectual in the service of the exploited classes differ, of course, depending upon whether it is a question of a country where the revolution has yet to triumph or one where the revolution is already underway. And, as we have recalled above, the term “intellectual” is broad enough to counter any attempts at simplification. The intellectual can be a theoretician and leader like Mariategui or Mella; a scholar, like Fernando Ortiz; or a writer like Cesar Vallejo. In all these cases their concrete example is more instructive than any vague generalization.81
The situation, as I said, is different in countries where the Latin-American masses have at last achieved power and set in motion a socialist revolution. The encouraging case of Chile is too immediate to allow for any conclusions to be drawn. But the socialist revolution in Cuba is more than twelve years old, and by this time it is possible to point out certain facts—although, owing to the nature of this essay, I propose to mention here only a few salient characteristics.
This revolution—in both practice and theory absolutely faithful to the most exacting popular Latin-American tradition—has satisfied in full the aspiration of Mariategui. “We certainly do not wish for socialism in Latin American to be a carbon copy,” he said. ‘ ‘It must be a heroic creation. With our own reality, in our own language, we must give life to Indo-American socialism.”82
That is why our revolution cannot be understood without a knowledge of “our own reality,” “our own language,” and to these I have referred extensively. But the unavoidable pride in having inherited the best of Latin-American history, in struggling in the front ranks of a family numbering 200 million brothers and sisters, must not cause us to forget that as a consequence we form part of another even larger vanguard, a planetary vanguard—that of the socialist countries emerging on every continent. This means that our inheritance is also the worldwide inheritance of socialism and that we commit ourselves to it as the most beautiful, the most lofty, the most combative chapter in the history of humanity. We feel as unequivocally our own socialism’s past: from the dreams of the utopian socialists to the impassioned scientific rigor of Marx (“That German of tender spirit and iron hand,” as Marti said) and Engels, from the heroic endeavor of the Paris Commune of a century ago to the startling triumph of the October Revolution and the abiding example of Lenin, from the establishment of new socialist governments in Europe as a result of the defeat of fascism in World War II to the success of socialist revolutions in such “underdeveloped” Asian countries as China, Korea, and Vietnam. When we affirm our commitment to such a magnificent inheritance—one that we aspire besides to enrich with our own contributions—we are well aware that this quite naturally entails shining moments as well as difficult ones, achievements as well as errors. How could we not be aware of this when on making our own history (an operation that has nothing to do with reading the history of others), we find ourselves also subject to achievements and errors, just as all real historical movements have been and will continue to be!
This elemental fact is constantly being recalled, not only by our declared enemies but even by some supposed friends, whose only apparent objection to socialism is, at bottom, that it exists—in all its grandeur and with its difficulties, in spite of the flawlessness with which this written swan appears in books. We cannot but ask ourselves why we should go on offering explanations to those supposed friends about the problems we face in real-life socialist construction, especially when their consciences allow them to remain integrated into exploiting societies or, in some cases, even to abandon our neocolonial countries and request, hat in hand, a place in those very societies. No, there is no reason to give any explanation to that sort of people, who, were they honest, should be concerned about having so much in common with our enemies. The frivolous way in which some intellectuals who call themselves leftists (and who, nonetheless, don’t seem to give a damn about the masses) rush forth shamelessly to repeat word for word the same critiques of the socialist world proposed and promulgated by capitalism only demonstrates that they have not broken with capitalism as radically as they might perhaps think. The natural consequence of this attitude is that under the guise of rejecting error (something upon which any opposing factions can come to an agreement), socialism as a whole, reduced arbitrarily to such errors, is rejected in passing; or there is the deformation and generalization of a concrete historical moment and, extracting it from its context, the attempt to apply it to other historical moments that have their own characteristics, their own virtues, and their own defects. This is one of the many things that, in Cuba, we have learned in the flesh.
During these years, in search of original and above all genuine solutions to our problems, an extensive dialogue on cultural questions has taken place in Cuba. Casa de las Americas, in particular, has published a number of contributions to the dialogue. I am thinking particularly of the round table in which I participated, with a group of colleagues, in 1969.83
And, of course, the leaders of the revolution themselves have not been remiss in expressing opinions on these matters. Even though, as Fidel has said, “we did not have our Yenan Conference” before the triumph of the revolution,84 since that time discussions, meetings, and congresses designed to grapple with these questions have taken place. I shall limit myself to recalling a few of the many texts by Fidel and Che. Regarding the former, there is his speech at the National Library of 30 June 1961, published that year and known since then as Words to the Intellectuals; his speech of 13 March 1969 in which he dealt with the democratization of the university and to which we referred a number of times in the above-mentioned round table; and finally, his contribution to the recent Congress on Education and Culture, which we published, together with the declaration of the congress, in number 65-66 of Casa de las Americas. Of course, these are not by any means the only occasions on which Fidel has taken up cultural problems, but I think they offer a sufficiently clear picture of the revolution’s pertinent criteria.
Although a decade has passed between the first of these speeches—which I am convinced has scarcely been read by many of its commentators, who limit themselves to quoting the odd sentence or two out of context—and the most recent one, what an authentic reading of both demonstrates above all is a consistency over the ten-year period. In 1971, Fidel has this to say about literary and other artistic works:
We, a revolutionary people, value cultural and artistic creations in
proportion to what they offer mankind, in proportion to their
contribution to the revindication of man, the liberation of man, the happiness of man . . . Our evaluation is political. There can be no aesthetic value in opposition to man. Aesthetic value cannot exist in opposition to justice, in opposition to the welfare or in opposition to the happiness of man. It cannot exist!
