Mea Cuba Guillermo Cabrera Infante Although the revolution has enormously expanded the physical infrastructure of cul- ture in Cuba and increased people's access to cultural resources, the relationship be- tween intellectuals and the revolutionary state has often been tense. The political cul- ture of the revolution emphasizes, even demands, a high degree of commitment from citigens, as well as a certain subordination of individual needs to the achievement of collective goals. And though the worst excesses of Soviet-style “socialist realism” have been avoided, dogmatic and intolerant positions adopted by cultural functionar- ies have placed limits on artistic and cultural expression and given rise to censorship, self-censorship, and other forms of cultural exclusion. The clash between the logic of revolutionary unity and cultural and intellectual autonomy was observed most clearly during the first decade of the revolution as Cuban artists and writers adjusted to the opportunities and challenges posed by the new state. The following selections reveal some of the issues involved. Guillermo Cabrera Infante (b. 1929), one of the most dis- tinguished Cuban writers living outside of the island, provides a characteristically hu- morous and sharply drawn account of several moments in the contest between cultural innovation and bureaucratic obscurantism during the 1960s. Revolucién had been the voice from the underground of the 26th of July Move- ment, the organization which did more to put Fidel Castro in power than the puny guerrilla he has made everybody believe did the job. Above ground now, Revolucién became a very powerful newspaper indeed, the first in Cuba and the only one that had access to the innermost recesses of power in the Govern- ment and in Cuban political life in general. Moreover, it had, for Cuba —at the time a country of some seven million people—an enormous circulation. Lunes profited from all this and became the first literary magazine in Latin America or Spain to boast of a circulation of almost two hundred thousand copies. Lunes had a lot of pull—and not merely literary push. My first mistake as an editor was to try and clean out the Cuban liter- ary stables by sweeping the house of words with a political broom. That's called an inquisition, and it can induce writer's block by terror. The maga-482 Guillermo Cabrera Infante zine, with the heavy weight of the Revolution and the government behind it plus the 26th of July Movement’s political prestige, literally blasted many Writers into submission—or oblivion. We had the Surrealist credo as our cate- chism and Trotskyite politics as our aesthetics, mixed like bad metaphors— or heady drinks. From this position of maximum strength, we proceeded to annihilate respected writers of the past, like Lezama Lima, simply because he dared to combine in his poems the anachronistic ideologies of [Luis de] Gon- gora and [Stéphane] Mallarmé, now joined in Havana to produce disjointed verse of a magnificently obscure Catholicism. We actually tried to assassinate Lezama’s character. There were other, older casualties, like the Spanish dentist who wanted to be a Dantist and whose recently published novel was pulled from its Asturian roots with laughing gas. At the same time, the magazine exalted Virgilio Pifiera, a man of Lezama’s generation, to the position of 2 Virgil out of double hell. He who had always been a pariah in his own coun- try, a novelist who was terribly poor, almost destitute, became our favorite father figure, the house-writer. Another mistake. Besides being an excellent short-story writer anthologized by Borges, a playwright of genius (he penned a play after the fashion of the theatre of the absurd when Ionesco hadn't yet staged The Bald Prima Donna [Soprano] and long before Beckett wrote W ing for Godot) and a pleasant poet, Virgilio had a particular fault. As with San Andreas, it was a very visible one. Virgilio, like his Roman counterpart, was 2 pederast. Perhaps the epitome of the literary queen, a Cuban Cocteau known not for his plays but for his playmates. That was food for gossip in Paris, but this was revolutionary Havana and there was no room left for queens shout “Off with his head!” in a revolution: all Cuban queens ended up with no he not even their own, especially not their own. ‘Third original sin in a row: there were too many talented people grouped around Lunes, each one supporting the Revolution in their fashion. José Bar= gafio, the Surrealist poet who came back from his exile in Paris where he befriended by André Breton himself, who hated Sunday painters and mim poets, was pet poet and pet pest on the magazine. Heberto Padilla, born in same town as Baragafio (the funnily named Puerta de Golpe in Cuban toba country: Puerta de Golpe literally means, as if Larry Grayson had named = “Shut the Door”), came from exile in the Berlitz Academy in New York, cultivated an easygoing but mordant style of verse. Padilla was a powerful poss in Lunes. Both Baragafio and Padilla, pugnacious poets, were out to get the older generation, many of them civil servants from Batista times and even b fore, as was the case with Lezama. Calvert Casey, who, in spite of his name and having been born in Baltimore, was not only a Cuban buta true habanew delicate and precise in the exquisite concealments of his homosexual pMea Cuba 483 though he had a mulatto lover, openly a couple. Anton Arrufat was a disciple of Pifiera—and not only in playwriting. Pablo Armando Ferndndez, a minor poet but an accomplished diplomat capable of extricating the magazine from any critical jam, was our pint-size Sebastian, a moving target. He isstill in Cuba, still a diplomat but no longer a poet, minor or otherwise. He is professionally dedicated to being host to political tourists from the United States, where he lived in a closet in Queens, before returning to Cuba, already married, in 1959. Like Padilla and Hurtado, I persuaded Pablo to come back to Cuba from