Essays in Cuban Intellectual History (New Concepts in Latino American Cultures)

New Concepts in Latino American Cultures A Series Edited by Licia Fiol-Matta & José Quiroga Ciphers of History: Latin American Readings for a Cultural Age by Enrico Mario Santí Cosmopolitanisms and Latin America: Against the Destiny of Place by Jacqueline Loss Remembering Maternal Bodies: Melancholy in Latina and Latin American Women’s Writing by Benigno Trigo The Ethics of Latin American Literary Criticism: Reading Otherwise edited by Erin Graff Zivin Modernity and the Nation in Mexican Representations of Masculinity: From Sensuality to Bloodshed by Héctor Domínguez-Ruvalcaba White Negritude: Race, Writing, and Brazilian Cultural Identity by Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond Essays in Cuban Intellectual History by Rafael Rojas Mestiz@ Scripts, Digital Migrations, and the Territories of Writing by Damián Baca Confronting History and Modernity in Mexican Narrative by Elisabeth Guerrero

Forthcoming Titles Cuba in the Special Period: Culture and Ideology in the 1990s edited by Ariana Hernandez-Reguant Cuban Women Writers: Imagining A Matria by Madeline Cámara Betancourt The Mestizo State by Joshua Lund Telling Ruins in Latin America edited by Michael J. Lazzara and Vicky Unruh Other Worlds: New Argentinian Film by Gonzalo Aguilar

New Directions in Latino American Cultures Also Edited by Licia Fiol-Matta & José Quiroga New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Zone by Raquel Rivera The Famous 41: Sexuality and Social Control in Mexico, 1901 edited by Robert McKee Irwin, Edward J. McCaughan, and Michele Rocío Nasser Velvet Barrios: Popular Culture & Chicana/o Sexualities edited by Alicia Gaspar de Alba, with a Foreword by Tomás Ybarra Frausto Tongue Ties: Logo-Eroticism in Anglo-Hispanic Literature by Gustavo Perez-Firmat Bilingual Games: Some Literary Investigations edited by Doris Sommer Jose Martí: An Introduction by Oscar Montero New Tendencies in Mexican Art by Rubén Gallo The Masters and the Slaves: Plantation Relations and Mestizaje in American Imaginaries edited by Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond The Letter of Violence: Essays on Narrative and Theory by Idelber Avelar Intellectual History of the Caribbean by Silvio Torres-Saillant None of the Above: Contemporary Puerto Rican Cultures and Politics edited by Frances Negrón-Muntaner Queer Latino Testimonio, Keith Haring, and Juanito Xtravaganza: Hard Tails by Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé

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Essays in Cuban Intellectual History

Rafael Rojas

ESSAYS IN CUBAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

Copyright © Rafael Rojas, 2008. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–60300–4 ISBN-10: 0–230–60300–9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rojas, Rafael, 1965– Essays in Cuban intellectual history / by Rafael Rojas. p. cm.––(New concepts in Latino American cultures) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–230–60300–9 1. Cuba––Intellectual life. 2. National characteristics, Cuban. 3. Cuban literature––History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series. F1760.R65 2007 306.2097291––dc22

2007024925

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: April 2008 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

Contents

Introduction

1

1 José Martí and the First Cuban Republicanism

9

2 The Moral Frontier

25

3 Fernando Ortiz: Transculturation and Nationalism

43

4

65

Orígenes and the Poetics of History

5 Gallery of Cuban Writing

93

6 Diaspora and Memory in Cuban Literature

115

7 Symbolic Dilemmas of the Cuban Transition

135

Notes

155

Bibliography

177

Index

191

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Introduction There you have it, Cuba lacks the poetry of remembrance; its echoes only repeat the poetry of hope. Its buildings lack history. —Condesa de Merlin

During the eighteenth century, Atlantic civilization, unfolding in its European and American spaces, underwent a decisive change in its forms of cultural and political sociability. The state system of the ancien régime, which referred back to the absolutist descendit of St. Thomas Aquinas—God-Monarch-KingdomCity—was inverted according to the logic of representative citizenship. Other ascendant bonds such as patriotic societies, Jacobin clubs, parliamentary alliances, and enlightened salons, which Emile Cioran has described as “gardens of doubts,” overflowed the monarchical corpus. These transformations gave rise to what Jürgen Habermas has called the public space: a kind of neutral ground between society and state where the discourses and the institutions of civil opinion and political representation are articulated.1 The enlightened public sphere thus completed the transition from the holistic order, in which the citizens were integrated into the whole of the State by means of the modern order of corporations; that great assembly of free and egalitarian individuals organized in a horizontal civility.2 In Spanish America, the European ancien régime had been tightly secured. A complex system of castes was added to military and ecclesiastic corporations that increasingly reinforced the stratified bonds of the state. The fragmentation of the social

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whole extended the closed spaces of culture to the point that they became predominant. The Church, the market, and liturgical festivities constituted the narrow public sphere, while the family and the body were the locus of the essential practices of civil and religious life. The shared piety, rosary prayer, veneration of the relic, imploration of manuscripts, and heraldic identity floated over a domestic image of the world.3 The field of the private was subject not only to these institutions, but also to the actual political and cultural imaginary of the ancien régime.4 Accordingly, with the Enlightenment, the displacement of the holistic order by the modern order also was an expression of the conflict between the public and the private. This new civility presumed the dismantling of those social formations that converted knowledge into mystery. Cuba did not experience a holistic order like that of the other zones of Spanish American colonial world. The transition from Creole alterity to national identity did not take place until the middle of the nineteenth century, and its Independence arrived when Europe and the Americas had already been experimenting with various forms of modernization. The Cuban ancien régime—the colonial society of the nineteenth century—was partially secularized by the Spanish liberalism of that era. The Church, the army, the Inquisition, the courts, the high courts, the town councils, and religious orders were corporally weak. (It is true that slavery was not abolished until 1886, but even so, the inexistence of a legal metanarrative concerning castes made possible an intense mixture of races and an accelerated cultural cohesion of nationality). The insular colony was neither free enough to be modern nor corporatist enough to be traditional. Both insufficiencies, those of modernity and tradition, contributed to the mixture that has always marked the exceptional casuistry of the island. Therefore, it seems that more than just a history of transitions, abrupt or smooth, into modern world, as in Europe and other parts of the Americas, Cuba has lived a series of tensions between modernity and its utopic resistance. The lack of a corporatist past, of a true ancien régime, left Cuban conservatism without historical references. In Cuba it is difficult to find an intellectual like the Mexicans Lucas Alamán

Introduction

3

and José María Gutiérrez de Estrada; the Peruvians Felipe Pardo and Benito Laso; the Ecuadorian Gabriel García Moreno, or the Central American José Antonio Irisarri. Not even Unión Constitucional—the Spanish party of the last decades of the colony—opposed to independence and autonomy of the island, reached the ultramontane definition that the great conservative continental organizations held, like Partido Conservador de Chile and the monarchical parties of Brazil, Mexico, and Peru.5 This absence of a conservative tradition, far from mobilizing the ideological reserves of Liberalism, divided them and produced new polarizations. Cuban political culture, from its beginnings, followed a trajectory of the left—or dissolved both extremes into an amorphous center. Instead of a confrontation between the modern pole and the traditional pole, it witnessed the hostility of an incomplete Liberalism and an intransigent antiliberalism. In Cuba, the Right has sacrificed everything—including sovereignty and equality—for the growth of national wealth; while the Left has sacrificed everything—including wealth and comfort—for independence. That is why the Right’s political culture identifies with liberal and reform values, in opposition to a Left of Jacobin and revolutionary inspiration. The displacement that we have described is represented within the Western canon as a lack of form, an absence of a well-defined political geography. Nevertheless, apart from the resistance to formalization, Cuban political culture cannot free itself from this “primordial dichotomy,” which conditions all insertions into the sphere of the state. Norberto Bobbio has presented this fundamental dyad in the following way: since the age of Rousseau and Burke, the Left has put more of an emphasis on the value of equality, while the Right concentrates its discourse and practices on the ideal of freedom.6 This is also the case for Cuba, where the antithesis acquires meaning as each ideological pole demonstrates its willingness to make sacrifices to define its priorities: the Left always resorts to authoritarian forms of power, which limit freedom, and the Right always upholds a hierarchical conception of order that restricts equality. The formation of the First Republic (1902–1933) set the stage for a possible polarization between supporters of the new

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order and the old; this polarization constitutes the historical frame for a modern political geography in Cuba. Before 1902, problems concerning sovereignty dislocated any tension between political forces. Yet paradoxically, almost all of the intellectuals who strived for the foundation of a national state, regardless of their ideological stance, idealized the colonial ancien régime. As Raúl Cepero Bonilla demonstrates in Azúcar y abolición, in the first decade of the Republic, Manuel Sanguily and Rafael Montoro, Francisco Figueras and Manuel Márquez Sterling, Raimundo Cabrera and Enrique Collazo; autonomists and separatists, reformists and revolutionaries, all possessed the nostalgic impression that Independence transferred Cuban control to foreign hands.7 Even Enrique José Varona himself, for whom colonial inertia was the greatest obstacle to the Republic’s modernity, wrote once that following the separatist wars “Cubans had lost economic supremacy, and had not achieved political power.”8 The myth of the lost colonial paradise was thus born as an enunciation that ran parallel to the discourse of the frustrated Republic. Fernando Ortiz and Jorge Mañach, while attesting to the cultural crisis of the first Republic, were in a certain way dealing with Oswald Spengler’s metahistory: the splendor of the colonial period was exceeded by the decadence of the Republic. “Cuban society is breaking up. Cuba is casting itself onto barbarism,” warned Ortiz in 1924.9 The following year, Mañach claimed in a similarly admonishing tone that “culture was a shipwreck, characterized by a churlish every man for himself attitude.”10 But the twenty-two-year-old Cuban state did not have time to experience the summit of its existence and then plunge into the abyss. Besides, the history of the first two decades of the Republic left little to inspire hope: American interventions, racial wars, the uprising of caudillos, electoral farce, latifundium, mockery (choteo), and so-and-so-ness (fulanismo). Without doubt, the cultural decline to which Ortiz and Mañach alluded was contrasted with a period of civilization and solidarity: the golden age that is the basis of any change in spirit and any utopic society. And such an epoch in early-twentieth-century Cuba was none other than that of the moral and political

Introduction

5

nineteenth century, when Cubans owned the land and envisioned a culture, conceived of the nation, and conquered the state. The most complete and credible mythologization of the colonial order appeared in the works of Ramiro Guerra. From Azúcar y población en las Antillas to Mudos Testigos, and Por las veredas del pasado, Guerra constructed an idyllic image of the moral and physical world of the Creole. The agriculture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was, according to him, a model of efficiency, the market economy, the dominance of the small estate, and the sharecrop system. The patrician was the native son, the natural subject who created the language of nationality. Consequently, it is in the image of the Creole that Guerra fused the two key figures of epic patriotism: the hero and the rhapsodist. From the first came the political act that registers history, and from the second, the spiritual testimony arranged by memory. But both owed their gesture and voice to the possession of the land.11And here, Guerra, employing the myth of Anteo, was giving the final touch to the Creole discourse begun in the eighteenth century. Since, if for José Martín Félix de Arrate, Anteo el indiano, son of Spain, deactivated the telluric metaphor by living without the assistance of the mother country, for Guerra on the other hand, Anteo el criollo reestablished the classical myth, transforming the land into nation.12 Ortiz, Mañach, and Guerra transform in the mid-twentieth century the discourse of the frustrated Republic—negative Cubanity and decadence—into a discourse of national civic restoration.13 The new narrative concerning identity now required an historical plot that would drive forward its cultural and political expressions. This is how the text of the island memory extended through the studies of Domingo FigarolaCaneda, Emeterio Santovenia, Emilio Roig de Leuchsenrig, Juan M. Cosculluela, Carlos M. Trelles, Francisco González del Valle, Joaquín Llaverías, José María Chacón y Calvo, Enrique Gay Calbó, Fernando Portuondo, José Luciano Franco, and Herminio Portell Vilá, among others. This vast Republican historiography, whose final testimony was the 1952 publication of Historia de la nación cubana, coordinated by Guerra y

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Santovenia, had as its corrolate the archeology of island though, the two finding expression in the fundamental works of Roberto Agramonte, Medardo Vitier, Elías Entralgo, and Humberto Piñera Llera.14 In the years between 1933 and 1952—that is to say, during the genesis, existence, and demise of the Second Republic—the writing of Cuban historicity reached an unprecedented profusion. At last, island history assumed the form of a tangible body capable of giving expression to moral and civic symbols. This conversion of time into discourse was reinforced by the production of knowledge within certain academic institutions such as the Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País, the Universidad de la Habana, the Academia de la Historia de Cuba, the Institución Hispano-Cubana de Cultura. The transferring of the historical image of the Republic onto the collective mentality certainly must have exercised an effect on the politicization of the nation that shook Cuba in the period between 1933 and 1959. The sensation that Cuba lacked a past stimulated the memory of Republican intellectuals, and the construction of an image that evoked the island’s becoming fulfilled the discursive needs of Cuban identity. Creoles of the nineteenth century deciphered the origins of national history, but they were children without a past and with foreign memory. Like Condesa de Merlin used to say: “They completely lacked the vision of memories, the faith in the relic.”15 The crisis of the Republic in 1902 increased memory to the point of emitting decisive projections for the statal destiny of the nation. In fact, the first political parties, whose programs were inspired from a historical discourse of nationality, arose during the revolutionary movement of the 1930s. La Joven Cuba, the Partido Revolucionario Cubano (Auténtico), and the ABC, reinforced in their political platforms the myth of the Creole’s ownership of the land. In all three parties, the opposition to latifundium, monoculture, and U.S. interference was based on a critique of the Republican order in the light of the colonial past. It was thus that the nationalist tendencies, from the Left or the Right, continued to capitalize on imaginary recuperation of the ancien régime, and inscribed themselves in the liberal spectrum. In those years, the closest

Introduction

7

discourse to a conservative tradition—that of Alberto Lamar Schweyer, Orestes Ferrara, Gustavo Gutierrez Sanchez, and Ramiro Guerra himself, for example—had to justify its defense of the dictatorship with an outside reference: the hierarchical and corporatist past of Spanish American societies and the “threat” of the growth of black population and migration from the Antilles.16 The 1940 Asamblea Constituyente, a product of the nationalist movement of the 1930s, was the clearest sign of new racial and social integration. The themes, political frustration and cultural limitations, appeared to belong to the past despite the fact that in 1938, Enrique Gay Calbó has published an essay titled El cubano, avestruz del trópico: tentativa exegética de la imprevisión tradicional cubana. Ortiz and Mañach believed that the 1920s civic crusade, by avoiding the fall into the abyss, somehow overcame the forces of dissolution.17 The magazine, Cuba Contemporánea, which from 1913, had consistently indicated the state of chaos, ceased publication in 1927. And that very year, as if to take up the slack, Juan Marinello, Jorge Mañach, Martín Casanovas, and others began to publish Avance: the utopic cultural space of the Minorista group. Nevertheless, following this organic rejection of disintegratory currents, and almost with the Second Republic at hand, another group of intellectuals emerged that infused discourse of the Republican crisis with unexpected dimensions. This group of writers and artists cohered around José Lezama Lima in four editorial projects: Espuela de plata, Nadie Parecía, Clavileño, and finally Orígenes.18 Between 1940 and 1960, the two decades before the establishment of socialism, Cuba experienced a broadening of the public sphere and a modernization of civil society. These advances (the articulation of civil society, the consolidation of the republican judicial and institutional order, the growth of the middle class), as well as the setbacks (the escalation of inequality, the emergence of a militaristic Right and a populist Left, the dominance of the oligarchy), had a decisive impact in the transformation of the political culture of the island.19 The Revolution of 1959, the complex result of that transformation, produced among intellectuals

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a readjustment of the interpretation of national history. From then on, as Edmundo Desnoes wrote in his novel, Memorias del Subdesarrollo (Inconsolable Memories) (1965), Cubans appeared to learn to remember without solace and to exert a definitive control over their history.20 The Cuban Revolution in 1959 was a culmination of this long process of republican agony, but was not the end of the Cuban history. Like a national rebirth, the Revolution was imagined foundational and eternal. Now, fifty years later, the Cuban culture lives that drama across the memory and beyond the national territory. The important contemporary autobiographical literature in the island and in the exile is a perfect sign that the Cuban history has earned a new extension. In this recent historicity, the Revolution becomes a part of the Cuban past and a new transnational subjectivity produces an unknowing sense of time.21 Transition or succession, change or continuity, today and tomorrow are the words more listened in Cuban affairs at the first decade of the twenty-first century. The best writers and artists, scholars and politicians, inside and outside the island, are persuaded that the Cuban history has not finished yet. They are feeling that the future is immense and they are learning to speak the “poetry of remembrance.”

1 José Martí and the First Cuban Republicanism

What would have happened if José Martí had not died in Dos Ríos on 19 May 1895? Twentieth-century Cuban imagination wanted to believe that the history of the island would have been different. According to this view, all the traumatic postcolonial experiences—U.S. military intervention in 1898, the Platt Amendment to the Constitution of 1901, the turbulent administrations of Tomás Estrada Palma, José Miguel Gómez, Mario García Menocal, and Alfredo Zayas, caudillismo, corruption, fraud, and dependence—would have been averted with Martí’s seraphic presence. In the postcolonial Cuban culture, Martí’s premature death thus opened ample space for counterfactual speculation.1 This chapter neither pretends to contribute to a theory of chaos in studying the past nor to transforming virtuality into fiction. My aim here is simply to revisit the Martí-inspired counterfactual argument by following the intellectual and political uses of Martí’s legacy and placing his ideas in the republican imaginary of his own time. As Rubén Darío asserted, if there was a certain peculiarity, an exceptional gift, or virtue in Martí, it expressed itself in his literary writing.2 His political ideas, however, remained always within the Hispanic American republican canon. These ideas even brought certain tensions, absent among most of his contemporaries, with twentiethcentury liberal and democratic theories.

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Essays in Cuban Intellectual History

One of the most fertile myths in Cuban culture during the twentieth century was the story recounting the love relationship between Martí—father, apostle, master teacher—and his daughter, the Cuban motherland and nation. According to this incestuous myth that exudes political religiosity, the death of Martí in 1895 left Cubans in dangerous orphanage just before the consummation of independence.3 In this mythology, the ritual inauguration of the national state on 20 May 1902, on the juridical foundation of the 1901 Constitution and its Platt Amendment, was associated to an act of treason or adultery committed against the legacy of Martí. In the absence of the father, the daughter was raped by the neighbor, the United States, with the complicity of her bastard brother, the island’s oligarchy. This theme of the violated orphan, observed by Freud as a pattern in feminine hysteria, is a variant of the “virginity taboo” that feeds the patriarchal imagery of Cuban nationalism.4 Roland Barthes averred that mythologies are “de-politicized speech,” “semiological systems,” “stolen languages.”5 The myth of Martí in the imagination of the Cuban community thus functions as a pill to soothe the malaise of a culture that interprets the birth of its national state as an act of treason. Lamenting Martí’s absence has been always a central figure in the discourse of the Cuban republican frustration. Melancholic testimonies appear as early as the very first years of postcolonial period. Historian Marial Iglesias documents how in the spring of 1899, the newspaper El Fígaro conducted a poll to select the hero whose statue would replace that of Queen Isabel II on the Paseo del Prado in Havana. José Martí was the hero most voted followed closely by Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, Máximo Gómez, Antonio Maceo, and Cristopher Columbus. The statue was sculpted by José Vilalta Saavedra and inaugurated by Máximo Gómez on 24 February 1905.6 During the Constitutional Assembly of 1901, its delegates organized a collection to donate the house where the “martyr of Dos Ríos” was born to Leonor Pérez, Martí’s elderly and blind mother. The influential Autonomist leader, Eliseo Giberga, a delegate for the Unión Democrática party, opposed such

José Martí

11

donation, arguing that Martí’s revolutionary activity had been “harmful” for Cuba. The Assembly, which counted among its member not few former collaborators and friends of Martí, rejected Giberga’s stance. Some delegates opposed to the Platt Amendment, including Juan Gualberto Gómez, Salvador Cisneros Betancourt, and General José Lacret Morlot, even pressed for the expulsion of Giberga from the Assembly.7 During the first two decades of the twentieth century, the evocations of Martí by intellectuals and politicians were recurrent. These individuals were Martí’s former partners and members of the Republican elite, including Máximo Gómez, Juan Gualberto Gómez, Enrique José Varona, Manuel Sanguily, Enrique Collazo, Néstor Carbonell, and, of course, the “executor” Gonzalo de Quesada, who laboriously published the first volumes of Martí’s complete works between 1900 and 1915.8 In these evocations appeared almost all the religious topics—apostolate, sanctity, sacrifice, immolation, guidance, paternity, martyrdom—that informed the cult of Martí since his last years in New York and, especially, from the moment of his death in Dos Ríos.9 However, the most eloquent laments of Martí’s absence were not etched in numerous biographical sketches and eulogies, but rather in the lyrics of popular songs that expressed more authentically the discontent of repatriated tobacco workers who were once migrants. As argued by Margarita Mateo, many troubadours of the First Republic, such as Luis Casas Romero, Pepe Sánchez, Alberto Villalón, Sindo Garay, and Manuel Corona, dedicated their songs to the heroes of Cuban independence, among which, those referring to Martí were the most outstanding for their hagiographic stance.10 Thanks to research by Odilio Urfé, we know that the famous song “Clave a Martí” was inspired by a piece of José Tereso Valdés, director of the ensemble “La llave de oro.” The piece had been composed around 1897 and dedicated to a singer of the Barrio del Pilar, doñ a Caridad Valdés. Emilio V. Villillo adapted the song to the theme of Martí, probably before 1906, because that year the commemoration of Benito Juárez’s centenary in Mexico produced a Mexican version of the same song with the same key and habanera tempo.11

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The song longed for Martí’s presence during the building of the new national state. First, it alludes to a “voice that can not be heard” and a “bugle that was silenced.” Then, in the main chorus, the song imagines a virtual plot: Martí no debió de morir Ay de morir Si fuera el maestro del día Otro gallo cantaría La patria se salvaría Y Cuba sería feliz

[Martí should not have died Ow! Not have died If he had been the master today A different story would be The motherland rescued Happy would Cuba live]

The main message, apart from the counterfactual argument that Cuban history would have been different if Martí’s death had not occurred, also delivers a messianic narrative. More than just remembering to compensate a republican frustration, the lamenting of the hero’s absence is an invocation to a Messiah who would retake the thread of national history broken on 19 May 1895 in Dos Ríos. As Ottmar Ette has admirably retraced, this eschatology guaranteed that each readoption of José Martí since the 1920s would be formulated as a crusade against infidels and a rescue of his sepulcher.12 All such evocations and memory battles, fought in the name of Martí by intellectual movements among the elite or the masses, have departed from a denunciation of a previous forgetfulness or falsification. In the best study written on the reception of Martí during the twentieth century, Ette questions the supposed “forgetting” of Martí in the First Republic (1902–1933). Moreover Ette observes the same symbolic pattern of legitimation in the diverse and successive appropriations of Martí’s legacy just before the Revolution of 1930.13 Since then, the main cultural and political players of Cuban history’s narrative have justified their actions with an exegesis of Martí’s texts and ornamented their power with the apostolic icon. Pierre Bourdieu clearly asserts in his Pascalian Meditations that the main investment of any power is the formation of a solid symbolic capital.14 Martí has been precisely that: the most commercialized national symbol of Cuban politics during the twentieth century, the monetary unit most used in the war of emblems.

José Martí

13

While the symbolic reference to Martí was thoroughly diffused among the elite and populace since the first postcolonial decades, it is however possible to detect some differences between Martí’s cult during the First Republic and the Second Republic (1940–1952). In my view, the main difference lies in the fact that the first cult placed Martí in a heroic pantheon shared with other founding fathers such as Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, Ignacio Agramonte, Antonio Maceo, and Máximo Gómez. This feature is common in the politicobiographical literature inherited from Antonio Bachiller y Morales and Manuel de la Cruz and authored by Jesús Castellanos, Manuel Sanguily, or Néstor Carbonell Rivero.15 Alternatively, the literature on Martí since Mitología (1929) by Alfonso Hernández Catá until “Secularidad de José Martí” (1953) by José Lezama Lima— including the biographies of Mañach, Lizaso, and Rodríguez Embil—crowned Martí as the prince of all heroes, the sole monarch of the Cuban nation.16 Thus, while the heroic pantheon of the First Republic was republican, that of the Second was monarchical. The publications—Diario de la Marina, Bohemia, Revista de Avance, Bimestre Cubana, Orígenes, and Ciclón; communists and Catholics; republicans, revolutionaries, Auténticos, and Ortodoxos; pan-Americanists and hispanic-Americanists, nationalists and cosmopolitans, liberal and anti-imperialists; Marinello and Mañach, Martínez Bello and Lezama, Lizaso and Roig de Leuchsenring; Ortiz and Santovenia, Mella and Machado, Prío and Chibás, Batista and Castro—all of them were martianos.17 They were so not just superficially, exogenously, or rhetorically. Even politicians grounded their uses and manipulations of Martí’s archive with sophisticated doctrines and hermeneutics. It is naïve to think, as Bourdieu warns, that the symbolic economics of power is based only on rhetorical contraptions.18 How can we explain such a wide and active readership of Martí? How is it possible that such diverse readings can share the same positive stance? For example, President Gerardo Machado tried in 1926 to reinforce the nationalist image of his first administration by editing and distributing twenty thousand copies of the essay

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Vindicación de Cuba.19 Similarly, the communist leader Julio Antonio Mella in his work Glosas on the thought of José Martí, written in Mexico that same year, assigned Cuban communism the mission of “deciphering the mystery of the ultra democratic program of the Partido Revolucionario Cubano.”20 But not only the communists perceived themselves as heirs of Martís Partido Revolucionario Cubano; the Auténticos even adopted the name of that political organization in 1934.21 Ten years later, Carlos Prío Socarrás wrote a peculiar article, “Martí. Arquetipo de lo cubano,” in which he affirmed that he was the one who suggested that name for his party in order to “differentiate the authentic from the false martianos,” as well as offering emblematic judgments on the hero’s canonization: “although it seemed an illogical phenomenon, exile produced in the political realm the greatest of all Cubans.”22 In the mid-1940s, Prío, while serving as senator and prime minister, cited grandiose phrases of President Ramón Grau San Martín to assert that the “Auténticos had recovered the torch of the Partido Revolucionario Cubano lost in Dos Ríos, invisible for a whole generation while warming and flaring the better embers of the Cuban soul.” Prío also traced a perfect genealogy between Martí’s unfinished revolution and the project of Grau’s government. This hermeneutical operation was very similar to the one practiced by Fidel Castro in his “Informe Central” to the First Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba.23 Fulgencio Batista also took advantage of the martiano symbolic capital to consolidate his project of an authoritarian and populist national state.24 Following General Batista’s initiative, announcements in1937 called for the building of a great monument in memory of Martí, as well as a famous contest of biographies “intended to stimulate new forms of cult” and “sculpt in consciences with the chisel of thought.”25 The winner of the literary contest was José Martí, el Santo de América. Estudio crítico-biográfico by the writer and diplomat Luis Rodríguez Embil.26 The biographies of the Spaniard Manuel Isidro Méndez and the Cuban Félix Lizaso came in second and third places respectively. In a letter to Lizaso, Batista referred to the mission of “following the saintly footprints of Martí.” In 1953,

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the dictator also promoted an intense commemoration of the centenary of Martí’s birth. Twenty years after the Revolution of 1933 when the idea of a gigantic monument was conceived, it was Batista who entrusted its creation to sculptor Juan José Sicre.27 Today, that immense Martí in stone, originally conceived as an emblem for a fascist public space, presides over the Plaza de la Revolución in Havana. As Mella contrasted his own Martí to that of Machado, so Fidel Castro justified his assault to the Moncada barracks by arguing that the Batista regime was an “insult” to the martiano legacy or something like a second “death of the Apostol in the year of his centenary.” That armed action of 26 July 1953 was, according to Castro, a proof that the spirit of Martí survived in the morale of new generations. In a passage of his La historia me absolverá, Castro articulated a rhetoric of martyrdom ending in a genealogy of blood: “in a splendid amendment young men came to die near his tomb [Martí’s mausoleum is actually located in Santa Ifigenia, Santiago de Cuba, near the Moncada barracks] to offer him their blood so that he can continue living in the soul of the Motherland.”28 Despite the many Marxist interpretations, La historia me absolverá does not include an antirepublican program.29 Castro proclaimed that one of the first five “revolutionary principles” was the restoration of the 1940 Constitution and longed for the rule of law and public freedom that existed before 1952.30 Moreover, Castro believed that “to be Cuban implies a duty,” and pays homage to the civic education and moral citizenry assured by the public institutions of postcolonial governments: “We are proud of the history of our motherland; we learned it in school and have grown up hearing about freedom, justice, and rights. We have been taught very early to revere the glorious example of our heroes and martyrs. . . . We have learned all this and will not forget it.”31 Thus, Castro based his famous self-defense on the premise that he and his companions were republican subjects formed in civics by the national state through a “martiana doctrine.” However, after the Revolution of 1959, a communist reading of La historia me absolverá spread the thesis that the Republic

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neglected Martí and his only legitimate recovery was the work of Fidel Castro’s government.32 An extreme version of this argument asserts that the leadership of the Partido Revolucionario Cubano and the Liberating Army abandoned Martí’s program right after his death in May 1895. By 1901, such abandonment had degenerated in a plain betrayal of his ideas. This narrative has several sophisticated reformulations through which there has been a peculiar convergence between important scholars of the island, such as Ramón de Armas and Pedro Pablo Rodríguez, and serious historians among exiled Cubans such as Carlos Ripoll and José Manuel Hernández.33 The difference between these two groups being, that while the first one thought that the Revolution of 1959 fulfilled Martí’s ideas, the second stated that his abandonment has persisted until now. However, a study of Cuban political history in reference to Martí’s influence shows the presence of his legacy in three important moments of constitutional foundations: 1901, 1940, and 1976.

Plural Heritage In my view, a hermeneutical context helps explaining the permeability of Martí’s political influence. Contrary to other intellectuals and politicians of his generation—such as Enrique José Varona, Manuel Sanguily, Eliseo Giberga, or Rafael Montoro— Martí did not organize his political ideas through careful discerning of Western philosophical traditions. Actually there was a certain antitheoretical stance in his thought, an association of theory with falsehood, speculation, unreality, particularly when he refers to republics and politicians of “paper,” “jargon,” “books and white uniform,” and “academics.”34 This anti-intellectual tendency in his minimal formulation of government and his economical defense of the representative system linked Martí more with the conservative tradition than with the liberal one.35 In the last few decades, several historians of Latin American political ideas—David Brading, José Antonio Aguilar, Elías José Palti, Roberto Gargarella—have retaken the pioneering studies of J.G.A. Pocock and Anthony Pagden on the birth of the

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representative system in the Atlantic World. They have concluded that the political process of independence in Hispanic America, between 1808 and 1820, also occurred in the frame of the “Machiavellian moment,” which is still within the first wave of neoclassical republicanism prior to the heyday of romantic liberalism and post-Napoleonic Restoration conservatism.36 Thus, during the construction of Hispanic American national states of the nineteenth century, republicanism and liberalism engaged in a constitutional tension. The political contributions of Martí can be considered from the perspective of these two traditions: the liberal stance that originated from the contractual theories of Hobbes and Locke, leading to the representative models of Constant and Tocqueville in the nineteenth century; and the republican vein born in classical Rome with Cicero and Livy, consolidated in the Venetian and Florentine republics of the Renaissance, and reformulated in the late eighteenth century by Harrington, Rousseau, and the American and French constitutions. If we compare Martí’s contributions with these two traditions, we find that he owed much to the republican tradition.37 Although the political process toward Cuban independence started in the mid-nineteenth century, the age of John Stuart Mill and the height of democratic liberalism underlying the 1848 revolutions, Martí resembled more a neoclassical republican than a romantic liberal. His true Hispanic American teachers were not Sarmiento and Mora, Alberdi and Ocampo, but rather Simón Bolívar, Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, Félix Varela, and certainly, José María Heredia. The political biography of Martí was marked by four republican experiences: the Spanish First Republic of 1873, the restored Mexican Republic (1867–1876) of Benito Juárez and Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada, the French Third Republic of 1875, and the “American renaissance” Republic that emerged from the United States’ civil war. Martí actually lived in three of these republics: Spain (1871–1874), Mexico (1875–1876), and the United States (1880–1895); although he traveled to France two times during the winters of 1874 and 1879, he only knew about the French Republic through the New York press. Martí’s review of the theater piece Garin by the French author Paul

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Delair, published in the Sun in 1880, informs us of the effect that the Third Republic caused in Martí’s poetry and politics. According to Martí, Delair continued the tradition of Victor Hugo of “placing art at the service of freedom . . . and representing the almost universal wish for a Republic.”38 Martí’s literary works are charged with the republican argument from the beginning to the end. At age twenty, Martí wrote the text “La República Española ante la Revolución Cubana” in which he averred that, if the government of Figueras and Pi y Margall did not recognize the independence of Cuba, then “the Spanish Republic has neither stood for the sovereign people nor has it understood the ideal of the Republic.”39 At the time of his death in Dos Ríos, Martí was preparing to transfer the commanding staff of the Liberating Army to Camagüey so as to “gather the representatives of all the insurgent Cuban masses so they—without considering themselves final and definitive nor closing the opportunity of those that follow—will provide the Revolution with brief and solemn, viable forms for the Republic, within reality and containing both its present and future outlines.”40 In his famous testament letter to his Mexican friend Manuel Mercado, Martí insisted on the “republican form of the war”: “the Revolution wishes full freedom in the army, without the reins imposed before by a Chamber with no real sanction or the jealousy and fears of the excessive future prominence of a scrupulous and farsighted chieftain; the Revolution wants both a succinct and respectable republican representation.”41 Brief and solemn forms, succinct and respectable republican representation: herein lies the discreet, primordial republicanism of José Martí. This economical device guaranteed a wide and diverse survival of his legacy. Deliberately, Martí left aside his political project aspects that occupied the attention of so many liberals and democrats of his time. Among the excluded elements were the bicameralism of the legislative branch, extent of suffrage, presidentialism versus parliamentarism, or the importance of political parties. With the republicans of the eighteenth century, Martí believed by the end of the nineteenth century that political parties divided the nation.42

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This classical republican mold was easy to assimilate by postcolonial political actors. It connected Martí—through the intermediation of Montesquieu—to the romantic populism and socialism that aspired to regulate certain “natural rights” such as work, family, education, and culture. Together with political and civil rights, these natural rights that we call today social rights were contemplated by Martí in his famous “first law, a Republic with all and for the good of all: the Cubans’ cult of the full dignity of men.”43 Only at times, this naturalism led him to adopt populist utopian principles. This is the Martí who has been hailed by Marxist readers Julio Antonio Mella, Raúl Roa, Blas Roca, Juan Marinello, Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, Ernesto Guevara, Fidel Castro, Armando Hart, among others.44 However, more formal Marxist interpretations such as those of Antonio Martínez Bello (1940) and, more recently, Paul Estrade (2000), clarify important points. Although Martí sympathized with the “generous thought” of those who, including Karl Marx, sought “the natural means to balance public wealth,” socialism meant for him, as it did for Herbert Spencer, a “future slavery” in which men would become “serfs of the state. From being slaves of capitalists . . . they would become slaves of state officials.”45 These thoughts distanced Martí from the socialist utopias of the nineteenth century as well as the totalitarian realities of the twentieth. The clearest disagreement between Martí’s republicanism and utopian populism lies in the importance that Martí ascribed to representation as an essential political practice. According to Martí, his frantic political and intellectual activity was inspired in the certainty that his fellow Cuban was “capable of order and discipline, exerting his own ideas, of engaging in the politics of vote and representation, delegation of responsible authority, and the accommodation of diverse wills within the common good.”46 He also believed that “the voting habit, vigilance and examination, and open traffic between all regions, would avoid the illness of caudillos.” In a moving sketch of General Grant, Martí affirmed, “a man who does not vote in a Republic is like a soldier who deserts the army.”47 Consequently, he summarized his political project in a combination of social, economic,

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and political rights: “justice, equality of merit, respectful treatment of the human being, full equality under the law, that is the revolution.”48 There is a seldom-studied text in which Martí’s republicanism is in full evidence. This is the “Las Fiestas de la Constitución de Filadelfia,” a report written in 1887, the year of the centenary of the U.S. Constitution. Martí avers that the Constitution had only one defect—slavery—which history would make sure to underscore seventy years later through the Civil War. According to Martí, such near perfection of the first U.S. laws guaranteed the lasting republican and federal regime of 1787. “The virtuous politics is the only useful and durable,” and concludes, “the American Constitution shows that government takes roots in a nation only if they are born in the nation itself.”49 What Martí admired the most about this Constitution was the pact, transaction, and “accommodation” between the states, which due to their “particular interest,” had engaged in “furious quarrel.”50 Such agreement, condensed in “brief and solemn forms,” demonstrated the dated nature of the previous confederation articles, “artificial imitations from the Greek leagues.”51 Thus, in his own modernist poetical style, José Martí subscribed to Montesquieu basic argument in book XIX of The Spirit of Laws, also used by Madison, Hamilton, and Jay in the Federalist Papers.52 This modicum of republicanism in Martí’s legacy, a favorable condition for its multiple uses during the twentieth century, is traceable in the three constitutional regimes of Cuban history. Surely, Martí would have subscribed the 115 articles of the 1901 Cuban Constitution, despite its individualistic liberalism, and most probably would have rejected the appendix that imposed the Platt Amendment.53 If Martí’s model was the U.S. Constitution of 1787, perhaps the semi-parliamentarian traits of the Cuban Constitution of 1940—the post of prime minister, congressional faculty to deny confidence to the executive, limitation of emergent powers—would have bothered him. However, he would have sympathized with its generous granting of social rights for education, family, work, and culture, and supported its 102nd article that forbade “the formation of political groups

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based on race, sex or class.”54 Lastly, in the socialist Constitution of 1976, Martí would have rejected the ambiguous implementation of representative power and the doctrinal conception of ideology, but would have praised the further extension of the social rights beyond those granted in 1940 as well as its populist and plebiscitary solidarity.55 While Martí defended Montesquieu’s principle that “laws should correspond to the general spirit, customs and habits of a nation,” he conceived Cuba as an American nation whose citizenship should be based on the equality of rights guaranteed by the republican regimen. Martí was very bothered by discourses of eugenics in positivist philosophies that explained the success of the United States by reasons of climate, religion, ethnicity, and culture. “It is a new fashion to presuppose that the accidents of education and climate can change the nature of men who are equal everywhere . . . The blond hates, lies, and bears just like the brown-haired. The North American gets impassioned, excited, rebellious, bewildered, and corrupted just like the Hispanic American.”56 Martí’s republicanism was American civic as opposed to the culturalist European. His politics was geared toward the constitutional foundation of a new nation that, as the United States, could pour its cultural identity in a modern civic mold. There are no signs of essentialist nationalism in Martí since he thought that any rhetoric of identification with racial, religious, or cultural taints could reinforce the prejudice that the Cuban people were not apt for sovereign government. Martí’s political literature is in good measure, an argument in favor of the moral capacity of late-nineteenth-century Cuban society to constitute itself as a modern citizenship. Therein lies his vehement optimism: “other republics were born seventy five years ago; we are doing so now. What has happened in other republics will no happen in ours. We have the republican marrow nurtured in war and exile as well as the healthy habits and wariness of the republican government.”57 Despite his criticisms against U.S. imperialism and Latin American caudillismo, Martí’s political paradigm remained the American Republic of Washington and Bolívar, Heredia, and

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Juárez. In “Crece,” one of his most realist articles published in Patria in the spring of 1894, he revealed his intimate aspiration: What those of the North did with their three centuries of republican preparation, we could also certainly have done coming from the musket, harquebus and dog. But they won and we defeat ourselves. Our war (1868–1878) did not have more treason, envy, delay, desertion, and hardship, than the war of the United States. . . . Our republic will not have more jealousy, gossip, disunion, discredit, disorder, treason, military danger, demagogy or civil danger, than the dying, criminal and destroyed first period of that of the United States.58

Here perhaps, without noticing it, Martí prophesizes the First Republic in Cuba by benevolently comparing it to the “dying, criminal and destroyed” prehistory of the United States before the Civil War of 1861. In great part, due to his plea, many Cuban intellectuals and practically all politicians of his generation also believed that Cuba was prepared to become independent from Spain and become a modern republic. For example, only after seven years of having expressed dire pessimism in 1888, Enrique José Varona and Manuel Sanguily wrote from New York in favor of the new separatist revolution organized by Martí.59 Moreover, the most important intellectuals of Martí’s generation—Varona, Sanguily, Rafael Montoro, Eliseo Giberga, Gonzalo de Quesada, and Juan Gualberto Gómez—actively intervened in the building of the postcolonial republican order. All without exception ended disillusioned not of the political regime but of a citizenship and elite incapable of coexisting in peace under modern laws and institutions. As early as 1901, just after the promulgation of the 1901 Constitution with the Platt Amendment appendix, Sanguily delivered a speech in Havana’s Teatro Nacional in which he invoked Martí’s “spell” in “this muddy hour” of “lowly yearning” since he had been the one who, with more energy, “believed his fellows capable of civility and progress just like the presumptuous and insolent races.”60 In 1905, Varona was even more bitter when he stated that the republican order was not an entity of “attraction and harmony among Cubans” but rather of “separation.”61 Even

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the Autonomist, Rafael Montoro, who never endorsed Martí’s project although he purged that “sin” with an intense republicanism, admitted that postcolonial politics, instead of favoring, actually “perturbed more or less profoundly” civic education in the new Republic.62 How would Martí have faired in such republican anxiety? Would he have kept his faith in the moral modernity of Cuban citizenship? Or would he have been frustrated like the majority of his contemporaries? To answer positively to the latter question is realistic; to think that his enthusiasm would have regenerated an entire nation is a messianic ideal. Even so, the diverse and selective appropriations of the intellectual and political legacy of Martí were grounded in this virtuality: the counterfactual energy emanating from the hero’s absence.63 The multiple uses of this legacy also took advantage of the hermeneutic conditions of Martí’s basic discursive conformation: anti-intellectual politics, minimal republicanism, classical ideas on citizenship, modern idea of society, moral enthusiasm, Americanism, and multiple comprehension of public rights. From this interpretation, it is absurd to exercise a total and exclusive orchestration of Martí’s legacy. Despite their obvious differences, the two prerevolutionary republics of 1902 and 1940 as well as the Revolution of 1959 made use of Martí’s living legacy. To assume the opposite—that his ideas were honored during the Republic and betrayed by the Revolution, or that the latter “rescued the tomb” after its republican oblivion and profanation—is to persist in symbolic quarreling between two authoritarian alternatives vying to control national documents.

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2 The Moral Frontier

Technically speaking, the military war between the United States and Cuba lasted less than a month. It started the evening of 22 June 1898, when the troops of Generals Lawton, Wheeler, and Roosevelt took the Spanish garrison of Siboney, and ended at noon on 17 July of that same year, with the surrender of the city of Santiago de Cuba.1 There were two more or less important battles: the ground battle of San Juan Hill and the naval battle of Santiago Bay. The casualties numbered 3,469: 224 Americans, 3,245 Spaniards.2 For such a short war, originally undesired by both rivals, it was, in the words of Secretary of State John Hay, “a splendid little war,” although a very bloody one.3 The armistice of 12 August 1898 ended the military war. But at this point, another war began, politically more costly and continuing today: I am referring to the war of discourses.4 Its weapons are well-known forms of knowledge: eugenics, ethnology, history, sociology, ethics, anthropology, esthetics, and literature. The battlefield is Cuban culture and the armies are the intellectual and political elites of the island. The objective is the hegemony and control over Cuban national identity, understood as the symbolic condition for a moral experience that will ground a civic model.5 Just as the military war was a conflict between three national actors, the discursive war, the war for the metanarrative of the nation, was (at least in the first decades of the postcolonial period in Cuba) a confrontation between three cultural imaginaries: the white Hispano-Catholic, the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, and the black and mulato Afro-Cuban.6

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A Map of Eugenics The scenario for this discursive war was not only Cuban culture, of course. The same war was fought elsewhere: in Spain, the United States, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and in almost all of the Latin American countries. All of these conflicts staged a confrontation between moral discourses and civilizing paradigms. The defeat of Spain was, for some, the definitive proof of the decline of Hispanic civilization (perhaps even of Iberian civilization) and, in the more extreme opinions, of Latin civilization as a whole. For others, the same defeat signaled the “barbaric” expansionism typical of Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture. This expansionism had started with “the perfidious Albion” and was continued by its energetic creature, Unenergetic creature, the United States.7 The historiography of 1898, both inside and outside Cuba, however, has not taken stock of the extensive proliferation of discourse that the war of 1898 generated in the island’s letters. I will first offer here an overview of the discursive tensions that 1898 produced in the United States, Spain, and Latin America, and then focus on the postcolonial debate in Cuba. American public opinion had demonstrated a great interest in the separatist war in Cuba since 1895. It was the press in particular (William Hearst’s Journal, Joseph Pulitzer’s World, and Charles Dana’s Sun) that decisively shaped public impressions of the American intervention.8 The cartoonist Frederic Remington and the correspondents Richard Harding Davis, James Crelman, and Stephen Crane all lived in the Inglaterra Hotel. Between martinis, they scared their New York readers with reports about the cruelty of the “butcher” Weyler, the physical and moral destruction of the island, and the case of Evangelina Cisneros, the young daughter of an insubordinate officer, who was jailed in the Recogidas Prison in Havana.9 Other newspapers opposed American participation in the war. Most notable among these were the Herald, the Tribune, the Post, and the Times. Two currents of public opinion were more or less delineated: the imperial, slave-owning nationalism of the South, and the abolitionist, antiexpansionist republicanism of the North.10

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Held over since the American Civil War (1861–1865), they reached a double discursive reflection in American letters. In the essayistic genre, for example, we find the first tendency represented in an author like Josiah Strong, who, in Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis, defends the idea of a great Anglo-Saxon and Puritan nation, with a calling to fulfill a providential mission.11 For the second tendency, we can offer as an example the little-known case of Carl Schurz. Schurz was a veteran of the German Revolution of 1848 and of Lincoln’s Union troops, and the author of Manifest Destiny, an essay in which he criticizes John L. Sullivan’s famous doctrine. He speaks from the opposition to the war with Spain, against Southern slavery, and against the tentative annexation of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines.12 If we turn to fiction, the division could be fleshed out with reference to the works of Mark Twain, another critic of nationalism who, like Schurz, did not imagine the Unites States as the Anglo-Saxon “closed family circle” but as a multiethnic nation. Or we could include Stephen Crane, the author of The Red Badge of Courage and The Open Boat. The latter tells the story of the shipwreck of the Commodore. Its narrative puts to test the military epic of the American soldier with the forces of nature before he actually lands on the shores of Cuba.13 We can point to instances in American literature where we can find sociological discourses about ethnic and religious civilizations. This discursive formation, however, which focuses on a eugenic episteme, carries much more weight in European culture.14 At the end of the nineteenth century, positivism, evolutionism, and above all Social Darwinism laid the groundwork for French, German, and English anthropology’s focus on race at the moment of its emergence. From this common root there originated two intellectual currents with a decisive influence on the debate concerning the superiority or inferiority of Western civilizations. These two tendencies are historical morphology (Frederick Burkhardt, Oswald Spengler, Ernest Troeltsch, Max Weber, Arnold Toynbee) and sociological eugenics (Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Georges Vacher de Lapouge, Sir Francis Galton, Lothrop Stoddard).15 It

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is true that there were marginal voices, such as that of the Russian anthropologist Iakov Alexandrovich Novikov, who resisted the interpretation of civilizations from an ethnic genealogy. However, the more or less accepted result of this debate was the idea that Latin civilization was declining irrevocably in the face of the equally inevitable ascent of Anglo-Saxon civilization.16 According to some French intellectuals, such as de Gobineau, Hippolyte Taine, and Alfred Fouille, the historical confirmation of this judgment had been the defeat of France by Prussia in 1871.17 It is in this sense that we can talk about a symbolic connection between the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 and the SpanishAmerican War of 1898. It is worth noting that the first initiated a cycle in Spain, marked by the topos of “Latin decadence.” This topos was reactivated in the name of Spanish nationalism only thirty years later, after “the year of the disaster.”18 The cycle began with the skeptical regeneracionismo (regenerationism) of Joaquin Costa, Ricardo Picavea Macias, and Lucas Mallada, and ended with the patriotic nihilism of Jose Martinez Ruiz (Azorin), Pio Baroja, and Ramiro de Maeztu.19 The two narrative poles of this discourse—on the one hand, the “decadence” of Spain, and on the other, its “greatness”—coexist in a most exemplary fashion in three influential books: En torno al casticismo (1895), by Miguel de Unamuno; Idearium espanol (1897), by Angel Ganivet; and La moral de la derrota (1900), by Luis Morote.20 Here, rhetoric achieves a perfectly dual or binary accommodation. The rejection of “ideocracy,” the “masked savagery,” the “unsociability,” and other faults of Spanish culture are always compensated by an exaltation of “the spiritual reserves of the fatherland.” The repercussions in Latin America of this eugenicist debate were quite intense. The Latinophobe, Anglo-Saxonizing discourse can be seen neatly in Conflicto y armonias entre las razas (1883) [Conflict and Harmony between the Races], by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento; El porvenir de las naciones latinoamericanas (1899) [The Destiny of the Latin American Nations], by Faustino Bulnes; and Nuestra America (1903) [Our America], by Carlos Octavio Bunge.21 Some passages from these works

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reproduce several of Edmund Demolins’s arguments in “To What Do the Anglo-Saxons Owe Their Superiority?” (1897), an essay that provoked fear in even the staunchest of Latinophiles. Against the seeming certainty of extinction, another discursivity organized itself and fought against the perceived “de-Latinization” of Latin America. We can see this by way of Hellenic spiritualism, in Jose Enrique Rodó’s Ariel (1900); in the criticism of American “imperial democracy” in José Martí’s “Our America” (1891); or by way of an emphasis on the founding “Latinness” of South America, as in Cesar Zumeta’s El continente enfermo (1904) [The Sick Continent]. The Spanish-American War of 1898, waged in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, was, in a way, the political and military correlate to the discursive clash between two civilizations. The eugenicist episteme is, then, the rhetorical axis of a cultural war between postcolonial elites in Latin America. The binary confrontation that surrounds 1998, staged between the “Latin” and the “Saxon,” involves other psychological, religious, economic, and anthropological pronouncements, enunciated from ethnic identity and constituting a civic, moral order. Michel Foucault observes that at the end of the nineteenth century, the discursive tensions surrounding different civilizing models produce the “inscription of racism in the mechanisms of the state” and determine the “emergence of biopower.”22 In this symbolic war of 1898, two different and diverging civic models, two representations of citizenship, do battle. These two models erect themselves as offshoots of determined ethnic roots and can be seen in light of Foucault’s analysis when he writes: In other words, the homicidal impulse in biopower is admissible, only if one is seeking not a victory over political adversaries, but over biological peril, and only if one tends toward the strengthening of the race itself or the species. . . . Racism insures, then, the function of death in the economy of biopower, by stating that the death of the other equals the biological affirmation of oneself as a member of a race or a civilization, as an element in a coherent and living plurality.23

The intellectual backdrop of the Spanish-American War of 1898 is precisely the “economy of biopower.” Jose Enrique Rodó, to

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take but one example, talks about “free” and “enslaved races.” By the latter, he means the civilizations that, according to him, are “held captive by their chrematistic passion,” by Puritanism and democracy, in sum, by a “propensity toward the vulgar” that endangers the “ideals of the species.”24 Rodó’s Calibanization of the United States is, then, a voice of alarm in the face of “AngloSaxon biopower” (in The Tempest, Caliban dreams of raping Prospero’s daughter and populating the island with Calibans). Francisco Bulnes goes a bit further when, upon confirming Spain’s defeat in the Caribbean, he wrote, “the Anglo-Saxon race,” the “most liberal,” the “hardest working,” is also the race “that multiplies with greatest vigor.”25 Rodó conceptualized the victory of the United States as “a threat against morals and culture,” that is, as “a defeat of the spirit.” Bulnes, however, understood it as further proof of the “Latin curse,” as a decisive step in the struggle to “catch up with the AngloSaxons” who, after 1898, “would start getting closer and closer.”26 Despite their differences, both understood the war in terms of that “injunction to die” that caused a break in the biological continuum of Latin America.27

The Threshold Today, we find ourselves returning to national identities. A century ago, however, things were very different, especially in the Caribbean, where the last Spanish colonies were barely initiating the phase of national construction. For Puerto Rico and Cuba, the twentieth century began with the moral invention of an identity, with the hermeneutics of a subject that occupied the center of culture. In both cases, postwar discursive formations reflected a process that Ernst Junger has described so well for the Germany of the time: the brief experience with war was transformed into a great symbolic capital, an inexhaustible resource for the construction of national identity.28 The military clash between the United States and Spain in 1898 was represented, then as now, as a cultural clash between two hostile civilizations and two hostile races.29 Postcolonial elites in these countries had to imagine their respective national

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communities in terms of a belonging to one or the other eugenic matrix. After they had established that ethnic hegemony, these elites moved on to what Clifford Geertz has called “the moral imagination of the collectivity”: the formation of a civic model, of an archetype of citizenship, which was then to constitutionally rule over the population.30 In Cuba, the continuation of the war by discursive means is perfectly legible. As early as spring 1901, under Governor Leonard Wood, the Guanabacoa Lycee organized a cycle of conferences around the topic of the “Cuban character.” In a talk given on 29 June of the same year, a minor author, Cristobal de la Guardia, criticized the principal “Anglo-Saxonizing theories” of the time and subscribed instead to Napoleon Colajanni’s proLatin ideas. In the next talk he gave, in February 1902, de la Guardia admitted some of the “faults” of Creole customs, or their “illnesses of the spirit.” These, he explained, derived from the Latin eugenic matrix, from whence originated the “vice of pain,” “melancholic passion,” “an immense satisfaction in being a disgrace,” and the “tendency toward imaginative as opposed to meditative qualities.”31 At the end of his talk, however, he called on Herbert Spencer to claim a sort of “political fallibility,” to insist that these faults were not “genetic” but “historical,” to explain them as the results of the cultural trace of the Spanish holistic tradition. He wanted to offer an optimistic conclusion: It’s true that the Cuban has great facility for minute and objectless criticism. If we have this or that defect, which we inherited from colonial tradition, there are other nations that have it worse. True, we like dancing, cockfights, and cards. But we are not bullfighters, nor do we kill each other with our bare fists over money, and neither do we burn Negroes for sport.32

De la Guardia developed his ideas further in his treatise De los vicios y defectos del criollo [Of the Vices and Defects of the Creole Man]. In this work, he formulates the guiding moral principle of the Republican elites: “to act against the race,” that is, to correct eugenic faults through civic methods.33 Curiously enough, this Creole patriotism, which rebels against the fatalistic

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theory of race, is reproduced by “low literature” or minor essays by authors such as Manuel Marquez Sterling in Alrededor de nuestra psicologia (1906) [About our Psychology]; Jose Sixto de Sola in El pesimismo cubano (1913) [Cuban Pessimism]; Mario Guiral Moreno in Aspectos censurables del caracter cubano (1914) [Censurable Aspects of the Cuban Character]; and Enrique Gay Calbó in his late study, El cubano, avestruz del tropico: Tentativa exegetica de la imp revision traditional cubana (1938) [The Cuban, Ostrich of the Tropics: A Tentative Exegesis of Traditional Cuban Improvision].34 “High” literature, on the other hand, represented by the likes of Enrique José Varona, Francisco Figueras, Roque E. Garrigó, José Antonio Ramos, and Fernando Ortiz, does not partake of that controlled skepticism, of that nativist enthusiasm that functions as a sort of compensation for a negative psychology in the case of the minor authors. The latter interpreted Cubanness as a nihilist metaphysics of traditions and customs. When Varona confirms the fictive nature of republican modernity, he avoids all complacency and paternalism and writes that “the monster that we thought we had tamed is resuscitated. The serpent of the fable has collected once again the monstrous fragments that the hero’s cuts have separated. Republican Cuba seems to be the twin sister of Colonial Cuba.”35 In a similar vein, Figueras, in Cuba y su evolution colonial (1906) [The Colonial Evolution of Cuba], rejects “apologetics in which the Cuban people emerge as a people without defects, sanctified by all the virtues,” and claims that the island “lacks the capacity to be an independent nation.”36 According to Figueras, the “Cuban character” is a tapestry composed of more vice than virtue. Cubans are “hospitable,” “generous to a fault,” “little given to commerce and thrift,” “vain,” “indolent,” and “deprived of a clear notion of Truth.”37 This tapestry produced a weak national character: If by character we understand a happy disposition that gathers and harmonizes the elevation of ideas with the energy of the will; perseverance in one’s effort, consistency in principles, purity and rectitude in intentions, abnegation of purpose and the unshaken cult of duty; if these are the defining elements of character, we are obligated to confess that this

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great quality of man reaches very moderate proportions in the Cuban, that it carries an infinitesimal and vulgar weight.38

This explanation of faults represents a curious attempt to intertwine eugenicist and cultural arguments. For Figueras, the weakness of the Cuban character originated fundamentally in the two ethnic roots of nationality: Spanish and African. The Cuban was not a human type that synthesized the two races. Rather, he was a third group, white Creole, that lived in the nineteenth century during colonial times. In Figueras’s determining thinking, contact, and not division among these social groups (a division that he compares to the caste system in India), was the determining factor in the “malformation of the Cuban soul.”39 The ethnic heterogeneity of the island (an obsession of the Creole intellectuals from Father Varela to Fernando Ortiz), was understood as an unfavorable condition for the modern civilizing project. Thus we have the emergence in eugenicist discourse of the representation of Cuba as threshold, an in-between of different races, religions, and civic models. This pronouncement on limits is seen even more clearly in Roque E. Garrigó’s La convulsion cubana (1906) [Cuban Convulsion]. Eugenics is heterogeneity of definitely the point of departure of this text, especially as the Argentine the island was Carlos Octavio Bunge defined eugenics. In his well-known essay, Nuestra America, Bunge analyzed the triple “Hispano— understood as an indigenous—African sediment” that in his opinion made up the “genius of the race” peculiar to Latin America.40 He did this through a thorough unfavorable register of physical and psychic attributes. Maybe it was the taxonomic sense of this moral imagination that held a particular attraction for Cuban condition for the intellectuals of the First Republic. They found the key to the translation of the colonial estate system in eugenics. Bunge wrote: Each physical race is a psychic race. Each race possesses its own character as a race. The word race is wide-ranging and vague, so that each race subdivides into many branches and families, with their own traits (regional in some instances). And yet, all these traits lead to common traits, a common character, although they are likely to present themselves

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The work of Garrigó is, to a great extent, a commentary to Bunge’s Nuestra America. In La convulsion cubana, for example, this moral taxonomy serves to promote an Anglo-Saxon discourse that goes hand in hand with long-term projections about the modernization of Cuban society through the assumption of a North American civic model. In his arguments, Garrigó reproduces a zone of this debate about the civilizing scheme of the Atlantic colonizations. In this way, little by little, Garrigó’s essay ends up surrendering to the seductions of the hypothesis as a rhetorical figure. He clings to those “plausible and alternative worlds” that offer what Geoffrey Hawthorn has called counterfactual conditionals.42 Garrigó’s imagination, once moral, becomes historical. As such, it is authorized to speculate on the fate of Cuba. What would have happened if its colonizers had been British instead of Spanish? If the capture of Havana had lasted more than a year? Or if the United States had bought Cuba’s sovereignty in the nineteenth century as the annexationists wanted? If our colonization had started with England and if the same men who disembarked from the Mayflower when it arrived in Massachusetts had come to the coast of Cuba, how different things would have been! The Puritans brought with them, impregnated in their soul, the spirit of liberty that the English Magna Carta expresses; the Spaniards, on the other hand, brought with them the symptoms of a thundering decadence that the nation emitted from each of its pores.43

This Anglo-Saxon perspective reached a peak in the eugenicist discourse of the First Republic. For example, Jose Antonio Ramos, in his Manual del perfecto fulanista (1916) [Manual of the Perfect Nobody], assumes a very similar position to Garrigó’s.44 According to him, the United States’ strong presence in Cuba was the best antidote against Latin and African faults that governed Creole customs.45

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In all truth, since the beginning of the Republic, and even more after the second U.S. intervention in 1906, there were reactions against the United States: for example, Julio Cesar Gandarilla in his essay Contra el yanqui (1913) [Against Yankees]; Alvaro Cata in his De guerra en guerra (1905) [From War to War] and in Cuba intervenida (1910) [Cuba Intervened]. Only rarely did these reactions adopt the arguments of antiSaxon, pro-Latin eugenics. They used, instead, the rhetoric of immediate political unrest. Even though in Cuba, as well as in Puerto Rico, North American hegemony produced a self-recognition in elites as being of Hispanic heritage, one gets the impression that in these years the Anglo-Saxonizing discourse was more solid; or, better put, more legible, better organized textually.46 Rodó’s influence was weak. The Arielism expressed by Jesus Castellanos, which he expounded in his Rodo y Proteo (1910) [Rodo and Proteus] and in Los optimistas (1914) [The Optimists], was, at best, skeptical. The Conference Society and the journal Cuba contemporanea [Contemporary Cuba], while they were close to the Hellenism of Alfonso Reyes, are not institutionally comparable to the Youth Athenaeum in Mexico. Neither did its promoters, Castellanos included, as well as Max Henriquez Urena, Luis Rodriguez Embil, and others, identify too much with the “return to the Iberian trunk” that the Peruvian Francisco Garcia Calderon exalted in La creacion de un continente (1912) [The Creation of a Continent], as a formula to avoid that the “Hispanic American nations exterminate each other.”47 Aside from the more obvious political reasons, the dissemination of anti-Latin eugenics in Cuba can be linked to the fact that this anthropological episteme facilitated the representation of national identity as a “threshold” in the years after the war. This is best observed in the early works of Fernando Ortiz. In his Los negros brujos (1906) [Black Witch Doctors] and his studies of the Cuban “low life,” later collected in Hampa afrocubana: Los negros esclavos (1916) [Afro-Cuban Underclass: The Black Slaves], Ortiz sets out to articulate a moral and psychic taxonomy of the races in Cuba. We only find slightly different versions of this taxonomy between the early works just

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mentioned and his classic “Las supervivencias africanas en Cuba” [“African Surviving Traits in Cuba”] of 1913. In one of his first texts on Cuban low life, pre-1898, Ortiz says: The white race influences the Cuban underclass through European vices that are modified and aggravated by social factors bred by the environment. The black race contributed to this underclass its superstitions, its impulsivity, well, its African psyche. The yellow race brought its addiction to opium, its homosexual vices and other refined corruptions of its secular civilization.48

Here we see a mixture of anthropological and sociological epistemes. A few years later, however, in one of the articles collected under the title Entre cubanos: Psicologia tropical (1913) [Between Cubans: Tropical Psychology], one can detect the first separation of the notions of race and civilization: I am convinced that few civilized peoples can attempt more successfully the study of demopsychology. There are not many countries like Cuba, who can say they are a receptacle where, in less than a century, a relatively brief period of time, representatives of the four classic ethnic types have fused their psychology: whites (Europeans and their descendants), blacks (Africans), yellows (Chinese), and coppers (Yucatecs, without counting the aborigines).49

Ortiz notices a political disintegration during the first years of the Republican order, a disbanding of those subjects that had previously melded during the colonial order. Aline Helg has astutely observed that the tensions between Creoles, Spaniards, mulatos, and blacks came to the fore between 1902 and 1914, after the period of truce called during the separatist war.50 Ortiz, like Varona, perceives the Republic as the process of fragmentation of a stratified pyramid, as the cycle of disintegration of a holistic community. In this space of the limit between races, religions, and cultures, Ortiz’s work is, in a way, the voice of one of the fragments—the white Creole group—or at least the voice of one of the segments of this group, the one that is completely identified with North American modernization. For Ortiz, the success of this modernization will depend on the containment of the two poles of identity, of their self-knowing, which for him

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are black identities and Spanish identities. According to him, these two poles are the major sources of eugenic faults that destabilize the new civic model in Cuba. It is in this sense that the distinction between race and civilization proves decisive. The Spaniards have their origin in a civilization, but do not constitute a race. Black people, on the other hand, come from different civilizations, but do constitute a race. However, according to Ortiz, because there is a confusion between the two concepts, a confusion owing to an epistemic mistake in sociology and anthropology, Spaniards and blacks in Cuba practice, at the time, two distinct politics of race. In La reconquista de America: Reflexiones sobre el pan-hispanismo (1911) [The Reconquest of America: Reflections on PanHispanism], Ortiz situates himself between both politics and occupies in this way the place of enunciation of the white Creole pro-American group. The majority of the articles that constitute this collection were published between 1909 and 1910 in El Tiempo and in the Revista Bimestre Cubana; but the prologue was written in Zurich. That is why we find a rather odd praise of the Swiss nation that, in the words of Ortiz, had been able to “affirm itself on a heterogeneous base of languages and politics, of religions and races.”51 This defense of heterogeneity is the leitmotif of a passionate criticism of the Americanist movement, which Rafael Altamira y Crevea headed from his post at the University of Oviedo. Salvador Rueda, Adolfo Posada, and other Spanish writers supported this vision. Ortiz had read Altamira’s Espana en America (1908) [Spain in America]; Rafael Maria de Labra’s Orientation americana de Espana (1909) [American Orientation of Spain]; and Posada’s Para America, desde Espana (1906) [For America, From Spain]. Based on these readings, Ortiz reaches the conclusion that the pro-Hispanic campaign mounted by these authors, clearly directed at Latin America, was the Spanish version of the Pan-Slavic movement or, better yet, of Pan-Germanism. These movements were based on the doctrine of the nation as a “community of race,” which appears in German Romanticism and especially in Fichte’s Discourses to the German Nation. This work had been translated into Spanish by none other than

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Altamira.52 Ortiz supports his arguments with the works of sociologists who were opposed to eugenicist discourse, such as Aleksandr Novikov, Ludwig Gumplowicz, and Napoleon Colajanni. This he does in order to establish that, theoretically speaking, Pan-Hispanism is flawed because “Spain is not a race, anthropologically or sociologically speaking.” According to Ortiz, “a multi-ethnic social group is a civilization, not a race.”53 In all truth, the reading performed by Ortiz is unfair, deliberately so. Altamira always imagined Spain as a civilization, not a race, from his Psicologia del pueblo espanol (1917) [Psychology of the Spanish People], to his masterwork, Historia de Espana y de la civilizacion espanola (1935) [History of Spain and of Spanish Civilization]. This was also seen in the courses he gave in Argentine, Mexican, and Cuban universities, as part of a tour conducted during 1909–1910. Ortiz exaggerated his interpretation, because in the case of Cuba, Hispanism did function as a racial identity set up to resist North American modernization. As soon as the debate was transferred to the theme of civilizations, hierarchies became morally acceptable. Ortiz claimed that there exist “differences in the forward march of humanity” and, because of this, some civilizations were more advanced than others. There existed civilizations that were superior and others that were inferior. Cuban civilization was inferior because it came from two inferior civilizations, the African and the Spanish: We are inferior and our major inferiority lies precisely in not admitting to the fact, even as we name it quite often. I’m not referring to our race. In spite of its vain Aryan whiteness, we really can’t pinpoint where it’s from, and not that we really care. I’m referring to our sense of life. Our civilization is vastly inferior to the English, to the American, to the German, in sum, to the civilizations of the countries that today rule the world.54

Ortiz thinks that Spain’s problem is very similar to that of Cuba’s: lack of civilization. “We should septentrionalize ourselves, approach the North.” From whence the harshness of his conclusion: “The Americanization of Cuba is analogous to the Europeanization of Spain”; “the Cubanization of Cuba is equal

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to its de-Hispanization.”55 His emphasis on Spanish “inferiority,” “barbarism,” and “parasitism” places him in a zone of eugenic discourse, very similar to that which he opposed. He thought that the dilemma between the Latin and the AngloSaxon was false, not because of hierarchies that would make one civilization “inferior” and the other “superior,” but because for him, Spain simply was not “Latin” enough. Latinization is not the same as Hispanization; in his opinion, Cuba “should absorb the best of Latin civilization,” that is, “Italian inventiveness, the positivist sentiment of its rebirth, the humanism of its culture, and the subtlety, sense of thrift and modernity of France.”56 Where we can best see Ortiz’s relapse into eugenics is in the analogies he formulates between Spanish racism and black racism: In all rigor, Spanish-Americanism equals Afro-Cubanism, and, scientifically speaking, Pan-Hispanism is worth the same as Pan-Africanism. [Our blacks] do not manifest their blood calling toward Africa in the least. Why then should natives of America manifest a blood calling toward Spain?57

Here, the place of his own enunciation is transparent: Ortiz speaks in the name of the “natives of America,” by which he means white Creoles. The representational scheme of his discourse depends on a double limiting of subjectivity: in the face of the Spaniard and in the face of blacks. His distance from both racisms is only resolved in a eugenicist discursivity that reconstructs the potential imaginary of Creole racism. The nation is narrated, then, as the space of a limit, as a singular ethnic identity that should exert a civic hegemony over the rest of the community. Only after his essay “Los factores humanos de la cubanidad” (1940) [“The human factors of Cubanness”] will Ortiz begin to narrate the Cuban nation as a space of traversable limits, of permeable frontiers. One of the first phrases of this text places the reader in a simple and seductive perspective: “Cuba, that is to say, a place,” he writes.58 This is the essay in which Ortiz introduces a metaphor that would become famous, that of the ajiaco (a thick, gumbo-like Cuban soup). Not coincidentally, it

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was formulated the same year that the Constitution of 1940 was drafted. This could be interpreted as a Republican allegory: a last-ditch effort on the part of Creole culture to erase the ethnic limits through recourse to a civic homogeneity. In 1986, Georges Duby held a meeting in which a group of distinguished intellectuals, Jorge Luis Borges and Umberto Eco among them, attempted to answer the question, what is Latin civilization? Well, all of them were “Latin,” and the meeting was held in Paris, but judging from their replies to the question, each individual experienced his “Latinness” in a somewhat whimsical fashion. Maybe the only point in which they coincided is summed up in Eco’s remark: “Latin mentality is obsessed with the idea of the frontier.”59 We only have to read a few pages of Mark Twain or Washington Irving, not to mention the mammoth The Significance of the Frontier in American History by Fredric Jackson Turner, to correct none less than Umberto Eco.60 At any rate, I would like to think that that which Eugenio Trias has called “the logic of the limit” constitutes the axis of the discourse of Cuban national identity, as conceived by Cuban intellectuals in the last two centuries.61 What we call the “Cuban nation” is an agonistic space, a battlefield where empires, races, sexes, provinces, elites, memories, and discourses have confronted each other, and still do. Cuba is the child of its wars—of the independence wars in the nineteenth century and the revolutionary wars in the twentieth; of the “splendid little war” between Spain and the United States; and of the Cold War between Washington and Moscow. In the end, whether the desired trophy be “sovereignty,” “justice,” or “identity,” each war has been a symbolic clash in which some subjects eliminate others and reproduce the historical forms of biopower. So we have it that the war of memory happens on many fronts. In spite of the “hard” representations of its national identity, Cuba is, as Levi Marrero used to say, “an open island.”62 Its history always involves other national actors; its liminal location makes of the insular destiny precisely a paradox of the limit in which inside and outside, interior and exterior are delineated savagely. We forget that Cuba is a topic of other

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narratives, an event in other national histories; merely a small place in the immense temporalities of Spain, Africa, China, Great Britain, the United States, Mexico, Russia, Puerto Rico, and so on. Our forgetting prevents us from experiencing the pleasure of being narrated by others and of narrating ourselves as if we were others. Maybe the disappearance of this feverish self-representation will help us tame our own memory.

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3 Fernando Ortiz:Transculturation and Nationalism

In the early twentieth century, news spread in the academic circles of Cuban social sciences that the fossil of a monkey, together with a mysterious jawbone, had been found in a cave in Sancti Spíritus, at the island’s center. The discovery aroused a degree of archaeological speculation that dated the first signs of human life on the island to the early Quaternary, when Cuba was still connected to the Florida Peninsula. This expedition to the Sierra de Banao, where in the Boca del Plurial cave researchers found the remains of what was to be named “homo cubensis,” “montaneia anthropomorfa,” “Sancti Spiritus man,” or simply “Cuban fossil man,” was led by Cuban paleontologist Luis Montané.1 The discovery also led to a kind of genealogical euphoria, in which the discourse of social sciences, anxious to affirm the identity of Cuban culture, made its first nationalist statements. Juan Antonio Cosculluela, an outstanding engineer, geographer, and archaeologist, would describe the life of the alleged homo cubensis, whose existence was questioned by the Society of Americanists of Paris, as a prehistoric epic of Cubanness: Homo cubensis, our primitive compatriot, an eyewitness to all those revolutions and transformations our Earth underwent at the end of the Tertiary and throughout the Quaternary, accompanied by now dead fauna, where large mammals abounded, from the hippopotamus to our current jutia, wandered its jungles dragging out a miserable existence,

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Essays in Cuban Intellectual History and its forests served him as a refuge from attack by the enormous and fierce quadrupeds, until he learned to overcome and defeat them.2

In 1922, Fernando Ortiz participated in that debate on protocubanness with his Historia de la arqueología indocubana.3 Here, the young anthropologist defended the exogenism of Cuban aboriginals and, in general, of man in the Americas, although it would not be until the mid-1930s, when the triumph of the revolution against the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado allowed him to return from exile in Washington, that he would be able to demonstrate that intuition in an article called “Cómo eran los indocubanos” (1935).4 In his defense of the thesis that the first inhabitants of the Americas had been Asians who arrived in the continent across the Bering Strait, Ortiz would even agree with Christopher Columbus: “Ethnographically, the Antilles were, as Columbus imagined, ‘the last land in the East Indies,’ or to put it better the East bank of the Indies, which looked toward western lands from the other bank of that Atlantic Sea, that once divided the world, from pole to pole, and that today joins its continents like a lake, civilization’s new Mediterranean.”5 By “giving them Asians,” as Edmundo O’Gorman was to put it, Christopher Columbus, according to Ortiz, was neither “hiding” nor “inventing” the Americas, he was simply defining them in their remote ethnogenesis.6 Puerto Rican scholar Arcadio Díaz Quiñones found in an early text by Fernando Ortiz, La filosofía penal de los espiritistas (1915), certain signs of the concept of transculturation that Ortiz would develop in Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (1940), insinuated in the “transmigration of souls” maxim maintained in the spritistic cult.7 In an original way, Díaz Quiñones was picking up on the old theme in Beginnings, that Louis Althusser spread in the 1970s with his theory of the “epistemological break” between the first and second Karl Marx, and that Edward Said theorized in his book Beginnings: Intention and Method.8 In the case of Fernando Ortiz, as we shall see, this penchant for archaeological readings within his own discoursive formation is accentuated by the strength of the certainty surrounding the discontinuity between the eugenic

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works of the first two postcolonial decades—the ambitious series comprising Hampa afrocubana (1906), La reconquista de América (1911), Entre cubanos (1913), Las Fases de la evolución religiosa (1919)—controlled by the positivist paradigm of Italian and Spanish criminal anthropology (César Lombroso, Enrique Ferri, Rafael Salillas, Constancio Bernardo de Quirós), and the later texts of the 1940s and 1950s—Los factores humanos de la cubanidad (1940), Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar, El engaño de las razas (1946), La africanía de la música folklórica de Cuba (1950)—in which a republican and transcultural notion of Cuban identity predominates.9 The critique of nationalist Cuban archaeology in the 1920s and 1930s also forms a bridge between the first and the second Ortiz. By defending the exogenism of the “Cuban man,” the young anthropologist was redirecting the understanding of national culture away from archaeological discourse toward migratory discourse and questioning the pertinence of a mythical account of origin. In this regard, the works of the Cuban scholar fully fell within the break with the positivist and Darwinian patterns of Victorian anthropology that, as George W. Stocking has seen, produced the “extinction of Paleolithic man” in the field of social knowledge.10 This settling of scores with classical evolutionism allowed Ortiz to progress toward an idea of culture in which national identity appears as an historical construction of the island’s successive ethnic immigrations.11 As is known, Ortiz later developed this idea in the lecture Los factores humanos de la cubanidad, which not only picked up on his criticism of archaeological discourse, but also distanced itself from other migratory and ethnological interpretations of identity, such as those of Ramiro Guerra in Azúcar y población en las Antillas (1927) or Alberto Lamar Schweyer in Biología de la democracia. Ensayo de sociología americana (1927) or La crisis del patriotismo. Una teoría de las inmigraciones (1929), who through a nostalgia for the Creole élites of the nineteenth century insinuated a eugenic rejection of the darkening of society, of the advance of miscegenation, and of the Caribbean immigration of the first postcolonial decades.12

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However, the later works by Fernando Ortiz, those that we associate with such texts as Los factores humanos de la cubanidad, Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar, and El engaño de las razas, are not without tensions. The most important, in my opinion, is that established between the anthropological discourse of identity and the cultural practice of difference. The idea of Cubanness, which in the first two essays is set forth through the metaphor of ajiaco and the concept of transculturation, resists the anthropological proposal of the hegemonic national subject, regardless of the fact that the latter is seen as the result of the most intense cultural crossbreeding.13 Ortiz still maintained this resistance in El engaño de las razas, through the explicit rejection of panmixia, despite the fact that in this book he openly assumed a postethnic republicanism, based on the observation of mankind’s “increasing crossbreeding.”14 In a comment on the English anthropologist J.C. Trevor, he even comes to question the pertinence of a hybrid conception of ethnicity: “logically mixture implies the preknowledge of purity. Trevor prefers the word hybrid instead of mixed; and not wishing to say mixed-blood populations, writes hybrid populations. But the word and the concept of hybridism carry with them the same objections as crossbreeding, mixed blood and other similar terms.”15 Therefore, Fernando Ortiz’s integrationism was neither acting as a principle to undermine multiracianalness nor as a device favorable to the closed narratives of national identity. Hence, a whole tradition of Latin Americanist writings by Fernando Ortiz and stagings of the combinatory argument, started perhaps by the great Uruguayan theoretician Ángel Rama, which identifies transculturation with cross-breeding, hybridity, or the contact zone, must be examined from the subtle hermeneutics of Ortiz’s texts.16 That warning, made some years ago by Antonio Cornejo Polar, about the totalizing effect that such notions as hybridity and cross-breeding take on, was shared by Fernando Ortiz himself, who came to distrust the encratic powers of metaphor.17 This does not, however, dispute the fact that Fernando Ortiz’s later works seek an affirmation of ethnic integrationism as a formula to deactivate racist discourses

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and practices. It is just that, in our opinion, integrationism was not conceived as an anthropological fusion leaving the hegemony of the white elites intact, but the articulation of a republican citizenry, with equal civil, social, and political rights, freely manifesting its cultural heterogeneity. What did Fernando Ortiz understand by “racial integration”? Apart from Los factores humanos de la cubanidad, Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar and El engaño de las razas, there is one text, Por la integración cubana de blancos y negros (1959), which deals with the subject head-on. It is a brief intellectual autobiography that Fernando Ortiz wrote based on the speech he gave at the Atenas Club in Havana in 1942. In it, he established the five stages of racial integration in Cuba or of the “reciprocal transculturation of races and cultures” on the island: the hostile—in the framework of colonial slavery until 1886; the transigent—when at the end of the nineteenth century the whites exercised their social hegemony accepting the legal freedom and cultural specificity of blacks; the adaptive—marking the moment when civil and political rights were extended to the black population in the early twentieth century; the vindicative—a stage of “mutual respect and cooperation among blacks and whites, although unpleasant memories of secular prejudices and the discriminatory burden of economic factors still intervene,” which, according to Ortiz, survived in his day; and, finally, the integrative stage—which was to be attained in the future.18 But we still have before us a fifth stage to attain in the future, the integrative stage. In it there is only a small minority. It contains those of us meeting here. It is the stage of tomorrow, of the tomorrow that is already dawning. It is the final stage, where cultures have melded, and conflict has ceased, giving way to a tertium quid, a third entity and culture, a new and culturally integrated community, in which merely racial factors have lost their dissociative malice. Therefore, in the light of its deep and transcendental significance, this act by a group of racially diverse Cubans coming together in a rite of social communion, in which the need is firmly established for reciprocal understanding on the objective basis of truth, aimed at the achievement of the ultimate integrity of the nation, constitutes a new moment in the country’s history and we must interpret it as such.19

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Certain phrases in this paragraph—“melding of cultures,” “ceasing of conflicts,” “third entity,” “ultimate integrity of the nation”—seem to allude to a postethnic utopia, where racial identities are erased, concealed, or dissolved under a homogeneous social fabric. If the nuance of authority inherent in the reference to a “small minority” already inhabiting that future community is taken together with these phrases, it is difficult not to detect here the discourse of those postcolonial educated elites who legitimized their cultural hegemony with speeches of republican integration. However, a close reading reveals that this minority was, according to Ortiz, a microcosm of ethnic heterogeneity: “a group of racially diverse Cubans coming together in a rite of social communion.” Thus, Fernando Ortiz’s civic narrative acted as a moral, antiracial counterweight for the anthropological certainty of ethnic identity, characteristic of anthropological discourse.20 In response to this tension between anthropology and civism, identity and difference, transculturation and republicanism, the works of the Cuban scholar proposed a scholarly dialectic, coinhabited by the visibility and concealment of the racial subject. To a large extent, maintaining the exogenism of man on the island amounted to an acknowledgment of the visibility of racial and migratory identities, and an internationalist and even taxonomic calling, that Fernando Ortiz demonstrated throughout his intellectual work. Proof of this vocation lies in his early texts on Menorcan dialect and customs (Principi y prostes [1895] and Para la agonografía española [1901]), his studies of Italians, Galicians, and Chinese in Cuba, his anthropological research into Indo-Cuban and Afro-Cuban cultures, his studies of the pre-Hispanic and colonial history of Mesoamerica and the Caribbean in El huracán, su mitología y sus símbolos (1947) and in Historia de una pelea cubana contra los demonios (1959) and, even, his forays into the subject of the diplomatic and cultural relations between Cuba and the United States. This record of diversity and nativeness, typical of a migratory conception of culture, makes Ortiz a member of the tradition of the “thought from outside” defined by Michel Foucault, after a subtle reading of Maurice Blanchot’s Celui que ne m’accompagnait pas21—An

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externality that questions and destabilizes self-centered discourses of national identity and that aspires to the remote paradigm of cosmopolitan patriotism.22

Readings in Counterpoint The first reaction of an ideal reader of Fernando Ortiz is surprise at the diverse immensity of his oeuvre. Ortiz himself embodies an entire discoursive formation in Cuban culture that exemplifies that textual metamorphosis spoken of by Michel Foucault, meaning a document can become a monument.23 Law and criminology, ethnology and sociology, linguistics and archaeology, literature and politics, anthropology and history create an unusual multiplicity of forms of knowledge that acts as a rhizome within that discoursive formation.24 María Zambrano uses the metaphor of the tree to signify the unitive fullness of José Lezama Lima’s oeuvre: “a tree that rises whole over its multiple and contradictory roots.”25 Similarly, Manuel Ulacia referred to the arboreal nature adopted by the poetry of Octavio Paz, as it moved into other areas of history and culture. But in both cases, the symbolic axis of the author-tree metaphor lies in the trunk. In Ortiz, on the other hand, the hermeneutic effectiveness is in the branches or, if the reader prefers, in the roots. Let us imagine for one moment the intellectual history of Cuba without Enrique José Varona and Jorge Mañach, without Elías Entralgo and Roberto Agramonte, without Alejo Carpentier and José Lezama Lima, without Lydia Cabrera and Manuel Moreno Fraginals. Even in this desert, the oeuvre of Fernando Ortiz alone would suffice to bring Cuban culture into the modern world. Ortiz’s legacy locates the mystery of a fully modern intellectual venture in the Caribbean and, even, in Latin America. This modernness is tested in what, after Habermas, we might understand as a dialectic between the self-assurance of a place in the world and the ability to journey toward other epistemological horizons.26 Ortiz’s discoursive nomadism finds form in the writing of numerous cultural anthropology studies of Cuban folklore, such as La africanía de la música folklórica de

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Cuba (1950) or Los bailes y el teatro de los negros en el folklore de Cuba (1951), of a precursor to a history of mentalities, such as Historia de una pelea cubana contra los demonios, which a decade earlier glimpses the historiographical path opened up by Jacques Le Goff and Georges Duby, Carlo Ginzburg and Robert Darnton, of such well-written civic essays as those in La crisis política cubana. Sus causas y remedios (1919) or En la tribuna; discursos cubanos (1923), and of hybrid texts, halfway between anthropology, history, and economics, and his emblematic Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar and El huracán, su mitología y sus símbolos.27 However, rather than in the expansiveness of his texts, the modernness of Ortiz’s writing lies in the shadow he projects, in the wake of readings that he leaves in his path, or in that vast territory of interpretations that opens around him: an unusual example, in Cuban culture, of the correspondence of two broad records, what is read and what is written.28 Let us take, for example, the case of Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar, Fernando Ortiz’s most read and commented text. The first edition of the work (Havana, Jesús Montero, 1940) appeared preceded by a “Prologue” by the Cuban historian Herminio Portell Vilá and an “Introduction” by the Polish-British anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, who was at that time was a professor at Yale and would remain so until his death in 1942. Both readings of the same text were born from different referential fields and were oriented toward different audiences, without provoking irreconcilable tension. Portell Vilá attempted to highlight the nationalist implications of the Counterpoint, in the context of a major commercial and tariff readjustment of Cuban sugar exports to the United States; whereas Malinowski set forth to underline the theoretical contribution of the transculturation concept to Western anthropology and Ortiz’s methodological affiliation with the functionalist school, founded by himself and Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown in England and adopted by sociologists Robert Merton and Talcott Parsons in the United States.29 In the Counterpoint, Portell Vilá reads a “certain, incontrovertibly true doctrine, that cane, the sugar industry, the system

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organized around it, form an exotic whole in Cuba, something alien to the country, that serves the foreigner before the national interest and that cannot be considered in isolation from its characteristics of human exploitation, undue privilege, and protectionism.”30 This nationalist reading in part resulted from the text’s binarism and also from the Cuban economic situation affected at the time by the revolutionary process of the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration’s New Deal, and the outbreak of the Second World War. The suspension of the system of sugar quotas established by the Costigan-Jones Act in 1934, and the tenfold increase in sugar tariffs, which were causing falling revenue, rising unemployment, falling wages, and rising prices, caused an interesting break among the political elites who still respected Raimundo Cabrera’s famous maxim (“without sugar there is no country”) and the intellectual elites who, since the mid-1920s, were demanding the abolition of the large landholdings and the redefinition of economic sovereignty in the presence of the United States.31 Other educated republicans, such as Ramiro Guerra, Emeterio Santovenia, Francisco Ichaso, or even Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring, would have subscribed to the Portell Vilá criticism of the “synonymy between sugar and nation,” which postulated the “equivalence of the national interest and the sugar interest.”32 Ortiz’s Counterpoint was read in that intellectual circle of republican liberals as a denunciation of monoculture and a defense of industrialization and agricultural diversification. Malinowski’s reading, on the other hand, was not addressed to Cuban public space but to the Anglo-American academic media and, to a lesser degree, to a certain enlightened portion of the U.S. political class related to the foreign service. First, Malinowski, who traveled to Havana at Ortiz’s invitation, acknowledged Ortiz’s patent on the concept of transculturation, which for him was more appropriate than others such as “cultural change,” “acculturation,” “dissemination,” or “migration or osmosis of cultures,” thanks to its abandonment of European ethnocentrism.33 On some pages of the Counterpoint, Ortiz could not conceal his personal pride at the fact that his term was spreading in the academic centers of Western anthropology.

