Cuban Memory Wars by Michael J. Bustamante

Author:Michael J. Bustamante
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2021-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

From the “Time of History” to Futurity’s Past

“They asked this man for his time / to be added to the time of History,” wrote Heberto Padilla in 1968. “They asked him for his lips, / his dry cracked lips, to affirm / and with each affirmation to build up a dream.”13 In his controversial 1968 collection Fuera del juego (Out of the Game), Padilla’s critical reflections on the binding of individual subjectivity to national epic had marked his emergence as an intellectual bête noire within the Revolution’s cultural establishment. Like Antón Arrufat’s play Los siete contra Tebas, Fuera del juego received a UNEAC prize but was only printed with a foreword noting UNEAC’s protest against the “antihistoricism” and “ambiguity” of its contents.14 By 1971, as we saw in chapter 4, the poet’s growing dissidence had culminated in arrest and an internationally denounced public “self-critique.” Oddly, however, had Padilla’s lines continued circulating, they might have taken on the powers of nostalgic incantation. As reliance on moral mobilization shifted toward more mundane patterns of central planning, the true “time of History” for Cubans in many ways seemed to have come and gone.

In the 1970s, the stakes of Cuba’s past, present, and future no longer seemed quite as immediate, intimately intertwined, or dangerously in the balance as in the decade before. Of course, the national saga continued to impregnate public rhetoric. In addition to signaling a new age of cultural orthodoxy, the final declaration of the 1971 National Congress of Education and Culture insisted that Cubans were living “true history,” the era in which “the masses” were the protagonists of social life.15 Official media likewise cast the bureaucratic “institutionalization” of the state along Sovietizing lines in this period as a new front of urgent battle, while cases of Cuban exile terrorism suggested that the Revolution’s opponents still presented an existential threat.16 Yet, whereas through the late 1960s many Cubans still believed that they were consummating the island’s history in real time—notwithstanding that others harbored real doubts—by the next decade the joyfully chaotic, unpredictable rallies that characterized the Revolution’s first years had long since morphed into routines of mass organization. When Leonid Brezhnev became the first Soviet premier to visit Cuba in 1974, the island’s political leadership greeted him with a full military review, a spectacle of state order, not popular euphoria, to seal Cuban-Soviet goodwill.17

Officially, any note of retrospective melancholy remained taboo in revolutionary political culture. Cuban literary giant turned cultural diplomat Alejo Carpentier wrote fawningly in 1979, “I have to profoundly thank the Cuban Revolution for the fact that … due to its energetic impulse toward the future, I have become immune to the aging, morbid fascination of nostalgia. I have been lucky to belong to a generation of Cubans that, from the first of January 1959, has been cured forever of empty longings, convinced by visible and tangible achievements that, for us, no past was better than the present.”18 Fidel Castro, too, denied that time had sapped the public’s spirit. “What has experience taught us?” he asked in 1975.

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