the States. Oscar Hurtado, also an economic exile in New York, was 2 dear giant ofa man, like the family elephant, but an incredible shrinking poet, inimical to Lezama and his Origenes group, and died not only unrecognized but unrecog- nizing in an asylum, suffering silently and alone from a varicose brain. And, never allowed to leave the boat when it was listing (Lunes was on all the lists of the security service, the counterespionage service, and the police), there was 1, who, though an inveterate smoker, couldn't share the peace pipe be- cause I smoked only cigars then. The magazine, as you can sec, was manned by a manic crew of pederasts (wait and you'll see why this fact of life became crucial to our demise), the happy few, as Che Guevara labeled us, who were not real revolutionaries, with a skipper who, no doubt due to myopia, saw the danger signals very, very late. Too late, in fact. I discovered that we had no true power when we hit what seemed a mere sectarian wave but was the tip of the totalitarian iceberg. Lunes should have been called the Titanic, for very soon we were in deep, cold waters. Before sinking, I saw clearly that we had tried to make the Revolution readable, therefore livable. Both tasks proved utterly "impossible. In its heyday, however, Lunes expanded quickly. Soon we had branched out into a publishing house (Ediciones R), whose first published book was Poesia, revolucién del ser (“Poetry, being’s revolution,” though, only a few months earlier, its author, José Baragafio, still the Paris Surrealist, had titled it Being Is Nothingness). This collection of poems was, in 1960, a rehashing of all the Surreal formulas of the preceding twenty years, but now sang a song to the Revolution and to the Heideggerian being for death. Though now, instead of nothingness, it offered everythingness. Opportunism, thy name is poetry. ‘Then we had an hour, at peak time, on television, second channel to the left. We formed a record company, called Sonido Erre, or Sound R, R for Revolu- tion. Our publishing venture— quite successful, by the way—was at the time che only independent publishing house left in Cuba. All the rest had already been nationalized. But it was no privilege, this solitary printing-press under private ownership. It was, in fact, as ominous as a smoke signal in Apache ter- story, It was then that I committed a mistake which proved to be a blessing484 Guillermo Cabrera Infante in disguise. I helped Saba, my brother, with the completion of a documen tary he was making with the cinematographer Orlando Jiménez-Leal—at the time the youngest photographer in Cuba, capable of handling a CinemaScope camera when he was fifteen, quite a film feat. As its title suggests, PM. would be a view of Havana after dark, the camera peeping into the small cafés and bars and dives patronized by the common Cuban having a last time before the political night closed in. I liked the idea. I gave them the money to edit the documentary, print two or three copies, and design the titles. All this was done outside the Film Institute—that is, officialdom—in our Tv channel labs but quite openly. Lunes got the exclusive rights to show the picture on its program and we showed it. There was no censorship for us on television. Asin my mag=- zine, we were our own boss. After all, we were the offspring of Revolucién, the newspaper of the Revolution, the voice of the people. We were omnipotent— sort of. But a spectacle needs spectators, and the filmmakers wanted to show their little night film of music to a live audience. There were still two or three cine- mas not yet nationalized in Old Havana. One of them specialized in documen- taries. The owneragreed to run the film: the next step was to obtain permission from the Comisién Revisora to show the picture in public. The Comision Reve sora was the same censorship office as in Batista’s time and further bac] headquarters you could see The Great Train Robbery and even Edison's The was under the control of the Film Institute, which is nothing like the Britis Film Institute but a state monopoly which controls everything that has t with films— from making pictures to importing, distributing, and exhibitin them. The Cuban Film Institute owns all the cinemas, drive-ins, and moy houses in Cuba—and you must go to them even to get a roll of film fora s: shot camera. On top of that, they had a long-standing feud with Lunes, whi they labeled as decadent, bourgeois, avant-gardist, and, the worst epithet in th Communist name-calling catalogue, cosmopolitist [cosmopolite]. In turn. saw them as despicable bureaucrats, a bunch of ignoramuses with artistically reactionary ideas and no taste at all. The director of the Film Institute, Alfrede Guevara (no relation to Che Guevara), was the worst Communist commiss== to deal with films this side of Stalin's Shumyavsky. To take P.M. to the Film stitute for approval was a naive and daring thing to do—like Little Red Ri Hood drilling the wolf’s teeth. But, you see, it simply had to be done. Some time later, Revolucién was going to be killed and reborn under the name Granma—and it has indeed shown big bad teeth ever since. Nevertheless. didn’t expect such a brutal bite. The Comisién Revisora not only refuse give any seal of approval to PM., but banned the film, which was accused =Mea Cuba 485 being counter-revolutionary and dangerous rubbish and licentious and lewd. Furthermore, they seized the copy sent for approval. This was more than we could stomach—even if there was to be a purge at the end of it. We had been expecting a showdown with the Film Institute. But it was to become a shoot-out. The banning of PM. occurred in June 1961, in what could be termed a period between two wars. In April that year the Bay of Pigs invasion took place. All the invaders had been impressively routed in less than forty-eight hours and, rather hastily, Fidel Castro had declared Cuba a socialist republic, though the country would be neither. The times were auspi- cious for the Communist Party (now merged with the remnants of the 26th of July Movement and the ghost of the Revolutionary Directory into one single party called orr[Organizaciones Revolucionarias Integradas]), somuch so that its Council for Culture had decided to stage a writers’ congress in Havana and to invite a few foreign novelists of note, such as Nathalie Sarraute, who were sympathizers of the Revolution but not necessarily Communists. In the meantime, in some kind of political montage (hooves of Klansmen’s horses galloping, then cut to damsel in distress, then cut to threatening blackamoor), Lunes was seen busily collecting signatures to protest about the sequestering of PM,, the little night film. This was going to have wider implications, with the Communist congress about to take place. When they saw us coming and knew we meant business the Council for Culture panicked. They asked us please not to turn the letter against the Film Institute into a manifesto by making the statement public. In turn, they prom- ised to postpone their congress and wash our dirty linen indoors by orches- trating a meeting (of all the factions concerned) with Fidel Castro and almost the entire Government. It was a sneaky ambush, the varmints. They invited all the intellectuals involved—and then some. The meetings took place every Friday for three consecutive weeks and were held in the spacious hall of the National Library, built by Batista but claimed by Castro. The day of the first meeting came like doom. On the rostrum were Fidel Castro, President Dorticés (since deposed), the Minister of Education Armando Hart (now Minister for Culture), his wife Haydée Santamaria, head of the Casa de las Américas (later a suicide), Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, then an influential Communist leader, now the third man from Moscow in Havana, his former wife Edith Garcia Buchaca (then the head of the Communist cul- tural apparatus, who later lived under house arrest for fifteen years), Vicentina Antuna, boss of the Council for Culture (under the political spell of Buchaca), Alfredo Guevara, no Che at all but a tropical Machiavelli giving advice not only to the Prince but also to the King, Then bringing up the rear came the scape-285 Guillermo Cabrera Infante eats, lambs feeding with lions: Carlos Franqui, editor of Revolucién, and I, as editor of Lunes... . Itbecame evident to everyone (defendants, prosecutor, jury, judge, and wit- nesses) that this was a show trial held in private: it was not only PM. but Lunes (end everything it stood for in Cuban culture) that was in the dock. Kafka in Cuba, Prague in Havana. Most of the people who took the stand were sworn enemies of the magazine—and some had reason to be. Like the fat woman who sent in some sonnets that were published in the magazine with the title: “From the Fat Lady of the Sonnets.” The pained dentist who thought he was Dante al dente complained bitterly. He not only complained but cried and prayed (he was a Catholic convert) and called us chartered murderers who as- sassinated writers as ifthey were so many characters. We were the hit-and-run men of culture. The Marxian Mafia perhaps? It was an impassioned though toothless speech—and he got what he wanted all along: a job as Ambassador to the Vatican as a consolation prize. ‘There were other witnesses, all for the prosecution, and a masked witness took off his mask for everyone to see his face: Baragafio, the Surrealist poet who instigated all the attacks against Lezama and his disciples, had turned on us! There was an expected enemy, though: Guevara, by nowa guerrilla speaker who couldn't say his rs, delivered a blow below the belt at both Revolucién and Lunes. Before 1 was an infante terrible; now I was a babe in the wood. Fidel Castro himself talked to us. Characteristically, he had the last word. Getting rid first of the ever-present Browning 9 mm fastened to his belt—making true a metaphor by Goebbels: “Every time I hear the word culture, I reach for my pis- tol” — Castro delivered one of his most famous speeches, famous not for being eight hours long, but for being brief and to the point for the first time since he became Cuba’s Prime Minister. His deposition is now called “Words to the Intellectuals,’ and it ends with a résumé which Castroites everywhere claim to be a model of revolutionary rhetoric but which is really a Stalinist credo: “Within the Revolution, everything,” he thundered like a thousand Zeuses. “Against the Revolution, nothing!” Everybody applauded, some in good faith. Though not I. [had to applaud even when I knew full well what he meant by his slogan. It had been the case of a sentence without a verdict: through-the- looking-glass justice. The outcome of the trial was that the Film Institute gave back the seized copy of PM, to its makers, but the film remained censored. Lunes was banned, too, and barely three months later ceased appearing. There was an official ex- planation for the stay of execution: an acute shortage of newsprint. A likely story. Three more literary publications saw daylight after the meetings: Unis a monthly from the Writers’ Union, dedicated to Communist culture, GacetaMea Cuba 487 de Cuba, a weekly published by the Writers’ Union that resembled Lunes like Cain resembled Abel, and an illustrated magazine issued by the Council for Culture that looked like a tattered Tatler. Three red reviews all in a row. The Communists had their congress (why do they need congresses so much? —is ita fixation or a fix?) with foreign writers as guests. In a typical gambit I was made one of the seven vice-presidents of the newly formed Writers’ Union, so IT wouldn't complain. I didn’t. I never intended to. You see, I had been in the Soviet Union the year before and found out what happened to all the writers who dared displease Stalin, even sotto voce. A tropical version of Stalin, even behind beards, could be tropically lethal. TRANSLATED BY KENNETH HALL