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“The proposed neologism transculturation having been subjected,” writes Ortiz, “to the unchallengeable authority of Bronislaw Malinowski, the great contemporary master of ethnography and sociology, it has been worthy of his immediate approval. With such an eminent patron, we shall not hesitate to launch the aforementioned neologism.”34 And so, Ortiz felt authorized by Malinowski, but Malinowski in turn highly valued the benefit of authorizing the Cuban anthropologist, because in turn he was assuring the inclusion of Ortiz in the methodological canon of functionalism. That is why, the Yale professor goes to great lengths insisting that Ortiz is “a true functionalist, knowing that the aesthetics and psychology of sensory impressions must be taken into account along with habitat and technology” or that he is a “good functionalist because he uses history when it is indispensable.”35 Nevertheless, there is one point on which Portell Vilá’s ideological nationalist reading and Malinowski’s epistemological functionalist reading, parallel thus far, subtly clash. Portell Vilá understands that criticizing sugar as an element of foreignness and submission implies economic independence from the United States, in other words, that which in his exalted prose would be the extirpation of a “parasite that extracts the nation’s vital juices.”36 Malinowski, on the other hand, assumes that by establishing a bidirectional dialogue between two or several cultures the concept of transculturation does not imply independence but interdependence with the United States.37 The author of Magia, ciencia y religión, who in his last years at Yale had become familiar with the shift in Roosevelt’s diplomacy toward Latin America, took advantage of his “Introduction” to the Counterpoint to involve a transculturation in foreign policy and suggest that “interdependence” among bordering countries would open new symbolic porosities. “Cuba, together with Mexico,” concluded Malinowski, “is the closest of those Latin American peoples where the ‘good neighbor policy’ should be established with all the intelligence, foresight, and generosity of which U.S. statesmen and even financial magnates are occasionally capable.”38 In certain political texts from the late 1920s and early 1930s, such as Las relaciones económicas entre Cuba y los

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Estados Unidos (1927), La creación de los colegios panamericanos (1928), and Lo que desea Cuba de los Estados Unidos (1932), Fernando Ortiz defended a bilateral relation between the United States and Cuba based on mutual respect and commercial and cultural cooperation. A radical political interpretation of both readings could show that, whereas Portell Vilá held the national, independentist perspective, Malinowski, very much in accordance with the original nature of British anthropological undertakings, held an imperial perspective. However, in the two reissues of the Counterpoint, corrected and augmented by Ortiz himself, made after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution and published by the Universidad Central de la Las Villas (1963) and the Consejo Nacional de Cultura (1963), Portell Vilá’s “Prologue” was removed while Bronislaw Malinowski’s “Introduction” was retained.39 The explanation is simple: the nationalist historian Herminio Portell Vilá had emigrated to the United States in disagreement with the revolutionary government’s adoption of Marxism-Leninism as its official ideology. Ten years after these reissues, the important historian Julio Le Riverend would pick up on quite a few ideas in Portell Vilá’s nationalist reading— without quoting him of course—including them in a MarxistLeninist explanation of Ortiz’s anti-imperialism, in his prologue to Don Fernando’s Órbita published by the UNEAC.40 But this incidental paradox calls for a redefinition of Ortiz’s nationalism and, in general, of nationalisms in Cuban culture, in other words, as Montserrat Guibernau recommends, an explicative transfer from the singular to the plural, from that abusive trite expression of “Cuban nationalism” to a typology of nationalisms in Cuba.41 Stating that Fernando Ortiz was a nationalist intellectual is to repeat the obvious: the true challenge of a sophisticated reading is to illustrate what type of nationalism his was. Perhaps without setting out to, Bronislaw Malinowski noted that if the Counterpoint itself was not read transculturally, a discoursive antinomy could arise between the nationalist and the transcultural contents. Indeed the excessively binary rhetoric adopted by Ortiz to narrate the secular fight between “Don

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Tabaco and Doña Azúcar” seems at times to suggest, as it suggested to Portell Vilá, that tobacco was a metaphor for things Cuban and sugar an allegory for the antinational. One of the most problematic passages in this sense reads as follows: “. . . in trade: for our tobacco the whole world as a market, and for our sugar, a single market in the world. Centripetalism and centrifugation. Cubanness and foreignness. Sovereignty and colony. Arrogant crown and humble coat.”42 However, in other parts of the text, beginning with the title, Ortiz states that Cubanness does not live within one or another archetype, in one or another allegory, but in counterpoint, coming together, and exchange, in other words, in the transculturation of sugar and tobacco. Thus, for example, he notes that sugar and its derivatives produce a “cross-breeding of flavors,” that “sugar was always originally mulatto, because the energies of blacks and whites always fused in its production” and that “the black’s arm and sugarcane are two factors in the same economic binomial in our country’s social equation.”43 Fernando Ortiz, a dialogistic thinker opposed to Manicheanism and stereotypes, did not exclude from the construction of the Cuban national identity, as Manuel Moreno Fraginals has seen, that economic, political, and cultural process of sugar, despite its infernal dialectic of “machinism, latifundism, colonialism, the trade in seasonal farmworkers, supercapitalism, absenteeism, foreignism, corporatism, and imperialism.”44 That is why he ended the essay presaging the marriage of Don Tabaco and Doña Azúcar and their triune offspring: rum.45 An appropriate way out of the tension between nationalism and transculturation would be the dialectic of a transcultural nationalism. It is obvious that when Ortiz writes the celebrated phrase, “the true story of Cuba is the story of its phenomenally complex transculturations,” he reveals a porous, nuanced, and permeable narrative of the island’s national identity.46 A careful reader will note that by using the plural “transculturations,” Ortiz refers first to a mutation within a sedentary population, taking place among the Paleolithic Ciboney and the Neolithic Taino, and, later, to an infinite cycle of immigrations that begins with the arrival of the first Spaniards and Africans in the

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sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries and continues with the inclusion into Cuban society of French, British, Germans, Italians, Chinese, Jews, Poles, Americans, Russians, and other immigrants in the last two centuries.47 The idea appears in greater detail in his lecture Los factores humanos de la cubanidad, in which Ortiz uses the metaphor of ajiaco to illustrate this endless process of settlement and filtration of different cultures in one national space. Again, it must be insisted, in light of the errors this text has originated, that Ortiz does not find the complexity of Cubanness in the stock, but in its cooking, not in “the sauce, its succulence fresh and synthetic, formed by the fusion of human lineages,” but “in the same complex process of its formation, disintegrative and integrative . . .”48 This idea of a permanent cultural construction in which collision and hybridity among the actors never dissolve, fragmentary identities into a homogeneous whole is the epistemological bridge between the Cuban Fernando Ortiz and the postmodern anthropology of Clifford Geertz, James Clifford, and Denis Tedlock.49 As is known, the first postmodern readings of the Counterpoint were made by Antonio Benítez Rojo, who especially highlighted the place of fiction in the text, and, more recently, by Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Roberto González Echevarría, George Yúdice, Román de la Campa, Fernando Coronil, Peter Burke, Enrico Mario Santí, and others, who, in greater accordance with postfunctionalist anthropology, have seen in Ortiz’s transcultural nationalism a useful analytical premise for a consideration of the tension between the multiculturalism and republicanism that characterize contemporary society.50 Some of these readings, such as those by Gustavo Pérez Firmat and Roberto González Echevarría, see the archtypical modernness of the Counterpoint, a “text burdened by the imperative of identity.”51 Now, the rejection of synthesis, as the dialectic fiction that turns national identity into a teleological metastory, is so clear in Ortiz that it becomes impossible to find in his essays a recycling of the myth of an alleged “primordial mulattoness of the Cuban.”52 Ajiaco presumes a mixing (“mixing of cuisines, mixing of races, mixing of cultures”), but it is not a synonym for

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mulattoness.53 Understanding mulattoness or racial crossbreeding as an allegory for nationality amounts to distorting an incomplete and diffuse whole within a part, because, as Ortiz says, the nation never “is made” and its “mass” is never “integrated.” Hence that lucid conclusion that has been read backward so many times: the infinite migratory fabric of Cuban society always “defers”—and will defer—“the consolidation of a definitive and basic national homogeneity.”54 Therefore, this transcultural nationalism distances itself from ethnic nationalism, in the style of Mexican José Vasconcelos’s Cosmic Race, whose argumentation, according to Ortiz, was “pure paradox.”55 In El engaño de las razas, Ortiz repeated his disagreement with Vasconcelos, stating that that “panmixia” of the “cosmic race” was a “paradoxical metaphor of propaganda, literature, religion, and that old philosophical fantasy of the universal mixture, cosmopolitanism, and humanitarianism, depriving the word race of its own and true sense: not supremely genetic, but one of anthropological specification.”56 Fernando Ortiz’s national narrative is, then, closer to a postethnic discourse, in the sense of David Hollinger, than to a multicultural citizenry model as has been proposed by Will Kymlicka.57 Despite its consideration of the heterogeneity distributed by the Cuban migratory fabric, Ortiz’s oeuvre stresses the integration between blacks and whites more through the path of republican civism than that of a mythological miscegenation. After Ortiz abandoned the eugenic episteme that controlled his first books— Los negros brujos. Apuntes para un estudio de etnología criminal (1906), La reconquista de América. Reflexiones sobre el panhispanismo (1911), Hampa afrocubana. Los negros esclavos (1916)—and adopted the postethnic perspective that was to become fully clear in El engaño de las razas, his nationalism included the civic principle as a liberator of interethnic tensions and arbiter of intercultural disputes. Fernando Ortiz, a modern intellectual fully integrated into the democratic current, always thought that transculturation, with all its frictions, led to a republican citizenry, whose social, civil, and political rights were distributed without legally embodying the signs of identity of those small migratory communities that comprised the nation.

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Transcultural Republicanism Apart from his critique of nationalist archaeology, Fernando Ortiz’s public interventions, from his dual role of an intellectual and a politician, articulated a civic discourse that, faced with the principle of the cultural heterogeneity of the Cuban nation, strengthened the principle of republican homogeneity. These interventions became recurrent between 1917 and 1933, when Ortiz alternated academic work with terms in the Chamber of Representatives for the Liberal Party (1917–1927); cooperation on the Crowder Code (1919); the foundation of the Cuban Civic Renovation Board and the Minoritist Group (1923); presidency of the Economic Society of Friends of the Country (1923); delegation to the Third (1926) and Sixth (1928) PanAmerican Conferences held in Washington and Havana; the birth of the Hispano-Cuban Culture Institution (1926); writing of the draft Criminal Code (1927); the publication of the valuable Boletín de Legislación (1929); and finally, exile in Washington (1931–1933), where he joined the public campaign against the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado.58 In this phase of public interventionism, Ortiz wrote several political essays in which a clear republican nationalism is revealed, opposed to dependence on the United States and favorable to the development of a modern citizenry, in conditions of legal equality. In La crisis política cubana, for example, Ortiz proposed a typology of six causes for the crisis: historical, sociological, demopsychological, proletarian, political, and international. For each one of these evils he recommended in turn a remedy of the same type. It is interesting to note how Ortiz maintained in his historical, sociological, and demopsychological interpretation of the crisis the civilizing or culturalist approach of the eugenic episteme (“general lack of culture of the ruled classes,” “disintegration and racial antagonisms,” “weakness of the Cuban character,” “Creole pessimism”), while he adopted an institutional and republican discourse in his political recommendations: constitutional reforms, administrative honesty, job creation, incentives for culture, open nationalism, “cordial reciprocal intimacy with the United States,” and “encouragement of Spanish immigration.”59

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Ortiz’s civilizing republicanism had already been included in certain essays in Entre cubanos. Psicología tropical (1913). Here, the young anthropologist reacted to the passiveness of the postcolonial subject in Cuba, the “sleepy son of the tropics,” characterized by a rosary of moral vices (indifference, lack of seriousness, vagrancy, superstition, irresponsibility, violence, crime, and so on), hidden under a kind of Creole arrogance summed up in a popular phrase: “we Cubans have no time for nonsense.”60 It is significant that as early as then, when Ortiz’s anthropological work still responded to the positivist paradigm, his political proposals were not eugenic or moralizing, but institutional: civic education, culture of legality, defense of sovereignty, creation of political parties. This ability to combine an anthropological discourse that, in the style of Los negros brujos, still finds the vectors of “barbarism” in certain ethnic defects, with republican politics that reject any racial determinism may also be seen in La reconquista de América. Reflexiones sobre el panhispanismo. Amid a passionate rejection of the criteria of racial and civilizing superiority, whether among Saxons, Latins, Hispanics, or Africans, Ortiz was to say of Spain that a “multiethnic nation was a civilization, not a race.”61 Cuba, a postcolonial multiethnic nation, was also a “civilization,” but, according to Ortiz, inferior to the great Western civilizations, including that of “America.”62 This civilizing conception of Cuban culture, despite the positivist defects that burdened it, heightened Fernando Ortiz’s republican reformism in the 1920s. Another text where this reformism is expressed was “La decadencia cubana” (Cuban decadence), a talk given by Ortiz on 23 February 1924 at the Society of Friends of the Country. At one of his moments of greatest eloquence, Ortiz used precisely the word barbarism to refer to the acute crisis of the postcolonial order: “Cuban society is disintegrating. Cuba is rapidly falling into barbarism. Yes! And it must be categorically stated, and repeated daily in homes and schools, workshops and lounges, so that Cubans will feel the horror of their future and the shame of their current despondency.”63 However, by decadence and barbarism, two concepts taken from historical morphology and evolutionist anthropology,

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Ortiz understood something very concrete, more closely related to the contradictions of a small Caribbean nation state, independent of the old Spanish slave-trading empire, and part of the neocolonial orbit of the United States. The symptoms of that disintegration were statistically tangible: 53 percent illiteracy, 70 percent of the sugar industry in foreign hands, 17 percent of national territory in American ownership, mining, railroads, the telegraph, and banks controlled by foreign companies.64 According to Ortiz, the fatal combination of a lack of culture and dependence created a selfish “capital,” lacking a “patriotic vibration,” incapable of “feeling solidarity with national pain.”65 Although the lament at the absence of a national bourgeoisie was obvious, Ortiz’s discourse penetrated an area beyond merely civic patriotism by including civilizing and eugenic notions. Thus, in a little-commented passage of the text, he wrote that the deterioration of public education in Cuba was so bad that it was “on the educational scale below all the British West Indies, inhabited almost totally by blacks.”66 This note revealed the weight, even in the mid-1920s, of the old Creole favorite of the black threat, rearticulated in that decade by Ramiro Guerra, Alberto Lamar Schweyer, and other republican intellectuals. In Ortiz’s case, attachment to that ancestral prejudice began to give way in the late 1920s, thanks to a large extent to his closeness to the Afro-Cuban cultural movement, promoted among other institutions by the Revista de Avance (1927–1930). This would be given a boost with the creation in 1936 of the Society of Afro-Cuban Studies led by Ortiz himself and bringing together poets Nicolás Guillén, Emilio Ballagas, Manuel Arozarena, and young anthropologists Rómulo Lachatañeré and Lydia Cabrera.67 In November 1928, Fernando Ortiz gave his famous lecture “Ni racismos ni xenofobias” [Neither Racisms nor Xenophobias] in Madrid’s Llardy restaurant, which was published the following year in the Revista Bimestre Cubano. Here, Ortiz completely assimilated the starting point for all his later works: the substitution of the concept of race with that of culture, in both anthropological studies and public interventions. This turn without which it is impossible to conceive of the writing of Contrapunteo

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cubano del azúcar y el tabaco or El engaño de las razas—was determined by Ortiz’s republicanism; in other words, by the certainty inherited from José Martí that Cuban nationality had to be defined in civic terms, as a citizenry with equal rights, beyond the cultural interaction established by its ethnic components. It is interesting to see how Ortiz applies the stylistic principle of the counterpoint to the concept of race and culture in a passage of this text, thus avoiding that perverse effect of the discoursive displacement implied by the taboo of anything racial. Race is a static concept; culture, is dynamic. Race is a fact; culture is also a force. Race is cold; culture warm. Only feelings can be inspired by race; feelings and ideas by culture . . . Culture unites everyone; race only the chosen or the damned.68

Elsewhere in this lecture, Ortiz recalled the famous Morúa Act, introduced by black Liberal Party senator, Martín Morúa Delgado, against the Colored Independents Party, which legally prohibited political associations “exclusively comprising individuals of one single race or color.”69 As is known, the colored independents, led by Pedro Ivonet and Evaristo Estenoz, took up arms in 1912 against the government of General José Miguel Gómez, sparking off the only racial war in Cuban postcolonial history. The cruelty with which the black and mulatto rebels were massacred in that war, as documented by historian Alejandro de la Fuente, reached the levels of “civil terror.”70 By evoking in 1928 the amendment of Morúa Delgado, who— following Martí’s dictum “Cuban is more than black, more than mulatto, more than white”—rejected racial political sociability, Ortiz was repeating his backing for the republican option, even in social conditions ripe for the emergence of racist practices and discourses. In Cuba, for example, a law is in force that prevents the formation of parties with racist propagandas, because it is felt that racism would lead us to a suicidal disintegration. And if the law prevents black racism, can we in turn allow ourselves any other kind of racism, no matter how superior we believe it to be?71

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This republican backing, however, left the problem of racism intact that, given the conditions of the social, economic, and political hegemony of the white elites, had since its origins been included in the postcolonial civic model. Faced with this dilemma, Ortiz maintained the reformist and civilizing attitude outlined in the 1920s that conceived racism as a set of stereotypes and prejudices, bolstered by a cultural deficit, which had to be confronted through public education. Thus, combining cultural reformism and political republicanism, Fernando Ortiz managed to personify the demands of the Cuban intellectual field in the mid-twentieth century. This explains why many other public writers in the postcolonial generations—Ramiro Guerra, Emeterio Santovenia, Jorge Mañach, Herminio Portell Vilá, Elías Entralgo—saw him as a teacher or a patriarch of republican knowledge, capable of creating models in multiple disciplines: anthropology, history, economics, literature, sociology, or politics. In the mid-1930s, however, after the revolution to bring down Machado and the end of his brief exile in Washington (1931–1933), Fernando Ortiz’s republicanism attained its full conceptual formulation, in anthropological terms, and that fullness was to bring about a settling of accounts with the reformist and civilizing approach. Between 1936 and 1940, while he was making major efforts to promote the mutual recognition of the two great races in Cuban culture, Spanish and African, through the Afro-Cuban Culture Institution and the Society of AfroCuban Studies, Ortiz developed the concept of transculturation, as a hermeneutic axis for historical and anthropological interpretations of Cuban culture. This concept appeared, first insinuated, in the Contraste económico del azúcar y el tabaco (1936), and, then fully, in El contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar and Los factores humanos de la cubanidad.72 After a careful study of the correspondence between Ortiz and Malinowski and of the uses of the concept of transculturation in recent decades, Enrico Mario Santí concludes that Ortiz’s notion has had an “ambiguous fate” dominated by its confusion with other terms of “cultural resistance” theories, such as crossbreeding, hybridity, multiculturalism, or neobaroque.73 Santí

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correctly recommends an understanding of the social process of transculturation as an historic equivalent of the literary technique of counterpoint, in other words, nothing other than a dialogue among the subjects, practices, and discourses that comprise a culture.74 This understanding, less ideological than the one prevailing in cultural studies, already put forward by Antonio Benítez Rojo, points toward a relationship between Fernando Ortiz’s transcultural republicanism and the theory of the “dialogue of voices” and “polyphonic narrative” developed by Mikhail Bakhtin in his studies of Dostoyevsky. Based on some notes by Viacheslav Ivanov and Leonid Grossman, Bakhtin defined the novels of Dostoyevsky as texts in which a “plurality of accents” is set, where the identity of the “heroes” alternates between the known and the alien, the familiar and the strange, or in other words, between two mysteries: that of oneself and that of others.75 Indeed, this dialectic of identity and difference is very similar to what Ortiz tried to bring into the dual semantics of transculturation and counterpoint. According to this, no agent of Cuban culture—neither the black nor the white population, neither the Chinese nor the Russian, neither the Catholic nor the Yoruba religiousness, neither Spanish nor African immigration, in other words, neither tobacco nor sugar—kept its homogeneity intact in the process of cultural coexistence, but neither did it totally assimilate the condition of the other. This was, all said and done, the dialectic of ajiaco, a perpetual cooking of natural culture with all its ingredients, without any of them ever being totally dissolved in the abstract entity—the Spirit, the Soul, or the Identity—of the nation.76 It is worth noting that Fernando Ortiz reached this transcultural understanding of Cuban nationality just when the country’s turbulent political life, after the revolution against Machado, was moving toward a new pact of national reconciliation that took form in the 1940 Constitution. Article 102 of that constitutional text endorsed the Morúa Act, which had been defended by Ortiz, by establishing that, although “the organization of parties and political associations is free, political groups of race, sex, or class, however, may not be formed.”77 In this regard, it

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may be said that the discovery of the transcultural principle, in the work of Fernando Ortiz, did not imply a retreat or a weakening, but a dialogic compensation of his republicanism, which, after 1940, was to demand the equal civil, political, and social rights and duties of a modern national citizenry and, at the same time, would require the respect for the identity of cultural subjects and would support “communicative action” among them, from a postfunctionalist perspective.78 This juxtaposition between legal homogeneity and cultural heterogeneity connects Fernando Ortiz, within Western thought, with the republican tradition more than with the liberal tradition.79 His insistence on equal rights as an antidote to social stratification, and his backing for educational and moral policies to promote the fulfillment of civic duties, show him to be an heir to that Atlantic and American republicanism personified in Cuba by José Martí. In addition to a clear identification with the representative system of government, the premise of any republican order, the typical comparison between virtue and commerce, studied by J.G.A. Pocock, is abundant in Fernando Ortiz’s work, bringing with it a branch of the nineteenth-century HispanoAmerican and Cuban intellectual tradition, which includes Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, Félix Varela, Simón Bolívar, José de la Luz y Caballero, José Enrique Rodó, and José Martí.80 After 1940, Fernando Ortiz’s later work finely tuned that transcultural republicanism. Texts such as Por una escuela cubana en Cuba libre (1941), Martí y las razas (1942), or El engaño de las razas were, in this sense, emblematic, given the expositive nature and public passion with which they were written. But even Ortiz’s most academic work, in the 1940s and 1950s—Las culturas indias de Cuba (1943), El huracán, su mitología y sus símbolos, La africanía de la música folklórica de Cuba (1950), or Historia de una pelea cubana contra los demonios—always remained faithful to managing the tensions between controlled nationalism, typical of a small postcolonial republic neighboring the United States, and a transcultural citizenry, cut off by multiple stereotypes and prejudices. The intense reception of Fernando Ortiz’s transcultural theory, despite its ambiguities and manipulations, confirms that the

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ideas of the Cuban scholar belong within the debate of contemporary social science. Seen from current polemics, that option of transcultural republicanism would play a mediating role in tensions between the liberal and multicultural currents. Fernando Ortiz was not only an academic who used the tools of anthropology and ethnography to describe the different components of Cuban culture: he was also a public intellectual who defended a legal framework for coexistence among the subjects of that Caribbean nation. His legacy is projected along two dimensions: the decisive contribution to the knowledge of the cultural actors of Cuban nationality and the imagination of a possible order, a virtual community, predesigned by dialogue and neighborhood, coming together and contacting, communication and exchange among all the identities who live their differences.

4 Orígenes and the Poetics of History

The work of this group that Lezama called “the poets of Espuela de Plata” (1939–1941) was distinguished by a conviction about the absence of a past, or, in other words, Cuba’s scarce historical density. In Después de lo raro, la extrañeza, a text that Lezama devoted to Cintio Vitier’s poetry, there is a comment about the “impotence of penetrating an inexistent past.” A poem by the Lithuanian poet Oscar Milosz ends with a scene of an old chamberlain in a medieval castle, grasping his keys. For Lezama, in the hands of the old man was tradition, the keys to the city. This was a vision among many that allowed him to imagine a holistic order, the inexistent ancien régime of the island’s time. Since, as he claimed, in Cuban poetry, history was a “desolation through which not a single ghost passes.”1 Acknowledging the absence of a traditional reserve in Cuban culture eventually altered the destiny of poetry. For Lezama, the almost nonexistent density of the past did not provoke the constant need to refer to a climax of splendor and decadence—a rise and fall in the history of the island; rather it activated a foundational and prophetic impulse toward the future. The lament of the frustrated Republicans always left a trail of postponed ucronía, the possible path that marginalized and pushed toward another temporality by some machination or treason. Lezama and the journal Orígenes replaced ucronía with utopia, frustration with emptiness, and decadence with nothingness. The Orígenes group believed that only through a nihilist view of the past could they penetrate being, and produce an historical

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image. Instead of sublimating itself in the nostalgia of a vanished time, the absence of tradition occupied the present by means of a poetic act, and turned itself into a potential memory of the future. This idea was the starting point of his essay: It would be too immature to confirm that as an obstacle or grace, Cuban poetry has come to accept the partial and demagogic solution of making from tradition an ex-futurity. Far from having to utilize the delicacy of a potent memory, it has been forced to use prophecy.2

Here we encounter that subtle differentiation that Orígenes established vis-à-vis the discourse of the frustrated Republic. Lezama and the Orígenes group were not interested in introducing the testimony of a present as a sign of identity that could have been and never was; their preoccupation was finding potential forms to fill the existing void, overcoming that which is with the incarnation of that which can be. Underwriting this imperative lay the desire to occupy the emptied body of the Republic and generate meaning within its interior. The alternatives are exemplified in a dilemma that excited Lezama, and that was represented through the opposition of a stoic Goethe, who is at ease inside his body, and a Thomist Valery, who rejects the will directed toward his body as limit.3 Orígenes, in relation to the body of Cuba, behaved in the stoic manner: seeing hollowness as a margin wherein the substantial form is established; conversely, the discourse of Cuban negativity (Francisco Figueras, Roque E. Garrigó, José Antonio Ramos, Jorge Mañach, Enrique Gay Calbó, Fernando Ortiz, and the like) followed the Thomist line, which was that of the spiritual destruction of the body of the Republic. Ernst Robert Curtius describes a certain oscillation of writers between two modes of assuming cultural heritage: the thesaurus and the tabula rasa.4 From its beginnings, for Orígenes, since an inexistent tradition could not be rescued but had to be created, the tabula rasa modality prevailed. In spite of what is often believed, the search for the island’s historicity by means of poetic archeology did not become a cosubstantial practice to the works of Lezama and Cintio Vitier until after Orígenes came to an end. To his archeology of poetical discourse, in Lo cubano en

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la poesía, Vitier later added a genealogy of moral discourse, and between both constructions of the becoming, he articulated the historical metatext closest to what Lezama understood as Teleología Insular.5 Lorenzo García Vega did not publish his anthology of the Cuban novel until 1960, and Lezama’s poetry anthology did not appear until 1965. Thus, the presence of a national time in the Orígenes was weak, as was its concern with Cuba’s past. The historical image was expressed through recurrent allusions to Casal and Martí, and translations of odd travel narratives and ethnographies like “Viajes a Cuba en el siglo XIX” by Emilio Tro, and Jonathan Jenkins’ “La sociedad en la Cuba antigua.” Hence, Orígenes’ position vis-à-vis the tradition of the Republic was resolved with this double stress: a nihilist impulse and a founding gesture as is evident in its first pages: We know now that we are in front of the extended vastness of a successive quantitative world where, impressionistic fish and revolutions, glorifications and leprosy, the most hermetic forms of confinement, and the most Dionysiac popular outputs, offer a violent succeeding richness that is necessary to reduce, in the painful reduction of the I to nothingness, and from this nothingness to a beginning.6

This nihilist operation disqualified three essential historical dimensions: the discourse of national civic renovation conceived in the 1920s; the cultural and political avant-gardes fostered by the Minorista group and Revista de Avance; and the revolutionary movement crystallized in the 1940 Constitution. The time of the Republic was seen by them as a presente intensidad, capable of only being translated into quantitative and automatic writings. The present, without the pulse (pulsión) of the future, was Noah’s Ark, according to the metaphor of a French encyclopedist that came to Lezama through some reading of Stendhal: the escape from the flood, and humanity’s rearrangement during the trip. Hence, Orígenes, denying the Republic’s historicity, aspired to the genesis of a poetic tradition, whose temporal hypostasis would be the possible destiny of the created image. The journal always maintained, in its generative form, this scatologic program, this providential plan that like any utopia, announced the beginning of another history.

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Lezama confirmed this project years later: We have already said that among us we had to create the tradition for futurity, an image looking for its incarnation, its fulfillment in historical time; in the participating metaphor.7

Land Without Telos,Without Participation The scarce Cuban historical density restored to the Orígenes group the feeling of Creole orphanhood. Before their eyes loomed the darkness of all times, eternity as void, and the few visible traces of island culture were not sufficient to acknowledge allegiance to a heritage. One century after Condesa de Merlin’s time in Havana, these poets had the same impression: Cuba lacked the poetry of remembrance. This connection to the immemorial brought them to a condition of unbearable levity in time, and lightness and alienation in space. But perhaps most disturbing to these new Republican orphans was the fact that such disorientation would erase all sign of continuity and stability in the becoming of the island. The first poetical discovery of the island’s lightness may have been Virgilio Piñera’s La Isla en Peso, a collection of poetry published in 1943. These poems elaborated a caricature of a thin Virgilio, endowed with the strength of an Atlas, holding up on his shoulders the hollow body of the island. The following year, Poesía y Prosa appeared; this book not only linked the lightness of Cuba to a lack of tradition, but also associated the island’s cultural bareness with the advance of the absurd in the social fabric. From Piñera’s perspective, Cuba was a country whose historical invalidity enclosed the territory with nothingness, and vanquished the culture’s inherent symbols. This Dantean or Kafkian vision exposed a fatal ontological doubt with regards to the existence of Cuba as a nation, as is evident in these lines: “My people, so young, you do not know how to give order to things! / My people, so divinely rhetorical, you do not know how to tell a story! / Like the light, or even infancy, you do not have a face.”8 Piñera considered himself a writer who, very much like Kafka, instead of having faith, testified to

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the unfolding of the world.9 He takes delight in the idea that Cuba’s historical movement was uncertain, and at times, false. The persistence of this feeling in his works is evident in this lapidary paragraph from that visceral and demythologizing article on Ballagas that appeared in a 1955 issue of Ciclón: Charles Steinberger told me once that our history was too close, our heroes so recent, that also the current critic of that history and those heroes would surely bring about irritation to his readers if he decided to speak the entire truth. That recent history is marked by compromise, palliative, concession, and an accommodation with our provincial critical procedures. Thus, Martí is pure, Maceo is pure, Gómez is pure and on and on . . . So much purity! And not a drop of slime? Not one? No, not one, because those lives are not those of the heroes, but our own foolishness reproducing purity on a large scale.10

But before this moment and the emergence of Ciclón, Orígenes’ nihilist stress was also confirmed in the essays written by José Rodríguez Feo. And in one essay in particular, namely the note on Lino Novás’ short stories published in the winter issue of 1946, Rodríguez Feo expresses a very clear understanding of Cuban temporality: he advanced the idea—no longer in vogue— that Cuban literature was impoverished in the area of prose fictions, a claim that resonated with Piñera’s line in La isla en peso “My dear country, so divinely rhetorical, you do not know how to tell a story!” So strong was this feeling of a narrative deficit that still in 1960, Lorenzo García Vega, in the prologue to his Antología, spoke about the “insignificant merits” and the “near vacuity” of the Cuban novel.11 In this article, Rodríguez Feo associated the scarcity of Cuban prose fiction with the absence of cultural cohesion, regarding the historical certainty that had served to consolidate Republican writing. He concluded his essay calling for the appearance of a novel—following the path opened up by Lino Novás Calvo—that would produce in Cubans a historical catharsis.12 Perhaps this desire later inspired Lezama to propose that he “had a novel.” Narrative was thus seen as a form of literary restitution of the historical. Orígenes’ generative and foundational stress was a more integral part of the nihilist views of Rodríguez Feo and García

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Vega than that of Virgilio Piñera’s. But the emergence of this vehement and new group of intellectuals corresponds with the poetic initiation of Cintio Vitier, Fina García Marruz, and Eliseo Diego. These are the writers who consolidated Lezama’s thinking about the historical image as a way of neutralizing nothingness. From the note on Piñera’s Poesía y Prosa—written by Vitier and included in the fifth issue of the journal—we see reflected the cross between Orígenes’ two internal currents: one that understood writing as the testimony about nothingness and the absurd; and the other that believed in the mission to fill the void with memory. From the very premise that acknowledged the insufficiency of Cuban historical density, two different—if not hostile—strategies came about. In the note just mentioned, this difference manifested itself through the clash of terms that expressed the same feeling of Republican orphanhood: nothingness, void, surface, hollow, abyss, and fragmentation. Vitier outlined Piñera’s text: It concerns a voice that emerges, so that someone can hear it at least as a confused signal, as the vanity and concaveness of a mask, as a resonator; not from a free and clear chest, but that hollowness and falsehood which responds above all to the conditions and obligations to which it must testify, which is not a landscape, nor a solitude, not even an abyss, but rigorously, empty. What we call emptiness is the human opposite of nothingness.13

In Vitier’s case, substituting nothingness with emptiness was proof that a new poetic ontology had been radically achieved. Since the lack of a historical becoming was denounced, to think the Republic as nothingness constituted merely an incitement to create being inside of it. For Lezama and Vitier, the telos of poetry was not, however, to give existence to being, but to make possible its becoming, its historicity, by means of the hypostasis of the image. The Republic was a void that had to be filled outside of its institutions, in the Gnostic space of an imaginal writing. Orígenes considered the decadence of Cuba an annular eclipse, and years later Lezama would say that the [1959] Revolution had taken the “ring out of the pond.” Cintio Vitier, Fina García Marruz, and Eliseo Diego used poetry to construct a landscape

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for memory that had the potential of filling up Republican hollowness. Works by these writers, such as Extrañeza de estar, Las miradas perdidas, and En la calzada de Jesús del Monte, responded to a desire to occupy abandoned places, and invent trails and relics that would allow remembrance to be drawn forth. Without doubt, these three books unfolded the common wish to become reconciled with space, to withhold the fugitive gaze, and to secure the city. Operating almost under one and the same writing system, the codes that characterize poems by these authors in this period are especially revealing. In Eliseo Diego’s “El Segundo Discurso: el que Pasa,” a poem dedicated to Lezama, three, among many unforgettable, verses connect with others by Fina García Marruz: “They say that I am a recent arrival, just from yesterday / that I have no business thinking, that I dance / like fruit driven by madness.” Dance and madness appear here as acts appropriate for beings without a past; they refer to personal experience without historical rationality. This idea shows up again as a question in Fina García Marruz’s sonnet, “Como un danzante”: “Why have I entered so soon into the madness / of these signs, of time, of what has passed, / of my fleeting surrounded empire?” After underscoring the lightness, the absence of a past, both poems bring forth the invention of a patrimony, portray its ascendance, and trace its historical coordinates: “I devise a thing / with which to bind the chords of my face / and then the ancestors perhaps, and memory itself,” writes Eliseo Diego. And Fina García Marruz: “My confusion lights up a vague tree: / I draw my father in its trunk.” By animating characters and places with reminiscence, this poetry sought what Cintio Vitier defined as “the heir’s aristocratic consummation.”14 The absence of a cultural substructure, of a historical tradition, was replaced with the recollective discovery of a secret patrimony. This tendency in Origenes’ poetics had a lot of qualities of the flâneur, notably the parochial stroll and serenade, but, unlike Walter Benjamin’s analytical schematic for reading Baudelaire, here there is no transit from the patriarch’s imago to that of the hero; that is to say, from flâneur to modernity.15 The crux of this poetry, as Cintio Vitier reveals in the Nemosine: Datos

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para una poética, is not history, but memory. The poet attained by means of anamnesis, the figure of the heir, and from his secret heraldry, he exercised power over the landscape. He was a sort of knight in flight of his own inexistence. Eliseo Diego’s poetics is an excellent illustration of the Orígenes’ proclivity to aestheticize remembrance in order to fill the voids of the historical image by making use of the imaginary space of a cultural aristocracy. In “El sitio en que tan bien se está,” a poem included in En la calzada de Jesús del Monte, the counterpoint between the voices of the poet and his father is further elaborated. The son, ironic, disbelieving, mimics the Republican faith of his ancestors: “. . . eloquence assaults fear / against rain, the Republic, / against malaria, whom but the Republic, / in favor of the widows / and the Republic against every sort of ghost . . .” Facing the father’s world of certainties generated by the Republican order, the son’s enunciation rises from another foundation: poetry. But poetry is not assumed to be a simple personal or generational vocation, but rather a legacy, something like a tradition in which the essence of nationality is fixed by language. Thus, the figure of the heir is not conceived in the relation he establishes between moral and political continuity and the model of citizenship practiced by his biological ancestors. Orígenes’ poets working along these lines displaced the civic bond determined by blood that characterized the Republic’s patricians, which is then relocated in the sphere of the national poetic imaginary. Orphanhood is thus resolved, inside the diachrony of a national narrative that goes on shaping lyrical subjects throughout history, and not through the political relay of generations. República becomes for them a resistant name, a hollow word, transitory, and impossible. The experience of a poetry that, in Eliseo Diego, is assigned the act of “naming things,” registering Republican time as an unnameable thing: Tendrá que ver cómo mi padre lo decía: la República.

Orígenes and the Poetics of History En el tranvía amarillo; la República, era, lleno el pecho, como, decir la suave, amplia, sagrada mujer que le dio hijos. En el café morado: la República, luego de cierta pausa, como quien pone su bastón de granadillo, su alma, su ofrendada justicia, sobre la mesa fría. Como si fuese una materia, el alma, la camisa, las dos manos, una parte cualquiera de su vida. Yo, que no sé decirlo: la República.16 [One must see it, as my father said the Republic. In the yellow streetcar; the Republic, was, bosom-filled, just as, the soft, ample, sacred woman who gave him children said. At the purple café: the Republic, after a certain pause, like one who sets down his rosewood cane, his soul, his gift of justice, atop the cold table. As if it were an affair of the soul, the shirt, the two hands, any part of his life.

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The reaction against the weightlessness of the Republic was to immerse the self in the river of the founders through a transfer of this poetics onto the intellectual field, wherein an encounter with the historicity of the Cuban nation might occur. After the first death of the Republic, that is, during the 1933 Revolution, language was called forth, or as Eliseo Diego used to say: “gentlemen, the images please”; Lezama’s principal tendency, as it developed in the pages of Orígenes, can be reduced to this use of the image to inhabit historical void of the present and prophetically to penetrate futurity. An alternative strain critical poetics in this period, associated more with Virgilio Piñera and Rodríguez Feo, did not look so much for the participating metaphor—which characterized Lezama’s eschatological discourse—but rather assumed an ironic mode, or what Roland Barthes called the “pleasure of the text.” If Lezama and Vitier tried to build a metanarrative of possible encrática epiphanies— a writing of transcendent power—then the project of Piñera always maintained a subversive immanence, perverse and terribly resistant to all forms of authority. Orígenes struggled between Pascal’s horror vacui and Nietzsche’s “nothingness that flows,” both being the great deconstructors of reason in the West: the anti-Descartes and the anti-Hegel. This nonlogocentric platform allowed a few approximations to Existentialism, specially in Humberto Piñera Llera’s essays. But if we were to add up the intensity of Orígenes’ philosophical references, the two guiding geniuses would have to be George Santayana and María Zambrano. Following the disillusionment with positivism, Santayana, a Harvard philosopher, elaborated his skeptical theory based on the concept of “animal faith”: something like Shaftesbury’s moral sense or Kant’s practical reason, freed from subjective transcendentalism.17 On the other hand, María Zambrano situated her thinking far from transcendental metaphysics as well as from positivist immanence. The great mystical tradition of the Spanish Golden Age empties onto her thought, rearranged

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through the prism of thinkers like Ganivet, Unamuno, Ortega, and Marías. While Santayana was closest to agnostic irony—to “pragmatic humor,” Rodríguez Feo might have said—Zambrano always associated knowledge with the mystery of the metaphor.18 This difference was enough so that each of Orígenes’ two currents would choose their own match among these two philosophers. If Lezama, Vitier, and García Marruz established a harmonious correspondence with María Zambrano’s secret thinking, Rodríguez Feo and Piñera Llera were conversely the translators and transmitters of Santayana’s works. But underneath these associations, there was another important element that separated the two major strains of writings of these writers affiliated with Orígenes: the alternative nexus with the island’s cultural borders—Spain and the United States. Juan Ramón Jiménez, María Zambrano, Jorge Guillén, and Luis Cernuda dominated the Spanish side of Orígenes, while Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams achieved a solid presence representing the body of anglophone poetry. Spain, as a part of Europe, lived out drama diametrically opposite to that of Cuba as a part of Latin America: Spain’s decadence did not originate from historical weightlessness, but from excessive density, an overweight of the past. As María Zambrano put it, “never had a country so much tradition weighing on it.”19 On the other hand, the national age of the United States was almost as short as that of Cuba. Both were countries born within modernity, lacking a substantial pre-Columbian tradition and bereft of a consolidated ancien régime. An essay by Walter Pach, translated by Rodríguez Feo and published in the fourth issue of Orígenes, suggested this similarity and described American countries as a cultural boulder facing Europe.20 Nevertheless, Orígenes sponsored a spiritual alignment with the Hispanic Catholic world that was openly opposed to the North American protestant zone. Yet, Rodríguez Feo himself, who played the key role of fostering relations with the writers in the United States, identified more fundamentally with the cultural dissidence emanating from North America. The identification of the United States, as an alternative to cultural model for the Americas, is clearly evident in one of best essays published

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by Orígenes: “George Santayana: Crítico de una cultura.” In this article, Rodríguez Feo outlined the spiritual tradition that extended from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Henry David Thoreau, and from him to Santayana, and presented it as the movement of human soul beyond the objectification (cosificación) of liberal society. In Santayana himself, the fact was not hidden that his criticism of modernity’s materialism was informed by a personal conflict between culture of Spanish Catholicism and that of North American Calvinism.21 The will to be aligned culturally with the Latin (lo latino) found its clearest expression in Vitier’s presentation at the Havana Pen Club on his anthology Diez Poetas Cubanos: What we owe to Europe, . . . mainly to modern France and the intrahistoric Spain that Unamuno spoke of, cannot be disregarded without falling into the sad Latin American simplicity of negating the dominant role that the Mediterranean basin still plays in guiding the spirit. And I say “still,” because rising from the most powerful nation in this hemisphere, a new spirit, if it can be called that, threatens to freeze our deepest essence (such essence that, in contrast, Europe helps us to know and define).22

It is likely that Lezama may not have embodied this demarcation as a rigid compromise. When he spoke of “the truly American tradition of the happy (alegre) impulsion toward what we do not know,” he does not seem to be including the United States, at least if one considers the significance of the word “happy,” to which Lezama always attributed a Catholic inflection. Adventure, expansion, and foreign conquest are the characteristics commonly associated with Anglo-American culture. According to Alexis de Tocqueville, in the United States, the lack of a past aroused an uncontrollable historical voracity. Lezama also produced a reading of this sort of infancy of North American civilization that, at times, brought him to an almost youthful state of dazzling fervor. For instance, in one of the passages from his 1957 Diario, he writes: I hear Tannegeers, Calypso, and Rock and Roll music. What fullness has North America achieved? Tannegeers, sung by a group of North American kids, have the same impact on me as do those good popular

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things coming from Russians and Spaniards. Listening to North American music, whether it be the songs of Southern Blacks, or Spirituals, or island songs from Trinidadian or St. Thomas, one experiences an encounter with these people and one intuits their reserves of power. In their best songs one finds proverbs, wisdom, something that shines through, and something that has sunk in a universal avalanche. It is as if superficial happiness culminates in an opening that leads to wisdom.23

Then later, with a twist that reminds one of that prophetic ambivalence with which José Martí used to write about the United States, Lezama concludes: How long would it take for such wisdom to turn dangerous, like that of the Western World? Does the world that now approaches include a Redskin running through Athenian ruins? Could the ruins of the ancient world be saved by a Redskin? Caution: wisdom, a feeling, and a song have been sketched; we shall see if they turn dangerous and poisonous. If this were to happen we would not have been saved from damnation of the Eternal Return. And in this exhaustion, nothing else would have value.24

Lezama came to assume, therefore, that North American civilization could occupy, in low modernity, a place equivalent to that of Greece or Rome in the ancient Western World. The intense Western and classical rationality of that culture could bring United States to its twilight, to its decadence; an idea advanced by Oswald Spengler that Lezama always liked to question. On the other hand, one must recall that in La expresión americana, Melville’s theological whale, Whitman’s total body, and Gershwin’s inexhaustible piano along with Mexican jácaras (old, ribald ballads) and Martín Fierro’s extensive guitar appear on the altarpiece of the star in the “nascent act.” For those who might consider these references as gratuitous, Lezama then made them reappear at the end of the book in the “Sumas Críticas del Americano.”25 The line traced by Lezama between two worlds was not a horizontal border separating the North from the South, but rather a vertical partition that distinguished the New World from the Old.26 Richard Morse, one of the most prominent critics of that mirage, which magnetizes the confluence between both Americas, claims: “he—Lezama—understands

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history not as a machine which packs and ties sausages, but as an interaction of different magnetic fields.”27 Nevertheless, on a certain occasion, Lezama stated that he preferred the “ethical attitude that derives from obtainable beauty” to the “simple puritanism; bat [the animal] of the senses, and decapitator of its flattery.”28 The Socratic kalokagathia, or fusion of the ideals of good and beauty in a mínima moralia, was thus conceived as the counterpart of the puritan split. The United States’ double doctrinal root, pragmatic and utilitarian, had a solid foundation in what might be called “puritan lycanthropy”: industriousness, accumulation, crematología, arks in the public sphere and also idleness, desire, pleasure, and relics in the private sphere. That is why, in the North American world, the penetration of the foreign was mainly spatial: territorial expansion, conquest of the Western frontier, exploration of the moon. This “puritan lycanthropy” manifested itself also in a political manner through the unfolding of a democracy within the nation and imperial expansion beyond its borders. On the other hand, Cuban culture, according to Lezama, should be oriented toward founding a tradition for futurity, that is, the impulse toward the unknown, the cognoscible Eros in search of its otherness, performing in time’s succession. Unlike the other regions of Spanish America, but similar to the United States, Cuba was in need of a past; in Orígenes’ view, Cuba, in contrast with the North, should direct itself toward winning over the future, instead of the present. This idea shows up in an unfinished text by Lezama, titled “La egiptización americana”: Just as Anglo-Americans live the frenetic vertical everydayness of their skyscrapers, in the false activity of the total present; the Hispanic American lives out voluptuous passivity, the inert rule of the viceroyalty’s mansion.29

Nevertheless, historical image produced by Orígenes was not deprived of penetration in space. But here the idea of landscape, or “nature befriended to man,” was operative and, in Cuba’s case, this was not an unknown otherness; but the very island itself—its domestic infinity—that had to suffer its anagnorisis in

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the image. Already in one of Orígenes’ dawning texts, Cintio Vitier reacted against the fact that Republican vacuity would make of Cuba a “land without telos, without participation,” that is, a country without a destined landscape. Years later, reminiscing about Guy Pérez de Cisneros’ Salón, Lezama stated that the Origenista subject in history proposed to “create telos and landscape.” In “El romanticismo y el hecho americano,” perhaps his closest text to political history, Lezama developed the principle, that the imagination of the Americas’ landscape in the works of Mier, Rodríguez, Miranda, Bolívar, and Martí was able to constitute itself in the form of the independent national State, and in this way, unravel an act.30 Thus, the historical image in Orígenes announces an emerging political order. The persistence of the prophetic in the writings of Lezama and Vitier had, as its correlation, the disqualification of the Republican State. They lamented the lack of a hierarchy of values, that is, of a holistic system that would impose spirit over the dispersed world of extension and quantity. Two primary political images took shape: “to design the destiny of our coming cities” and “to form with poetic tradition, a strong castle.”31 The political landscape imagined by Orígenes always preserved these holistic representations, not only because its poetic principles rooted itself in a medieval reference, but because the journal sought to subvert the decaying order of the Republic with a magical totality, an idea expressed that Lezama acknowledged, when he wrote: . . . there has always been among us an essence superimposed on a disintegrated one. There exists among us another sort of politics, another sort of governance for the city, profound and secret.32

The idea of Republican disintegration was as recurrent in Orígenes as the idea of the void. Lezama spoke of the “integration and ascending spiral in the nineteenth century” that was cut off after Independence.33 Versed in the sociology of modern transitions, Enrique José Varona believed the integration of the social organism prolonged the traditional holism, which precisely needed to be destroyed. Therefore, his image of the Republic’s decadence turned out to be the opposite of Lezama’s

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elaboration in which: “the fairy-tale serpent reunites the monstrous fragments severed by the hero.” Varona saw the neocorporatist, patronizing and corrupt Republican enunciation, as the survival of an ancien régime that had to be modernized. On the other hand, Lezama preferred to imagine a holistic order without visible ties to Cuba’s history and conceived its crystallization in regard to landscape. Lezama clearly determined that disintegration had a more significant effect on the national culture than it did on the State. State institutions lacked imagination; they were near-sighted or indifferent, yet they were organic and formally modern. He suspected that in reflecting on national identity, following the rhetoric of those years, he would link his poetics to the Hispanic. More than the Spanish root as an identifying principle for island culture, he was interested in the moral reserve of what Angel Ganivet called “iberian senequismo.” The stoic ethos allowed him to wait patiently for the arrival of the Imago. Instead of sublimating the absence of national signs, political image in Orígenes sought poetically to replace a State lacking projection. Lezama formulated this notion in the following manner in his memorial to Guy Pérez de Cisneros: We were aspiring to an art form, not in correspondence with the nation, which was indecisive, limping and amorphous, but rather art with possibility, with goals, with final values that would unite the march of generations, headed toward a distant but still workable point: a futurity belonging to a tense present with the bow full of elastic energy.34

The two components of Orígenes’ image of the State were holistic integration and the teleological trajectory. The most important connection between these two principles is perhaps to be found in a passage about the “One-Monarch” metaphor in “Introducción a un Sistema Poético.” Here Lezama sets up a capricious antinomy between the hypertely of the Holy Grail and the firmness of the Enchiridion (either that of Erasmus or of Epictetus). The circulation of José de Arimatea’s blood within the emerald cup causes it to take flight without a fixed destiny, while the Christian knight’s hidden weapon, Erasmus’ Enchiridion sword, responds to the uniting coordinates of scholasticism’s theocracy. Lezama

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wanted to assign Enchiridion’s teleological unity to Cuba, and leave out the hypertelic chaos of the flying cup. But, as Lezama developed this thesis, he discovered that the potential talismanbook—Espejo de paciencia—of Cuban culture does not offer any civic or religious catechism. José Martí’s sentence and death do, however, achieve for Lezama the One-Monarch’s participation in the island’s history. According to Lezama, Martí was “the only one who penetrated the house of the alibi, the mystical condition where imagination could generate occurrence.” But the historical incarnation of Martí’s image had not generated a moral code, a civic model, an Enchiridion, or manual of the Cuban knight.35 It is rather strange that Lezama did not choose to cite here this line from Martí’s poem “Copa con alas”: “A cup in the air ascended / And I, in arms unseen reclined / After her, clinging to her soft borders / Through the blue space I too rose up.” Nevertheless, the image of the Grail transporting Martí, would have represented the hypertelic dominion over the teleological, and Lezama was looking for quite the contrary. It is very likely that the Cuban Enchiridion, or the island’s primordial text, might have become for Lezama the object of his very own poetics. In this sense, we find revealing the suggestion that a world poetic system could replace religion, and constitute itself as civil doctrine.36 And more eloquent itself, is Lezama’s outline of poetry’s historical destiny, which shows up in Exámenes In order to achieve its Paradise where creature and essence are transfused, poetry has to achieve a participatory ecstasy in the homogeneous, vanquishing the demon of extension, which renders impossible metaphoric participation and blocks the possession of the exteriority by the image.37

These two constitutive elements comprising Orígenes’ image of the state, the holistic and the teleological, were key points of Thomist political doctrine. In his treaty, De Regno, Aquinas represented the state with that famous corporatist ship metaphor If the end of something is exterior to itself, like a ship to its port, then the task of governing corresponds both with protecting the thing from harm as well as guiding it to its final destination.38

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“King-Navigators” commanded the Thomist ship, determining the destination and the course of the voyage, in the same way that the universe was ruled by God, and the body by the soul. The unified character of the scholastic monarchy was confirmed by the distribution of operations among agencies of the civil corpus. The navigator made sure that the ship made it to port, while the caulker repaired any damages, and the look-out man watched over the reefs. But each one worked in coordination with the whole, by means of divine will embodied in the royal figure. This Providential plot—this teleological image—as it is incarnated in the unified image of the state, achieved holistic social integration through the mystical body of the Kingdom. Something like this was proposed by Lezama when he argued that “if the nation is inhabited by a living image, the state reaches its form, because the plenitude of a state is the coincidence of image and form (figura).”39 Lezama, like Father Varela, preferred Patristic doctrinal references to those of scholasticism. The political theory of the Fathers of the Church, which reached its highest expression with St. Agustine’s City of God, was based on the principle of civil and ecclesiastic double power. The Communion of these two cities—the earthly and the celestial—and its corresponding government was impossible after Christ’s sacrifice. Pope San Gelasio’s famous “two swords doctrine” would thus find its inspiration in this Augustinian political dualism. On one side, the weapon of temporal power, and on the other, the spiritual, the altar, and throne dyad. But Orígenes, from its first page, had rejected all dualism because of the superficiality and decadence of binarisms. For them, two swords did not exist, but rather one—Enchiridion’s small hidden dagger. Consequently, when the journal established a political image, it was closer to the Thomist idea of the divine origin of authority. Following a Stoic immersion in the body of the Republic, Orígenes announced the unity of image of the Revolution. Lezama proposed a cosmogony of images in which, similar to holistic theocracies, no moral or physical entity is exterior. His representation of power must then be seen as the hypostasis of the image upon the State, as an “imagocracy.”

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As Lezama’s poetical system reflected upon itself, the teleological dimension eclipsed. From Anacleta del Reloj emerged notions like “oblique personal experience,” “hypertelic path,” or “the unconditional,” which directed themselves against finalist and causal Aristotelianism. This new cycle of his poetics and Orígenes’ imminent disappearance may have disappointed him with regards to the teleological project. Thus, in January of 1956, he would write: “. . . in my 1937 Coloquio con Juan Ramón Jiménez, I proposed the notion of insular teleology. Excluding now the development of such a notion, it is adequate now to underline the hymnic and whitmanesque sense of its generation, searching for the optimist cantabile.”40 Such dismay also seeped onto “Poesía como fidelidad,” an essay included in the last issue of Orígenes, in which Vitier asked: “is there not also a certain cataclysm and strangeness to each dawn?”41 But after the Revolution, the teleological project would be rearticulated, and the political image elaborated as Orígenes encounters a temporality in which it is tested. If we apply the torno, Vico’s ideal of the eternal triad, to the history of Cuba, the first thing that strikes one is the absence of a theocratic period, a time of the Gods. In the island’s movement through time, there had been many points of transit from the heroic to the human, but there was always the lack of a divine past, a theocratic age. Lezama and the Orígenes group knew this right from the start, which partly explains why they imagined a holistic order with possible incarnations in history. Then the Revolution dismantled the Republic, whose weightlessness and hollowness had already been expressed in the poetics of Orígenes. It is therefore understandable that the new regime would be interpreted as the arrival of telos and participation. Lezama believed himself to be facing a regained theocratic age: “God in front of man, in his crops and in his children, in his conversation and in the quotidian table.”42 More than a theocratic age, the new state turned out to be a mixture of imagocracy and ideocracy, a government of idea and image (figura). Nevertheless, Orígenes lived its “mystical dialogue” with the Revolution, which, according to Fina García Marruz, is the dialogue that “gives of itself in all of its purity, when the union

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with that which exceeds us, which is the intimate, the closed, the ‘sealed font’ restores, in its solitude, the lost family.”43

Gravitation to the Margins The weak fixity of Cuba’s corporatist ancien régime made the displacement of the private by the public not as decisive as it was in Europe and the rest of the Americas. Since the debate between a holistic and a modern order had not occurred in the island’s history, the tension between private and public cultural spaces took shape in light and late fashion. Insufficient Enlightenment, the obstacles imposed on the Creole population regarding peninsular political representation, and the impossibility of articulating a complete national discourse within colonial institutions— remember, for example, the difficulties of the Academia de Literatura in 1834—inhibited the genesis of a public space until 1878.44 Only after the Pacto del Zanjón did Cuba enter the modern logic of representative politics and begin to achieve the opening of civil opinion relatively separated from the state. Thus, the so-called autonomist propaganda created the first Republic of Letters in the island’s culture. In fact, Cuban intellectual sociability, since the nineteenth century, existed on the margins of both the civic and the corporative, that is, in a space that might be called secret: for instance, Domingo del Monte’s and Ignacio Valdés Machuca’s home academies; the literary get-togethers of González del Valle, the Zambranas, the Borreros, the Loynaz del Castillos; Lezama’s Curso Délfico and Virgilio Piñera’s bungalow in Guanabo were all clandestine compensations for a deficient institutional culture. These spaces generated secret poetics and innovative discourses in which knowledge takes the form of mystery. Not only in this domestic dimension—which one can very well call an internal exile, an insile (insilio)—is the mysterious and clandestine language articulated, but also in foreign exile, which is another form of marginality, did this secret tradition appear. We see it, for example, in the mystic, moral, and political cult to José Martí’s silence: the sonorous solitude, the virtues of the quiet man, and patient conspiracy.

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The great expansion of public space in the Republican period took place in the 1920s. In 1923, the Minorista group’s “lettered city” is born, which first met around the magazine Social, and then later found its most faithful medium of expression in the Revista de Avance. The Minoristas were born within the public sphere, and its disposition and destiny were always linked to this origin. The Protest of the Thirteen, the lunches at Hotel Lafayette, and the literary get-togethers in Café Martí were open radicality that would later project itself in the 1933 Revolution. The intellectual strategies of those years gravitated toward the correspondence of personal poetics with collective causes. In other words, it was about the genesis of a political culture by means of transferring doctrinal and aesthetic avantgardes into statal initiatives. The Minorista generation totally involved itself in the passage from the First to the Second Republic. Revista de Avance was considered the “portico to the Revolution,” according to Carlos Ripoll, and its protagonists were the founders of a new civic discourse. It is not strange then, that Jorge Mañach, Francisco Ichaso, and Félix Lizaso later became the spiritual guides of the political regime that took power in 1940 and that they behaved, at times, like the guardians of its cultural continuity. Thus, when Orígenes appears in 1944, denouncing the absence of tradition and the hollowness of the Republic, it was normal that these intellectual authorities of the public space attempted to alienate it in various ways. Long-awaited clash between the two great cities of Republican letters occurred finally in September 1949, when Jorge Mañach published in Bohemia “The arcanum of certain new poetry: an open letter to José Lezama Lima.”45 The article set in motion an elegant oracular duel between the public and secret gurus of Cuban culture. Mañach acknowledged that many of the intellectuals of his generation were conditioned by the two great branches of power: the State and the Academy. He even admitted to having been “formalized” through writing and life. But what he did not pardon in the position of Orígenes was their “lack of filial recognition,” their denial of “the father because he does not have the gracefulness of the past.” This was one of the essential

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complaints: the fact that Orígenes presented itself as tábula rasa and not as thesaurus, as the rupturing with the foundations of 1920s avant-garde aesthetics, and not as its heir. The other reproach, perhaps the one less admissible to Lezama, was that Origenista poetry, according to Mañach was a “thing of mere personal disposition, foreign to other people’s sensibilities.” Mañach’s article laid emphasis upon the two central principles of Orígenes’ cultural strategy: founding nihilism and the gravitation on the margins. This controversy had its case history. In the first issue of Verbum (June 1937)—a publication of University of Havana’s Law students, whose editor in chief was José Lezama—appeared an article by Guy Pérez de Cisneros in which the comfort of Avance’s intellectual generation was questioned. This important critic and very good friend of Lezama, came closest to outlining publicly Orígenes’ cultural project. The text accused Jorge Mañach and Juan Marinello of being “mercenaries,” “sellers of Cuban culture to foreigners” at a time when the situation of the island required a concentration of intellectual output. Marinello lived in Mexico at this time, and Mañach in New York, a professor at Columbia University. Both exiles had been provoked to flee by the militarization of the 1933 revolutionary process; but by 1935, and at the latest by 1937, it was possible to return to Cuba, without running vital risks. Pérez Cisneros’ critique in fact expressed a constantly recurring theme in the history of Cuban culture: intellectuals living on the island delegitimated those who had emigrated. Nevertheless, his polemic was inspired by more than patriotic mistrust and aimed at cutting the lines of poetic and political continuity between the two generations. Perhaps worried that the student journal would fall into the cliché of confronting the established intellectuals, Lezama wrote to Mañach asking him for a contribution for a special issue dedicated to the Spanish writer Juan Ramón Jiménez exiled in Cuba. Mañach answered three months later and, by way of Lezama, transmitted a message to Guy Pérez de Cisneros I do not object to the attitude; asking questions, holding each individual responsible for his conduct are healthy things. That is also the way that

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I myself began, and the way that always functioned while living there [in Cuba]. Does Pérez Cisneros know that since I arrived in this country [the USA], I have not stopped thinking of my return to Cuba? Does he know that as a result of such a stubborn desire, of living out such hope, I have refused in this land many incredible offers to take academic positions on the condition that I remain here permanently? Does he know that from this exile I do nothing but watch for the opportunity to return to Cuba without risking enslavement the minute I arrive? In effect, I am hopeful that the University shall create a History of Philosophy program, so that I may get involved with its dynamics, and finally give to Cuba that which I do not wish to continue giving to a foreign people?46

That these words of Mañach were sincere was confirmed by his subsequent history. He and Marinello returned to Cuba a year or two later, and in 1939, both were delegates of the Asamblea Constituyente. For Mañach, it was unimaginable that these young writers, who only a few years later founded Orígenes, would attempt to get rid of the avant-garde legacy of the Minoristas and Revista de Avance. The apparent praise of that letter to Lezama was more akin to self-recognition. For example, Mañach also wrote, “in your attitude and achievements, in your wish for excellence and elevation, you are continuing the workings that our Revista de Avance started, delivering it to the turbulent revolutionary parenthesis.”47 What Mañach could not understand was that neither Verbum nor Orígenes recognized the hereditary tie to Avance that he asserted; simply, those two publications saw themselves as cultural orphans. The same orphanhood that its editors observed in Cuban culture was the symbolic matrix of each page and gesture. In one of Orígenes first major essays, “Después de lo raro, la extrañeza,” Lezama had mentioned that the recognition of a different region could motivate a “clandestine heraldry.” This idea was linked to Vitier’s construction of a memorable heritage and reasserted the condition of Republican orphanhood that gave impulse to Orígenes’ work. The design of a clandestine heraldry was another form of the return to that inexistent holism by means of the poetic image. But this constant invention of Republican content, in order to engage a lyrical substance with historical possibilities, had to be secret. That is, it

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had to accumulate signs assuming an empty public space, and filling it in from its borders. Hence, Orígenes’ marginality does not respond to mere Pythagorean delirium, but to a radical conscience of the institutional limits of the Republic. Half a century later, Cintio Vitier still reiterated this position when offering his opposing judgment about the avant-garde poetics of the 1930s: If anything distinguishes the poets that we can call the conductors of Orígenes’ central message (1944–56), it was their estrangement, not only from the superficial pirouettes of the ephemeral and clumsy Cuban avant-garde, whose medium, mainly oriented towards the essay, was Revista de Avance (1927–30), but also from the best consequences that came out of that impulse known as “pure” and “social” poetry.48

Given the challenge posed to Republican time by their historical image, the Orígenes group could never have fully articulated itself in the public space as Mañach would have desired. Lezama believed that, for poetry, the present was Noah’s Ark: the withdrawal from the flood, life within the house. But he also thought that when poetry becomes “testimony of the innocent act of being born, it jumps from the boat (barca) [and here he could have said ‘del arca’ (from the Ark)] to a conception of the world as image.”49 A strategy that succumbed to the gravitation to the margins did not imply a ditch between two realities, but a refocusing from a different angle in order to perceive all from the new position. The Mañach-Lezama polemic, more than a crossroads between two different ways out of the politics/culture antinomy, was the confrontation of two total historical visions: one that looks out from the public, and the other one that comes forth from the secret. This is why Lezama, in response to Mañach, described public space as a “tattooed reality where one floats in the mundane bargains of positive politics.”50 If the Minoristas and Avance had sought the sede, the agora, the visible watchtower, then Orígenes was interested in moving through “historical protoplasm,” in the secret cult to the image, in the fede.

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María Zambrano’s idea of knowledge as mystery exerted a lot of influence on Orígenes’ secret politics. In her provocative essay “La metáfora del corazón,” one encounters many of the terms that made up Orígenes’ clandestine vocabulary: the deep, the unknown, the ineffable, the profound function and, above all, the Unamunian concept of intrahistoric continuity. Actually, in one of the passages in this essay, the metaphor of the heart appears to allegorize the task that Orígenes had set for itself within Cuban culture: “the heart is the most noble organ because it carries with it the image of a space, of a dark interior, secret and mysterious, opening at times.”51 All of this passion for the abandonment of visible and public surfaces was poured into “La Cuba secreta,” another memorable text by Zambrano that Orígenes published. Here, Origenista poetics was waking up the island from its prenatal sleep, from the state of pure oblivion. And this was certainly true, at least to the Origenistas, since Orígenes’ ten poets believed themselves to be the first intellectuals to feel Cuba’s historical weightlessness as emptiness, and the first to attempt to represent this by means of the linkages between memory, image, and landscape. To constitute oneself in the secret space of culture implied a gravitation to the margins of the state, the Academy, and public opinion. In contrast with Avance, the flâneur of Origenista poetics directed himself against the modern, rational, urban, and public structures. In Orígenes, not only did the holism of the political image, but also intellectual sociability itself, transformed themselves into resistant zones outside the modern order. To this effect, sprang forth their understanding of the avant-gardes as aesthetic catharsis of a technical-instrumental rationality. Lezama had the habit of employing the double aspect of Descartes’ cogito, identifying the world of extension with capitalism’s immediate materiality against which he set the atemporal thought of the Imago. And in this sense, he once lamented the “hardening of Cuban media,” after 1940, which rejected the expression “spiritual” in the cultural field, but surely emphasized it “with technical obstinacy” in public relation circles.52

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The most convincing criticism regarding modern poetics that appeared in Orígenes was the publication of Roger Caillois’ essay “Límites de la literatura.” The self-perception of literature in the Romantic period, in the avant-gardes of the 1920s, and in the Existentialism of the 1940s, according to Caillois, was identical. Literature’s aim was located elsewhere, in a world where hostility turned against the medium of privileged expression. This position provoked the mutual nullification of both dimensions: the literature loathed their city, and cities expelled their literature. Facing such absurdity, Caillois’ proposal was to revert to the instrumentalism of art, and turn it into a total finality: “to rebel or better yet to turn oneself into the alreadyrebelled, and to employ such rebellion in gaining the applause of the public: how contradory and how comical!” It is clear that this attitude reinforced the secret strategy of the gravitation to the margins. But the most evident and encouraging sign of convergence with Origenista poetics was hinted in the last phrase of this essay: “some recover and extract from the test a will . . . a power of communion.”53 For Orígenes, participation in public affairs actually represented a communion with the possible poetical images, and not an attendance to the everyday political stage. Fina García Marruz said, in another one of those important Orígenes essays, that the only exterior dimension to poetry was the angelic or the divine, that is, the unimaginable one. The state represented a sphere of action that could also be traversed by the image. But by not being exterior, like God or an Angel, the Republic was incapable of establishing a mystical dialogue with poetry. In fact, Orígenes assumed such indifference toward the Republican State with utmost naturalness, and that it declined in 1954, an offer made by Guillermo de Zéndegui to be financed by the Instituto Nacional de Cultura. The State, according to Orígenes, “represented the nihil admirari, the coat of arms of most ancient decadence.”54 As was already mentioned, however, between the Cuban Revolution and Orígenes, a mystical dialogue was established.55 How could the Revolutionary state become an exteriority for poetry? Well, by means of its holistic sacralization. Lezama,

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seeing the hero enter the city, felt “the replacement of God through God.” The new order became for him a “kingdom of the image that opens up to an absolute time.”56 By making itself as eternal as God or the Imago, the Revolution became unimaginable for poetry, but inaugurated an intimate dialogue with its destiny.

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5 Gallery of Cuban Writing

Cuban letters offer abundant approaches to defining “Latin American culture.” In Nuestra América (1891), an essay packed with metaphor and allegory, José Martí interprets what he termed “the continental soul.” José Lezama Lima dedicated a complete book to the topic. In his La expresión americana (1957), this author explores the American imaginary and its historical incarnations based on Creole symbology derived from the Baroque and from romanticism. Like Roberto González Echevarría established in a classic book, Alejo Carpentier translated Latin American culture into his poetics of narrative in El reino de este mundo (1949), Los pasos perdidos (1949), El siglo de las luces (1962), Concierto barroco (1974), El recurso del método (1974), as well as in others of his essays and novels. In Calibán (1971) and other essays, Roberto Fernandez Retamar has attempted to prove that Latin American culture exists and that its historical context differs from that of the Occident. These four authors inscribe Cuban national identity within a larger cultural space, one that corresponds to Latin America in general. However, this has not kept them from devoting significant attention to specifically Cuban culture. In La poesía contemporánea en Cuba (1954), Idea de la estilística (1958), and Ensayo de otro mundo (1967), Fernandez Retamar makes repeated references to the island’s cultural development. Alejo Carpentier’s first work, Ecue-Yamba-O! (1933), was an AfroCuban novel. Later he wrote La música en Cuba (1946), the story of what he called the “particular island sound.” He also

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penned El acoso (1954), a novella set in the 1930s during the revolt against the dictator Gerardo Machado; it portrays the paranoia of the Cuban revolutionary. In addition to various chronicles and essays concerning the literature and art of the island, Carpentier wrote, toward the end of his life, La consagración de la primavera (1978), in which Cuban events structure the narrative. José Lezama Lima, for his part, dedicated some of his best essays to Cuban poetry, painting, and customs. He always sought those moments when national identity—what he called “the certainty of what belongs to us”—became fixed in cultural images. Consider, for example, his Coloquio con Juan Ramón Jiménez (1938), Tratados en la Habana (1958), the essay “A partir de la poesía” (1960), the prologue to his Antología de la poesía cubana (1965), his novels Paradiso (1966) and Oppiano Licario (1974), or finally, his texts on Ventura Pascual Ferrer, Jose Maria Heredia, Julian del Casal, Juan Clemente Zenea, José Martí, René Portocarrero, Mariano Rodriguez, or Aristides Fernandez. Finally, at the end of the nineteenth century, José Martí wrote innumerable articles affirming Cuban national culture. In his texts regarding race, such as Basta, Mi Raza, Sobre negros y blancos, or in his praise of certain Creole intellectuals like José María Heredia, Antonio Bachiller y Morales, and José de la Luz y Caballero, one clearly sees his conviction that Cuba is a nationality, with its own social composition and spiritual genealogy. As evidenced in these four cases, Cuban literature addresses national identity from within two parallel discourses that resist expressing the tensions one might expect to obtain between them. On one hand, Cuba is a nation that participates in Latin American cultural identity. On the other hand, Cuban national identity stands out from within a general Latin American culture, and yet belongs to it. That is to say, Cuba magically remains Latin American because of its Cuban traits, and it remains Cuban because of its Latin American traits. We are dealing with a comfortable application of set theory to the discourse of insular identity. Cuba would be, then, a cultural subset within Latin America, its area simultaneously proper and

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foreign to it. But that parallelism between a double national and continental identity is careful not to acknowledge conflict or friction between the two discourses.

Near Otherness Even so, Cuban letters do not lack writers who have defined and continue to define island culture from within, from without, in the margin, and sometimes even in counterpoint to Latin American culture. This is the discourse of insular exceptionality. Its gaze of knowledge is more anthro pological than sociological. It assumes that, even if Cuban society shares characteristics of Latin American postcolonial societies, its people, social composition, and historical experience are quite different. This is what José Antonio Saco, in the nineteenth century, meant by the word “nationality”: a historical, cultural formation that differed as much from Spain and Europe as from Latin American countries and the United States.1 Saco’s position, developed within his white, Creole, Catholic imaginary, is just an anthropological intuition that will evolve into the twentieth century, with Fernando Ortiz’s and Lydia Cabrera’s studies of cultural mestizaje. Perhaps the best treatment of this subject can be found in two texts published in 1940—not coincidentally, the year that signals Cuba’s political and constitutional maturity: El contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (1940) [The Cuban Counterpoint: Between Tobacco and Sugar] and Los factores humanos de la cubanidad (1940) [The Human Factors of Cubanness]. The anthropological concept of transculturation formulated in the former is expressed in the latter by way of a metaphor: el ajiaco (a kind of blended sauce). That would be Cuban culture, a unique mixture of African, Chinese, Spanish, European, North American, and Russian ingredients.2 However, there is yet another insertion of the discourse of Cuban identity into another space that surrounds it: the cultural situation of the Antilles and the Caribbean. Curiously, this insertion seems more distant and weaker than that of Latin Americanist discourse, even though it is closer and more

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immediate. However, it is possible to find it in some passages by Fernando Ortiz; Alejo Carpentier; the historians Jose Luciano Franco and Manuel Moreno Fraginals; and, above all, in the only book written by a Cuban that purports to read the culture as if it were already inscribed in the Caribbean context, La isla que se repite. El Caribe y la perspetiva postmoderna (1989) [The Repeating Island: The Caribbean in Postmodern Perspective], by Antonio Benitez Rojo.3 A centrist and rigid nationalist definition opposes this weak insertion. It seeks to unmoor Cuban experience from the Caribbean cultural connection. One can read, again in the midnineteenth century, the papers of José Antonio Saco, for whom the model of the sugar plantation, with its consequent blackmajority population, applied to the English, French, and Dutch Antilles, placed nationality at risk. That is, it threatened the white, Creole, Catholic model of the Cuban nation.4 In texts by Francisco de Arango y Parreno, José de la Luz y Caballero, Domingo del Monte, Francisco Frias y Jacott, Gaspar Betancourt Cisneros, and Rafael Montoro, ones sees the fear of a black revolution like the Haitian revolution of 1804 that eventually caused the Spanish Crown’s loss of Santo Domingo. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the same theme emerges in some essays by Roque E. Garrigó, Francisco Figueras, and Cristobal de la Guardia, who attribute that Caribbean chaos, of which Benitez Rojo speaks, to the racial mixing of Latinos and Africans.5 Thus, we are dealing with a deep-rooted cultural phobia running through Creole mentality since the nineteenth century, one that feeds a Cuban nationalism for which the Antilles and the Caribbean are a zone of the Other that must be denied. It is no surprise, then, given the weight of such a cultural stereotype in the Creole imaginary that, as late as 1927, Ramiro Guerra’s Azucar y poblacion en las Antillas (1927) [Sugar and Population in the Antilles] resonated with that anti-Caribbean discourse. Guerra sees the latifundismo that invades Cuban agriculture in the early twentieth century, along with the practice of shoring up the labor force with Haitians and Jamaicans, as being very similar to the plantation system during the sugar

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boom of the early nineteenth century. There is a kind of centenarism in his text, as if the phenomenon that threatened Creole patriarchy a hundred years ago—the concentration of agrarian property in foreign hands and the growth of the black population— were being repeated. That is why Guerra takes on the role of the letrado who, like Saco in his day, speaks for the Creole elite, and warns against the dangers of contamination and decadence. As Arcadio Diaz Quinones points out, this nationalistic discourse locates the Other of the Cuban subject in a specific geographical and cultural zone: the Antilles, the Caribbean.6 Like Alberto Lamar Schweyer, Fernando Ortiz, Emeterio Santovenia, Jose Antonio Fernandez de Castro, and Herminio Portell Vilá, Ramiro Guerra was convinced that Cuba was the Caribbean country most completely established as a nation. Based on that notion, a good number of the republican intellectuals attributed to the island a type of spiritual leadership in the region. They enthusiastically praised the Italian doctor, Gustavo Pittaluga, whose Diálogos sobre el destino (1954) [Dialogs on Destiny] encouraged, among other projects, the establishment of an Antillean confederation, to be headed by Cuba.7 Mañach, always the skeptic, was annoyed that the immigrant Dr. Pittaluga, after witnessing the “painful birth of the Republic,” would assign to Cuba a providential mission in the Caribbean, the Americas, and the world.8 But for Medardo Vitier, the book, “one of the three or four most important publications in Cuba,” was praiseworthy because it transferred to Cuba “that energy of the Occident, that inspires creation and domination, as Europe has created and dominated.”9 During the Republic, this Cuban Creole haughtiness and vanity toward the Caribbean only became more marked. With the Revolution, it never disappeared either, in spite of the new emphasis on decolonizing, Bolivarian, pro-Third World discourse. The imaginary of the Revolution and of the left in general represented Cuba as a leading country of the Third World, of underdeveloped countries, of Latin America, and also as a country that was not so very Third World, underdeveloped, or Latin American, due to its belonging to the Soviet bloc and its social advances. Thus, the Dominican Republic and Puerto

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Rico came to serve as negative archetypes for revolutionary nationalistic rhetoric, given their common element of HispanicAfrican mestizaje. It is very common to hear in official Cuban ideology the argument that if “the Revolution is destroyed, Cuba will become a Puerto Rico or a Santo Domingo.” Dramatically describing the economic failure of Cuban socialism, the historian Manuel Moreno Fraginals predicted in 1989 that Cuba would be just like Haiti in the first decade of twenty-first century. Cuban nationalism has already shared a long history of small grievances with Puerto Rico, of which Arcadio Díaz Quiñones reminds us constantly. Since the days of the Puerto Rican section of the Cuban Revolutionary Party to the days of solidarity with Pedro Alvizu Campos’s independence movement, there has existed a kind of paternal treatment, an older-brother complex, in Cuba’s cultural and political dealings with the neighbor island. Luckily, two Cubans, the historian Leví Marrero and the essayist Jorge Mañach, both exiled and buried in Puerto Rico, tried to correct that paternalism. Mañach’s unfinished Teoría de la frontera [Border Theory] energetically exalted what he called Puerto Rico’s “prophetic adventure,” its voluntary disposition to become a “zone of confluence” between the two Americas.10 And Levi Marrero’s Raíces del milagro cubano (1995) [The Cuban Miracle], an essay on the work of Cuban exiles in Miami, refers to the Puerto Rican experience as a cultural model that, in its way, resolves the dilemma of a nationality that must survive under North American imperialism.11

Portrait Series The frame that marks Cuban culture within the space of Latin America and the Caribbean is intimately related to the construction of a national literary canon for the island. In a certain way, we are dealing with the articulation of an identificatory metastory, whose will to power manifests itself in parallel gestures toward the outside and toward within a supposed “Cuban aesthetic.” This selection and authorization of certain insular texts, from within the vast textual output of Latin

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America and the Caribbean, grounds a critical economy quite similar to the one constructed in the process of canonizing texts emblematic of literary Cubanness. Both the canon that looks inward and the canon that looks outward, although they register different works and authors, pursue the same objective: to establish a hierarchy of value for those literary documents that best narrate the nation. Ernst Jünger commented that if nationalism did not exist, the literature of each country would be infinite and incomprehensible. This idea appears clearly in some of Homi K. Bhabha’s essays: Nations become “narrating narratives,” which is to say that they cease being only narrated objects, imagined communities, in order to transform themselves into subjects that invent their own genealogies through writing.12 In the case of Cuban literature, the scholar Enrico Mario Santí suggests it this way: Unfortunately, our contemporary critical environment does not abound with reflection on the national literary canon. The absence of such discussion is due, in part, to the very nature of the topic. The occidental canon is in dispute today with the purpose of destabilizing the order of those hegemonic cultures whose interest is fed by exclusion of marginal or dependent cultures. It would seem clear, however, that the discussion should include specific national literatures, such as those that constitute the body of Latin American literature. . . . The prevalent criterion in the construction of a Cuban canon has been the common perception of how the text contributes to forging national identity.13

The first histories of Cuban literature, at mid-nineteenth century, stress the idea of a spiritual genealogy of the nation within the colonial discourse of Hispanic identity. Between 1859 and 1861, Antonio Bachiller y Morales, who was trustee of the Havana city council and secretary of the Economic Society of Friends of the Country, wrote the first modern attempt at a history of Cuban literature: Apuntes para la historia de las letras y de la instrucción pública en la isla de Cuba (1861) [Notes for a History of Letters and Public Instruction in the Island of Cuba]. In his note to the reader, Bachiller warned that “ingratitude is one of the worst vices, and Cuba ought to be grateful to remember the names of those from whom she has received the benefits of the education that has led to her current state.”14

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Gratitude and memory appear centrally in the catalog of virtues that define the American Creole of the nineteenth century: the true patriot ought to give thanks to the land that gave him birth, always remembering the names of its founding fathers. This is the same strong sense of tribute and honor that Americo Castro has emphasized in Iberian mentality. For Cuba, patrician gratitude toward the founding fathers is expressed, as Agnes Lugo observes, through biographical writing that establishes the spiritual genealogy of the nation.15 Galería de hombres útiles (1859) [Gallery of Instrumental Men] by Antonio Bachiller y Morales is an emblematic text of this genealogical discourse. Here, for the first time, and following the model of biographical writing from Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Representative Men, we see the definition of the moral archetype of a Creole subject. Bachiller’s gallery begins with a Spaniard, the enlightened governor Luis de las Casas, and it ends with a Creole, the philosopher and teacher José de la Luz y Caballero. Reviewing the decisive period in Cuba’s national cultural formation between 1790 and 1868, Bachiller paints the emblematic figures of colonial modernity: Alejandro Ramírez, Juan Jose Díaz de Espada Landa, Francisco de Arango y Parreño, Félix Varela, and José Maria Heredia. The “instrumental man,” or “the son of Cuba who deserves a space in the pantheon of the national heroes,” is essentially a public intellectual who divides his attentions between administration and the academy, between education and the government.16 Thus, the men of letters (Varela, Heredia, Luz) appear in the gallery along with the statesmen (Las Casas, Ramírez, Arango). This modern notion of the public intellectual as an “instrumental man” lent a performative character to their biographies, as if exemplary lives once narrated could offer themselves for imitation. This character of the texts enhanced, in turn, their foundational and pedagogical force. More than anything else, though, Bachiller’s Gallery offered a moral portrait of the “useful man,” in which the founding subject’s parameters were clearly delimited. This HispanicCreole white, Catholic, masculine, educated, rich, and virtuous

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subject led the birth of a new nation among the old elites of the colonial order. Bachiller tried in every possible way to depoliticize his biographies in order to remove any dangerous and subversive attitude from these intellectuals. This neutralization occurs particularly in the texts on José Maria Heredia and José de la Luz y Caballero. Bachiller avoids dealing with Heredia’s vehement republican separatism to highlight his lyrical work, where, he claims, “for the first time, love for country is made to last.”17 As for Luz, the depoliticization becomes transparent: “Luz y Caballero—he said—was wise, a useful man, a friend of progress; he was not a politician, and he had no truck with revolutionary ideas. One must be just with him and not disfigure the noble, pacifist and patriotic image of him that should live into posterity.”18 Therefore, just as the instrumental man embodied Creole subjectivity, Bachiller’s text emphasized patriotism above all as the main contributor to the spiritual genesis of nationality. His Apuntes, as much as Gallery, proposed a double canonization: that of the intellectual person and that of the intellectual text. However, not until his disciple Aurelio Mitjans wrote an Estudio del movimiento cientí fico y literario de Cuba (1890) [Study of the scientific and literary movement in Cuba, 1890] did the technology of the national canonization of the text come to be fully exposed. The moral archetype of the useful man was no longer as important for Mitjans as was the discourse of aesthetic and national dignity. That is why, in his regrettably incomplete Study, he does not focus on figures like Varela, Arango, Luz, or Saco; rather, he provides full reviews of works by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Joaquin Lorenzo Luaces, and Enrique Pineyro.19 Like Bachiller, Mitjans framed his canon between the years 1790 and 1868, setting the limits of a mythical period of spiritual foundation, a Golden Age in which the country’s patricians invent Cuban nationality. This topic of the “age of the gods” or the “era of imagination”— to replace Vico’s notion with Lezama’s—which precedes the heroic period inaugurated with the wars of independence and which heralds the spiritual genesis of nationality reappears after Bachiller and Mitjans in all of the island’s literary historiography.

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Raimundo Cabrera in Cuba y sus jueces (1887) [Cuba and its Judges], José Martí in his article on Bachiller y Morales (1889), Manuel de la Cruz in his Cromitos cubanos (1892), Fernando Ortiz in his lecture “La decadencia cubana” (1923) [Cuban Decadence], Jorge Mañach in his essay “La crisis de la alta cultura en Cuba” (1924) [The Crisis in Cuban High Culture], Ramiro Guerra in Azúcar y población en las Antillas (1929) [Sugar and Population in the Antilles], Medardo Vitier in Las ideas en Cuba (1938) [Ideas in Cuba], these and others all confirm the mythic memory of the first half of the nineteenth century as an epoch of national, spiritual gestation. The following pages of Rafael Montoro’s prologue to the first edition of Mitjans’s Study are sufficient to show the diffusion of that theme of the colonial “era of imagination”: At no time, in any country, under such unfavorable circumstances and institutions, has there ever come into being a literature like this island’s colonial literature. In spite of its natural subordination to foreign models, in particular those of the metropolis, over thirty or forty years of true activity, it gave to the cultured world names like Heredia and Avellaneda, hopes like Orgaz, Mendive and Luaces; don Jose de la Luz y Caballero, a figure sublime in his frank contemplation of eternal matters; as profound and wise a writer as Saco; literary men like Del Monte and Echevarria; and even from the lower classes of a society corrupted by slavery, plebeians like Plácido and servants like Manzano, in whose heads, humiliated by injustice, God stamped the inspiration that saved their souls from dishonor and opened to them, wide and magnificent, the doors of immortality.20

An inventory of the central figures in the colonial Creole canon emerges in this exalted discourse. Montoro includes a woman, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, and two black poets, Plácido and Manzano. However, despite the fact that the canonical structure continues to be white, male, and Catholic, these inclusions signal the beginning of an opening in the canon. In contrast to Montoro, Manuel de la Cruz, in his Cromitos cubanos, begins his gallery of twenty Creole men of letters with Montoro himself and ends with Enrique José Varona, without including any women or black intellectuals.21 Raimundo Cabrera, on the other hand, constructs a wider canon in his Cuba y sus jueces.

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He identifies some ninety figures, including five women, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Marta Abreu, Luisa Perez de Zambrana, Aurelia Castillo de González, and Susana Benítez, as well as two black intellectuals, politician and journalist Juan Gualberto Gómez and the musician José White.22 Already, from these first galleries of Cuban writing, one sees the tension between an opening up and a closing down of the national canon. At the beginning of the twentieth century, independence provoked a certain withdrawal from the discourse of cultural identity. More than a legitimization of Creole culture in the fact of peninsular Spain, criticism sought a generic canonization of Cuban literature. The imperative was no longer to show that Cuba possessed its own literature, but rather to discover what type of literature it produced: What kind of poems and novels did island authors write? Essays by Enrique Pineyro and José María Chacón y Calvo, in this sense, constituted the first serious attempts to formalize a canon of Cuban poetry. Pineyro dedicated monographic studies to Jose Maria Heredia, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés (Plácido), and Juan Clemente Zenea, who, in his judgment, were the four cardinal poets of the nineteenth century. In his important book Estudios heredianos (1939) [Heredian Studies], Chacón y Calvo followed a similar path, although he showed little interest in Plácido and placed Heredia at the center of the Cuban poetic canon. The canonization process for the novel was a bit slow due to the relative limits in publication of that genre at the beginning of the twentieth century. Two studies were Arturo S. Carricarte’s article “La novela en Cuba” (1907) [The Novel in Cuba] and Arturo Salazar y Roig’s lecture, “La novela en Cuba: sus manifestaciones, ideales y posibilidades” (1934) [The Novel in Cuba: Its Manifestations, Ideals, and Possibilities]. But the true legitimation of the novel in critical discourse does not begin until the 1940s and 1950s, when Jose Antonio Fernández de Castro, Juan J. Remos y Rubio, Salvador Bueno, Raimundo Lazo, and Max Henriquez Urena write their general histories of Cuban literature. The central corpus of canonical Cuban narrative

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receives clear definition in their works: Villaverde, Carrion, Rodriguez, Labrador, Cardoso, Carpentier. Lorenzo Garcia Vega’s Antología de la novela cubana [Anthology of the Cuban Novel], published in 1960, confirms this canon of insular narrative. It also implicitly protests against its narrowness by expanding the list to include José Lezama Lima and Dulce Maria Loynaz, two novelists relatively unknown at the time. By the mid-1960s, when Raimundo Lazo writes his Historia de la literatura cubana [History of Cuban literature], the canonization process of the colony and the republic is complete. The critics rely on four or five historiographies of Cuban letters that organize the development of writing according to the criteria of aesthetic and moral authority. However, that does not stop the generic canons from continuing to define themselves in the margin of that historiography, seeking to correct, open, or modernize the preceding canon. Cintio Vitier, who had published his anthologies Diez poetas cubanos (1948) [Ten Cuban Poets] and Cincuenta años de la poesía cubana (1952) [Fifty Years of Cuban Poetry], produces Lo cubano en la poesía (1950) [Cuban Poetry], which a few years later would become the most important rewriting of the Cuban canon of poetry after that of Jose Maria Chacon y Calvo. José Lezama Lima, in a similar vein, changes this critical canon in his Antología de la poesía cubana (1965) [Anthology of Cuban Poetry]. Ambrosio Fornet’s book of essays, En blanco y negro (In Black and White) and his Antologia del cuento cubano contemporáneo (Anthology of the Contemporary Cuban Short Story), both published in 1967, propose a new selection and aesthetic authorization of short narrative in Cuba, since the classic anthologies Cuentos contemporáneos (1937) by Federico de Ibarzábal and Cuentos cubanos contemporáneos (1947) by José Antonio Portuondo. Rine Leal accomplishes the same thing for theater in La selva oscura (1975) [The Dark Forest], and more recently, in La novela cubana de la Revolucion [The Cuban Novel of the Revolution], Rogelio Rodriguez Coronel updates literary historiography of the colonial and republican narrative canon. A century after Antonio Bachiller y Morales wrote his Apuntes, Cuban criticism has succeeded in defining a canon of

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national letters. The purest form of this new metastory of identity is found in the literary histories that begin to emerge in the 1940s and 1950s. Books by Fernández de Castro, Remos, Bueno, Henríquez Urena, and Lazo establish, as we have seen, the aesthetic authorization of texts according to the density of national narrative, seen from the inside. Remos, for example, defined the objective of this historiographic discourse in the prologue to his Proceso histórico de las letras cubanas (1958) [The Historical Process of Cuban Letters]: In these pages we will consider the progress of Cuban letters, from its infancy to the stage at which we can truly name Cuban literature. Although they do not deny the notable Spanish influence, now Cuban letters evidence the presence of a Cuban spirit, the product of an evolved collective consciousness. It offers its own characteristics, that are separate from the merely Spanish, and that move first toward liberty and then toward full sovereignty, according to their own sense of political, social, and economic organization.23

In contrast to Remos, who inscribed the national personality of Cuban letters from within a Spanish aesthetic, Lazo insists on locating “Cubanness” in the context of Hispanic American letters: As happens with respect to the particular literatures of other Hispanic American communities—doubtless in very different stages of development—a literature exists with a differentiated personality, not just because of the language in which it is written, but rather, decisively, because of its content, the unique community and the unique circumstances that it manifests, and which are causes that determine the existence of its own, autonomous literary movement, with characteristics of a specific historical entity. And the singular reality of Cuba, of that which is Cuban and of its organic literary expression, are present in it, as an experience that is inseparable from the historian and even the mere observer, from the quotidian events of Hispanic America.24

Although the territories into which they insert Cuban literature are subtly distinct, both authors direct their definitions outward in similar ways. It is possible to speak of a “Cuban literature,” within what Paul Ricoeur calls “other textual worlds,” precisely because Cuba relies on a considerable “national narrative.”

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Lazo and Remos agree that for more than two centuries Cuban writers have mainly narrated their country, their being, their national identity. Even when novels or poems are not set in the island’s cultural space or they do not address Cuban themes, their Cubanness is stamped on them through the language, style, or through something more mysterious like “breath,” “tone,” or “atmosphere.” The best proof that in this historiography Cuba appears as a narrating narrative is that mechanism by which national identity achieves a powerful capacity for inscription. Cubanness becomes, then, a reifying rationality that can attach itself to a text, even against an author’s will. This constitution of nation identity as, in Homi K. Bhabha’s terms, a narrating narrative appears most clearly in Max Henriquez Ureña’s Panorama historico de la literatura cubana (1963) (Historical Panorama of Cuban Literature): Cuban literature . . . for the most part is dedicated to awakening Cuban consciousness, whether in the service of studying the Cuban problematic as with the thinkers and the sociologists, or in the service of lyrical expression of patriotic sentiment as with the poets. . . . What do the poets and the costumbristas do, if not look inward, toward the very essence of Cuban feeling? And to what do we owe the diffusion reached by, not only patriotic poetry, but also Creole poetry inspired by a popular spirit, or indigenist poetry, or the rich and varied literature of customs that includes everything from description to graphic or picturesque drawings, to the amusing farce of local color and the novel that recreates an entire epoch? Cuban literary history represents, in general terms, the constantly renovated project of helping the Cuban people acquire full consciousness of their historical destiny.25

This teleology of the national subject has marked Cuban culture since the nineteenth century. It has been very difficult to resist the powerful inscription of its aesthetic authority in the canon. However, there is no lack of rebellions and escapes from those galleries of learned, white, Catholic, Creole men. With her Album biografico y fotogra fico de poetisas y escritoras cubanas (Biographical and Photographical Album of Cuba’s Women Poets and Writers), dedicated to Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda, Domitila Garcia Coronado provides one of the primary resistances to the Cuban national canon.26 In more than twenty

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portraits, Garcia Coronado demonstrates the possibility of another gallery, this time of women’s writing, but which does not pretend to isolate itself from the ethnic canonization of nationality. Rather, she seeks to reformulate it from the perspective of gender. Like Bachiller, Cabrera, or de la Cruz, la Peregrina, and other Cuban female writers of the nineteenth century sought aesthetic authorization of the national story. Only their catalog is made up of those women who “sang to the fatherland” with their best “white and Catholic” voices.27

Four Strategies of Canonization George Yudice and John Guillory, who have criticized the idea of the Western canon from within the multiculturalist left, agree with Harold Bloom that all literary canonization, even if applied to a Third World culture, requires the establishment of a center.28 Canon formation responds to a centrifugal logic, similar to that of a solar system. First the aesthetic center of gravitation—the “brightest star,” as Reinaldo Arenas would say—is set, and then the stars that orbit around it.29 Bloom, for example, never doubts that William Shakespeare occupies the center of the Western canon. In the same way, José Martí represents the most central writing for historians of Cuban literature since the mid-twentieth century. This was not always the case, however. Chacón y Calvo thought that Heredia ought to occupy the center of the poetic canon, and many others, like Virgilio Piñera, hold to the idea that Casal, rather than Martí, was the greatest nineteenth-century Cuban poet. Still, since the 1940s, it is undeniable that criticism and historiography place Martí at the center of the island’s literary canon. This aesthetic coronation presents certain difficulties and affects the general process of literary canonization. Martí not only wrote fiction, but also, as Piñera points out, an abominable novel, and was the victim of a subtle antinarrative prejudice. This provoked a certain crisis of legitimacy, or rather, a gap in the representation of him. Shakespeare, as Bloom argues, is the center of the Western canon because his writing reflects Occidental aesthetics in general, and also because he left no

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literary genre untried. Martí does not meet this second qualification. However, this gap is supplemented by another type of fiction, the type that determines, in the end, the narrating narrative of national identity. In contrast to Cirilo Villaverde or Miguel de Carrion, Martí never wrote a “romance about the birth of the Cuban nation,” but his “foundational fiction,” to quote Doris Sommer, expressed through poetry, journalism, oratory, and the essay, came to wield more power than that of those two novelists.30 In a word: Martí invents the national identity of the island through his writing, and that is why he occupies the center of the literary canon. It is curious to note how, since the 1940s, any attempt to expand the Cuban canon has been forced to confirm Martí’s centrality. The most illustrative case of this phenomenon might be that of the poets of Orígenes. As is well known, Cintio Vitier, José Lezama Lima, and to a lesser degree, Gastón Baquero and Virgilio Piñera, never hid their desire to rewrite the history of Cuban poetry. Their will to open up the canon was obvious in the curiosity or archivism that led them to unearth some writers like Tristán de Jesús Medina, or to revisit others, like Juan Clemente Zenea. But at the same time, Lezama saw Martí as the Uno-Monarca of insular culture, and Vitier took this representation to an extreme in his angry reactions against any treatment of Casal and Varona that did not acknowledge Martí’s superiority to them.31 The authoritarianism implied by this canonization of Martí responds to the fact that the history of Cuban literature is always subordinate to a political teleology. According to republican and revolutionary historiography, the work of Cuban writers reflects a people’s path toward its destiny, the nation’s trajectory. This telos changes name according to the ideology of the historian or the critic. Sometimes it is called “independence” or “republic”; at other times, it is “revolution” or “socialism”; and at yet others, although less often, it is called “democracy.” Basically, though, this teleology, just as in Greek tragedy, serves to confirm the identity of a homogenous model subject, rigidly defined in moral, ideological, sexual, racial, political, religious, and gendered terms. I am speaking, of course, of the national subject.

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One way to observe this subject’s exercise of power would be to interpret the mechanisms of authority that the national literary canon formalizes. Among these mechanisms, which range from simple exclusion to a more subtle devaluation of certain works and authors, the most common is probably the one we might call “denationalization of the text.”32 Adriana Méndez Rodenas has referred to this process in relation to Cintio Vitier’s assertion that the “setting and tone” of Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda’s poetry are “Spanish” rather than “Cuban.” A similar, though less strident, predisposition toward Dulce María Loynaz’s work appears in the histories of José Antonio Fernández de Castro, Salvador Bueno, and Max Henríquez Ureña. In this case, more than an aesthetic value like Vitier’s (he does not even mention her in his Lo cubano en la poesia), a geographical editorial criterion predominates. Until the 1950s, Loynaz had published her most important books in Madrid: Juegos de agua [Water Games], Poemas sin nombre [Unnamed Poems], Ultimos dias de una casa [A Home’s Last Days]. Therefore, these historians mention only a very few of her poems, preferably those included in Versos, her opera prima, edited by Úcar y García in Havana. A desire to silence or neutralize feminine voices within the metastory of national identity probably motivates these mechanisms of the aesthetic canon. Such a conclusion is supported by the fact that literary criticism, including feminist literary criticism, has evaded or ignored the most radical writing by Cuban women during the republic. I am referring to some authors of the 1920s and 1930s, uncomfortably associated with the avantgarde, such as Ofelia Rodriguez Acosta, Lesbia Soravilla, Serafina Núñez, Berta Arocena, Julieta Carreta, and Tete Casuso. They were all founders of the Cuban Women’s Club and the National Women’s Union, two civic institutions whose histories are still largely unknown in contemporary Cuban culture. The worst evidence of this politics of forgetting is that some of them, along with others such as Mercedes Garcia Tuduri, Herminia del Portal, Josefina de Cepeda, and Julia Rodríguez, are not even mentioned in the Diccionario de la literatura Cubana [Dictionary of Cuban Literature], published by the Cuban Academy of Science in 1984.

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Even so, the neutralization or silencing of feminine voices is rarely formulated directly as a gender-related strategy. Remos, perhaps the most generous historian regarding this literature, noted that “the huge sensation” caused in 1929 by Ofelia Rodriguez Acosta’s novel La vida manda [Life in Control], was caused less by “the inherent interest of its feminist theme,” its “strength of style,” or the “liveliness of its naturalist descriptions,” than by “the happenstance that it was written by a young woman who, to top it all off, was single.”33 Here, the writing subject’s identity is key to literary canonization. But such transparency is truly exceptional. The most typical strategy was for critical or historiographical discourse to inscribe power in terms that hid the subject’s identity under strictly aesthetic or stylistic categories. Regarding women’s writing, one of the most common mechanisms of authorization in the national canon is the one we will call “generic excellence.” It is notable that almost all historians of Cuban literature resist considering Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda or Dulce Maria Loynaz as novelists. Lazo writes of Dos mujeres [Two Women], Espatolino, and Dolores: “the novel and other forms of prose narration were not the most appropriate forms for expressing Avellaneda’s literary talent.”34 The same author insists on treating Loynaz’s Jardín [Garden] as a prose poem rather than as a novel, given the strong presence of “fantasy and lyricism” in the text.35 Again, we see an equivalence drawn between two powers: that of narrative literary genre and that of masculine gender. This symmetrical principle contaminates literary history and generates a marked tendency to canonize only one type of narrative, at times even only one type of prose. The mechanism of generic excellence is not limited to being used against repressed or marginal subjects. As Harold Bloom suggests, all modern canons impose a holistic regime of literary specialization. Casal, Guillen, and Lezama, for example, are ensconced as canonical poets; Villaverde, Carpentier, and Sarduy as novelists; and Mañach, Lamar Schweyer, and Rodriguez Embil as essayists. This rigid parcelization leads to textual resistance to the national canon. How should we treat Casal’s

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Prosa, Guillén’s Memorias, or Lezama’s Paradiso? According to what generic category do we read Villaverde’s essays, Carpentier’s Crónicas, or Sarduy’s poems? Where in the canon do we place the rarities of the essayists’ narratives, like Mañach’s Belén, el Aschanti, Lamar’s La roca de Patmos, or Rodriguez Embil’s short stories in La mentira vital? I do not mean to deny that the national canonization of certain literature does violence to nonhegemonic subjects. I simply intend to suggest that the mechanisms by which literary authority is inscribed in the canon function within an autonomous sphere guided by aesthetic, ideological, and moral principles. To characterize Virgilio Piñera’s poetics as “non-Cuban,” for example, Cintio Vitier uses a phrase quite similar to the one we saw earlier in relation to Avellaneda. Commenting on La isla en peso, he writes: “an influence of visions that have nothing to do with us in any way is obvious in the tone and the thesis of this poem.”36 It is probable that disapproval of Piñera’s homosexuality motivates this veiled condemnation, but its articulation in the text can only be apprehended through ethical or aesthetic allegories of the nation. The erasure of an Other voice is achieved more clearly, it seems to me, in Jose Antonio Fernandez de Castro’s Tema negro en las letras de Cuba, where the subject’s ethnic identity is radically supplanted by the thematic identity of the text, which is no more than the condition of possibility for any national canon. We can also consider the numerous negative critiques of Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés (Plácido) and José Manuel Poveda for being mulatto poets who stylistically resist the ontologeme of mestizaje.37 Poveda’s homosexuality accents his vulnerability to such criticism. In his case, Cuban literary historiography tries to neutralize the subject’s black and gay identities simultaneously. Just as Federico de Ibarzabal writes El problema negro [The Black Problem] to convert a corporal aspect of the writing into an ideological theme, Alfonso Hernández Cata writes El ángel de Sodoma [The Angel of Sodom] and Carlos Montenegro writes Hombres sin mujer [Men without Women], two novels in which the text, far from embodying homosexuality, attempts to represent it. However, their external representation of gay identity

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does not save these novels from the forms of exclusion the canon produces. Hernández Cata and Montenegro are two of the least-recognized narrators in contemporary Cuban literary criticism.38 Finally, I want to point out two other mechanisms of literary authorization. Antonio José Ponte writes in his essay “La lengua de Virgilio” [Virgil’s Tongue], of a certain critical tendency to counterpose the works of Lezama and Piñera, as if these two authors were, in Cabrera Infante’s terms, two “lives to be read.”39 This tendency arises from an obsession in critical and historiographic discourse that we will call “stylistic parallelism.” The history of Cuban poetry, in particular, seems to be a parade of pairs: Zequeira and Rubalcava, Plácido and Manzano, Casal and Martí, Boti and Poveda, Ballagas and Florit, Lezama and Piñera. This binary structure, at the root of Cuban authoritarianism, extends through two galleries that make up, in turn, the national literary canon and the countercanon. Those who prefer a list including Zequeira, Manzano, Martí, Boti, Ballagas, and Lazama adhere to the hard centrist line of Cuban identity, where terms like “autochthonous,” “proper,” “sincere,” and “earthy” predominate. In contrast, those inclined toward the other list (Rubalcava, Placido, Casal, Poveda, Florit, Piñera) allow for the “Cubanization” of “play,” “nihilism,” “artificiality,” and “oddity.” It is worth recognizing that the first group carries more weight in criticism and Cuban literary history. Del Monte’s declarations regarding the “false” and the “mimetic” in Placido reappear in Mitjans’s assessment of Rubalcava or in Lazo’s judgment of Poveda. These stylistic parallelisms are not, then, simple juxtapositions, but rather dichotomies, such as Bueno proposes between Ballagas and Florit, or antitheses, such as in Lo cubano en la poesía’s opposition of Martí to Casal. A narrating narrative, like the one that the Cuban literary canon produces, can tolerate the aestheticization of those authors, like Rubén Darío, considered to be rare exceptions. In a way, Rubalcava, Casal, Poveda, and Piñera embody that strangeness. But what becomes definitely intolerable for the national canon is the kind of text that Emmanuel Levinas would

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call “exterior,” that narration of the foreign from within the bounds of the proper, or those representations of other imaginaries and other subjects seen from the cultural space of the island. The “outside” would seem to be another version of the “rare,” the “imitative,” or the “exotic.” For example, two radical “Frenchifications,” like Ignacio Valdes’s Rousseau-esque Cantatas or José Manuel Poveda’s Baudelairean Versos precursores would be halfway between “exotic” and “external.” In the same way, Pedroso y Arriaga’s Los misterios de la Habana, an imitation of Eugene Sue’s work, approaches, through mimesis, the narrative of exteriority. The negative criticism that these works have always received merely confirms their expulsion from the canon. Cuban literature, then, is full of those external texts. I will mention only a few: Avellaneda’s El artista barquero, a novel based on the life of French painter Hubert Robert; Ramon de Palma’s El ermitaño del Niagara, perhaps the best of his novellas, but whose plot is set in London, where English characters face English problems; Tristan de Jesus Medina’s Mozart ensayando su requiem, whose title transports us to a remote dialog with Pushkin; essay collections La sombra de Heraclito by Fernando Lles and Hercules en Yolcos by Emilio Gaspar Rodriguez; Luis Rodriguez Embil’s El imperio mudo, AustroHungarian stories set during the First World War; Dulce Maria Loynaz’s Un verano en Tenerife, about life in the Canaries; Lisandro Otero’s Temporada de angeles, a historical novel on Oliver Cromwell, and more recently, Jose Manuel Prieto’s Enciclopedia de una vida en Rusia, Livadia, and Rex, a trilogy of Russian novels written by a young Cuban author. The invisibility of these texts in Cuban literary history and criticism speaks of another mechanism of power in the national canon: the negation of exteriority. It is tempting to construct a countercanon of Cuban literature based on these texts or based on the archeological substrata of women’s, gay, black, dissident, or minority literatures. But the danger of constructing any countercanon lies in the tendency to redefine the national from within undervalued, marginal, forgotten, or rebel discourses. Today, the true challenge of Cuban

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literary criticism and history is to transcend canonical logic by abandoning the narrating narrative that imposes a national identity on us. We can only glimpse the future of such a project, since critics currently seem to be more interested in avenging exiled identities than in the radical exercise of difference. Even so, there is strong evidence that in the coming years, a discourse of exteriority will define new subjects and new practices in a postnational culture.

6 Diaspora and Memory in Cuban Literature

The Italian philosopher Mauricio Ferraris dedicated a complete treatise to showing the close relationship between memory and mourning in Saint Augustine, Montaigne, Rousseau, and Heidegger. Memory, according to Ferraris, and more specifically autobiographical and historical writing, is generally associated with a moment of loss, of the decline of a certain identity.1 The reconstruction of the symbolic memory of any country—after a civil war that split in two the cultural imaginary of the community, or in the wake of an authoritarian government, that exerted excessive control over the national historic narrative— is also part of the mourning process, marking the end of the former regime. In the case of Cuba, this reconstruction began in 1992, when the reform of the Constitution attempted to adapt the mechanisms for symbolic legitimation of the Cuban regime to the conditions of the post–cold war. In the pages that follow, I am proposing a journey through the principal topics of this post-communist reconstruction of Cuba’s historical memory through contemporary literature produced both on the island and in the Diaspora. At the conclusion of this journey, as will be seen, is the notion that in spite of certain indications of the emergence of a narrative of national reconciliation, the principal actors of Cuban culture are still in a state of memory-war, a struggle for historic legitimacy that derives from exclusive and irreconcilable narratives of a common past.

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The entanglements of Cuban memory originate from each group’s resistance to recognize the other’s historical legitimacy. This binary tension bears, to some extent, the traces of a symbolic projection of enmity, of a civil war narrative fully incorporated into the politics of memory exercised by the national subjects. In the Cuban case, the discursive obstacles placed by certain identities on national reconciliation set the stage for a perpetual conflict, similar to that described by Jean Améry, in which every attempt to go beyond resentment and guilt—beyond the affirming monologue of the victim and the expiatory mentality of the executioner—appear condemned to failure.2

Forgiveness and Forgetting Like most Hispanic American literature, Cuban literature has not produced many confessions, memoirs, and autobiographies.3 For this reason, the emergence of this genre in the most recent writing of Cuban exiles without the support of a national or continental tradition is astonishing. Not only has a large portion of Cuban diasporic writers written autobiographical poems, novels, stories, or essays (Lorenzo García Vega, Manuel Díaz Martínez, Carlos Victoria, Jesús Díaz, Zoé Valdés, Vicente Echerri, Uva de Aragón, Daína Chaviano, Matías Montes Huidobro, Yanitzia Caneti, and José Manuel Prieto among others), but in the last two decades of the twentieth century a complete corpus of memoirs of the Cuban intellectual was formed: Carlos Franqui, Retrato de familia con Fidel (1981); Heberto Padilla, La mala memoria (1989); Reinaldo Arenas, Antes que anochezca (1992); Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Mea Cuba (1993); Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Next Year in Cuba (1995); Eliseo Alberto, Informe contra mi mismo (1996); Juan Abreu, A la sombra del mar (1998); Lisandro Otero, Llover sobre mojado (1998); César Leante, Revive, historia (1999); Norberto Fuentes, Dulces guerreros cubanos (1999), and so on. The intensity of this discourse in the Diaspora of the 1990s relates, of course, to the reclaiming of a subjectivity inhibited by strong collective pressures, or with that detachment of the I from a collective, totalitarian We, and the reconstruction of personal identity experienced in every exile.4

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In these memoirs, the rhetorical emphasis, anchored in prosopopœi, always directs the evocation toward a moral objective: accusation (Franqui and Cabrera Infante), revenge (Padilla, Arenas, and Abreu), confession (Alberto and Leante), apology or justification (Otero and Fuentes), and identity (Pérez Firmat). All the memoirs are interspersed with these five perspectives; that is, all are accusatory, vengeful, confessional, justificatory, and seek to define identity. In Franqui, memory is a pretext to denounce, step by step, the rapid Stalinization of the revolutionary government of the 1960s; and in Abreu, it is a spiritual compensation for the persecutions that he suffered together with Reinaldo Arenas in the Havana of the 1970s. For Alberto, it is primarily a matter of exorcising an unbearable complicity, whereas for Fuentes, it is the excuse for a terrifying and captivating epic. In the case of Pérez Firmat, it represents the first Cuban American presence.5 Each moral recovery of the past produces a struggle between the instinct of evading and that of confronting responsibilities for past associations with the Castro regime. It is clear that the two intellectuals who had the deepest involvement in the revolutionary government, Lisandro Otero and Norberto Fuentes, are the most elusive. Otero, who in the gray decades was one of the most influential intellectuals in the cultural policies of the country, blames history, the whirlwind, the collectivity fostered by a period of “ardent romanticism,” “patriotic passion,” and “utopian idealism” that converted him “much in line with the times” into an “Orthodox,” an “intransigent,” and even a “fanatic.”6 Fuentes, the author closest to the real center of power, State Security, describes like some latter-day Dante the political hell of Castroism, but makes the executioners into melancholic, ingenuous heroes. In 460 pages, he only manages to acknowledge (in the third person) that “the author also was on the side of those who filled the jails, and that he helped manufacture the same pincers that, in fact, he later found around his own neck.”7 At the other extreme is the acknowledgment of responsibility. Consider, for example, the passage in which Padilla mentions Koestler and laments his “complicity with an authoritarian regime that his deepest convictions

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rejected”; the page where Eliseo Alberto confesses to having drafted reports about his own family for State Security; the remorse of César Leante for having “engulfed himself in a myth which exonerated real atrocities”; or the painful and witty contrition of Guillermo Cabrera Infante in Mea Cuba: “The guilt is great and experienced: for having left my land to become an outcast, while at the same time leaving behind those who were traveling on the same ship, which I helped to launch without knowing that it was for the worse.”8 Autobiographies written by some of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, such as The Tongue Set Free or The Torch in My Ear by Elías Canetti, Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov, and Italo Calvino’s Hermit in Paris, depict the lives of those committed to literature and capable of assimilating strong political passions without developing a sickly morality, a pathos, in their transcription of the personal experience of history. For those masters, the true mystery resides in the “symbolic halo” that, according to Joseph Conrad, emanates from every work of art. The lives of Cuban intellectuals, on the other hand, reveal the unsheltered individual, shaken by Time, History, Fate or its most oppressive variant, the Revolution, which condemns them to an irreversible, premature aging. A copious litany of aphorisms cursing Fate can be extracted from the memoirs of these Greek-like beings: “History is slavery” (Cabrera Infante); “History is that rat that each night climbs the stairs” (Heberto Padilla); “History is that river of turbulent waters that annihilates us, dragging everything along with a deafening roar” (Reinaldo Arenas); “History is a cat that always lands on its feet” (Eliseo Alberto).9 There is just as much melancholy in the pride that Lisandro Otero feels upon evoking his participation in the narration of the epic as lies, as in the shame of the voluntary accomplice who torments César Leante. Even Gustavo Pérez Firmat, an author who fully developed in exile, establishes the Castro revolution as the foundational event of his CubanAmerican imaginary.10 The perception that literature performs a kind of magic state against history, and that it will protect the individual from the outside world is not exactly beneficial for all cultures. In the

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case of Cuba, this reification of letters—which extends from Heredia to Casal, Martí to Lezama, and Villaverde to Cabrera Infante—arises from a nihilist heritage, developed over two centuries of political frustration. Today, the ridiculous nature of certain aristocratic poses in the ruins of some city is only equivalent to the cynicism with which many intellectuals adhere to the worst policies within and outside of the island. Before gravitating once more toward the idea of literature as a mythic refuge against History, it is better to search for redemption in Geography. Writing as the construction of specific places (the Havana of Cabrera Infante; the homoerotic beach of Arenas; the Miami of Pérez Firmat) at least offer the possibility of a community ruled by the pleasure principle. In these literary spaces, History reveals its disconcerting domesticity and dries up its fountain of infernal myths. The Diaspora has reinforced this tragic imaginary of history through the discourse of the illegitimacy of the Revolution. For decades, the Cuban opposition, in and outside the island, assumed that the Castro regime was illegitimate because it had sprung forth from a popular revolution, whose leadership was never checked by the electoral norms of a representative democracy. This discourse regarding the illegitimacy of the Cuban regime was always reinforced by the fact that nationalist and liberal politicians such as José Miró Cardona, Manuel Antonio de Varona, Manuel Ray Rivero, and Manuel Artime Buesa assumed positions of leadership in exile. (Several had been members of the first revolutionary government because of their rejection of the socialist radicalization of the process and broke with Fidel Castro between 1960 and 1961.) In the first historiography of exile, often written by intellectuals who initially sympathized with the revolutionary movement (such as Jorge Mañach, Carlos Márquez Sterling, Herminio Porte Vilá, Mario Llerena o Leví Marrero), the main topic was the betrayed revolution. These authors reiterated the notion that the revolutionary project that prompted the fall of Fulgencio Batista in 1959 was based on a social-democratic consensus that was abandoned by Fidel Castro and the radical wing of the 26th of July Movement, in alliance with the Communists, once

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they took power.11 The theme of the betrayed revolution coalesced in the political anticommunist culture of the Cuban opposition and facilitated the alliance of the exiles with the government of the United States during the Cold War. The nationalism and violence of this first wave of exiles prompted them to band together for political and military activities aimed at overthrowing an illegitimate regime that subordinated the island to Soviet Imperialism. The alliance between the Cuban exiles and the U.S. government was always justified by a nationalist rhetoric and a mentality similar to that which, from the perspective of the government of Fidel Castro, sustained the need for a defensive pact with the Soviet Union.12 Along with this mirrored nationalism, which in a parallel manner defined the identity of the revolution and the exile, there emerged, on both sides of the conflict, a discourse of national victimization that was very similar on both sides. According to the government of Fidel Castro, the island was a victim of the United States and of the Cuban bourgeoisie (previously of Havana and now relocated in Miami), which had to be defended against. According to the exile movement, Cuba was, in reality, the victim of Fidel Castro, the Soviet Union, and international communism, and had to be rescued and protected. While the Castro government quantified the damages of counterrevolutionary terrorism, the exile movement bore witness to the balance of repression: executions, imprisonment, torture, forced labor, marginalization, and exodus. A good portion of the symbolic patrimony of exile was constructed on the certainty that the Castro regime is extremely oppressive. This certainty has been documented through a voluminous corpus of testimonies and memoirs that requires a comparison with official archives, and a public or juridical resolution.13 Another example of the perceived illegitimacy of the regime that was set in the memory of the exiles was the notion of the Revolutionary moment as a calamity or an accident of Cuban history, which should be denied or overcome in order to take up, once again, the proper trajectory of the republican tradition. This instinct to turn its back on the present of the island gave the political language of emigration the illusory tone that restoring

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the past was a possibility. To a large extent the positions toward change and restoration, so exploited by the Castro government in its constant discrediting of the political opposition, originated in these first years.14 The idealization of the republican past and the abuses of the revolutionary present were, in the exiles, the opposite of the government’s exaltation of the socialist today and its reviling of the republican yesterday. The war of memory on both shores has been based, for decades, on this symbolic struggle over two periods in Cuban history, the Republic, and the Revolution, and two spaces in national life: the island and exile. The symbolic battle between these two communities that seek mutual nullification frequently turns to those “abuses of memory” of which Tzvetan Todorov speaks.15 Prompted by this national discourse of tragedy and victimization, the theme of guilt also emerges in the memory of the exile. The handling of the question oscillates from universal formulas of distribution of responsibility, as seen first in Todos somos culpables (1993) by Guillermo de Zéndegui—who had been an important cultural official during the Batista regime— and the absolute personalization of blame in the figure of Fidel Castro that closes Reinaldo Arenas’ Antes que anochezca (1992). In any case, it is important to note that each migratory wave arrives in exile with its own record of grievances and its own particular location of guilt. Thus, for example, the memoirs of intellectuals who emigrated in the first two decades after having taken part in the Revolution (such as those of Carlos Franqui, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Nivaria Tejera, or César Leante) show a frustration with the political regime and with the person of Fidel Castro. Since the authors themselves had been socialists, their frustration is not focused on a “revolution betrayed” by Marxism-Leninism, as the first generation of exiles had done in their writing. Rather, the principal motive that caused their breach with the regime was the “Stalinization” or the “Sovietization” of Cuban socialism, which until then had been “autochthonous.” This turn could be verified by the shift in positions that went from the “Revolutionary Offensive” of 1967, to the support of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the imprisonment and “self-criticism” of poet Heberto

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Padilla and the National Congress of Education and Culture in 1971.16 The Mariel generation, on the other hand, introduced into the memory of exiles one of the most bitter and painful stories in the history of Cuban culture, as represented in testimonies such as Arenas’ Antes que anochezca (1993) or A la sombra del mar (1998) by Juan Abreu, and in the poetic narrative or fiction of other authors such as Carlos Victoria, Guillermo Rosales, and Nestor Díaz de Villegas. The wounds of Mariel have more to do with a rejection of every form of theoretically “moral” authoritarianism than with political disenchantment with the Castro regime. Because this generation was not only the victim of political and social repression on the island, but also subject to discrimination and distrust by the traditional exile community, its memoirs are strongly marked by a type of pain that is reluctant to approach any type of reconciliation. At the end of Antes que anochezca, Arenas remembered that while he was in New York, each time he felt nostalgia for Cuba or for Old Havana his “outraged memory, which was more powerful than any nostalgia,”17 intervened. The testimonial rage of Mariel is, in the words of Juan Abreu, the “beautiful rebelliousness” of a “generation decimated, humiliated and reviled by the Cuban dictatorship.”18 A good approach to discern the contrast between the testimonial angst of Mariel and other less anger-filled considerations of the Cuba of the 1970s may be a parallel reading of the memoirs written by two Latin American journalists. One is La Habana en un espejo (2004) [Havana through a Mirror], by the Mexican author Alma Guillermoprieto, and the other Finding Manana: Memoir of A Cuban Exodus (2005), by Cuban Mirta Ojito, a Mariel émigré. The first describes the Havana scene after the unsuccessful Ten-Million-Tons Harvest and during the Sovietification process, from the perspective of a New York ballet dancer who studies under Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, and Twyla Tharp, who rejects the precariousness of socialism but still feels passionately about a small island rebelling against the United States and Western capitalism. The second, from inside Cuba, narrates the suffering caused by marginalization

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and by the hatred against the families that, after two decades of doubts and uncertainties, dare to abandon the “revolutionary utopia” and get on a boat in search of the American Dream.19 In contrast with the bitterness that characterizes the memoirs of the Mariel generation, the Cuban diasporics of the 1990s reached exile with a vision that was more reconciled with its revolutionary past. Many intellectuals of this migratory wave, such as Manuel Díaz Martínez, Jesús Díaz, Zoé Valdés, Daína Chaviano, and Eliseo Alberto, have written personal testimonials of their break with the regime, where beats a less traumatic, more contemplative experience of the Revolution, including a recognition of its important cultural legacy.20 In the most emblematic memoir of that wave of the Diaspora, Informe contra mí mismo (1996) by Eliseo Alberto, there is a constant call for the recovery of the revolutionary culture of the 1960s and 1970s, and an obsessive attempt at reconciling this heritage with its opposite, the culture of the exile.21 A sentence from this text clearly transmits the integrative will of these two memories: “the sterile bipolarity of judgment has preserved too many memories, which is like wasting a lot of fertile memory, because the recollections are no more than moments that we have forgotten to forget, out of mere forgetfulness.”22 Proof of the lack of common ground between the memoirs of Mariel and the Diaspora of the 1990s is the critique of Juan Abreu that appears in the initial pages of A la sombra del mar and comments upon Eliseo Alberto’s Informe contra mí mismo. Abreu states: The book of Eliseo Alberto appears to me useful and necessary, but the insistence of the author in legitimizing certain aspects of the dictatorship of Fidel Castro is a form of self-justification of himself and of his class. The author cannot or does not wish to grasp that we were all victims, they and we, but not all of us were guilty. He does not manage to comprehend that the best form of rewriting the past is by being that which we were not allowed to be: free, totally and painfully free. And such liberty does not allow for camouflage, nor self-pity, nor a clean slate for that disastrous period in the history of our country.23

Similar reproaches to writers and artists from the island run through the book of memoirs Mi vida saxual by musician

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Paquito D’Rivera, and the essay “Contra la doble memoria,” by Enrico Mario Santí, a dismantling of the autobiography of Lisandro Otero’s, Llover sobre mojado.24 These texts of “difficult forgiveness,” as Paul Ricoeur would call them, are characteristic of remembering victims and part of the debate about the responsibility of the intellectual in an authoritarian or totalitarian order that, in the last few years, has begun to be articulated on the island and in the Diaspora. In recent Cuban narrative, there are two important novels that, through stories of denunciation and reconciliation, approach the subject of the responsibility of the intellectual under totalitarianism: Las palabras perdidas by Jesús Díaz, and La novela de mi vida by Leonardo Padura.25 Two works that address the same subject are Jacobo Machover’s La memoria frente al poder and the essay “Cuba y los intelectuales” by Enrico Mario Santí. These two authors insist that any political reconciliation in the Cuban intellectual camp should start with the public admission of their moral responsibility and collaboration in the construction of a totalitarism that restricted freedom of expression.26 As Ricoeur points out, the difficulty of requesting and granting forgiveness in societies that have endured dictatorships and civil wars is related to the strong implication of political guilt.27 In the last decade, the old topic of the “intellectual and the revolution” has been notably displaced by more complex notions of how to assume ideological commitment and public criticism, which do not follow the traditional correlation between civil society and the State.28 Several Cuban writers living on the island (such as Ambrosio Fornet, Leonardo Padura, Arturo Arango, Rafael Hernández, and Desiderio Navarro) have approached the subject in an oblique manner, through the disregard for the role of the intellectual as a subject fully incorporated into the ideological State apparatus, rather than through their role as “critical consciousness” in civil society.29 These authors articulate a new discourse about intellectual autonomy inscribed in a Gramscian concept of civil society that questions the symbolic link between intellectuals and the Revolution and highlights the separation between public criticism and state ideology.

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Together with the memoirs of the Mariel generation and of the Diaspora of the 1990s, in the last two decades there has also appeared an autobiographical literature written by Cuban American authors—children, for the most part, of the first exile—who introduce a new look at the past. Such works as Exiled Memories. A Cuban Childhood (1990) by Pablo Medina; Next Year in Cuba. A Cubano’s Coming-of-Age in America (1995) by Gustavo Pérez Firmat; Cuba on My Mind. Journeys to a Severed Nation (2000) by Román de la Campa; ReMembering Cuba: Legacy of Diaspora (2001) by Andrea O’Reilly Herrera, and Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy (2003) by Carlos Eire establish a symbolic relationship with the Revolution as an event, and with the exodus to the United States, different from those of the first exile, Mariel and the Diaspora of the 1990s.30 Here, the evocation of the Republic, associated with childhood, lacks the idealization of the first exile while at the same time, the authors’ judgment of the Revolution is a harsh revelation of the period’s violence and pillaging. It is interesting to note that in this generation, in contrast with the historic exile and Mariel, but similarly to the Diaspora of the 1990s, the theme of return occupies a significant place, whether it is ultimately rejected (Pérez Firmat), perceived critically (Medina), or anticipated (Román de la Campa). Several Cuban American scholars including Eliana Rivero, Adriana Méndez Rodenas, Isabel Alvarez Borland, Lourdes Gil, Andrea O’Reilly Herrera, and Madeline Cámara have theorized over the concept of Diaspora as a viable strategy for the articulation of the Cuban cultural experience in the United States. For example, in one of the first books devoted to the theme, Alvarez Borland speaks of a “Cuban American literature of exile” narrating the nation as “loss.” Conversely, essayist Eliana Rivero has eloquently expressed her rejection of an exilic notion in her critical work Discursos desde la diáspora: “I have never liked the word ‘exile.’ I find its emotional impact too excluding, like a reference to a former sports champ or an ex-spouse. That is, to define ourselves by what has ceased to be, by what no longer works, by what is missing.”31

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The Cuban American generation also has contributed to the memory of exile in the form of academic historiography. Studies of the Cuban Revolution and Cuban socialism produced by Cuban Americans in the academy since the 1970s have contributed to the abandonment of the topic of the illegitimacy of the Revolution. In critical works such as Cuba: Order and Revolution (1978) by Jorge L. Domínguez; The Cuban Revolution: Origins, Course and Legacy (1993) by Marifeli Pérez-Stable; On Becoming Cuban. Identity, Nationality and Culture (1999) by Louis A. Pérez Jr.; and Cuba and the Politics of Passion (2000) by Damián J. Fernández, the Cuban Revolution appears as a social process in Cuba’s past, not as a current form of government, and, therefore, its legitimacy is not political but, rather, historic.32 This historiographic body of work, though circulates predominantly in North American academic settings, helps to expand the memory of the exile community and favors national reconciliation within the intellectual milieu. The notion of the illegitimacy of the Cuban regime, however, has persisted in the memory of organized exile, in spite of its present rejection of violence and terrorism as political means. The change in the political sociability of immigrants experienced since the mid-1980s, which today reports a virtual absence of armed opposition groups, has not been fully absorbed into the cultural imaginary of exile. The notion that the political system of Cuba should be transformed from the inside by its own actors and institutions has gained ground in the dissident movement and in the Diaspora, especially since 1992. However, the dominant Cuban-American political groups continue to support a subversive strategy, which combines punitive diplomatic and commercial pressures by the government of the United States, and the destabilization of the regime through civil disobedience and social dissent. In fact, there seems to be increased disagreement between the agenda of the “loyal opposition” (constitutional, quiet, and gradual), and the project of “rapid transition” proposed by Cuban-American congressional representatives, many exile organizations, and the government of the United States.

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The Narrative of Reconciliation In a novel that received much popular acclaim in Spain, Javier Cercas told the story of the novelist Rafael Sánchez Mazas, ideologue and founder of Falangism, and of soldier Antonio Miralles, a veteran of the Fifth Regiment, who fought under Líster, later enlisted in the French Foreign Legion, and finally joined De Gaulle in the Second World War. Starting with an investigation regarding the possibility that Miralles could have been the young republican soldier who pardoned the life of his enemy (the writer Sánchez Mazas) in the hills of Catalonia in early 1939, Cercas wrote more like a historian than a novelist, by depicting a civil war without winners or losers, without heroes or traitors, and only populated with decent, responsible people who morally transcend the political conflicts they are involved in. In one passage of the novel, Cercas recalled a statement by Andrés Trapiello expressing how the Spanish Republicans had lost the war on the field but had won it in literature.33 Both themes—the biography of rivals (the Hero and the Traitor as interchangeable figures in a civil war), and the familiar theme of arms and letters (embodied in the intellectual Sánchez Mazas and the warrior Miralles)—seem to me applicable to the Cuban Revolution. And not just to this recent period of the history of the Caribbean, but to any other in the modern history of Latin America, such as the Mexican or Nicaraguan revolutions. Sombras nada más, the last novel by Sergio Ramírez, for example, also attempts to construct a story about a civil war, the 1979 revolution in Nicaragua, in which the Sandinistas and Somozistas—the character Alirio Martinica is a former private secretary of Anastasio Somoza, who the FSLN puts on trial— are treated without rigid moral asymmetries or politically ennobling arguments.34 The first difficulty presented by the Cuban case to this new narrative is that the revolution of Fidel Castro is still not perceived as a civil war, in which the rivals fought with the same legitimacy or lack thereof. In fact, for the first two years of the war (1957–1959), legitimacy was defined in negative terms: the

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government of Batista was a dictatorship imposed by a coup, while the Revolution was a popular, armed movement against that de facto regime. After 1 January 1959, the government of Fidel Castro began to be perceived as illegitimate in the democratic sectors of the revolutionary camp because of its refusal to convene promised elections, and, from 1961 on, for its alliance with the USSR and its turn toward communism, which were never a part of the original program of the Revolution. Between 1959 and 1967, the armed opposition against the revolutionary government, acting in the mountains of Escambray and in the principal cities of the island, was basically formed by former revolutionary combatants, who continued to be faithful to the Moncada Project. This opposition, articulated nationally by organizations such as the Movement of Revolutionary Recovery and the Revolutionary Movement of the People, and which had its setting of maximum confrontation in the spring of 1961 with the landing of Brigade 2506 on Playa Girón, play, in the historic and the literary narrative of the Revolution, the role of enemy and of traitor—a role that these “counterrevolutionaries,” “bandits,” and “mercenaries” (Manuel Artime, Tony Varona, José Miró Cardona, Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo, Húber Matos) share with the adversaries of the old regime, the Batistianos and the bourgeoisie, and the rivals of today the space of exile and dissidence. In spite of the fact that for years political opposition within and outside the island has recognized the legitimacy of the regime, advocates peaceful change, and does not propose the destruction, but rather the reform, of the system, the government of Fidel Castro continues to see itself as a revolution, at eternal war with a counterrevolution that must be annihilated. The effect of this polarization in the system of symbolic legitimization of the Cuban government has informed the literary treatment of the civil war in the last forty years. The authors who wrote novels or short stories about the insurrection against Batista (Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Lisandro Otero, Jaime Sarusky, Edmundo Desnoes, Noel Navarro, José Soler Puig, Humberto Arenal, César Leante, and Hilda Perera among others), who were collaborators or sympathizers of the revolutionary

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movement, described the revolutionaries as having an excess of virtues and the Batistianos an excess of vices. In most cases, their disciples, the young writers who focused on the struggle against the armed opposition in the 1960s and 1970s, which was categorized as the “struggle against bandits” (David Buzzi, Norberto Fuentes, Jesús Díaz, Eduardo Heras León, Osvaldo Navarro, Hugo Chinea, Raúl González Cascorro) portrayed the rebels of Escambray as abominable beings, a cross between horse thieves and political bosses, devoid of political ideals, and totally submissive to the interests of the United States. A canonical text of this narrative, Los pasos en la hierba by Eduardo Heras León, describes the broad moral spectrum of the revolutionary camp. The “milicianos” in these stories are subjects both complex and vulnerable in their resolved commitment: there were the “slow” ones, the “cowards,” the “doubting,” “the middle class,” and the “thieves.” Nevertheless, the enemy camp— that of the “counterrevolutionaries” and “bandits”—appears as a spectral presence, invisible, unnamed, stripped of any historic subjectivity. In the story that gives the book its title, the face of the enemy is scarcely delineated: “Those are the rebels!” a character screams, and the other responds, “But, where?”35 Another short story, significantly titled “No se nos pierda la memoria,” contains a beautiful phrase that refers to the “weaker” ones on the revolutionary band and could well designate the phantasmal camp of the losers: “the memory of the weak ones is slowly lost in the dead letters of an archived file.”36 The moments of greatest understanding of the humanity of the enemy, in such as Los años duros by Jesús Díaz, Condenados de Condado by Norberto Fuentes, or El caballero de Mayaguara by Osvaldo Navarro, for example, are inscribed within an atmosphere of political tension in which the discovery of true dignity in the adversary underlines the heat of the struggle. Since the best Cuban narrators supported the Revolution, particularly in the decade between 1957–1967, it is difficult to find a solid narrative of exile that defends the defeated, except in cases such as Andrés Rivero Collado’s Enterrado vivo (1960) or Salvador Díaz Versón’s Ya el mundo oscurece (1961).37 The great Cuban narrative of exile is that which is associated with

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authors who were already established before the triumph of the Revolution, such as Lino Novás Calvo, or Carlos Montenegro, or with the writers who broke with the regime early on, such as Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Severo Sarduy or in later decades, as Reinaldo Arenas. In this sense, in Cuba (as opposed to Spain) one can state that the revolutionaries won both the political and the literary war. The publication in recent years of several books written by Cuban authors living outside of the island suggests a new historical narrative in which the two bands of the civil war begin to be assimilated in their reason and madness, their violence and legitimacy. Such is the case, for example, with Cómo llegó la noche (2002), the memoir of Húber Matos, one of the commanders of the Revolution who was jailed by the government of Fidel Castro because of a request to resign in protest of the communist turn that the Revolution took at the end of 1959. Matos, a victim of the Revolution who spent twenty years incarcerated and then another twenty years in exile, writes an autobiography without rancor, in which two-thirds of the text is dedicated to reconstructing the anti-Batista period between 1957 and 1959, and the first year of the triumphant Revolution, and only one-third is devoted to narrating the trials of imprisonment. In spite of the pain that permeates his writing, the memory of this victim is still capable of defending the justice of the revolutionary idea: Our national independence was not the work of politicians. They prepared the way, but it is the revolutionaries who make history advance, changing the structures of society. In reality, the revolutionary is a politician committed seriously to liberty, justice, and the interests of the people, in the manner of Simón Bolívar, Benito Juárez, and José Martí.38

Another memoir written by a revolutionary intellectual, Espero la noche para soñarte, Revolución (2002) by Nivaria Tejera, in addition to sharing the same nocturnal metaphor of the failure of utopia, maintains a similar tone of reconciliation with an idealized past that, like a mirror, reflects lost political illusions. Tejera, in contrast to Matos, is interested in evoking the moment

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of disenchantment, the very instant of the spiritual metamorphosis, rather than in recovering the nobility of the original commitment to the Revolution. Her search is not dictated by a mere desire to break with the revolutionary past, but by a determination to understand and even recover the moral fabric of the transformation. In an admirable passage, Tejera demonstrates her eagerness to capture with the greatest clarity that moment of transformation that allows her to reconcile with the two halves of her biography—the revolutionary half and the exile half: Terrible anguish to abandon a revolution, its well-profiled dogmas, and to climb without tottering the barrier walls of its standards of conduct, of its slogans, constantly renewed in the expectation of who knows what unknown goal. Always a wavering, well-calculated goal: today against some, tomorrow against some others. Sharp line of fire, this goal which, a priori and in fragranti, made all of us into irremediable targets. Sooner or later it condemned us. Behind that train, whose path drew me closer to an inextricable exile that would put an end to the desperate proposition of fleeing which had obsessed me day after day, there remained, lagging behind in its terrifying despotism, moldy, spongy, floating like a landscape in the dead leaves, an ideal revolution.39

Another female, Uva de Aragón, in an exercise of fiction that is rather close to that which Javier Cercas calls “a real story,” reconstructs the memoirs of the twin sisters Menchu and Lauri, separated for forty years by the Revolution and exile. The novel, impeccably titled Memoria del silencio, narrates the parallel lives of these sisters by turning to their diaries—that is, by means of two autobiographical tales that juxtapose different historical gazes of the same events: the dictatorship of Batista, the triumph of the Revolution, the Bay of Pigs, the Missile Crisis, the Vietnam and Angola wars, the exodus of Mariel, the fall of communism and the depression of the 1990s. These sisters, who have dialogued in the silence of their memories, believed that their lives could have been interchangeable. Lauri, who lives in Miami, thus states: “Menchu is the mirror of that which I was not and could have been.”40 Nevertheless, when the two sisters meet, first in Havana and then in Miami, their personalities affirm themselves and at the same time yield mutually in a perfect rite of reconciliation. In this way, the sister

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from Havana reclaims the dignity of her decision to remain in Cuba: Well. What do you want me to tell you? That I should not have fallen in love with Lázaro because he was a Marxist, that all the hours I spent in literacy campaigns, that all the cane I cut, that the schools I designed, that the only place to which I traveled, the Soviet Union, that all the poverty I have suffered, and that all the sacrifices we have made are worth nothing . . . that my life is worth nothing, that the lives of twelve million on the island are worth nothing, that we should bow our head before exile?

To which the sister from Miami replies: We have lived nearly forty years sighing for Cuba, filling our photos from Cuba, with pictures of the flame trees of Cuba, writing poetry about Cuba, composing songs about Cuba, speaking to the children about Cuba, denying that this country was swallowing us up, thinking about Cuba day and night, keeping up with news from Cuba, founding a Cuba House, feeling like foreigners everywhere, and now you are saying that not even in Cuba are we going to have the right to an opinion!41

This collision of two “worthy” actors, enmeshed in a conflict of great moral costs, is also shaped in the novel No siempre gana la muerte, by the North American writer David Landau. This work recounts the story of Mariano José Núñez Hidalgo, alias Rodrigo, a young Cuban who, after participating in the clandestine movement against the dictatorship of Batista, joins the opposition to the revolutionary government in 1960. The youth is hired by the CIA to assassinate Castro but fails. He is consequently jailed in La Cabaña prison for more than twenty years. The interesting element of the tale is that as he recalls his mission, the character insists upon underscoring his observations by emphasizing the role of the United States in the history of Cuba, as if he were weighing the ambivalence of aspiring to a nationalist political goal through imperialist methods.42 As in Húber Matos’ memoir, the discourse of the victim approaches serenity and the suspension of rancor: “I have come to agree with Goethe that the way of cleaning the world is that each

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person sweeps the front of his own house . . . in jail, in war, in all that I have done, I have had the privilege of seeing what the human condition has to offer.”43 A similar approach to this “vision of the vanquished” appears in a recent novel by Osvaldo Navarro, Hijos de Saturno. The biography of the imaginary commandant of the Revolution Eustaquio de la Peña, who lost power after the triumph of 1959, permits Navarro to introduce a complex, nuanced perspective of the Cuban civil war. At the end of the novel, Navarro describes how the core of the rebels, who took arms against the government of Fidel Castro in the mountains of Escambray, came from the very rebel army that had fought against the dictatorship of Batista in that central region of the island, and that was now opposed to the establishment of a Marxist-Leninist regime. The accusations of “comevacas” (shit-eaters) and “bandits” against those disaffected soldiers, according to Navarro, sought to disqualify the armed opposition, which did nothing more than continue the revolutionary “sociability” generated by the anti-Batista movement.44 The fierce rivals appear here as actors who share the discourse and the practices of one and the same political culture. This new historical narrative, which we have briefly reviewed, stands in marked contrast to the official story of Cuban contemporary history, which is based in the certainty that the Revolution lives a “continuous past.” As Avishai Margalit points out in The Ethics of Memory, the symbolic actualization of the conflicts of the past allows authoritarian powers to legitimatize themselves by appealing to the situation of perpetual war against a transhistoric enemy.45 The predominance of this narrative in the intellectual camp grants literary poetics a certain will for the gathering of moral testimonies, appropriate to those subjects enmeshed in civil wars, who try to glimpse at a scenario for reconciliation. Except that this politics of memory establishes a dialectic between forgiveness and forgetting in which, generally, the actors give up emotional segments of their identity in exchange for being recognized, fully, as legitimate subjects of history.

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7 Symbolic Dilemmas of the Cuban Transition

Any approach to the history of contemporary Cuban culture must consider the great transformation produced by the revolutionary triumph of 1959 and the subsequent establishment of a Marxist-Leninist regime. This change produced not only a new social order and a new set of practices, values, discourses, and customs, it also marked a break with the island’s intellectual framework, creating new attitudes of adherence, rejection, and other subtle forms of symbolically processing the conflict. Traditionally, the schism in Cuban society and culture in the second half of the twentieth century has been conceptualized according to dual opposing categories: revolution versus counterrevolution, Castroism versus anti-Castroism, communism versus anti-communism, nationalism versus annexation, socialism versus liberalism, totalitarianism versus democracy. In a reflection of cold war mentality, these identities—ideological, political, or sentimental—have been conceived as polarized camps based on the existence of two symmetrically divided and homogeneous sides.1 After half a century of fragmentation, it is only natural to expect the emergence of a range of intellectual and political strategies for resolving or managing the conflict. These strategies, whether more or less effective, must overcome not only the intransigence of the two opposing sides but also their tendency to gloss over or deny the schism. In this context, it is worth

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pointing out that complex theories for addressing the dilemmas of Cuban intellectual life from 1959 to the present have little chance of epistemological success if their goal is to sublimate or suppress those dilemmas. In the last fifty years, Cuban culture has experienced a rupture, with ideological and political identities playing a decisive role in the break. It is an undeniable fact that at the conflict’s symbolic level, Cuban cultural and political actors have mobilized themselves according to subjective realities: revolutionary and nationalist, liberal and socialist, democratic and authoritarian. Instead of avoiding the dilemma, an attempt to displace it conceptually may allow us to understand the behavior of actors whose identities are less rooted in ideology. The notion of civil war could contribute to a recasting of the dilemma that may facilitate its conceptual displacement, even if it does not neutralize it. A civil war, argues the historian Ernst Nolte, is the polarization of a community from the family through the nation and along multiple dimensions: military, political, ideological, diplomatic, and cultural.2 From 1959 to 1967, when the last guerrilla outposts in the Escambray Mountains were eliminated, Cuba experienced a civil war between a revolutionary government and an armed opposition supported by the United States. The 1970s brought the consolidation of the socialist regime and its entry into the Soviet orbit, shifting opposition activity to the Cuban exile community in Miami. For three decades, exile groups, with few resources and little interest from Washington, tried to overthrow the Castro regime through sabotage, assassination attempts, and the infiltration of commando groups on the island. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1992, the Cuban opposition adopted new tactics, acting through the United States—and, to a lesser degree, Europe, Canada, and some Latin American countries—to pressure for democratization of the Cuban regime through trade, immigration, and diplomacy and to reinforce peaceful dissident movements on the island.3 Throughout this long process, the civil war itself continued to express itself in different dimensions, militarily at first and then

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in politics, diplomacy, trade, and immigration. In the mid1990s, however, the symbolic dimension of the conflict began to intensify, turning the civil war into a battle over memory between heirs to the opposing sides. The confrontation has not disappeared; the repressive apparatus of the Cuban government and the U.S. embargo continue to play their roles in fueling the conflict. In the last decade, however, the spotlight has shifted to a dispute over national legacy, amounting to a quarrel over the country’s symbolic heritage.4 The case of Elián González and the “battle of ideas” launched by the Cuban government in 1999 are recent episodes in this symbolic war, but they are not the only ones. The great debates between intellectuals on the island and in the diaspora over three centennial commemorations—the hundred-year anniversaries of the death of José Martí in 1995, the first U.S. intervention and the fall of the Spanish colonial regime in 1998, and the founding of the Republic in 2002—as well as constant disputes over the legacies of José María Heredia, Félix Varela, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Fernando Ortiz, Lydia Cabrera, Jorge Mañach, Dulce María Loynaz, Gastón Baquero, Eugenio Florit, José Lezama Lima, or Virgilio Piñera reflect this quarrel over heritage. At times this war over memory—as in the case of the Proyecto Varela, which proposes economic and political reforms and is the most celebrated Cuban opposition initiative in recent years—shifts to the sphere of politics.

Other Transitions and Their Experiences An ideal starting point for considering the roles of ideology, culture, and memory in any process of democratic transition is the theoretical distinction between a totalitarian and an authoritarian regime developed by the Spanish political scientist Juan Linz.5 This distinction is essential for describing the mechanisms of symbolic legitimization that characterize every political regime. In this sense, communist totalitarian regimes—the Soviet Union, Central and Eastern Europe, China, North Korea, and the like— have a state ideology that manifests itself in different versions of Marxist-Leninism. In contrast, authoritarian regimes—Spain

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under Francisco Franco, Portugal under Antonio Salazar and Marcello Caetano, the Southern Cone military juntas, the Central American dictatorships, Mexico under the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)—lack a state ideology. Their discourse of power is limited to a regime doctrine based to a greater or lesser degree on nationalist values. State ideology tends to be more philosophically and morally dense than regime doctrine. Regime doctrine does not present a closed version of history, nor does it aspire to a cultural and educational regeneration of the citizenry. Both discourses may share messianic, teleological, and legitimizing elements, but while state ideology is transmitted in its entirety via the state ideological apparatus, transmission of regime doctrine is only partial. While totalitarian regimes aspire to an ideological indoctrination of society, authoritarian regimes settle for a mental construct that leads the masses toward certain collective actions. The relationship between discourses and regimes with their national symbols is different, as well. Authoritarian regime doctrine identifies national symbols with a caudillo or government. However, this identification refers to a condition that is nearly always exceptional or associated with a temporary state of emergency. In contrast, totalitarian state ideology—Stalinism, Maoism, North Korean juche—reorders national symbols under a universal communism that is historically embodied in the bureaucratic-charismatic duality of party and leader and that justifies annulling any other type of nationalism not amenable to the government. The differences between regimes and discourses manifest themselves in complex ways during the transition to democracy. During transitions, authoritarian regimes, because they are capable of tolerating a controlled opposition and a certain level of public freedoms, have generally coexisted with peaceful and moderate dissident groups that question the official doctrine and reestablish the concept of ideological pluralism among the public. In contrast, the fall of totalitarian regimes in the Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe has been accompanied by the emergence of new political actors from within the power elite or subaltern sectors, such as labor unions and intellectuals,

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which confront the state’s Marxist-Leninist ideology from a liberal, social democratic, Christian democratic, nationalist, or purely democratic standpoint. All democratic transitions in the last twenty years have faced the symbolic problem of memory along with the criticism of official ideology or doctrine and the articulation of a pluralist public sphere. Memory in this sense is understood to be not only a form of cultural knowledge that permits the construction of historical, moral, and political narratives, but also a dimension of justice that encompasses conflicts related to the crimes and abuses of the past and national reconciliation among the actors involved in the democratic transition.6 Democratic transitions, therefore, whether in communist totalitarian regimes or authoritarian ones, have made the official historical narrative more flexible by vindicating the losers and iconoclasts of the past, dismantling the legitimizing doctrinal apparatus of state power, and above all, separating national symbols from government discourse. Every transition handles the relationship between memory and justice differently. In former totalitarian regimes, such as the Soviet Union and Poland, as well as in former authoritarian regimes, such as Franco’s Spain or the PRI’s Mexico, political actors have opted for varying expressions of “amnesty but not amnesia,” the formula advocated by the Polish intellectual Adam Michnik.7 In addition to South Africa—an exceptional case given the institutionalized segregation of Apartheid—other countries in transition, including some in South America, Central America, and the Andes, have chosen to establish truth and justice commissions, with strikingly dissimilar results. Another historical point of comparison is the example of the reformed communist regimes in some Asian countries, among them China and Vietnam. In these cases, entrenched communist parties undergoing a process of generational renewal have launched social and economic liberalization programs. These include certain capitalist elements, such as allowing small and medium-sized private enterprises and promoting the domestic market, while maintaining the system’s one-party structure. The ideology, culture, and memory of these societies have also

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been transformed by a new diversity of legitimizing discourses that incorporates Eastern mystical, religious, nationalist, and cosmopolitan traditions and the effort to enter Western markets. Where does the Cuban regime fall in the distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes? Above all, how should we describe Cuba’s symbolic transition? The debate over defining the existing political regime has intensified in recent years in light of the theory of democratic transition. From the time of its institutionalization (the early 1970s) through 1992, Cuba’s political system exhibited the distinctive traits of a totalitarian communist regime: a single party, official Marxist-Leninist ideology, state ownership of the means of production, corporativist integration of civil society. The regime functioned constitutionally between 1976 and 1992. But before its institutionalization—that is, in the 1960s— the Cuban revolutionary process went through a series of nationalist, distributive, mobilizing, and charismatic phases that never entirely disappeared and that balanced the system’s bureaucratic rationality. Other factors, both external and internal, also contributed to the Cuban regime’s singularity within the socialist camp. These included the confrontation between the revolution and the United States (a relatively autonomous conflict in the cold war context), the island’s geographic location, the establishment of an opposition movement in Miami, and the Latin American and Caribbean cultural framework of Cuban society itself.8 This singularity was also reflected in the mechanisms of symbolic legitimization adopted by the Cuban regime. The revolution’s initial agrarian, anti-imperialist, and redistributive ideology soon found its echo in the Third World anticolonialist movements. This Third World line was absorbed into nationalist revolutionary discourse, which Cuba’s leaders emphasized over Marxist-Leninism. Until 1992, therefore, the regime’s symbolic legitimization was based on two fundamental narratives: the doctrine of revolutionary nationalism and Marxist-Leninist ideology. In cultural and educational policy, these discourses merged or coexisted.9

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After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Cuban regime tried to adapt, constitutionally, to the dangers presented by the absence of the socialist camp and the intensification of the conflict with Washington and Miami. Observers of the Cuban transition regard the 1992 constitutional reforms as a possible starting point toward regime change. For some, the reforms represent the transformation of the totalitarian communist regime into a merely authoritarian one. Others argue that they mark a shift toward a charismatic, post-totalitarian model, for the communist system continues to be based on a single but not hegemonic party and the opposition is repressed rather than controlled.10 In the ideological sphere, however, the collapse of socialism and the Cuban economy’s reinsertion into Western capitalism have had a decisive impact, as have the reforms of the 1990s— the 1992 constitutional reforms and other, no less significant ones that followed, such as the decriminalization of the dollar, the reopening of the agriculture and livestock markets, the authorization of self-employment, mixed foreign investment schemes, the reduction of the communist party’s professional cadres, and the development of tourism and remittances as the national economy’s first steps toward integration. All together, their effect has been the abandonment of Marxist-Leninism as the state ideology and the readoption of revolutionary nationalism as regime doctrine.11 Some elements of the transformation of post-communism in Russia and Central and Eastern Europe—the emergence of an entrepreneurial and monetary mentality among the technocratic elite, the articulation of dissident discourses grounded in civil society and human rights, or the intellectual debate over the notions of sacrifice, blame, and reconciliation—are perceptible in the Cuban experience since 1992. What makes the Cuban process distinctive, however, is that these symptoms of the post-communist phase have emerged alongside the political structures of a regime that is still capable of maintaining governability vis-à-vis a social majority, and consensus among the elite.

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This readjustment of the regime’s symbolic structure underlines the exceptional nature of the Cuban case in the context of democratic transitions from totalitarian regimes, such as those in the Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe, or authoritarian regimes like the Latin American dictatorships. In the last fifteen years, Cuba has remained outside of the “third wave” of democratic transitions, but it has also, temporarily at least, begun to incorporate certain elements of those transitions, such as substituting a Marxist-Leninist state ideology with a nationalist revolutionary regime doctrine, within a very effective strategy of symbolic reproduction of power.12 Fidel Castro’s government managed to survive late-twentieth-century democratization and to nourish itself symbolically on the failures of the new Latin American and Third World democracies. The enduring strength of Fidel Castro’s Cuba in the global environment of resistance to U.S. hegemony also differentiates the Cuban case from those of China and Vietnam. Although since 1992, Cuba has experienced ideological flexibility similar to that of the Asian countries, tense relations with the U.S. government and the Miami exile community, as well as the Communist Party’s lack of institutional consistency and the timidity of its economic reforms, distinguish Cuba from the reformed socialisms and state capitalisms of Asia. The singular relationship between time and democracy in the Cuban case suggests that the island’s de-Sovietization since 1992 is a process of political change unconnected to democratic transition in any real sense. The drama of regime change shared by almost all of the third-wave transitions and the “heuristic metaphors” surrounding the fall of dictatorships described by Laurence Whitehead have no place in Cuban post-communism.13 In the last twelve years, the political drama on the island has been associated with social explosions such as the balsero (rafter) crisis of 1994, government campaigns like the 1999–2000 Elián case, or opposition campaigns such as the mobilization of European public opinion against the executions and incarcerations of spring 2003. This drama is unrelated to any change in the regime but rather to its persistence.

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The Symbolic Adjustment The transformation of the Cuban regime in the twelve years of the post-communist period (1992–2004) can be observed in at least three areas: ideological policy, educational policy, and cultural policy. These three policies, while relatively autonomous, particularly in terms of language and agency, function as part of a discursive legitimization that originates from the center of power. The dilemmas of personal and collective memory and national reconciliation, so important in any democratic transition, are related to the modification of the ideology, politics, and culture of the Cuban regime. In the last decade, the political ideology of the Cuban government, as reflected in the mass media, public propaganda, official Communist Party documents, National Assembly laws, the discourses of its leaders and official journalism has focused on the confrontation with the U.S. government, Cuban American exiles—referred to as the “Miami mafia”—and the domestic opposition. Although among intellectuals, signs of the shift toward revolutionary nationalism were visible as early as 1992– 1996, political implementation of the trend accelerated after the downing of the Brothers to the Rescue planes in 1996 and the Fifth Communist Party Congress a year later. It culminated in the campaigns for the return of the young balsero Elián (1999–2000) and for the release of the “five heroic prisoners of imperialism” (2001–2004) that molded the so-called battle of ideas that took place between 2000 and 2004. In 2004, the agenda for this battle, led by a new generation of Cuban politicians such as Hassán Pérez, Yadira García, Carlos Valenciaga, Carmen Rosa Báez, and Otto Rivero, whom the Comandante incorporated into his support staff at the start of their careers, became official government policy with the creation of a vice-presidential post in the Council of Ministers to implement it. Evidence of the new emphasis on revolutionary nationalism can be found in legislation and in official pronouncements. Examples include Fidel Castro’s Convocation and Report to the Fifth Cuban Communist Party Congress in 1997; the Declaration of the Mambises of the Twentieth Century issued the same year;

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Law 80 of 1997 (On Cuban Dignity and Sovereignty) and Law 88 of 1999 (On Protecting the Independence and Economy of the Cuban Nation), both conceived as antidotes to the HelmsBurton Act and the domestic opposition; the propaganda offensive in favor of the return of Elián González, including the installation of a special protestódromo (protest stage) a few meters from the U.S. Interests Section; and finally, the wave of repression in the spring of 2003 and the propaganda machinery that accompanied it. Another dimension of the battle of ideas beyond its direct ideological function relates to what the Cuban government calls the “educational revolution.” From a quantitative point of view, this revolution is a function of the state’s efforts to compensate for a teacher shortage by turning out young instructors with only a few months of training, all the while recalling the epic literacy campaigns of the 1960s. From a qualitative point of view, the new educational strategy envisions a virtual ideological reeducation of the citizenry, promoting a “political culture” based on a heroic nationalist narrative—from the nineteenth-century wars of independence, the ideas of José Martí, the struggles against neocolonialism in the twentieth century, the 1933 and 1959 revolutions to today’s resistance to U.S. imperialism—rather than a Marxist-Leninist reading of Cuban history. Although post-communist cultural policy is the symbolic sphere least caught up in the battle of ideas, it also reflects the shift from Marxist-Leninism to revolutionary nationalism. The two main themes of the Ministry of Culture’s new strategy under Abel Prieto—defense of “Cuban cultural identity,” a principle introduced by the 1992 constitutional reforms; and “openness,” a policy that combines looser political and ideological controls on creativity, a rediscovery of the intellectuals of the republican ancien régime, selective acceptance of the work of diaspora intellectuals, and entry into Western cultural markets—reflect a shift in doctrinal paradigms that the 1992 Constitution refers to as the transition from “Marxist-Leninist ideology” to an “ideological framework based on Marx and Martí.”14

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This policy of openness and, especially, market entry has allowed part of the island’s cultural camp to separate itself from the state apparatus of political legitimization. This separation is most obvious in music, the visual arts, film, theater, elite literature, and the most academic branches of the social sciences. For at least the past five years, however, intellectual fringe publications, such as the online news source La Jiribilla and Contracorriente magazine, have joined in the battle of ideas and in the process may have furthered official propaganda against the opposition and exile communities. The symbolic adjustment of Cuban post-communism in ideological, educational, and cultural policy has reshaped the regime’s historical narrative and changed the way political actors, both government and opposition, are represented within a new discourse of official memory that for the most part traces back to the party’s Fifth Congress in 1997. The 1997–1999 “antidote” legislation in response to the Helms-Burton Act and the campaigns for the return of Elián González between 1999 and 2000 and the freeing of the five heroic prisoners of imperialism in 2001–2004 identified the enemy as the “Miami anti-Cuban mafia.” The government of Fidel Castro uses this term to label all exile groups, whether moderate or not, in addition to Cuban American politicians from both parties and the U.S. government. Since the election of George W. Bush in 2000 and his declaration of a “war on terrorism,” the new U.S. administration has been closely identified with this redefined enemy. Numerous documents reflect the rewriting of official memory that has accompanied this adjustment. Literary examples include General Fabián Escalante Font’s Cuba: la guerra secreta de la CIA [Cuba: The CIA’s Secret War] and La contrarrevolución cubana [The Cuban Counterrevolution] by Jesús Arboleya.15 In the legal sphere, the antidote legislation (Laws 80 [1997] and 88 [1999]) passed by the National Assembly of People’s Power, the 2002 constitutional reforms backing “irrevocable socialism,” and prosecution documents from the cases of seventy-five regime opponents in 2003 reflect not only a policy of establishing continuity between the enemies of the past—the “neocolonial bourgeoisie,” “Yankee imperialism”—and those of the present—the

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grupúsculos (a pejorative term for small opposition groups), the “Miami anti-Cuban mafia,” the George W. Bush administration— but also a detailed accounting of the economic and human toll of hostile U.S. policies. The late 1990s antidote legislation against the Helms-Burton Act and the domestic opposition clearly intensified the historical narrative of revolutionary nationalism. Examples of its effects include the Claim Brought by the People of Cuba against the Government of the United States for Human Damages, presented in the People’s Provincial Tribunal of Havana in May 1999, and the book Cicatrices en la memoria. Terrorismo y desestabilización en Cuba [Scars of Memory. Terrorism and Destabilization in Cuba]. In the 1999 claim, Cuba demanded that Washington pay 181 billion dollars in compensation for the 3,478 dead and 2,099 wounded that Havana blames on U.S.-backed sabotage, bombings, and other terrorist acts. In Cicatrices en la memoria, eighteen Cuban writers present works of fiction that reenact some of the main military offensives against the Cuban regime attributed to Cuban exiles and the U.S. intelligence services over the last four decades. These include several failed attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, the public burning in Miami of a painting by the artist Manuel Mendive, the October 1976 terrorist attack on Cubana de Aviación Flight 455, and the dengue fever epidemic that killed 158 residents of the island in 1981 and affected more than 300,000 others. Following the jailing of seventy-five peaceful and moderate opponents of the regime in spring 2003, legal documents and propaganda and a number of books (Los “disidentes” [The Dissidents], by Rosa Miriam Elizalde and Luis Báez, and El camaján [The Snake in the Grass], by Arleen Rodríguez and Lázaro Barredo) insisted on equating the legal and peaceful opposition with military and subversive elements, thereby erasing all nuances in the opposing camp.16 The Castro regime identifies all expressions of opposition or direct political criticism, even ones that are peaceful and legal, with its historic enemy, the United States, and its goal of destroying Cuban nationhood.

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The Pacification of Memory Along with the intensification of revolutionary nationalism in the three spheres of symbolic legitimization—ideological policy, education policy, and cultural policy—Cuban post-communism has tolerated some displays of national reconciliation and the pacification of memory. In addition to advancing a cultural policy that promotes classic works of the Republican ancien régime and diaspora intellectual activity—a policy that coincides with the immigration agenda of the Ministry of Foreign Relations as expressed in the 1993 and 1995 conferences on “nation and emigration”—the Castro government has shown some signs, however timid and symbolic, of seeking to normalize relations with the United States and some sectors of the exile community, as long as the process includes no political conditions. Among the most significant displays of reconciliation, in symbolic terms, were the tripartite conferences marking the thirtieth and fortieth anniversaries of the Cuban Missile Crisis, in 1992 and 2002, and, above all, the March 2001 commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of the Bay of Pigs invasion, all of which were held in Havana. In addition to representatives of the ex-Soviet Union and a group of distinguished scholars, participants at the first two events included important members of the Kennedy cabinet, among them former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara and presidential advisors Arthur M. Schlesinger, Richard Goodwin, and Theodore C. Sorensen. From the point of view of political reconciliation, however, the third conference, on the fortieth anniversary of the Bay of Pigs, was the most productive, for it allowed three veterans of the 2506 Brigade, Alfredo Durán, Luis Tornes, and Roberto Carballo, to meet some of their former military foes, Samuel Rodiles Planas, Ángel Jiménez González, Ramiro Valdés Menéndez, and José Ramón Fernández. Such encounters are part of the process of pacification of historical memory, in which violence and war between political opponents—the Cuban government, on the one hand, and Cuban exiles and the United States, on the other—are presented as past scenarios that can be overcome through negotiated

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management of the conflict. Beyond the short-term political use that the Cuban government makes of these forums to pressure the United States to lift its trade embargo and the Cuban Adjustment Act, the new historical narrative outlined at such events contributes to a gradual normalization of relations between Havana, Miami, and Washington and to overcoming the polarization of the cold war period. The Havana restoration project, led by city historian Eusebio Leal, also reflects the shift toward a more flexible historical narrative. With efficient use of resources from the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation (AECI), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and various autonomous communities in Spain, the Master Plan for Comprehensive Revitalization of Old Havana, launched in December 1994, has proceeded with architectural and urban conservation and restoration in the historic section of Old Havana, declared a World Heritage site in 1982. In 1997, plans for the Malecón (seafront) and Puerto Carenas expanded the scope of the restoration effort to include not just the historic city center but also buildings, monuments, and public places in the Vedado, el Cerro, and Miramar districts. Sites of key historical interest from the prerevolutionary, colonial, and republican periods such as the Cristobal Colón Cemetery, the Spanish societies, Beth Shalom synagogue, and monuments to Generals Calixto García and José Miguel Gómez have been included in the restoration efforts.17 In the last ten years, the heritage and editorial policies of the Ministries of Culture, Education and Higher Education have joined in acknowledging the republican and emigrant legacies. The island’s main intellectual journals, Gaceta de Cuba, Temas, and Unión, and important cultural institutions such as the National Library, Instituto del Libro, Casa de las Américas, and Juan Marinello Center have recognized and promoted republican and émigré culture, two aspects of the national tradition that, until recently, were shunned as repositories of bourgeois, neocolonial, and annexationist values. The negative stereotypes that for the last four decades defined prerevolutionary Cuba as a “pseudo republic” and the émigré community as

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the “counterrevolution” are gradually disappearing or weakening their hold over these dimensions of contemporary Cuban culture, which have been less caught up in the battle of ideas. The works of young Cuban historians also reflect this flexibility. Studies by Rafael Acosta de Arriba, María Antonia Marqués Dolz, Marial Iglesias, Reinaldo Funes Monzote, Ricardo Quiza Moreno, and Duanel Díaz Infante, among others, take an unbiased approach to topics and periods in colonial and republican history considered taboo just a short time ago, such as economic, social, and political development under the Pact of Zanjón (1878–1895) or intellectual diversity and legal culture in the republican years (1902–1959). This new body of historical work, along with a growing interest in the study of Cuban emigration at institutions such as the University of Havana’s Center for Alternative Political Studies (CEAP), the Juan Marinello Center, or the journal Temas contributes to the pacification of Cuba’s historical memory. In the last decade, new signs of reconciliation with the Cuban diaspora have appeared. These join a tradition of dialogue defended by moderate émigrés for more than thirty years. One such sign is the virtual absence of armed opposition groups in the Cuban exile community and a widespread preference for peaceful regime change from within. The idea of a peaceful transition to democracy via a process of national reconciliation has gained support among Cuban exiles since 1992 and has been consolidated in recent years thanks to initiatives in this direction on the part of the regime itself, in its laws and institutions, as well as efforts by the domestic opposition groups such as Concilio Cubano (1995), La patria es de todos (1997), and Proyecto Varela (2002). In addition to demilitarizing, Cuban intellectuals abroad have led important efforts to improve cultural communications. The Olof Palme Institute seminar, The Bipolarity of Cuban Culture (1994) organized by the Sweden-based novelist René Vázquez Díaz convened important writers from Cuba and the diaspora. The journal Encuentro de la cultura cubana, founded by Jesús Díaz in 1996, has showcased the best works

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by Cuban and diaspora intellectuals in its thirty-seven issues in the last nine years. Plaza Mayor publishers, directed by Patricia Gutiérrez from San Juan, Puerto Rico, publishes works by authors in Cuba, Europe, Latin America, and the United States. Finally, academic programs such as those run by the Cuban Research Institute (CRI) at Florida International University or the Bildner Center at the City University of New York promote exchanges with professors and researchers on the island. In the last few years, U.S. academics have produced an abundance of works on the Cuban Revolution and the social, economic, and political order that this important historical process established in the second half of the twentieth century. Besides the classic studies by Jorge I. Domínguez, Carmelo Mesa Lago, Louis A. Pérez Jr., and many others, this list includes the works of Marifeli Pérez Stable, Lisandro Pérez, Jorge Pérez López, Damián Fernández, and Alejandro de la Fuente. This scholarly output, which is based on intellectual dialogue with academics on the island and is not intended to serve as part of a discourse of legitimization for either the exile community or the opposition, plays an important role in the pacification of historical memory and national reconciliation among political adversaries. The first effort—intellectually, at least—to design a specific national reconciliation project is the Task Group on Memory, Truth and Justice led by Marifeli Pérez Stable, Jorge I. Domínguez, and Pedro A. Freyre. Cuban National Reconciliation (2003), a report produced after a series of meetings among the group’s Cuban and non-Cuban members, reviews the way other countries and regions—Spain, the Southern Cone, South Africa, Central America, and Central and Eastern Europe—have handled issues of justice, truth, memory, and national reconciliation. For the first time ever in studies and debates on Cuba, it proposes a historical accounting of “possible human rights violations by the Cuban government” and “abuses, crimes or atrocities committed by the violent opposition.” This double exercise of memory could be an ideal starting point for future Cuban political actors to begin a process of democratic negotiation.18

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Premises for Transition Article 94 of Cuba’s 1992 “Martí- and Marxist-Leninist-based” constitution states that “in case of the absence, illness or death of the President of the Council of State, the First Vice President will substitute him in his duties.” Cuba’s first vice president is the minister of the armed forces and second secretary of the Cuban Communist Party, Raúl Castro. Therefore, if Fidel, the elder brother, dies, is removed from his post, or otherwise disappears before Raúl, then Cuba’s transition to democracy will begin as a dynastic succession. It would be difficult for a succession based on the mere substitution of one head of state for another to sustain itself for long in the face of pressure by multiple actors—proponents of reform within the government, the domestic and external opposition, émigrés, the international community, the United States—and the challenges of concentrating power in personal hands in the absence of a leader as unique as Fidel Castro. Even so, all of the possible scenarios for regime change in Cuba—peaceful and negotiated transformation, civil war, social upheaval, U.S. intervention—fall within two options: succession or democratic transition. Whatever the path Cuba takes toward democracy, regime change will imply a profound symbolic transformation that will be reflected in the ideology, culture, and memory of political actors and citizens on the island and in the diaspora. Given the Cuban regime’s emphasis on these spheres in projecting its legitimacy at home and abroad, the change in ideas, values, and symbols may be traumatic and could hinder or redirect the process of national reconciliation among political actors. The following discussion is an attempt to explore the main dilemmas of a potential transition to democracy in Cuba. From a symbolic point of view, the transition to democracy in Cuba faces a significant obstacle. The behavior of the four main actors in Cuban politics—the government of Fidel Castro, the opposition, the exile community, and the U.S. government—is based on a logic of confrontation in which the subjects figure as irreconcilable enemies, not loyal adversaries. The historical,

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ideological, and cultural values that comprise their political identity are grounded in warlike imagery in which one’s very existence depends on annihilating the other. The basic premise of a peaceful and negotiated transition to democracy in Cuba must, therefore, renounce violence in both of its historical forms: the subversive violence of the opposition and the repressive violence of the government. The Cuban political sphere is still restricted enough to obstruct the process of national reconciliation on the cultural front and to block its effects on the pacification of memory.19 The recognition of civil and cultural diversity on the island and in the diaspora, a process that requires building new political institutions through fair elections and a free and plural society, is another premise of the democratic transition. In the absence of minimal rights of association and expression, culture can serve as a partial bridge toward national reconciliation. Once the obstacles to the democratic normalization of real pluralism have been overcome, the symbolic problems of Cuban democracy must be faced, taking into account the expectations and demands of established political actors. In this sense, it is not difficult to foresee a restatement of the ideological conflict around the legacies of revolution and exile, the Castro government and the domestic and external opposition, as contrasting and past dimensions of Cuban history. To minimize the costs of political change, all political actors from Cuba’s past must acknowledge the historic legitimacy of opposing groups. Democracy will imply a break with the past, especially in relations with Miami and Washington. Nationalism, which has been at the sentimental core of all modern Cuban political trends, will not disappear, but it will no longer be the moral monopoly of one group or another. Instead, it will be shared among the different associations, all with the same national legitimacy, which will comprise a new political pluralism. This sharing of the sources of nationalism will make it easier to draw boundaries between state and nation, two entities that the current regime and its symbols and certain exile associations have conflated. It will also allow political actors to develop new strategies that affirm their belonging to a single national heritage

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encompassing republican, socialist, revolutionary, and émigré elements. The distinction between state and nation is, at heart, the condition for achieving a transition to a democratic regime in Cuba. The range of options for governance possible in a climate of loyal competition can only emerge if all actors accept the equal place in Cuban history of the varying discourses and narratives of the island’s past and the present. The political and cultural subjects responsible for these discourses and narratives require, above all, recognition of their legitimacy and acceptance of their right to engage in a civilized dispute for power under conditions of equality and respect. In any culture that has experienced prolonged civil war, the pacification of memory is never complete.20 Cuban politics will not be free of conflict in the following decades, nor will the heirs of the two sides end their disputes over their share of the national legacy. The desired goal is to overcome the current polarization through the establishment of democratic standards that guarantee political competition and modulate civil tension. Only in this way will conflicts over heritage give way to a climate of trust where subjective realities can assert themselves without fear of exclusion or annihilation.

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Notes

Introduction 1. Jürgen Habermas, El cambio estructural de lo público (Buenos Aires: Amorrortu Editores, 1987), pp. 63–67. 2. Louis Dumont, Homo aequalis (Madrid: Taurus Ediciones, 1982), p. 14. 3. Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru, “Hacia una historia de la vida privada en Nueva España,” Historia Mexicana 42.2 (1992): 355–357. 4. Philippe Ariès y Georges Duby, Historia de la vida privada (Madrid: Taurus, 1987), pp. 7–19. 5. See José Luis Romero “El pensamiento conservador en el siglo XIX,” in, Situaciones e ideologías en Latinoamérica (México: UNAM, 1981), pp. 115–146. 6. Norberto Bobbio, Derecha e izquierda. Razones y significados de una distinción política (Madrid: Taurus), pp. 133–164. 7. Raúl Cepero Bonilla, Escritos históricos (La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1989), p. 163. 8. Enrique José Varona, De la colonia a la república (La Habana: Sociedad Editorial Cuba Contemporánea, 1919), p. 229. 9. Fernando Ortiz, “La decadencia cubana,” Orbita (La Habana: UNEAC, 1973), p. 71. 10. Jorge Mañach, La crisis de la alta cultura en Cuba (Miami, Florida: Ediciones Universal, 1991), p. 42. 11. Rafael Rojas, “Ramiro Guerra o la memoria de un patricio,” Revista Op. Cit, 7, San Juan, 1992: pp. 121–144. 12. Ramiro Guerra, Azúcar y población en las Antillas (La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1970), p. 164. 13. Rafael Rojas, “El discurso de la frustración republicana en Cuba” in El ensayo en Nuestra América (México: CCYDEL, UNAM, 1993), pp. 398–432. 14. Alexis Jardines, Filosofia cubana in nuce. Ensayo de historia intelectual (Madrid: Colibri, 2005), pp. 120–145.

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15. Condesa de Merlin, Viaje a la Habana (La Habana: Editorial Arte y Literatura, 1974), p. 116. 16. Orestes Ferrara, Las enseñanzas de una revolución (La Habana: Editora Cultural S. A., 1932); Alberto Lamar Schweyer Biología de la democracia. Ensayo de sociología americana (La Habana: Editorial Minerva, 1927) and La crisis del patriotismo. Una teoria de las inmigraciones (La Habana: Editorial Marti, 1929); Gustavo Gutierrez Sanchez, La desintegracion de la nacion cubana (La Habana: Imprenta “El Siglo XX,” 1919). 17. Ortiz, “La decadencia cubana,” p. 69. Mañach, La crisis de la alta cultura en Cuba, pp. 45–50. Mañach’s case may be more complex. His works reflect a constant swing between Cubanity’s hope and disillusionment. Both tendencies are apparent in his book Historia y estilo (1944). While he admits Cuba’s force in its historical formation, he also laments the fragility of its civic-moral fabric. Jorge Mañach, Pasado vigente (La Habana: Editorial Trópico, 1939), pp. 112–116. Duanel Díaz, Mañach o la República (La Habana; Insituto Cubano del Libro, 2003), pp. 149–178. 18. Ana Cairo Ballester, El Grupo Minorista y su tiempo (La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1978); Duanel Diaz Infante, Los limites del origenismo (Madrid: Colibri, 2005). 19. Richard Fagen, The Transfornation of Political Culture in Cuba (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1969), pp. 1–18; Jorge I. Domínguez, Cuba. Order and Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 58–109; Louis A. Pérez Jr., Cuba between Reform and Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 229–275; Marifeli Pérez-Stable, The Cuban Revolution. Origins, Course and Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 17–23; Charles D. Ameringer, The Cuban Democratic Experience. The Aunténtico Years (Gainesville: University f Florida Press, 2000), pp. 167–190; Robert Whitney, State and Revolution in Cuba. Mass Mobilization and Political Change, 1920–1940 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001), pp. 149–176; Julia E. Sweig, Inside the Cuban Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 1–11; Samuel Farber, The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), pp. 13–32; Frank Argote-Freyre, Fulgencio Batista. From Revolutionary to Strongman (Rutgers: Rutgers University Press, 2006), pp. 72–85. 20. Edmundo Desnoes, Memorias del subdesarrollo (Buenos Aires: Editorial Galerna, 1968), p. 39. 21. José Quiroga, Cuban Palimpsests (Minneapolis: University of Missesota Press, 2005), pp. 25–50; Damián Fernández, Cuba Transnational (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005), pp. 24–41.

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1 José Martí and the First Cuban Republicanism This chapter is translated by Rafael Rojas 1. Niall Ferguson, ed., Virtual History. Alternatives and Counterfactuals (London: Macmillan Publishers, 1997), pp. 79–90. 2. Rubén Darío, Los raros (Buenos Aires: Colección Austral, 1952), pp. 193–203. 3. Sobre la religiosidad política del mito martiano, see Antonio Elorza, La religione politica. I fondamentalismi (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1996), pp. 202–222. 4. Sigmund Freud, Obras Completas (Madrid: Editorial Biblioteca Nueva, 1973), vol. 3, pp. 2444–2453. 5. Roland Barthes, Mitologías (México: Siglo XXI, 1980), pp. 199–213. 6. Marial Iglesias, “José Martí: mito, legitimación y símbolo. La génesis del mito martiano y la emergencia del nacionalismo republicano,” in José A. Piqueras, ed., Diez nuevas miradas a la historia de Cuba (Castelló de la Plana: Universitat Jaume Y, 1998), pp. 179–201. 7. Mario Riera, Cuba política (1898–1955) (La Habana: Impresora Modelo, 1955), p. 27. 8. Ottmar Ette, José Martí. Apóstol, poeta revolucionario: una historia de su recepción (México: UNAM, 1995), pp. 63–87. 9. Lillian Guerra, The Myth of Jose Mart: Conflicting Nationalism in Early Twentieth Century Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), pp. 44–60. 10. Margarita Mateo, Del bardo que te canta (La Habana: Letras Cubanas, 1988), pp. 136–167. 11. Cristóbal Díaz Ayala, Música cubana. Del areíto a la Nueva Trova (San Juan, Puerto Rico: Editorial Cubanacán, 1981), p. 87; Oscar Luis López, Luis Casas Romero (La Habana: UNEAC, 1982), p. 159. 12. Ette, José Martí, pp. 40–42. 13. Ibid., pp. 60–62, 89–136. 14. Pierre Bourdieu, Meditaciones pascalianas (Barcelona: Anagrama, 1999), pp. 301–323. 15. Jesús Castellanos, Cabezas de estudio. Siluetas políticas (Miami: Editorial Cubana, 1996); Manuel Sanguily, Nobles memorias (Miami: International Press of Miami, 1982); Néstor Carbonell Rivero, Próceres (Miami: Editorial Cubana, 1999), pp. 179–186. 16. José Lezama Lima, Obras Completas (México: Editorial Aguilar, 1977), vol. 2, p. 410. 17. Ette, José Martí, pp. 89–136. 18. Bourdieu, Meditaciones pascalianas, pp. 313–316. 19. Ette, José Martí, p. 89.

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20. Julio Antonio Mella, “Glosando los pensamientos de José Martí,” in Documentos de Cuba republicana (La Habana: Instituto Cubano del Libro, 1972), vol. 1, p. 168. 21. Charles D. Ameringer, The Cuban Democratic Experience. The Auténtico Years, 1944–1952 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), p. 14. 22. Carlos Prío Socarrás, El emigrado político y el soldado mambí (La Habana: Información y Publicidad, 1946), p. 19. 23. Historia de la Revolución Cubana (La Habana: Editora Política, 1980), pp. 7–43. 24. Ibid., pp. 20–21. 25. Robert Whtiney, State and Revolution in Cuba. Mass Mobilization and Political Change, 1920–1940 (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000), pp. 149–176. 26. Ottmar Ette, op. cit., pp. 137–140. 27. Joao Felipe Goncalves, “The Apostle in Stone: Nationalism and Monuments in Honor of José Martí,” manuscrito, 2001, pp. 7–14. 28. Fidel Castro, La historia me absolverá (La Habana: Oficina de Publicaciones del Consejo de Estado, 1993), pp. 108–109. 29. Véanse, por ejemplo, Fernando Martínez Heredia, “La noción de pueblo en La historia me absolverá,” Verde Olivo 46 (1973): 26–29; Zaida Rodríguez Ugido, “El principio del análisis clasista en el programa del Moncada,” Universidad de la Habana 223 (1984): 239–246. 30. Castro, La historia me absolverá, pp. 88–90. 31. Ibid., pp. 108–109. 32. See, for example, Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, “José Martí, contemporáneo y compañero” and Armando Hart Dávalos, “Discurso en Dos Ríos,” in Siete enfoques marxistas sobre José Martí (La Habana: Editora Política, 1978), pp. 79–114 y 117–137. 33. Ramón de Armas, La Revolución pospuesta: contenido y alcance de la revoución martiana por la independencia (La Habana: Ciencias Sociales, 1975); Pedro Pablo Rodríguez, “La idea de liberación nacional en José Martí,” in Pensamiento Crítico 49–50 (1971): 121–169; Carlos Ripoll, José Martí, the United States, and the Marxist Interpretation of Cuban History (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1984); José Manuel Hernández, Política y militarismo en la independencia de Cuba. 1868–1933 (Madrid: Editorial Colibrí, 2000), pp. 46–57. 34. José Martí, Obras Completas (La Habana: Editorial Lex, 1953), vol. 2, pp. 305, 379, 702. 35. Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 193–234. 36. See José Antonio Aguilar, En pos de la quiemera. Reflexiones sobre el experimento constitucional atlánstico (México: FCE, 2000), pp. 48–56.

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37. Rafael Rojas, José Martí: la invención de Cuba (Madrid: Editorial Colibrí, 2000); J.G.A Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Theory and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli, Machiavelli and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Philip Pettit, Republicanismo. Una teoría sobre la libertad y el gobierno (Barcelona: Paidós, 1997). 38. Martí, Obras Completas, vol. 2, p. 931. 39. Ibid., p. 48. 40. Ibid., p. 260. 41. Ibid., p. 273. 42. Ibid., p. 567. 43. Ibid., p. 698. 44. See, for example, Colección de Estudios Martianos, Siete enfoques marxistas sobre José Martí (La Habana: Editora Política, 1978). 45. Martí, Obras Completas, vol. 2, pp. 954–957. See also, Paul Estrade, José Martí. Fundamentos de la democracia en Latinoamérica (Madrid: Doce Calles, 2000). 46. Martí, Obras Completas, vol. 2, p. 328. 47. Ibid., p. 433. 48. Ibid., p. 1103. 49. Ibid., p. 496. 50. Ibid., pp. 1238 and 1242. 51. Ibid., p. 1237. 52. Montesquieu, Del espíritu de las leyes (Madrid: Tecnos, 1995), pp. 204–220. 53. Leonel-Antonio de la Cuesta, ed., Constituciones cubanas. Desde 1812 hasta nuestros días (New York: Ediciones Exilio, 1974), pp. 135–158. 54. Ibid., pp. 242–329. 55. Constitución de la República de Cuba (La Habana: Instituto Cubano del Libro, Editorial Orbe, 1976), pp. 31–41. 56. Martí, Obras Completas, vol. 2, p. 1236. 57. Rojas, “El discurso de la frustración republicana en Cuba”, pp. 126–140. 58. Martí, Obras Completas, vol. 2, p. 445. 59. Enrique José Varona, Textos escogidos (México: Editorial Porrúa, 1974), p. 19. 60. Manuel Sanguily, Discursos y conferencias (Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1998), p. 165. 61. Varona, Textos escogidos, p. 35. 62. Rafael Montoro, Discursos y escritos (Miami: Editorial Cubana, 2000), p. 158. 63. Jorge Mañach, El espíritu de Martí (San Juan, Puerto Rico: Editorial San Juan, 1973), pp. 27–47.

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2 The Moral Frontier This chapter is translated by Licia Fiol-Matta. 1. Esmond Wright, The American Dream: From Reconstruction to Reagan (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 135–139; Allen Nevins, Henry Steele Commager, and Jeffrey Morris, Breve historia de los Estados Unidos (México, DF, México: FCE, 1994), pp. 360–361. 2. I take these somewhat dubious facts from Hugh Thomas, Cuba: La lucha por la libertad, 1760–1970 (Barcelona: Grijalbo, 1973), pp. 512–515. 3. Ibid., p. 524; see also John L. Offner, An Unwanted War: The Diplomacy of the United States and Spain over Cuba, 1895–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); and Walter La Feber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1963). 4. Michel Foucault speaks of “infinite wars” when referring to “battles between nations, between races or between civilizations.” Genealogia del racismo (La Plata, Argentina: Editorial Altamira, 1996), pp. 117–137. 5. On the moral instrumentation of the “civic model,” see Fernando Escalante, Ciudadanos imaginarios (México City: El Colegio de Mexico, 1992), pp. 32–35. 6. As is apparent, in this chapter I focus solely on ethnic and religious enonces for the interpretation of identitary national discourses. Other enonces, such as gender and sexual ones, while not absent from discursive constructions, are much less visible in the first decades of postcolonial culture in Cuba. For the concepts of enonce and discourse, see Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1995) and The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Harper and Row, 1976). 7. These are popular Spanish phrases widespread after the defeat of Charles the Fourth in Trafalgar. They express Spanish hatred of the British. 8. See the excellent article by Jesus Timoteo Alvarez, “Opinion publica y propaganda belica al inicio de la contienda,” in 1895: La guerra en Cuba y la Espana de la Restauracion, ed. Emilio de Diego (Madrid: Editorial Complutense, 1996), pp. 247–261. 9. Thomas, Cuba, pp. 443–463. 10. Ibid., p. 446. 11. M. Thomas Inge, ed., A Nineteenth Century American Reader (Washington, DC: United States Information Agency, 1989), pp. 22–24. 12. Ibid., pp. 25–31. 13. Ibid., pp. 560–575. For Crane’s literary epic, see Chester L. Wolford, The Anger of Stephen Crane: Fiction and the Epic Tradition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983). 14. See Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in America (Boston: Beacon, 1955).

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15. Don Martindale, La teoria sociologica: Naturaleza y escuelas (Madrid: Aguilar, 1971), pp. 191–201. 16. Eric Hobsbawm, La era del imperio (Barcelona: Labor, 1989), pp. 56–57. 17. See, for example, Hippolyte Adolphe Taine, “La opinion en Alemania y las condiciones de la paz,” Ensayos de critica e historia (Madrid: Aguilar, 1953), pp. 780–794. 18. Maria Alicia Laorga, “Mentalidad y novela: Una reflexion sobre la postura de ciertos intelectuales a la altura de 1995,” in Juan Pablo Fusi and Antonio Nino, eds., Antes del desastre: Origenes y antecedentes de la crisis del 98 (Madrid: Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 1996), pp. 427–428. 19. J. Eslava Galan and D. Rojano Ortega, La Espana del 98: Elfin de una era (Madrid: Editorial Edaf, 1997), pp. 254–264; Eric Storm, “La generacion de 1897: Las ideas politicas de Azorin y Unamuno en el fin de siglo,” in Fusi and Nino, Antes del desastre, pp. 465–480; Luis de Llera Esteban and Milagrosa Romero Samper, “Los intelectuales espanoles y el problema colonial,” in de Diego, 1895, pp. 263–295. 20. See Miguel de Unamuno, En torno al casticismo (Madrid: Editorial Biblioteca Nueva, 1997), pp. 40–50; Angel Ganivet, Idearium espauiol (Madrid: Editorial Biblioteca Nueva, 1997), pp. 37–54; Luis Morote, La moral de la derrota (Madrid: Editorial Biblioteca Nueva, 1997), pp. 149–154. 21. See Rafael Rojas, “El discurso de la frustracion republicana en Cuba,” in El ensayo en Nuestra America (México City: UNAM, 1993), pp. 411–417. 22. Foucault, Genealogia, p. 205. 23. Ibid., pp. 206, 208. 24. Jose Enrique Rodó, Ariel (México City: Espasa-Calpe, 1992), pp. 75, 78, 86–87. 25. Francisco Bulnes, El porvenir de las naciones latinoamericanas ante las recientes conquistas de Europa y Norteamerica: Estructura y evolution de un continente (México: El Pensamiento Vivo de America, 1899), p. 147. 26. Rodo, Ariel, 87; Bulnes, El porvenir, p. 147. 27. Foucault, Genealogia, p. 206. 28. Ernst Junger, “Fuego y movimiento,” Sobre el dolor (Barcelona: Tusquets, 1995), pp. 128–129. 29. A century later, this clash of civilizations is still the order of the day. See Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). 30. Clifford Geertz, Conocimiento local: Ensayos sobre la interpretation de las culturas (Barcelona: Paidos, 1994), pp. 55–60. 31. Cristobal de la Guardia, Estudio sobre el carcicter cubano (Havana: Liceo de Guanabacoa, 1902), pp. 5–15. 32. Ibid., p. 17. 33. Cristobal de la Guardia, De los vicios y defectos del criollo (Havana: Cultural S.A., 1939).

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34. The articles by Sold and Guiral appeared in the journal Cuba conteinporcinea (vols. 2 and 4, 1913 and 1914, respectively). Between 1913 and 1927, this publication was a center for the reproduction of eugenicist discourses of Cuban identity. When I speak of minor literature here, I am not referring to Gilles Deleuze but rather to Miguel de Unamuno’s description of “minor literature” as that which has very little “will to style.” See Miguel de Unamuno, Ensayos (Madrid: Aguilar, 1958), pp. 1224–1225. 35. Enrique José Varona, Textos escogidos (México City: Editorial Porrua, 1974), p. 57. 36. Francisco Figueras, Cuba y su evolution colonial (Havana: Isla S.A., n.d.), pp. 6, 19. 37. Ibid., pp. 210–217. 38. Ibid., p. 234. 39. Ibid., p. 175. 40. Carlos Octavio Bunge, Nuestra America (Barcelona: Imprenta de Henrich y Cia. Editores, 1903), p. 34. 41. Bunge, Nuestra America, pp. 22–23. 42. Geoffrey Hawthorn, Plausible Worlds: Possibility and Understanding in History and the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 1–54. 43. Roque E. Garrigo, La convulsion cubana (Havana: Imprenta La Razon, 1906), p. 23. 44. Jose Antonio Ramos, Manual del perfecto fulanista: Apuntes para el estudio de nuestra dinkmica politico-social (Miami, Fla.: Editorial Cubana, 1995), p. 64. 45. Ibid., p. 65. 46. On the strengthening of the Hispanic identity, see Manuel Moreno Fraginals, Cuba/Espaiia, Espa fia/Cuba: Historia comiin (Barcelona: Critica/Mondadori, 1995), pp. 295–300. 47. Francisco Garcia Calderon, La creation de un continente (Paris: Libreria de Paul Ollendorf, 1912), pp. 48–49. 48. Qtd. in Garrigo, La convulsion cubana, p. 23. 49. Fernando Ortiz, Entre cubanos: Psicologia tropical (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1987), p. 86. 50. Aline Helg, Our Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886–1912 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). 51. Fernando Ortiz, La reconquista de America: Reflexiones sobre el panhispanismo (Paris: Sociedad de Ediciones Artisticas y Literarias, Libreria de Paul Ollendorf, 1911), p. 2. 52. Ibid., p. 7. 53. Ibid., p. 19. 54. Ibid., p. 27. 55. Ibid., pp. 111, 110. 56. Ibid., pp. 32–33. 57. Ibid., pp. 39–40.

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58. Fernando Ortiz, Estudios etnosociologicos (Havana: Editorial de las Ciencias Sociales, 1991), p. 10. 59. Qtd. in Georges Duby, Civilization latina (Barcelona: Editorial Laia, 1989), p. 22. 60. Inge, A Nineteenth Century American Reader, pp. 48–55, 68–73. 61. Eugenio Trías, La lógica del límite (Barcelona: Destino, 1991). 62. Levi Marrero, Cuba: Isla abierta (Puerto Rico: Ediciones Capiro, 1995), pp. 1–7.

3 Fernando Ortiz:Transculturation and Nationalism This chapter is translated by Rafael Rojas. 1. Emeterio S. Santovenia, Historia de Cuba (La Habana: Editorial Trópico, 1939), 3 vols. vol. 1, pp. 52–55. 2. Juan Antonio Cosculluela, Cuatro años en la Ciénaga de Zapata. Memorias de un ingeniero (La Habana, 1918), p. 65. 3. Fernando Ortiz, Historia de la arqueología indocubana (La Habana: El Siglo XX, 1922). 4. Fernando Ortiz, “Cómo eran los indocubanos,” Revista Bimestre Cubana 35 (1935): pp. 26–28. 5. Ibid., p. 27. 6. Edmundo O’Gorman, La invención de América (México City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1958), pp. 15–17. 7. Arcadio Díaz Quiñones, Sobre los principios. Los intelectuales caribenos y la tradicion (Buenos Aires: Universidad de Quilmes, 2006), pp. 289–318. 8. Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Para leer El Capital (México City: Siglo XXI, 1974). 9. Armando García González and Raquel Alvarez Peláez, En busca de la raza perfecta. Eugenesia e higiene en Cuba (1898–1858) (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1999), pp. 117–167; Rafael Rojas, Isla sin fin. Contribución a la crítica del nacionalismo cubano (Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1998). 10. George W. Stocking, Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York: The Free Press, 1987), pp. 274–283. 11. Ibid., pp. 302–314. 12. Ramiro Guerra, Azúcar y población en las Antillas (La Habana: Instituto del Libro, 1970); Alberto Lamar Schweyer, Biología de la democracia. Ensayo de sociología americana (La Habana: Editorial Minerva, 1927), and La crisis del patriotismo. Una teoría de las inmigraciones (La Habana: Editorial Martí, 1929). 13. Fernando Ortiz, Etnia y sociedad (La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1993), pp. 1–20.

164

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14. Fernando Ortiz, El engaño de las razas (La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1975), pp. 313–333. 15. Ibid., p. 332. 16. Ángel Rama, Transculturación narrativa en América Latina (México City: Siglo XXI, 1982); Néstor García Canclini, Culturas híbridas. Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad (México City: Editorial Grijalbo, 1990); Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992); Celina Manzoni, “El ensayo excéntrico: el Contrapunteo de Fernando Ortiz (o algo más que un cambio de nombre),” Filología Review 29 (1996): 151–156; Serge Gruzinski, El pensamiento mestizo (Barcelona: Paidós, 2000). 17. Antonio Cornejo Polar, “Mestizaje e hibridez: los riesgos de las metáforas,” Revista Iberoamericana 63 (July–September, 1997): 341–344. 18. Fernando Ortiz, “Por la integración cubana de blancos y negros,” in Órbita de Fernando Ortiz (La Habana: UNEAC, 1973), pp. 186–188. 19. Ibid., p. 188. 20. See George W. Stocking, American Social Scientists and Race Theory, 1890–1915 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1960) and Race, Culture, and Evolution. Essays in the History of Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1968). 21. Michel Foucault, El pensamiento del afuera (Valencia: Pretextos, 1997), pp. 15–22 and 73–82. 22. Kwane Anthony Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Patriots” and Scott L. Malcomson, “The Varieties of Cosmopolitan Experiences,” in Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds., Cosmopolitics. Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), pp. 91–114 and 233–245. See also James Clifford, Routes. Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 244–277. 23. Michel Foucault, La arqueología del saber (México City: Siglo XXI, 1974), pp. 51–64. 24. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mil mesetas. Capitalismo y esquizofrenia (Valencia: Pretextos, 1997), pp. 9–29. 25. María Zambrano, La Cuba secreta y otros ensayos (Madrid: Ediciones Endymion, 1996), p. 176. 26. Jürgen Habermas, El discurso filosófico de la modernidad (Madrid: Taurus, 1989), pp. 11–35. See also Arendt’s essay on Walter Benjamin’s modern look in Hannah Arendt, Hombres en tiempos de oscuridad (Barcelona: Gedisa, 1990), pp. 158–178. 27. Julio Le Riverend, “Fernando Ortiz y su obra cubana,” prologue to Órbita de Fernando Ortiz (La Habana: UNEAC, 1973), pp. 49–51; Isaac Barreal, “Prólogo,” in Ortiz, Etnia y sociedad, pp. VII–VIII. 28. After Bloom, it could be said that that long shadow of texts makes Ortiz a canonical author: Harold Bloom, El canon occidental. La escuela y los libros de todas las épocas (Barcelona: Anagrama, 1995), pp. 11–22. See

Notes

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50.

165

also Jacques Derrida, La diseminación (Madrid: Editorial Fundamentos, 1975), p. 41, and Giuglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, Historia de la lectura en el mundo occidental (Madrid: Taurus, 1998), pp. 534–549. Fernando Ortiz, Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (La Habana: Jesus Montero Editor, 1940), pp. IX–XXIII. Ibid., p. X. Ibid., p. XI. Ibid., p. X. Ibid., p. XV. Ibid., p. 142. Ibid., p. XXI. Ibid., pp. X–XI. Ibid., p. XXII. Ibid., p. XXII. On the editions of the Counterpoint, see the “Prologue” by María Fernanda Ortiz Herrera, the author’s daughter, in a beautiful reprint that she supervised herself: Fernando Ortiz, Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (Madrid: Música Mundana Maqueda, 1999), pp. I–IX. See also Fernando Ortiz, Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (Universidad Central de las Villas, Cuba, Dirección de Publiciones, 1963), p. IX. The most recent critical edition of the Counterpoint was supervised by Enrico Mario Santí: Fernando Ortiz, Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (Madrid: Cátedra/Música Mundana Maqueda, 2002). Órbita de Fernando Ortiz (La Habana: UNEAC, 1973), p. 39. Montserrat Guibernau, Los nacionalismos (Barcelona: Editorial Ariel, 1996), pp. 9–14. Fernando Ortiz, Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (La Habana: Jesus Montero Editor, 1940), p. 7. Ibid., pp. 31, 80, 81. Ibid., p. 71; Manuel Moreno Fraginals, El Ingenio. Complejo económico social cubano del azúcar (Barcelona: Crítica, 2001), pp. 87–115. Ibid., p. 131. Ibid., p. 137. Ibid., pp. 137–142. Ortiz, Etnia y sociedad, p. 6. Clifford Geertz and James Clifford, El surgimiento de la antropología posmoderna (Barcelona: Gedisa, 1992), pp. 63–77, 141–170 and 275–288. Before Benítez Rojo, Moreno Fraginals, from the viewpoint of a distrusting historian, referred to the weight of fiction in the Counterpoint, a book “written with all the grace and genius of maestro Fernando Ortiz, describing the contrasts between sugar and tobacco just as the Archpriest of Hita did in the fight between Don Carnal and Doña Cuaresma. Many of his statements are wonderfully brilliant and suggestive: many others do not stand up to the slightest Celtic analysis.” Manuel Moreno Fraginals, El

166

51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69.

Notes Ingenio. Complejo económico social cubano del azúcar, pp. 728–729, Antonio Benítez Rojo, La isla que se repite (Barcelona: Editorial Casiopea, 1998), pp. 183–190; Román de la Campa, Latin Americanism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), pp. 64–96; Fernando Coronil, “Introduction” to Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint. Tobacco and Sugar (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. IX–LVI; Peter Burke, Formas de historia cultural (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2000), pp. 202–203; Enrico Mario Santí, Fernando Ortiz: contrapunteo y transculturación (Madrid: Editorial Colibrí, 2002), pp. 65–89. Roberto González Echevarría, La voz de los maestros. Escritura y autoridad en la literatura latinoamericana moderna (Madrid: Editorial Verbum, 2001), pp. 65–66; Gustavo Pérez Firmat, The Cuban Condition. Translation and Identity in Modern Cuban Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 47–66. Rojas, Isla sin fin, pp. 105–122. Ortiz, Etnia y sociedad, p. 6. Ibid., p. 20. Ibid., p. 7. Ortiz, Etnia y sociedad, p. 62. David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America (Pantheon Books: New York, 1995); Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). Julio Le Riverend, “Fernando Ortiz y su obra cubana,” pp. 23–36. Ibid., pp. 99–119. Fernando Ortiz, Entre cubanos, Psicología tropical (La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1987), pp. 1–15. Fernando Ortiz, La reconquista de América. Reflexiones sobre el panhispanismo (Paris: Librairie Paul Ollendorf, 1913), p. 19 Ibid., p. 27. Fernando Ortiz, Órbita de Fernando Ortiz (La Habana: UNEAC, 1973), p. 71. Ibid., pp. 73–80. Ibid., p. 80. Ibid., p. 73. Jorge Schwartz, Las vanguardias latinoamericanas. Textos programáticos y críticos (México City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2002), pp. 677–678. See also, Octavio di Leo, El descubrimiento de África en Cuba y Brasil. 1889–1969 (Madrid: Editorial Colibrí, 2001), pp. 62–76; Robin D. Moore, Música y mestizaje. Revolución artística y cambio social en la Habana. 1920–1940 (Madrid: Editorial Colibrí, 2002), pp. 241–274. Ortiz, Órbita de Fernando Ortiz, p. 79. Aline Helg, Lo que nos corresponde. La lucha de los negros y mulatos por la igualdad en Cuba. 1886–1912 (Habana: Imagen Contemporánea, 2000), pp. 220–225; Alejandro de la Fuente, Una nación para todos.

Notes

70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

79.

80.

167

Raza, desigualdad y política en Cuba. 1900–2000 (Madrid: Editorial Colibrí, 2000), pp. 111–116; Alejandra Bronfman, Measures of Equality: Social Science, Citizenship, and Race (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Press, 2004), pp. 70–84. Fuente, Una nación para todos, pp. 117–121. Ortiz, Órbita de Fernando Ortiz, pp. 679–680. Enrico Mario Santí has described the complex genesis of this text in his critical edition of the Counterpoint. Fernando Ortiz, Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (Madrid: Cátedra/ Música Mundana Maqueda, 2002), pp. 47–61. Santí, Fernando Ortiz: contrapunteo y transculturación, pp. 65–76. Ibid., pp. 84–89. Mijaíl Bajtín, Problemas de la poética de Dostoievski (México City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1986), pp. 15–34. Fernando Ortiz, “Los factores humanos de la cubanidad,” in Etnia y sociedad (La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1993), pp. 1–20. Lionel Antonio de la Cuesta, Constituciones cubanas desde 1812 hasta nuestros días (New York: Ediciones Exilio, 1974), p. 262. Habermas based his theory of “communicative action” precisely on the “rejection of any functionalist intention.” Jürgen Habermas, Teoría de la acción comunicativa, 2 vols. (Madrid: Taurus, 1987), vol. 2, pp. 562–572. On the distinction between the liberal and republican families in Western political thought, see Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Hartcourt, Brace & World, 1955); J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); Gisela Bock, Quentin Shinner, and Maurizio Viroli, Machiavelli and Republicanism (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Philip Pettit, Republicanismo. Una teoría sobre la libertad y el gobierno (Barcelona: Paidós, 1999); Mark Hulliung, Citizens and Citoyens. Republicans and Liberals in America and France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 2002. J.G.A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 20–35.

4

Orígenes and the Poetics of History

This chapter is translated by Luis P. Aguilar. 1. José Lezama Lima, “Después de lo raro, la extrañeza,” Orígenes 2.6 (1945): 51. 2. Ibid. 3. José Lezama Lima, “Sobre Paul Valery,” Orígenes 2.7 (1945): 24.

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4. Ernst Robert Curtius, Literatura europea y Edad Media Latina (México: FCE, 1975), pp. 564–565. 5. In applying Curtius’ ideas to the works of Cintio Vitier, Arcadio Díaz Quiñones identifies it with the thesaurus. In Cintio Vitier: La memoria integradora (Puerto Rico: Editorial Sin Nombre, 1987), p. 32. 6. Orígenes 1.1 (1944): 6. 7. José Lezama Lima, “Señales: La otra desintegración,” Orígenes 6.21 (1949): 60. 8. Virgilio Piñera, Poesía y crítica (México: CONACULTA, 1994), p. 54. 9. Virgilio Piñera, “El secreto de Kafka,” Orígenes 2.8 (1945): 42–45. 10. Virgilio Piñera, “Revaluaciones. Ballagas en persona,” Ciclón 1.5 (September 1955): 41. 11. Lorenzo García Vega, Antología de la novela cubana (La Habana: Ministerio de Educación, 1960), pp. 9–10. 12. José Rodríguez Feo, “Los cuentos de Lino Novás Calvo,” Orígenes 3.12 (1946): 25–27. 13. Cintio Vitier, “Virgilio Piñera: Poesía y Prosa,” Orígenes 3.5 (1945): 47–49. 14. Cintio Vitier, “En La Calzada de Jesús del Monte,” Orígenes 6.21 (1949): 53. 15. Walter Benjamin, Poesía y Capitalismo. Iluminaciones II (Madrid: Ediciones Taurus, 1991), pp. 91–92. 16. Eliseo Diego, En la calzada de Jesús del Monte (La Habana: Ediciones Orígenes, 1949), pp. 98–99. 17. Humberto Piñera Llera, “Jorge Santayana,” Orígenes 10.33 (1953): 105–106. 18. María Zambrano, “La Metáfora del Corazón,” Orígenes 1.3 (1944): 7. 19. María Zambrano, Pensamiento y poesía en la vida española (México: El Colegio de México, 1991), p. 23. 20. Walter Pach, “Problemas del arte americano,” Orígenes 1.4 (1944): 17–20. 21. José Rodríguez Feo, “George Santayana: Crítico de una cultura,” Orígenes 1.1 (1944): 35–48. 22. Cintio Vitier, “El Pen Club y los Diez Poetas Cubanos,” Orígenes 5.19 (1948): 41. 23. José Lezama Lima, Diarios (México: Era, 1994). 24. Ibid. 25. José Lezama Lima, La expresión americana (México: FCE, 1993), pp. 132, 174–176. 26. Rafael Rojas, “La expresión lezamiana,” Estudios 36 (Spring 1994): 107–110. 27. Richard Morse, Resonancias del Nuevo Mundo (México: Editorial Vuelta, 1995), p. 24. 28. José Lezama Lima, “Señales: La Otra Desintegración,” p. 61.

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29. José Lezama Lima, “La Egiptización Americana,” Revista de la Biblioteca Nacional José Martí 2 (May–August 1988): 22. 30. José Lezama Lima, La expresión americana, pp. 107–133. 31. Lezama, “Después de lo raro, la extrañeza,” pp. 52–53. 32. José Lezama Lima, “Señales: Un fracaso, una vergüenza que alguien paga,” Orígenes 4.15 (1947): 44–45. 33. Lezama, “Señales: La Otra Desintegración,” pp. 60. 34. José Lezama Lima, “Recuerdos: Guy Pérez de Cisneros,” Revista de la Biblioteca Nacional José Martí 2 (May–August 1988): p. 26. 35. See José Lezama Lima “Introducción a un Sistema Poético,” Orígenes 11.36 (1954): 45–47. 36. One hears the echo of José de la Luz y Caballero, aphorism 536, inscribed in the Cuban moral: “One, and only one doctrine for all . . . but one which will comprise all of the community’s moral needs: in short, a religion.” José de Luz y Caballero, Aforismos (La Habana: Editorial de la Universidad de la Habana, 1945), p. 342. 37. José Lezama Lima, “Exámenes,” Orígenes 7.25 (1950): 72. 38. Santo Tomás de Aquino, La monarquía (Madrid: Editorial Tecnos, 1989), p. 69. 39. José Lezama Lima, “Triunfo de la Revolución Cubana.” Revista de la Biblioteca Nacional José Martí 2 (May–August 1988): p. 46. 40. Lezama, “Recuerdos: Guy Pérez de Cisneros,” p. 28. 41. Cintio Vitier, “Poesía Como Fidelidad,” Orígenes 13.40 (1956): 28. 42. Lezama, “Triunfo de la Revolución Cubana,” p. 44. 43. Fina García Marruz, “Lo Exterior en la Poesía,” Orígenes 4.16 (1947): 22. 44. Manuel Moreno Fraginals, Cuba/España. España/Cuba. Historia común. (Barcelona: Crítica, 1995), pp. 191–192. 45. Bohemia (25 September 1949): 78–90. 46. Fascinación de la memoria. Textos inéditos de José Lezama Lima. (La Habana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1993), p. 291. 47. Ibid. 48. Cintio Vitier, “La aventura de Orígenes,” in Iván González Cruz, ed., Fascinación de la memoria. Textos inéditos de José Lezama Lima (La Habana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1993), p. 309. 49. José Lezama Lima, “Las Imagenes Posibles,” Orígenes 5.17 (1948): 3. 50. José Lezama Lima, Imagen y Posibilidad (La Habana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1981), p. 188. 51. Zambrano, “La Metáfora del Corazón,” p. 7. 52. Lezama, “Recuerdos: Guy Pérez de Cisneros,” p. 27. 53. Roger Caillois, “Límites de la Literatura,” Orígenes 4.16 (1947): 7. 54. José Lezama Lima, “Diez Años en Orígenes,” Orígenes 11.35 (1954): 65. 55. This is the central thesis of Duanel Diaz Infante, Los limites del origenismo (Madrid: Colibri, 2005). 56. Lezama, “Triunfo de la Revolución Cubana,” p. 46.

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5 Gallery of Cuban Writing This chapter is translated by Rebecca E. Biron. 1. See his arguments against the annexationists in La situacion politica de Cuba y su remedio (1852) and Las esperanzas de Cuba (1858), in Contra la anexion, vol. 2, 107–51, 235–44 (Habana: Cultural S.A., 1928). 2. Fernando Ortiz, Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azucar (advertencia de sus contrastes agrarios, económicos, históricos y sociales, su etnografía y su transculturación) (Habana: Universidad Central de las Villas, 1963), 22–54; Los factores humanos de la cubanidad (Havana: Molina, 1940), 7–19. 3. There is a long Cuban-Carribean bibliography with which Benitez Rojo disagrees. But texts by Cuban authors are scarce. See Benitez Rojo, La isla que se repite. El Caribe y la perspectiva postmoderna (Hanover: Ediciones del Norte, 1989), pp. 1–65. 4. José Antonio Saco, Paralelo entre la isla de Cuba y algunas colonias inglesas, in Obras (New York: Roe Lockwood and Hijo, 1853), 1: 147–170; “Analisis de una obra sobre el Brasil,” in Coleccion de papeles cientificos, historicos y politicos sobre la isla de Cuba, vol. 2 (Havana: Ministerio de Educacion, 1960), 77–86. 5. Benitez Rojo, La isla que se repite, pp. XXIII–XXIX. 6. Arcadio Diaz Quinones, Sobre los principios. Los intelectuales caribenos y la tradicion (Buenos Aires: Universidad de Quilmes, 2006), pp. 319–376. 7. Gustavo Pittaluga, Dialogos sobre el destino (Miami: Mnemosyne Publishing, Inc., 1969), pp. 403–410. 8. Ibid., p. 19. 9. Medardo Vitier, Valoraciones (Las Villas: Universidad Central de las Villas, Departamento de Relaciones Culturales, 1960), pp. 334–341. 10. Jorge Mañach, Teoria de la frontera (Universidad de Puerto Rico: Editorial Universitaria, 1970), pp. 138–160. 11. Leví Marrero, Raíces del milagro cubano (Miami: Patromonio Nacional Cubano, 1995), pp. 3–30. 12. Homi K. Bhabha, Nation and Narration (London/ New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 1–7, 291–322. 13. Enrico Mario Santi, Por una politeratura. Literatura hispanoamericana e imaginacion politica (México: UNAM/ Ediciones del Equilibrista, 1996), pp. 368–369. 14. Antonio Bachiller y Morales, Apuntes para la hitoria de las letras y de la instruccion publica en Cuba, vol. 1 (Havana: Academia de Ciencias de Cuba, 1965), p. 35. 15. Agnes I. Lugo-Ortiz, Identidades imaginadas. Biografía y nacionalidad en el horizonte de la guerra (Cuba 1860–1898) (San Juan: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1999), pp. 111–121. 16. Antonio Bachiller y Morales, Galeria de hombres titiles (Hanana: Instituto Nacional de Cultura, 1955), p. 67.

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17. Ibid., pp.183–193. 18. Ibid., p. 257. 19. Aurelio Mitjans, Estudio sobre el movimiento cientifico y literario de Cuba (Havana: Consejo Nacional de Cultura, 1963), p. 56. 20. Juan J. Remos y Rubio, Historia de la literatura cubana (Miami: Mnemosyne Publishing, 1969), pp. I–II. 21. Manuel de la Cruz, Cromitos cubanos (Madrid: Editorial Saturnino Calleja, S.A., 1926), p. 354. 22. Raimundo Cabrera, Cuba y sus jueces (Miami: Editorial Cubana, 1994), pp. 289–362. 23. Juan J. Remos, Proceso historico de las letras cubanas (Madrid: Ediciones Guadarrama, S.L., 1958), p. 20. 24. Raimundo Lazo, Historia de la literatura cubana (México: Dirección General de Publicaciones, 1974), p. 16. 25. Max Henriquez Ureña, Panorama historico de la literatura cubana, vol. 1 (Puerto Rico: Ediciones Mirador, 1963), pp. 9–11. 26. Domitila Garcia Coronado, Album biografico y fotografico de poetisas y escritoras cubanas (Havana: Imprenta “El Figaro,” 1926). 27. See Florinda Alzaga, La Avellaneda: Intensidad y vanguardia (Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1997), p. 103. 28. George Yudice, “We Are Not the World,” Social Text 10.2–3 (1992): 202–215; John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. vii–xiv. 29. See the excellent critique by Christopher Dominguez Michael in “Observaciones sobre el Canon de Bloom,” Vuelta 247 (June 1997): pp. 57–59. 30. Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances o f Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 31. Iván González Cruz, Diccionario. Vida y obra de José Lezama Lima (Valencia: Generalitat Valenciana, 2000), pp. 238–240. 32. Cintio Vitier, Lo cubano en la poesia (Havana: Instituto del Libro, 1970), pp. 127–130. 33. Juan J. Remos y Rubio, Historia de la literatura cubana, vol. 3 (Miami: Mnemosyne Publishing, 1969), p. 309. 34. Lazo, Historia de la literatura cubana, p. 89. 35. Ibid., p. 224. 36. Cintio Vitier, Lo cubano en la poesia, p. 481. 37. José Antonio Fernandez de Castro, El tema negro en las letras de Cuba, 1608–1935 (Havana: Ediciones Mirador, 1943). 38. See the excellent work by Uva de Aragon, Alfonso Hernandez Catá. Un escritor cubano, salmantino y universal (Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, 1996), pp. 27–31, 71–73. 39. Antonio Jose Ponte, La lengua de Virgilio (Matanzas: Ediciones Vigia, 1993), pp. 19–24.

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6 Diaspora and Memory in Cuban Literature This chapter is translated by John Miller. 1. Mauricio Ferraris, Luto y autobiografía. De San Agustín a Heidegger (México: Taurus, 2001), pp. 11–21. See also Marta Tafalla, Theodor W. Adorno. Una filosofía de la memoria (Barcelona: Herder, 2003), pp. 209–238. 2. Jean Améry, Màs allá de la culpa y la expiación. Tentativas de superación de una víctima de la violencia (Valencia: Pretextos, 2001), pp. 39–49. 3. Sylvia Molloy, Acto de presencia. La escritura autobiográfica en Hispanoamérica (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996), pp. 11–22; Angel Loureiro, The Ethics of Autobiography. Replacing the Subject in Modern Spain (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000), pp. 15–30. 4. Ibid., pp. 25–51, 60–73. 5. Carlos Franqui, Retrato de familia con Fidel (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1981), pp. 40–42; Juan Abreu, A la sombra del mar. Jornadas cubanas con Reinaldo Arenas (Barcelona: Casiopea, 1998), pp. 18–23; Eliseo Alberto, Informe contra mí mismo (México: Alfaguara, 1996), pp. 11–21: Norberto Fuentes, Dulces guerreros cubanos (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1999), pp. 21–22; Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Next Year in Cuba. A Cubano’s Comingof -Age in America (New York: Doubleday, 1995), pp. 1–13. 6. Lisandro Otero, Llover sobre mojado. Memorias de un intelectual cubano (1957–1997) (México: Planeta, 1999), pp. 11–26. 7. Norberto Fuentes, Dulces guerreros cubanos (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1999), p. 157. 8. Heberto Padilla, La mala memori (Barcelona: Plaza y Janés, 1989), p. 205; Eliseo Alberto, Informe contra mí mismo (México: Alfaguara, 1996), p. 21; César Leante, Revive, historia. Anatomía del castrismo (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 1999), pp. 10, 33; Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Mea Cuba (México: Editorial Vuelta, 1993), p. 18. 9. Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Mea Cuba, p. 37; Heberto Padilla, Fuera del juego (Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1998), p. 55; Reinaldo Arenas, Antes que anochezca (Barcelona: Tusquets Editores, 1992), p. 116; Eliseo Alberto, Informe contra mí mismo (México: Alfaguara, 1997), p. 23. 10. Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Next Year in Cuba, p. 47. 11. Jorge Mañach, Teoría de la frontera (San Juan: Puerto Rico, Editorial Universitaria, 1970), pp. 140–160; Carlos Márquez Sterling, Historia de Cuba (New York: Las Americas Publishing Company, 1969), pp. 655–676; Herminio Portell Vilá, Nueva historia de la República de Cuba (Miami: La Moderna Poesía, 1986), pp. 727–770; Mario Llerena, La revolución sospechada. Origen y desarrollo del castrismo (Buenos Aires: Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires, 1981), pp. 11–21; Leví Marrero, Escrito ayer (Puerto Rico: Ediciones Capiro, 1992), pp. 155–160.

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12. James G. Blight and Peter Kornbluh, Politics of Illusion: The Bay of Pigs Invasion Reexamined (Boulder: CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998), pp. 10–20. 13. Efrén Córdova, “Represión e intolerancia”, en 40 años de Revolución. El legado de Castro (Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1999), pp. 253–279. See also “El presidio político en Cuba,” Encuentro de la cultura cubana 20 (Spring, 2001): 154–238. 14. Alejandro Portes y Alex Stepick, City of the Edge.The Transformation of Miami (Berkeley, LA: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 89–107; María Cristina García, Havana-USA. Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 1959–1994 (Berkeley, LA: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 13–45; María de los Ángeles Torres, In the Land of Mirrors. Cuban Exile Politics in the United States (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), pp. 42–61. 15. Tzvetan Todorov, Los abusos de la memoria (Barcelona: Paidós Asterisco, 2000), pp. 11–18, 49–59. 16. Carlos Franqui, “Libertad y socialismo,” Libre 2 (December–February 1972): 9–10; Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Mea Cuba, pp. 38–40; Nivaria Tejera, Espero la noche para soñarte, Revolución (Miami: Ediciones Universal, 2002), pp. 30–35; César Leante, Volviendo la mirada (Miami: Ediciones Universal, 2002), pp. 17–37. 17. Reinaldo Arenas, Antes que anochezca (Barcelona: Tusquets, 1992), p. 314. 18. Juan Abreu, “Bella insumisión,” Mariel. Revista de literatura y arte (special anniversary edition), Miami, spring 2003, p. 23. 19. La Habana en un espejo (México, D.F.: Mondadori, 2004), pp. 257–301; Finding Man´ana (New York: Penguin, 2005) pp. 161–185. 20. Manuel Díaz Martínez, Sólo un leve rasguño en la solapa, Logroño (España: AMG Editor, 2002), pp. 120–150; René Vázquez Díaz, Voces para cerrar un siglo (Estocolmo: Olof Palme International Center, 2000), vol. 2. 21. Eliseo Alberto, Informe contra mí mismo, pp. 134–154. 22. Ibid., p. 315. 23. Juan Abreu, A la sombra del mar. Jornadas cubanas con Reinaldo Arenas, p. 34. 24. Paquito D’Rivera, Mi vida saxual (San Juan, Puerto Rico: Plaza Mayor, 1999), pp. 174–189; Enrico Mario Santì, Bienes del siglo (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2002), pp. 363–384. 25. Jesús Díaz, Las palabras perdidas (Barcelona: Ediciones Destino, 1992); Leonardo Padura, La novela de mi vida (Barcelona: Tusquets, 2002). 26. Jacobo Machover, La memoria frente al poder (Valencia: Universitat de Valencia, 2001), pp. 11–19; Enrico Mario Santí, Bienes del siglo (México: Fondo de Cultura Ecoómica, 2002), pp. 359–362. 27. Paul Ricoeur, La memoria, la historia y el olvido (Madrid: Editorial Trotta), pp. 616–620. 28. Roque Dalton y otros, El intelectual y la sociedad (México: Siglo XXI, 1971), pp. 7–29.

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29. Leonardo Padura and John M. Kirk, La cultura y la revolucion cubana. Conversaciones en la Habana (San Juan, Puerto Rico: Plaza Mayor, 2002), pp. 321–332; Ambrosio Fornet, La coartada perpetua (México: Siglo XXI, 2000), pp. 25–36; Arturo Arango, Segundas reincidencias (Santa Clara: Editorial Capiro, 2002), pp. 128–136; Rafael Hernández, Mirar a Cuba. Ensayos sobre cultura y sociedad civil (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2002), pp. 96–133; Desiderio Navarro, “In medias res publicas. Sobre los intelectuales y la crítica social en la esfera pública cubana,” in Rafael Hernández and Rafael Rojas, ed., Ensayo cubano del siglo XX (México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2002), pp. 689–707. 30. Pablo Medina, Exiled Memories. A Cuban Childhood (New York: Persea Books, 2002), pp. 108–114; Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Next Year in Cuba, pp. 17–45; Román de la Campa, Cuba on My Mind. Journeys to a Severed Nation (London, New York: Verso, 2000), pp. 1–21; Andrea O’Reilly Herrera, ReMembering Cuba: Legacy of Diaspora (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001); Carlos Eire, Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy (New York: Free Press, 2003). 31. Eliana Rivero, Discursos desde la diáspora (Cádiz: Duana Vieja, 2005), p. 17. 32. Jorge I. Domínguez, Cuba. Order and Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978); Marifeli PérezStable, The Cuban Revolution. Origins, Course and Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Louis A. Pérez, Jr., On Becoming Cuban. Identity, Nationality, and Culture (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Damián J. Fernández, Cuba and the Politics of Passion (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000). 33. Javier Cercas, Soldados de Salamina (Barcelona: Tusquets, 2001), p. 22. 34. Sergio Ramírez, Sombras nada más (Madrid: Alfaguara, 2002), pp. 13–45. 35. Eduardo Heras León, Los pasos en la hierba (La Habana: Unión de Escritores y Artistas, 1990), p. 82. 36. Ibid., p. 52 37. Carlos Espinosa Domínguez, El peregrino en comarca ajena. Panorama crítico de la literatura cubana del exilio (University of Colorado: Society of Spanish and Spanish American Studies, 2001), pp. 13–16. 38. Huber Matos, Cómo llegó la noche (Barcelona: Tusquets, 2002), p. 47. 39. Nivaria Tejera, Espero la noche para soñarte, Revolución (Miami: Ediciones Universal, 2002), pp. 14–15. 40. Uva de Aragón, Memoria del silencio (Miami: Ediciones Universal, 2002), p. 240. 41. Ibid., pp. 226–227. 42. David Landau, No siempre gana la muerte (Los Angeles: Pureplay Press, 2002), p. 130. 43. Ibid., pp. 262–264. 44. Osvaldo Navarro, Hijos de Saturno (México: Editorial Debate, 2002), pp. 264–267.

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45. Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 48–83.

7 Symbolic Dilemmas of the Cuban Transition This chapter is translated by Alisa Newman. 1. Eric Hosbawm, The Age of Extremes (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), pp. 225–256; Ronald E. Powaski, La guerra fría. Estados Unidos y la Unión Soviética, 1917–1991 (Barcelona: Crítica, 2000), pp. 125–170. 2. David Rieff, The Exile. Cuba in the Heart of Miami (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), pp. 11–45; Ann Louise Bardach, Cuba confidencial. La lucha de poder, amor y venganza entre Miami y La (Habana, México D.F.: Grijalbo, 2004), pp. 21–27; Julieta Campos, La forza del destino (México D.F.: Alfaguara, 2004), pp. 11–70; Ernst Nolte, La guerra civil europea, 1917–1945. Nacionalismo y bolchevismo (México: FCE, 1994), pp. 11–32. 3. Enrique Encinosa, Unvanquished. Cuba’s Resistence to Fidel Castro (Los Angeles: Pureplay Press, 2004), pp. 4–55; Andreas Huyssen, En busca del futuro perdido. Cultura y memoria en tiempos de globalización (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2002), pp. 13–40; Bruce Catton, The Civil War (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), pp. 262–276; Jordi Gracia, La resistencia silenciosa. Fascismo y cultura en España (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2004), pp. 117–156. 4. Rafael Rojas, Tumbas sin sosiego. Revolución, disidencia y exilio del intelectual cubano (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2006), pp. 11–49. 5. Juan J. Linz, Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes (Londres: Lynne Riener, 2000), pp. 15–24. 6. Alexandra Barahona de Brito, Carmen González Enríquez, and Paloma Aguilar, The Politics of Memory. Transitional Justice in Democratizing Societies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 20–35. 7. Adam Michnik, “Aministía sin amnesia,” Istor 5. Año II, (2001): 7–24 8. Jorge I. Domínguez, Cuba. Order and Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 58–109. 9. Marifeli Pérez-Stable, The Cuban Revolution. Origins, Course and Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 122–152. 10. Jorge I. Domínguez, Cuba hoy. Analizando su pasado, imaginando su futuro (Madrid: Colibrí, 2006), pp. 30–45; Marifeli Pérez-Stable, Cuba en el siglo XXI. Ensayos sobre la transición (Madrid: Colibrí, 2006), pp. 10–20. 11. Rafael Rojas, Tumbas sin sosiego. Revolución, disidencia y exilio del intelectual cubano (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2006), pp. 428–446.

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12. Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), pp. 3–30. 13. Laurence Whitehead, Democratization: Theory and Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 5–25. 14. Abel Prieto, “Cultura, cubanidad y cubanía,” Conferencia “La Nación y la Emigración” (La Habana: Editora Política, 1994), pp. 75–80. 15. Fabián Escalante Font, Cuba: la guerra secreta de la CIA (La Habana: Capitán San Luis, 1993); Jesús Arboleya, La contrarrevolución cubana (La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1997). 16. Rosa Miriam Elizalde y Luis Báez, “Los disidentes.” Agentes de la Seguridad Cubana revelan la historia real (La Habana: Editora Política, 2003); Arleen Rodríguez y Lázaro Barredo, El Camaján (La Habana: Editora Política, 2003). 17. Antonio José Ponte, La fiesta vigilada (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2006), pp. 141–204; Alfredo José Estrada, Havana. Autobiography of a City (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 245–258. 18. Grupo de Trabajo Memoria, Verdad y Justicia, Cuba: la reconciliación nacional (Miami: Centro para América Latina y el Caribe, Universidad Internacional de la Florida, 2003). 19. Paloma Aguilar Fernández, Memoria y olvido de la guerra civil española (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1996), pp. 20–45. 20. Michael-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past. Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), pp. 141–153.

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Index

Abreu, Juan, 116, 117, 122 Abreu, Martha, 103 Acosta de Arriba, Rafael, 149 Agramonte, Roberto, 6, 49 Aguilar, José Antonio, 16 Alamán, Lucas, 2 Alberdi, Juan Bautista, 17 Alberto, Eliseo, 116, 117, 118, 122 Altamira y Crevea, Rafael, 37, 38, 39 Althusser, Louis, 44 Alvarez Borland, Isabel, 125 Améry, Jean, 116 Aquinas, St. Thomas, 1 Aragón, Uva de, 116, 131 Arango y Parreño, Francisco, 96, 100 Arango, Arturo, 124 Arboleya, Jesús, 145 Arenal, Humberto, 128 Arenas, Reinaldo, 107, 116, 117, 118, 119, 121, 122, 130 Arimatea, José, 80 Arocena, Berta, 109 Arrate, José Martín Félix, 5 Artime Buesa, Manuel, 119, 128 Bachiller y Morales, Antonio, 94, 99–101, 106–107 Báez, Carmen Rosa, 143 Báez, Luis, 146 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 62 Ballagas, Emilio, 69, 112 Baquero, Gastón, 108, 137 Baroja, Pío, 28

Barredo, Lázaro, 146 Barthes, Roland, 10, 74 Batista, Fulgencio, 13–25, 121, 127, 128, 130, 131 Baudelaire, Charles, 71 Benítez Rojo, Antonio, 55, 61–62, 96 Benítez, Susana, 103 Benjamin, Walter, 71 Betancourt Cisneros, Gaspar, 96 Bhabha, Homi K., 99, 105 Bloom, Harold, 107 Bobbio, Norberto, 3 Bolívar, Simón, 17, 21, 63, 79, 130 Borges, Jorge Luis, 40 Borrero Echevarría, Esteban, 84 Borrero, Juana, 84 Boti, Regino, 112 Bourdieu, Pierre, 12, 13 Brading, David, 16 Bueno, Salvador, 103–107, 109 Bulnes, Faustino, 28 Bulnes, Francisco, 30 Bunge, Carlos Octavio, 28, 33 Burke, Peter, 55 Burkhardt, Jacob, 27 Bush, George W., 145 Buzzi, David, 129 Cabrera Infante, Guillermo, 116, 117, 118, 119, 121, 128, 130 Cabrera, Lydia, 49, 137 Cabrera, Raimundo, 4, 102, 107 Caetano, Marcelo, 138

192

Index

Caillois, Roger, 90 Calbó Gay, Enrique, 32, 66 Calvino, Italo, 118 Cámara, Madeline, 125 Campa, Román de la, 55, 125 Caneti, Yanitzia, 116 Canetti, Elías, 118 Carballo, Roberto, 147 Carbonell Rivero, Néstor, 11, 13 Cardoso, Onelio Jorge, 104 Carlyle, Thomas, 100 Carpentier, Alejo, 49, 93–96, 110–111 Carreta, Julieta, 109 Carricarte, Arturo S., 103 Carrión, Miguel de, 104, 108 Casal, Julián del, 67, 94, 107, 112, 119 Casanovas, Martín, 7 Casas Romero, Luis, 11 Casas, Luis de las, 100 Castellanos, Jesús, 13, 35 Castillo, Aurelia, 103 Castro, Fidel, 13, 15, 19, 119, 120, 121, 127, 128, 130 Castro, Raúl, 151 Casuso, Teté, 109 Catá, Álvaro, 35 Cepeda, Josefina de, 109 Cepero Bonilla, Raúl, 4 Cercas, Javier, 127, 131 Cernuda, Luis, 75 Céspedes, Carlos Manuel de, 10, 13 Chacón y Calvo, José María, 5, 103–104, 107 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 27 Chaviano, Daína, 116, 122 Chibás, Eduardo, 13 Chinea, Hugo, 129 Cicerón, Marco Tulio, 17 Cioran, Emile, 1 Cisneros, Evangelina, 26 Clifford, James, 55 Colajanni, Napoleón, 31, 38 Collazo, Enrique, 4, 11

Columbus, Christopher, 10, 44 Conrad, Joseph, 118 Constant, Benjamin, 17 Cornejo Polar, Antonio, 46 Corona, Manuel, 11 Coronil, Fernando, 55 Cosculluela, Juan Antonio, 5, 43 Costa, Joaquín, 28 Crane, Stephen, 26–27 Creelman, James, 26 Cromwell, Oliver, 113 Cruz, Manuel de la, 102, 107 Cunningham, Merce, 122 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 66 DRivera, Paquito, 123 Dana, Charles, 26 Darío, Rubén, 9, 112 Darnton, Robert, 50 Davis, Richard Harding, 26 De Armas, Ramón, 16 De Cisneros Pérez, Guy, 79, 80, 86, 87 De Gaulle, Charles, 127 De Gobineau, Joseph Arthur, 27, 28 De la Fuente, Alejandro, 150 De la Guardia, Cristóbal, 31, 96 De Labra, Rafael María, 37 De Lapouge, Georges Vacher, 27 De Maetzu, Ramiro, 28 De Sola, José Sixto, 32 De Unamuno Miguel, 28, 75, 76 Del Monte, Domingo, 84 Delair, Paul, 18 Demoulins, Edmund, 29 Descartes, Rene, 74, 89 Desnoes, Edmundo, 8, 128 Díaz de Espada y Landa, Juan José, 100 Díaz de Villegas, Néstor, 122 Díaz Infante, Duanel, 149 Díaz Martínez, Manuel, 116, 122 Díaz Quiñones, Arcadio, 44, 97–98 Díaz Versón, Salvador, 129 Díaz, Jesús, 116, 122, 124, 129, 149 Diego, Eliseo, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74

Index Domínguez, Jorge I., 126, 150 Duby, Georges, 40, 50 Durán Alfredo, 147 Echerri, Vicente, 116 Eco, Umberto, 40 Eire, Carlos, 125 Elizalde, Rosa Miriam, 146 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 76, 100 Entralgo, Elías, 6, 49, 61 Erasmus, Desiderius, 80 Escalante Font, Fabián, 145 Estenoz, Evaristo, 60 Estrada Palma, Tomás, 9 Estrade, Paul, 19 Ette, Tomar, 12 Feo Rodríguez, José, 69, 74, 75, 76, 79 Fernández de Castro, José Antonio, 97, 103, 109, 111 Fernández Retamar, Roberto, 93–95 Fernández, Arístides, 94 Fernández, Damián J., 126, 150 Fernández, José Ramón, 147 Ferrara, Oretes, 7 Ferraris, Mauricio, 115 Ferrer, Buenaventura Pascual, 94 Ferri, Enrique, 45 Fierro, Martín, 77 Figarola-Caneda, Domingo, 5 Figueras, Francisco, 4, 32, 33, 66, 96 Florit, Eugenio, 112, 137 Fornet, Ambrosio, 104, 124 Foucault, Michel, 29, 48–49 Fouille, Alfred, 28 Franco, Francisco, 138 Franco, José Luciano, 5 Franqui, Carlos, 116, 117, 121 Freud, Sigmund, 10 Frías y Jacott, Francisco, 96 Fuentes, Norberto, 116, 117, 129 Funes Monzote, Reinaldo, 149

193

Galton, Sir Francis, 27 Gandarilla, Julio César, 35 Ganivet, Ángel, 28, 75, 80 Garay, Sindo, 11 García Calderón, Francisco, 35 García Coronado, Domitila, 106–107 García Marruz, Fina, 70, 71, 75, 83, 90 García Menocal, Mario, 9 García Moreno, Gabriel, 3 García Tudurí, Mercedes, 109 García Vega, Lorenzo, 66, 69, 104, 116 García, Calixto, 148 García, Yadira, 143 Gargarella, Roberto, 16 Garrigó, Roque E., 32, 33, 34, 66, 96 Gay Calbó, Enrique, 5, 7 Geertz, Clifford, 31, 55 General Grant, 19 Gershwin, George, 77 Giberga, Eliseo, 10–11, 16, 22 Gil, Lourdes, 125 Ginzburg, Carlo, 50 Goethe, Johan Wolfgang, 66, 132 Gómez de Avellaneda, Gertrudis, 101–103, 106–107, 110, 113, 137 Gómez, José Miguel, 9, 60, 148 Gómez, Juan Gualberto, 11, 22, 103 Gómez, Máximo, 10, 13, 69 González Cascorro, Raúl, 129 González del Valle, Francisco, 5 González del Valle, José Zacarías, 84 González del Valle, Manuel, 84 González Echevarría, Roberto, 55, 93 González, Elián, 144 Goodwin, Richard, 147 Graham, Martha, 122 Gramsci, Antonio, 124 Grau San Martín, Ramón, 14 Grossman, Leonid, 62 Guerra, Ramiro, 5, 45, 51, 59, 61, 95–98, 102 Guillén, Jorge, 75

194

Index

Guillén, Nicolás, 110–111 Guillermoprieto, Alma, 122 Guillory, John, 107 Gumplowicz, Ludwig, 38 Gutiérrez de Estrada, José María, 3 Gutiérrez Menoyo, Eloy, 128 Gutiérrez Sánchez, Gustavo, 7 Habermas, Jürgen, 1 Hamilton, Alexander, 20 Harrington, James, 17 Hart, Armando, 19 Hawthorn, Geoffrey, 34 Hay, John, 25 Hearst, William, 26 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 74 Heidegger, Martin, 115 Helg, Aline, 36 Henríquez Ureña, Max, 35, 103–107, 109 Heras León, Eduardo, 129 Heredia, José María, 17, 21, 94, 100–101, 103, 137, 119 Hernández Catá, Alfonso, 13, 111–112 Hernández, José Manuel, 16 Hernández, Rafael, 124 Herrera O’Reilly, Andrea, 125 Hobbes, Thomas, 17 Hollinger, David, 56 Ibarzábal, Federico de, 104, 111 Ichaso, Francisco, 51, 85 Iglesias, Marial, 10, 149 Irisarri, José Antonio, 3 Irving, Washington, 40 Ivanov, Viacheslav, 62 Ivonet, Pedro, 60 Jay, John, 20 Jenkins, Jonathan, 67 Jiménez González, Ángel, 147 Jiménez, Juan Ramón, 75, 83, 86

Juárez, Benito, 11, 17, 22, 130 Junger, Ernst, 30 Kant, Immanuel, 74 Koestler, Arthur, 117 Kymlicka, Will, 56 Labrador Ruiz, Enrique, 104 Lamar Schweyer, Alberto, 7, 45, 59, 97, 110 Landau, David, 132 Laso, Benito, 3 Lazo, Raimundo, 103–107, 110 Le Goff, Jacques, 50 Le Riverend, Julio, 53 Leal, Rine, 104 Leante, César, 116, 117, 118, 121, 128 Lerdo de Tejada, Sebastián, 17 Levinas, Emmanuel, 113 Lezama Lima, José, 7, 13, 49, 65–91, 93–95, 101, 104, 108, 110–112, 119, 137 Linz, Juan, 137 Livio, Tito, 17 Lizaso, Félix, 13–14, 85 Llaverías, Joaquín, 5 Llerena, Mario, 119 Lles, Fernando, 113 Locke, John, 17 Lombroso, César, 45 Loynaz del Castillo, Enrique, 84 Loynaz, Dulce María, 109–110, 113, 137 Luaces, Joaquín Lorenzo, 101 Luz y Caballero, José de la., 63, 94, 96, 100–101 Maceo, Antonio, 10, 13, 69 Machado, Gerardo, 13–14, 44, 57 Machover, Jacobo, 124 Madison, James, 20 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 50–53 Mallada, Lucas, 28 Manzano, Juan Francisco, 102, 112

Index Mañach, Jorge, 4, 5, 7, 13, 49, 61, 66, 85, 86, 87, 88, 98, 110–111, 119, 137 Margalit, Avishai, 133 Marinello, Juan, 7, 13, 19, 86, 87 Marqués Dolz, María Antonio, 149 Márquez Sterling, Carlos, 119 Márquez Sterling, Manuel, 4 Marrero, Leví, 40, 98, 119 Martí, José, 9–23, 29, 63, 67, 69, 77, 79, 81, 84, 93–95, 119, 107, 112, 130, 137, 144 Martínez Bello, Antonio, 13, 19 Martínez Ruiz, José (Azorín), 28 Marx, Karl, 44 Matos, Húber, 128, 130, 132 Mc Namara, Robert S., 147 Medina, Pablo, 125 Medina, Tristán de Jesús, 108, 113 Mella, Julio Antonio, 13–14, 19 Melville, Herman, 77 Méndez Rodenas, Adriana, 109, 125 Méndez, Manuel Isidro, 4 Mendive, Manuel, 146 Mercado, Manuel, 18 Merlin, Condesa de, 1, 68 Merton, Robert, 50 Mesa Lago, Carmelo, 150 Michnik, Adam, 139 Mier, Fray Servando Teresa de., 17, 63, 79 Milosz, Oscar, 65 Miranda, Francisco, 79 Miró Cardona, José, 119, 128 Mitjans, Aurelio, 101–103 Montaigne, Michel de, 115 Montenegro, Carlos, 111–112, 130 Montes Huidobro, Matías, 116 Montesquieu, 19 Montoro, Rafael, 4, 10, 16, 22–23, 96 Mora, José María Luis, 17 Moreno Fraginals, Manuel, 49, 54, 96, 98 Moreno Guiral, Mario, 32 Morote, Luis, 28

195

Morse, Richard, 77 Morúa Delgado, Martín, 60 Nabokov, Vladimir, 118 Navarro, Desiderio, 124 Navarro, Noel, 128 Navarro, Osvaldo, 129 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 74 Novás Calvo, Lino, 69, 130 Novikov, Iakov Alexandrovich, 28, 38 Núñez, Serafina, 109 O’Gorman, Edmundo, 44 Ocampo, Melchor, 17 Ojito, Mirta, 122 Ortiz, Fernando, 4–5, 13, 32, 33, 35, 36, 37, 38, 43–64 Otero, Lisandro, 113, 116, 117, 118, 124, 128 Pach, Walter, 75 Padilla, Heberto, 116, 117, 121 Padura, Leonardo, 124 Pagden, Anthony, 16 Palma, Ramón de, 113 Palti, Elías José, 16 Pardo, Felipe, 3 Parsons, Talcott, 50 Pascal, Blaise, 74 Paz, Octavio, 49 Perera, Hilda, 128 Pérez de Zambrana, Luisa, 103 Pérez Firmat, Gustavo, 55, 116, 117, 118, 119, 125 Pérez Jr., Louis A., 126, 150 Pérez López, Jorge, 150 Pérez Stable, Marifeli, 126, 150 Pérez, Hasán, 143 Pérez, Leonor, 10 Pérez, Lisandro, 150 Pi y Margall, Francisco, 18 Picavea Macias, Ricardo, 28 Piñera Llera, Humberto, 6, 74, 75 Piñera, Virgilio, 68, 69, 70, 74, 108, 111–112, 137

196

Index

Piñeyro, Enrique, 101, 103 Pitaluga, Gustavo, 97 Planas, Samuel, 147 Pocock, J.G.A., 16, 63 Ponte, Antonio José, 112 Pope San Gelasio, 82 Portal, Herminia del, 109 Portell Vilá, Heminio, 5, 50–54, 61, 97, 119 Portocarrero, René, 94 Portuondo, Fernando, 5 Portuondo, José Antonio, 104 Posada, Adolfo, 37 Poveda, José Manuel, 111–113 Prieto, José Manuel, 113, 116 Prío Socarrás, Carlos, 13–14 Pullitzer, Joseph, 26 Queen Isabel II, 10 Quesada, Gonzalo de, 11, 22 Quirós, Constancio Bernardo de., 45 Quiza Moreno, Ricardo, 149 Radcliffe Brown, Alfred Reginald, 50 Rama, Àngel, 46 Ramírez, Sergio, 127 Ramírez, Alejandro, 100 Ramos, José Antonio, 32, 34, 66 Ray Rivero, Manuel, 119 Remington, Frederick, 26 Remos y Rubio, Juan J., 103–107 Reyes, Alfonso, 35 Ricoeur, Paul, 105, 124 Ripoll, Carlos, 16 Rivero Collado, Andrés, 129 Rivero, Eliana, 125 Rivero, Otto, 143 Roa, Raúl, 19 Roca, Blas, 19 Rodó, José Enrique, 29, 30, 35, 63 Rodríguez Acosta, Ofelia, 109–110 Rodríguez Coronel, Rogelio, 104 Rodríguez Embil, Luis, 13–14, 35, 110–111, 113 Rodríguez, Arleen, 146

Rodríguez, Carlos Rafael, 19 Rodríguez, Emilio Gaspar, 113 Rodríguez, Julia, 109 Rodríguez, Mariano, 94 Rodríguez, Pedro Pablo, 16 Roig de Leuchsenring, Emilio, 5, 13, 51 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 51–52 Rosales, Guillermo, 122 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 17, 115 Rubalcava, Manuel Justo de, 112 Rueda, Salvador, 37 Saco, José Antonio, 95–98, 101 Said, Edgard, 44 Saint Agustine, 115 Salazar Roig, Arturo, 103 Salazar, Antonio, 138 Salillas, Rafael, 45 Sánchez, Pepe, 11 Sanguiy, Manuel, 4, 11, 13, 16, 22 Santayana, George, 74, 75, 76 Santí, Enrico Mario, 55, 61, 124 Santovenia, Emeterio, 5, 13, 51, 61, 97 Sarduy, Severo, 110–111, 130 Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, 17, 28 Sarusky, Jaime, 128 Schlesinger, Arthur M., 147 Shaftesbury, Conde de, 74 Shakespeare, William, 107 Shurz, Carl, 27 Soler Puig, José, 128 Sommer, Doris, 108 Soravilla, Lesbia, 109 Sorensen, Theodore C., 147 Spencer, Herbert, 31 Spengler, Oswald, 4, 27, 77 Steinberger, Charles, 69 Stendhal, 67 Stevens, Wallace, 75 Stocking, George W., 45 Stoddard, Lothrop, 27 Strong, Josiah, 27 Stuart Mill, John, 17

Index Sue, Eugene, 113 Sullivan, John, 27 Taine, Hyppolyte, 28 Tedlock, Denis, 55 Tejera, Nivaria, 121, 130 Tereso Valdés, José, 11 Tharp, Twyla, 122 Thomas, Dylan, 75 Thoreau, Henry David, 76 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 17, 76 Todorov, Tzvetan, 121 Tornes, Luis, 147 Toynbee, Arnold, 27 Trapiello, Andrés, 127 Trelles, Carlos M., 5 Trevor, J.C., 56 Trías, Eugenio, 40 Tro, Emilio, 67 Troeltsch, Ernest, 27 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 40 Twain, Mark, 27, 40 Ulacia, Manuel, 49 Urfé, Idilio, 11 Valdés Caridad, 11 Valdés Machuca, Ignacio, 84, 113 Valdés Menéndez, Ramiro, 147 Valdés, Gabriel de la Concepción (Pla´cido), 102–103, 111–112 Valdés, Zoé, 116, 122 Valenciaga, Carlos, 143 Valery, Paul, 66

197

Varela, Félix, 17, 63, 82, 100–101, 137 Varela, Francisco, 33 Varona, Enrique José, 4, 11, 16, 22, 32, 49, 79, 102 Varona, Manuel Antonio de, 119, 128 Vasconcelos, José, 56 Vázquez Díaz, René, 149 Vico, Giambattista, 83, 101 Victoria, Carlos, 116, 122 Villalón, Pepe, 11 Villaverde, Cirilo, 104, 108, 110–111, 119 Villilo, Emilio V., 11 Vitier, Cintio, 65–91, 104, 109, 111 Vitier, Medardo, 6, 97 Washington, George, 21 Weber, Max, 27 Weyler, Valeriano, 26 White, José, 103 Whitehead, Laurence, 142 Whitman, Walt, 77 Williams, William Carlos, 75 Wood, Leonard, 31 Yúdice, George, 55, 107 Zambrano, María, 49, 74, 75, 89 Zayas, Alfredo, 9 Zéndegui, Guillermo de, 90, 121 Zenea, Juan Clemente, 100, 103, 108 Zequeira y Arango, Manuel de, 112 Zumeta, César, 29