Gramsci in 1960s Cuba

Fernando Martinez Heredia, Alex Martin

Nepantla: Views from South, Volume 2, Issue 2, 2001, pp. 373-385 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

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 Gramsci in 1960s Cuba

Fernando Martínez Heredia

W
hy Gramsci in 1960s Cuba? Antonio
Gramsci’s work had been gaining a wider audience in most nations of the
world since the late 1950s, after many years of being excluded or forgotten
(except in Italy, where excluding or forgetting Gramsci was impossible).
And yet he passed through some valleys in his ascent. These are attributable
to his position outside Marxism’s dominant current, which was working
then for specific political ends—some of them quite spurious—and to the
specificity of each audience’s context. In Cuba Gramsci was appreciated
early, but the context was peculiar in two respects: first, he became known
here shortly after the triumph of a profound anticapitalist revolution of
national liberation; second, this small, very Western nation, locked in a
bitter standoff with the United States, was a country with a colonial and
neocolonial past and an entirely homegrown revolutionary process that had
nonetheless linked itself, recently and very solidly, to the center of so-called
world socialism.
I would like to make a brief and general reference to certain as-
pects of this revolution, background I believe essential to our topic here. The
palpable demonstration of the power of action against limits of the possible
hitherto thought intangible was the first great cultural change worked by
the Revolution, and it has remained among the most important. Any rev-
olution is a victory against the limits of the possible, and in Cuba this was
true to an extreme degree. A political system based on limited sovereignty,
on the acceptance of general corruption and the ineffectiveness of democ-
racy, all made even harsher by the installation of a very harsh dictatorship,
was laid waste by organized popular action. The most deeply rooted beliefs
underlying the acceptance of the social system were swept away when par-
ticipation reached massive proportions in tandem with the steps taken by

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the revolutionary power. A community that had great respect for fate but
not necessarily for the church, a public whose tendency to place its hopes in
individualism and chance had been exacerbated, suddenly realized its own
strength and exercised this with exemplary enthusiasm and willpower, not
to mention unquenchable optimism.1
The change that the Cubans operated in themselves was the prin-
cipal fruit of all this effort and of this exceptional upheaval in people’s
relationships, ideas, and sensibilities. The Revolution converted the present
into change and the future into projects. This profound alteration in the
sense of time, as well as the multiplying numbers of participants in the
revolutionary events, so transformed daily life that until now only art has
been able to transmit these exploits effectively to people who didn’t live
them. Furthermore, this alteration wasn’t brief. Its prolongation ensured
the change in lifestyle, in the results of the reproduction of social life, in
the country’s basic institutions, and even in its customs. The prerequisite
for this achievement was a prolonged union of the two principal impacts
of revolutions: first, the liberating fervor that unleashes potential, making
victory and change possible, and second, the revolutionary power that chan-
nels, guarantees, and organizes. The Revolution had to confront extreme
situations, to which it reacted in the first decade with successive deepenings
of the process. This generated many new situations and problems, in mul-
tiple terrains. It is in these fields that the Revolution’s cultural problems are
found, with “cultural” meant in a broad sense.
In examining the events and situations that marked this process,
we see that there were many ideological confrontations. In the years of the
insurrectional struggle, then later in victory and in the 1960s, there were
countless tensions, differences, and polemics among those involved in the
Revolution. For instance, central to the debate from the beginning of the
1960s was the question of whether Cuba would be a “popular democracy”
in the Eastern European sense or whether it would create its own kind of
revolution. What would Cuban socialism be like? Other points debated
included the unity of the revolutionaries, political organization, changes
in agriculture, various economic topics (e.g., what would be the general
orientation and the role of the economy in Cuban socialism?), literary and
artistic creation, and the relationship between culture and politics.2 The
breadth of what the process would allow and promote in individuals was a
marvelous social reality for the majority, but at the conceptual level it was an
unknown. The profusion of debates, the subjects they considered and the
freedom with which they were undertaken—in a country in which dissent
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Martínez Heredia . Gramsci in 1960s Cuba

against the Revolution in the media was not tolerated—was in itself very
favorable and a clear sign of the health and vigor of the new regime.3
After the battle of Girón and the proclamation of the process’s
socialist character (April 1961), Marxism was considered to be the ideology
of the Revolution and official measures were taken to make it known.
But most important was that many thousands of people became passionate
about Marxism, and its presence became a social fact that brought with
it problems of thought and feeling. Although they had been known in
some Cuban circles since the nineteenth century, it was only during the
Revolution of 1930 that the ideas of Marxism took root on the island. But it
was the enormous transformation that the revolutionary process caused in
daily life and in society that made Marxism an ideology of the masses. Today
we may ask this question: Did Marxism come to the aid of the Revolution
or just legitimate it? The formal elements of existing Marxism seemed to be
useful for the latter. The problem was whether our thought was going to be
the kind that followed or the kind that created; without losing its specificity,
the question was intimately bound up in the very nature of the Revolution.
Marxism already had a long history and a diversified cultural her-
itage. We couldn’t just use it as we pleased. So along with Soviet oil and
weapons we received the products and influence of the Soviet theorized ide-
ology known as Marxism-Leninism, reinforced by those of other members
of the world communist movement. Soviet and French communist texts
were widely read; they contained a rigidly dogmatic theory at the service
of an ideology of legitimation and obedience.4 The fundamental issue was
not academic, nor even entirely one of ideas. It was a battle in which each
side had elements in its favor but from which violence—which has played
such a prominent role in other revolutions—had been excluded. A war of
ideas thus took place within the Revolution. Through a complex process,
the ideas and ideology generated by the Revolution gained ground, and
they conditioned the Cuban Marxism of that decade. The public statements
of the nation’s principal leaders greatly favored the tendency. In no way
did this eliminate the relative autonomy that thought always enjoys. Out of
this autonomy came studies and debates, things consumed and produced,
whose fruits became the contents of the massive expansion of Marxism in
Cuba, filling its different forms and aspects.5
Why and how did Gramsci arrive here? Whom did his appearance
serve? Was it polemical? I find I have to be almost telegraphic. First and
foremost, Gramsci did not come to us from the U.S.S.R. or through the
French Communists. Nor was he a product of the Khrushchevian “thaw,”
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that modernization so moderate that it unfroze none of the basic prob-

lems. From Eastern Europe we received, at the most, ideas about economic
reform, a certain philosophic humanism, and Polish thought; the French
prose went no further in its contents. Furthermore, this literature was in
the minority with respect to its own principal line, and both lived in the
tenacious shadow of Stalinism. From that Europe came E. G. Liberman
and Roger Garaudy, but not Gramsci. The communist movement guided
by the U.S.S.R., which had sung the praises of Georgi Dimitrov, instead rec-
ognized Palmiro Togliatti as its foremost intellectual. But reality is always
complicated. The pro-Soviet Argentine Communist Party—which in 1950
had published a very tendentious selection of Gramsci’s Prison Letters—in
1958 launched the publication in Latin America of the Prison Notebooks
on the initiative of one of its leaders, the intellectual Héctor Pablo Agosti.6
Agosti’s prologue to the first volume, El materialismo histórico y la filosofía
de Benedetto Croce, reveals in its four pages the reach and limits of this man
of the Party, who is clearly going as far as he can but who is nonetheless
constrained.
One rational explanation for Gramsci’s sudden emergence on the
scene may lie in two relatively simultaneous necessities, given the challenge
posed by China, the Cuban Revolution, national liberation movements, and
the growing unease and insurgency of the 1960s: first, the need, felt by those
who struggled or longed for profound change, for effective instruments
of thought; and second, the need for theory and imagery to be “updated”
by people who figured in the Left but who were unable or unwilling to
change themselves in order to confront the radicalness of the new situation.
The arrival of Gramsci’s thought in Cuba, naturally, was due to the first
necessity. Gramsci’s intellectual history in Latin America, in the context
that I have already mentioned, has been described over the past twenty
years by numerous authors and debated in many forums, but the limits of
this article do not allow me to go into those discussions. I will simply make
one comment: The failure by most authors to consider the Cuban case is
deleterious to an understanding of the subject. The dissemination and use
of Gramsci’s thought in 1960s Cuba are not mentioned, nor are the Cuban
editions of the 1960s ever cited.
The Cuban heresy adopted Gramsci unselfconsciously, even when
he remained very problematic in the U.S.S.R. and in Eastern Europe. We
had known his work ever since Editorial Lautero’s publication of the four
“green books” (so called here for the dark green covers of the paperback
edition), which arrived in Cuba in considerable quantity around 1964. A
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Martínez Heredia . Gramsci in 1960s Cuba

biographical pamphlet, “Una revolución contra El capital” [A revolution

against Das Kapital] (Gramsci 1957), and a few other texts helped inform a
number of Cubans who, in 1964 and 1965, were anxious to better understand
Marxism. From the very beginning, we could see that Gramsci had several
things to recommend him.

• He was a soldier of the Revolution; in Cuba this was of fundamen-

tal importance. He had been a founder of the Italian Communist
Party and for ten years was a prisoner of the fascists, who released
him only when he was on the point of death.7 With these creden-
tials, he had every reason to be appreciated.
• He was a critic of the Soviet version of Marxism, not only through
his early critique of Nikolay Bukharin’s Historical Materialism,
but in his entire theoretical position. Furthermore, he seemed to
be rejected by the dogmatists, which spoke well for him.
• He wrote very suggestively about fundamental issues, proposing
ideas and raising questions that led the reader to rethink com-
monplaces, and promoted an intellectual labor that inquires and
explores the depths instead of being content with simplifications.8
He offered a concept of culture and its relationship to politics,
ideologies, and the creation of socialism.
• He held a philosophical position that defended the centrality of
dialectics, a philosophy of praxis. His work satisfied the hunger
of the new Marxists, who wanted to think for themselves. Since
the first half of the nineteenth century Cuba had lacked a signif-
icant philosophical tradition. The most organized forms of social
thought had been political and historical ideas, pedagogy, and the
political programs of organizations. With the establishment of rev-
olutionary power emerged the need for a philosophy, which had
to be Marxist. Gramsci offered the possibility of a creative Marxist
philosophy.

No polemic erupted when Gramsci’s work appeared in Cuba.

It made a place for itself rather quietly, although, certainly, some ad-
mired the man and others didn’t. Those who read him came from dif-
ferent lines of work and walks of life. Some were people who, though
searching for aesthetic Marxist fundamentals consistent with the country’s
cultural needs and problems, were at odds with “socialist realism,” the
texts on “Marxist-Leninist aesthetics,” and the concrete manifestations of
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dogmatism. Gramsci found other readers among those who rejected the po-
sitions of peaceful coexistence, “national democracy,” opposition to armed
struggle in Latin America, the “struggle for peace” as geopolitics between
the powers, hegemony in the name of socialism, and so on, but who needed
to take these stands as Marxists instead of being excluded or excluding
themselves before the arrogant “proprietors” of Marxism. He was also dis-
covered by those who worked in the field of theory and craved oxygen for
their thought so that it could truly exist, who wanted to develop the faculty
of thought with native criteria, as the Revolution’s leaders themselves had
called for. I will cite just one example, that of the group that I belonged to at
the time, “los de la calle K” [the K Street bunch], so known for the location
of the University of Havana’s Department of Philosophy, created by the
University Reform Law of 1962. The “oldest” members of this collective
of young people worked there for nine years, from 1 February 1963 until
the department was dissolved at the end of 1971. Among the activities of
this group was the creation of the monthly theoretical review Pensamiento
crítico, which was published from February 1967 to August 1971.
The mission of this department was to impart Marxist philosophy
to all the university disciplines, those distributed among what today are the
universities of medical science, technology, pedagogy, agronomy, and the
University of Havana (which includes the schools of humanities, science,
and law). To all the campuses, in other words. Despite being such young
and novice educators, we were charged with training all those students
in philosophy; we weren’t above making fun of ourselves and each other,
something that always helps. First and foremost for us was serving the
Revolution, which goes to show that we weren’t terribly original: most
Cubans thought that way then. Second, as far as Marxism was concerned,
we had to “set the ocean on fire” [incendiar el océano]. The image wasn’t
ours; it came from a leader of the Revolution (Osvaldo Dorticós Torrado),
in early 1964. Setting the ocean on fire meant developing Marxist theory
in Cuba in such a way that it could satisfy and play roles appropriate to
the needs of the Cuban Revolution. Soon we saw the need to fight dogma
and reformism; theoretical dogmatism and political reformism at the time
generally went together, although in reality they never have been mutually
exclusive. But taking a stand was not enough; it was barely the beginning.
We needed to contribute to the creation of a new philosophic dimension,
one that would not simply be an ornament of politics. In private we said,
with youthful cheek, “We have to make Marxism-Leninism rise to the level
of the Cuban Revolution.”
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Martínez Heredia . Gramsci in 1960s Cuba

In this way we took part in the clash of ideas of that period. We

soon had critics. By about 1965 we set about eliminating the Soviet manuals
from our classes and were called “classicists” for the “error” of using Marx,
Engels, and Lenin. Some deemed that we were “leftist revisionists” for
copying for the students’ use Che’s Algiers speech of February 1965. But
we didn’t want to be simply spokespeople for a political line. Our teaching
work and our study were very organized, with rigorous requirements. We
studied and researched with great perseverance, trying to forge a method
that would oppose bias and dogma. Our investigations had to be truly
honest, that is, they had to take into account criteria and data that diverged
from or opposed our ideas.
For us, Gramsci quenched a thirst and provoked many questions.
We began teaching his ideas in 1965, mimeographing for students such
texts as his “The So-Called Reality of the External World” and “Base and
Superstructure.”9 Early in 1966, in the midst of a profound reformulation of
our curricula, we published a first text for students, a very thick book with
rather improbable pagination, the “libro amarillo” [yellow book] (Depart-
ment of Philosophy 1966). Of this anthology’s 746 pages, pieces by Gramsci
took up 53, in four groups of texts. He joined authors such as Karl Marx,
Wassily Leontief, Gordon Childe, Vladimir Lenin, Friedrich Engels, Guy
Besse, Louis Althusser, Paul Sweezy, Amílcar Cabral, Fidel Castro, Che
Guevara, Exari Polikarov, Régis Debray, S. T. Meliujin, Albert Einstein,
and Manuel Sacristán. Short pieces by some of us also appeared in the vol-
ume. It was itself a Gramscian presentation of our problem, that is, “We
have included everyone here, in a certain order, and guided by a purpose.”
A second textbook, known as the “libro verde” [green book], was published
two years later (Department of Philosophy 1968).10 Though much more
ambitious, it was based on the same principle. It included many of our own
contributions.
Edición Revolucionaria was a project in which our group was
deeply involved from the founding of the publishing house in December
1965; on 1 September 1966, it became the Instituto Cubano del Libro. The
first two books in its philosophy collection were El materialismo histórico y la
filosofía de Benedetto Croce (Gramsci 1966) and La ideología alemana (Marx
and Engels 1966). Already Gramsci was in the hands of thousands of Cuban
readers. Periodicals also published texts by him, and especially ones about
him and his thought.
Midway through the decade we began to receive Italian texts by
and about Gramsci. In the mostly leftist Italian books and periodicals that
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reached Cuba Gramsci’s presence could be strongly felt. By the end of

the decade we were relatively well furnished with this material, through
exchanges and with the help of friends and people interested in the Cuban
Revolution, which at the time was very influential in the worldwide Left.11
In 1970 we had the recent biography by Giuseppe Fiori (1966) translated
but could not get it published here.12 In 1973 the Antología edited by Manuel
Sacristán was published, but this volume, based on the Mexican edition put
out by Siglo XXI in 1970, was posthumous in terms of the first phase of
Gramsci study in Cuba.
Let me now sum up the intellectual and ideological results of
this first phase. It made his work known to the extent that, from 1965 to
1971, many thousands of university students—first in Havana, and later
also in Oriente and Las Villas—were taught Gramsci’s thought through
his own texts. In a multitude of schools affiliated with state entities and
political and military organizations thousands more read his work. In the
curricula of these institutions, and in the training and promotion classes
for philosophy teachers and professors, Gramsci was included. His ideas
were used extensively in social research, which at the time was feverishly
promoted by the country’s political leadership. It must be emphasized that
the study of Gramsci began with his own texts and not with interpretations;
this practice was also followed in the teaching and divulgation of his work.13
In terms of content, the assimilation of Gramsci achieved optimal
results. First and foremost, it led to a reformulation that included culture
and the role of the intellectual in Marxist theory, with both subjects con-
sidered in relation to domination and revolution. In Gramsci’s thought
the culture of the subaltern classes was a central theme; and a theory that
connects ordinary people and philosophy is a very felicitous achievement
for a society in revolution. Gramsci truly relates the Marxist worldview
with practical politics. The idea—fundamental for us—is that the socialist
transition should consist of a succession and a combination of enormous
cultural changes, and not in the supposed “construction of the technico-
material base,” as if the economy were a locomotive towing the wagons
of society. Gramsci helped us to think the concept of socialism that we
embraced—which I continue to consider the right one—of the process as a
series of profound cultural changes. He also had a philosophical approach
to revolution as something human created by human beings. And he never
let us forget the tremendous complexity of the social.
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Martínez Heredia . Gramsci in 1960s Cuba

Second, Gramsci pleaded powerfully against the dogmatism of

so-called dialectical and historical materialism, against the mix of specu-
lative and positivist thought offered up in the name of Marxism, against
metaphysics, evolutionism, simplification, authoritarianism, scientism, and
pedantry.
Third, through his critical conception of the world, he offered a
theoretical terrain in which there was room for many issues to function
and be articulated, among them hegemony as the theater of cultural strug-
gle; the Party as organized action, collective intellect, and form of power;
philosophy as a vehicle for transcending common sense; the organic
intellectuals; and recovering the centrality of dialectics.
Fourth, Gramsci contributed to our pursuit of the only overarch-
ing and viable objective of the socialist transition, that of transcending the
capitalist horizon through work with consciousness and subjectivity. From
Marx we learned the need to rise up against the entire imposed world and
not simply against one part of it; in other words, he taught us that we need,
not to go from one form of domination to another, but to end all forms of
domination. In Gramsci we found a theory able to participate in the creation
of socialism. It allowed one to think deeply the complexity of a socialism
that would take on the effective socialization of the means of production,
the economy, and all of political life. An internationalism, instead of a
raison d’état. A socialism that would organize revolutionary struggle and
change, that is, one that would overcome the limits placed on human action
by the so-called material or objective conditions of reproduction of social
life. A socialism that would neither fear nor demagogically obscure the fact
that socialist transition must have its form of domination, but which would
develop the means of progressively socializing the control and weakening
the nature of domination, making more viable the growing exercise of free-
doms essential to the existence and progress of socialism. Gramsci gave us
a theory and the first outlines of a dialectics between domination and free-
dom in the socialist transition and thus between power and the project, a
dialectics in which power must serve the project.
Fifth and finally, in studying the life of this admirable man we
also got to know one of the protagonists of a historical drama that played
itself out in several tableaux: the apogee and tragedy of Bolshevism and the
class struggles of 1920s and 1930s Europe, the first attempt to universalize
the Communist movement and Marxism, the end of the Soviet Revolution,
and the official dogmatization of Marxism. Gramsci’s texts and personal
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drama contributed to our intellectual maturation with respect to the history

of Marxism and the struggles against capitalism.
Gramsci’s oeuvre, his questions, subject matter, theoretical archi-
tecture, methods, and the openness of his thought form a rich network of
paths, suggested intuitions, and crucial interrogations, urging us to think
and understand, to act consistently. For all these reasons, Gramsci was one
of our intellectual weapons in the first stage of the Revolution in power,
a phase (lasting from 1959 until the beginning of the 1970s) during which
the deepening Cuban Revolution formulated its communist project. This
phase, in turn, included different periods. The subject is too vast for this
essay, but let me simply say that there was a period of liberation from polit-
ical tyranny, from the bourgeoisie, imperialism, and customary obedience
in Cuba; a second period dominated by the armed defense of the coun-
try and the organization of a new regime—a period that lasted from 1961
to 1965, one could say; and a third, more radical period—the second half
of the 1960s—marked by the nation’s attempt to develop autonomously
through an accelerated economic project and the very important role given
to consciousness and internationalism.
Gramsci’s work was so totally caught up in the Cuban process
that it had to suffer from the end of this first stage. At the beginning of
the 1970s a second phase began, one contradictory in many aspects and
disastrous for social thought. Gramsci disappeared from teaching curricula
and became a stranger in Cuba; the abovementioned anthology was no
longer used: no one talked about Gramsci anymore.14 He was no more
the center of controversy in vanishing than he had been on his arrival;
instead, he was simply forgotten, becoming a shadow, joined by those ghosts
from the mountains that Silvio Rodríguez evoked in his “Canción urgente
para Nicaragua.” And nevertheless, Gramsci had “been” here; this was an
extraordinary cultural fact for the Cuban Revolution. He had been here;
he had become “an unclaimed estate”—as lawyers say—like many other
elements in the great intellectual progress and cultural accumulation that
resulted from the successes of the Cuban Revolution. In this sense I can say
that, whatever his immediate fate, he has remained a permanent value.
Beginning in 1986 the dogmatization and impoverishment that
had governed Cuban social thought were affected by the political movement
known as “the rectification of errors and negative tendencies.” The fall
of the Eastern European regimes and the bankruptcy of their ideology
strengthened this trend. Gramsci’s return, however, has been neither quick
nor easy, which testifies not only to the great specificity of thought and its
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Martínez Heredia . Gramsci in 1960s Cuba

reproduction but also to the general characteristics of the Cuban process. In

any case, in the opening of recent years Gramsci is studied more and more;
texts by and about him are published; and in these new conditions he is again
becoming a highly valuable tool for research into the problems of society and
culture and for reinvigorating Marxism as a dialectic anticapitalist theory.

Translated by
Alex Martin

Notes
1. The vast body of writing on these events includes widely diverging interpretations.
I have studied the subject in numerous publications; for recent examples see
Martínez Heredia 1999a and 2000.
2. I discuss the debates that marked Cuban history from the 1950s to the 1990s in
Martínez Heredia 1999b.
3. Quite apart from its function within the circumstances in which it was pronounced
during the summer of 1961, Fidel Castro’s maxim “Dentro de la revolución,
todo; contra la revolución, ningún derecho” [Within the Revolution, every-
thing; against the Revolution, nothing] was used as an effective slogan during
that decade by those who opposed socialist realism and dogmatism in general.
For the complete text, see Castro 1987 [1961].
4. This type of thought circulated in Cuba, from the beginning of the 1960s, in thou-
sands of copies of Soviet Spanish-language manuals of philosophy, political
economics, Marxism-Leninism, and the history of philosophy, as well as in
philosophical dictionaries and more or less specialized monographs. Texts
from Latin American publishers (Grijalbo, Pueblos Unidos, Lautaro) also
circulated or were reprinted by the new Cuban houses. A range of periodi-
cals and other products and actions broadened this thought’s influence on the
island.
5. For my views on this see, among other texts, Martínez Heredia 1968, 1989, and 1999c.
6. Agosti’s Editorial Lautaro published four volumes of the Italian edition (1958–62).
The two final ones, El risorgimento and Pasado y presente, only appeared in
1974 (published by Granica of Buenos Aires). José M. Aricó, translator of
volumes 3 and 4, was notably influenced by Gramsci. As a member of the
editorial board at the journal Pasado y presente he tried to adopt with Gramsci’s
help a revolutionary Marxism, a position for which he and his fellow board
members were condemned by the Argentine Communist Party. See Aricó
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1964. Aricó played an important role in the divulgation of Marxist works in

Latin America.
7. Gramsci died in a Rome hospital on 27 April 1937, shortly after being released from
prison for health reasons. Trans.
8. “ . . . a way of understanding Marxism. From a Marxism of absolute truths to one
renewed and without absolutism; nothing is to be taken for granted; every-
thing must be reinvestigated”; one of the members of the old Department of
Philosophy at the University of Havana, interviewed by the sociologist Marta
Núñez Sarmiento (1999). Quoted with the permission of the author.
9. Our early writings reveal the influence that using Gramsci had on us. In my own case
this can be noted beginning with Martínez Heredia 1965, a critical commen-
tary.
10. Fourteen thousand copies of this edition of the two-volume, 796-page textbook were
printed.
11. At the time our international connections were quite extensive. For example, we
received 104 periodical publications dedicated to thought and social science in
exchange for Pensamiento crítico, among them the world’s most famous leftist
journals.
12. Editions in other languages include Antonio Gramsci: Life of a Revolutionary (New
York: Dutton, 1971), Vida de Antonio Gramsci (Barcelona: Península, 1976
[1968]), A vida de Antonio Gramsci (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1979), and Das
Leben des Antonio Gramsci (Berlin: Rotbuch, 1979).
13. “Today this couldn’t be repeated: even if one reads Gramsci directly, there are
so many interpretations of him”; opinion of an interview subject in Núñez
Sarmiento 1999.
14. “Marxism as a discipline and as social knowledge has its history in Cuba’s process of
socialist transition. I will not go into its ups and downs here; it suffices to recall
that Antonio Gramsci, the last great European thinker of the Leninist period,
was studied and published in Cuba twenty-three years ago, and that in the
1970s and 1980s he was simply disappeared” [simplemente fue desaparecido]
(Martínez Heredia 1990, 29).

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Fernández Mayo. Vol. 2. Havana: Pueblo y Educación.
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Department of Philosophy, University of Havana. 1966. Lecturas de filosofía. Havana:

Imprenta Universitaria.
. 1968. Lecturas de filosofía. 2 vols. Havana: Instituto Cubano del Libro.
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