In 1961, he had declared:
It is man himself, his fellow man, the redemption of his fellow man that constitutes the objective of the revolutionary. If they ask us revolutionaries what matters most to us, we say the people, and we will always say the people. The people in the truest sense, that is, the majority of the people, those who have had to live in exploitation and in the crudest neglect. Our basic concern will always be the great majority of the people, that is, the oppressed and exploited classes. The prism through which we see everything is this: whatever is good for them will be good for us; whatever is noble, useful, and beautiful for them will be noble, useful, and beautiful for us.
And those words of 1961, so often cited out of context, must be returned to that context for a full understanding of their meaning:
Within the revolution, everything; outside the revolution, nothing.
Outside the revolution, nothing, because the revolution also has its rights; and the first right of the revolution is to be, to exist. No one, to the extent that the revolution understands the interests of the people, to the extent that the revolution expresses the interest of the nation as a whole, can maintain any right in opposition to it.
But consistency is not repetition. The correspondence between the two speeches does not mean that the past ten years have gone by in vain. At the beginning of his Words to the Intellectuals Fidel had recalled that the economic and social revolution taking place in Cuba was bound inevitably to produce in its turn a revolution in the culture of our country. The decisions proclaimed in the 1969 speech on the democratization of the university along with those of the 1971 speech at the National Congress on Education and Culture correspond, among other things, to the very transformation mentioned already in 1961 as an outcome of the economic and social revolution. During those ten years there has been taking place an uninterrupted radicalization of the revolution, which implies a growing participation of the masses in the country’s destiny. If the agrarian reform of 1959 will be followed by an agrarian revolution, the literacy campaign will inspire a campaign for follow-up courses, and the later announcement of the democratization of the university already supposes that the masses have conquered the domains of so-called high culture. Meanwhile, in a parallel way, the process of syn-dical democratization brings about an inexorable growth in the role played by the working class in the life of the country.
In 1961 this could not yet have been the case. In that year the literacy campaign was only just being carried out. The foundations of a truly new culture were barely being laid. By now, 1971, a great step forward has been taken in the development of that culture; a step already foreseen in 1961, one involving tasks that must inevitably be accomplished by any revolution that calls itself socialist: the extension of education to all of the people, its firm grounding in revolutionary principles, and the construction and safeguarding of a new, socialist culture.
To better understand the goals as well as the specific characteristics of our developing cultural transformation, it is useful to compare it to similar processes in other socialist countries. The creation of conditions by which an entire people who have lived in exploitation and illiteracy gains access to the highest levels of knowledge and creativity is one of the most beautiful achievements of a revolution.
Cultural questions also engaged a good part of Ernesto Che Guevara’s attention. His study, El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba [Man and Socialism in Cuba], is sufficiently well known to make comment on it unnecessary here. But the reader should be warned, above all, against following the example of those who take him a la carte, selecting, for example, his censure of a certain conception of a socialist realism but not his censure of decadent art under modern capitalism and its continuation in our society—or vice versa.85 Or who forget with what astonishing clarity he foresaw certain problems of our artistic life, expressing himself in terms that on being taken up again by pens less prestigious than his own, would raise objections no one dared make to Che himself.
Because it is less known than Man and Socialism in Cuba, I would like to close by citing at some length the end of a speech delivered by Che at the University of Las Villas on 28 December 1959, that is, at the very beginning our our revolution. The university had made him professor honoris causa in the School of Pedagogy, and Che’s speech was to express his gratitude for the distinction. He did so, but what he did above all was to propose to the university, to its professors and students, a transformation that all of them—and us—would have to undergo in order to be considered truly revolutionary, truly useful:
I would never think of demanding that the distinguished professors or the students presently associated with the University of Las Villas perform the miracle of admitting to the university the masses of workers and peasants. The road here is long; it is a process all of you have lived through, one entailing many years of preparatory study. What I do ask, based on my own limited experience as a revolutionary and rebel commandante, is that the present students of the University of Las Villas understand that study is the patrimony of no one and that the place of study where you carry out your work is the patrimony of no one—it belongs to all the people of Cuba, and it must be extended to the people or the people will seize it. And I would hope—because I began the whole series of ups and downs in my career as a university student, as a member of the middle class, as a doctor with middle-class perspectives and the same youthful aspirations that you must have, and because I have changed in the course of the struggle, because I am convinced of the overwhelming necessity of the revolution and the infinite justice of the people’s cause—I would hope for those reasons that you, today proprietors of the university, will extend it to the people. 1 do not say this as a threat, so as to avoid its being taken over by them tomorrow. I say it simply because it would be one more among so many beautiful examples in Cuba today: that the proprietors of the Central University of Las Villas, the students, offer it to the people through their revolutionary government. And to the distinguished professors, my colleagues, I have to say something similar: become black, mulatto, a worker, a peasant; go down among the people, respond to the people, that is, to all the necessities of all of Cuba. When this is accomplished, no one will be the loser; we all will have gained, and Cuba can then continue its march toward the future with a more vigorous step, and you will not need to include in your cloister this doctor, commandante, bank president, and today professor of pedagogy who now takes leave of you.86
That is to say, Che proposed that the "European university,” as Marti would have said, yield before the “American university.” He proposed to Ariel, through his own most luminous and sublime example if ever there-was one, that he seek from Caliban the honor of a place in his rebellious and glorious ranks.
—Havana, 7-20 June 1971 —Translated by Lynn Garafola,
David Arthur McMurray, and Roberto Marquez