retamar caliban (8 page)

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: