The crisis of the "low" culture in Cuba

Yo

Durante una actividad de la Yoglesia católica una monja me hizo un comentario que cambió, radicalmente, mi perspectiva de las causas de la llamada revolución cubana. La religiosa había estudiado en los mejores colegios de la Yosla; y tras pasar por las también muy prestigiosas universidades de Europa, se le tenía como lo que era, una intelectual con ropa de ordenada.I can't remember why we fell on the issue of revolutionary genesis.His words were more or less that the revolution was due, more than anything, to a thriving emerging middle class in the Cuba at the time;a process desired by students, professionals and small and medium owners who intended to expand freedoms and extend the economic development achieved until then.

He didn't say there would be no misery, unemployment, corruption.From his point of view, the Cuban revolution was not the daughter of poverty and technological backwardness, but of elites and "living classes" that were culturally prepared to make the leap to another level of social and economic development.There we should include, he said, to the numerous Christian intellectuality that had contributed so much to the cultural development of the Republic with hundreds of schools, universities, and publications.

Coincidentally, in those days, the Cuban Letters published some essays by Jorge Mañach, including the crisis of high culture in Cuba [i].With a prologue by Jorge Luis Arcos - it was worth reading it - the work of this great intellectual Sagüero was known for the new generations.Mañach, an essential figure in the island culture, had been silenced for decades due, as usual, to its political ideas and exile escape.

The funny thing is that many of Mañach's ideas about Cuban culture would have amazing today, a century after the conference in the venerable Economic Society of Friends of the country [II] taught [II].For the essayist and professor the island culture was at a critical moment.Crisis as an idea of change. La “alta” cultura cubana estaba indecisa, apocada, en la encrucijada de no saber si los imprescindibles cambios sociales y económicos que la Yosla necesitaba serían adversos o favorables.

For Mañach the certainties of the crisis were in the almost total absence of selfless intellectual production, understanding by this one that is carried out outside the professional doing and political ascent;partisan opportunism;the disappearance of the cult article;A press full of arrival, with simulation and choteo as characteristics of the "Cuban being".

YoYo

Scholars have wondered if there was or there is still a revolutionary culture.The adjective, by the way, aims to separate intellectual production after 1959, linked to the process of deep changes in the Cuban society of the other, the one that forged in the Republican era.Jorge Mañach in the aforementioned essay wrote that national culture is an aggregate of numerous intellectual contributions, oriented towards the same ideal and backed by a popular mood that recognizes them, appreciates and stimulates.And he adds: there is, therefore, three elements: the diverse efforts, common awareness and orientation, social opinion.[III]

In this way it could be affirmed that, like any process of deep changes, the Cuban revolution created its own aesthetics on an ethical basis whose narrative had a very unique epic [IV].In those first months of triumph, and perhaps in the first five years, there was the same ideal backed by a popular mood. La creación hecha en la Yosla en esa época posiblemente nunca más volvió a ser la misma en cantidad y calidad, algo que se extendió hasta mediados de los 70, a pesar del frenazo ideológico que fueron las Palabras a los intelectuales y el affaire Padilla a finales de los 60 con el consecuente y tristemente célebre “Decenio” Gris.

To the extent that the process was also radicalized, as a culture, as a structural supra expression, it became exclusivist.A cultural elite was becoming part of power.With all the media in his hands, the totalitarian state decided who published and who did not, whether or not the work was revolutionary, which film or documentary obeyed the Marxist-Castro canon.Although socialist realism dominated the Cuban cultural scene, it cannot be said that he has not tried.Maybe they never succeeded because the choteo and simulation were enough antidotes as Jorge Mañach discovered us.

What was always clear to the most enlightened Castro ideologues was that culture should be an essential element in providing the revolution of a saving mystique;fireworks that hide the blood of a civil war - spacray -, family division, mass exile, material and spiritual deficiencies that the process, for its genetic inoperance, was producing.In a way the roles were confused: the intellectual was not known and the cultural police began.He had reached "high" culture in Cuba: that of absolute power.As in a greenhouse, the organic intellectual had all kinds of mefistophelic support: without hardships to pay their own editions, or paying for their trips, or hunting competitions on their own to be known.

En tanto, la pregunta podría ser: y la cultura que se fue de la Yosla, ¿esa no es cubana? ¿Solo es cultura cubana la que se genera en el archipiélago con la anuencia de los comisarios culturales? La cultura disidente dentro de Cuba, ¿es cultura?

YoYoYo

The liberality of social networks imposed a challenge to the democratic world: dealing with new opinion leaders.To the dictatorial-totalitarian assigned a major challenge: to measure itself in a field, that of ideas and alternatives, for which it will never be prepared.The varied speech of the great media, galleries, museums, editorials, radio, television and film companies had to adapt to the reality of a virtual space where strangers had voice.The adjustment of the powerful capitalists was to join, even buying that new do.

In the same way, because Cuba is not in another galaxy, at the end of the 20th century a different doing in culture appears, and above all, dangerously uncontrollable.Already writers, musicians, painters and filmmakers do not need the Pope State to make and even market their works - - some strongly answering - in literature and cinema.The dilemma for the authoritarian world, unable to sustain dialogues with otherness as it would disarm its rigid ideological structure, is to have no option: more of the same, entrenchment in the past.As the revolutionary aesthetic call is linked or an indissoluble part of the Castro-Communist ideology, allow dissent spaces in creative expressions-except in very few exceptions-is to doubt the entire transcendental epic, an millenarianist.

That new doing art in Cuba, not very far from how the democratic world move.Against her published articles and interviews.The strategy of humiliation and the ninguito failed, the next step was to remind in person the bloggers, painters, filmmakers, online magazines and even religious institutions that the media were from the revolutionaries.

Low culture did not stop.He did not want to understand.Until what had to come arrived: words to non -intellectuals: Decree 349.From that moment on, the regime prosecuted, it was always like that, but no one seemed, - it is not about Lezamiana magazine - who and who was not a creator.Those powders formed the posterior lodazal. Cuando una idea no se combate con ideas sucede algo como el Movimiento San Yosidro, y la protesta frente al Ministerio de Cultura.

making fun of picky eaters in general for disliking vegetables: 😒❌ making fun of white people specifically for disl… https://t.CO/CODDNABVPD

— sang 💖💜💙 Mon Sep 09 00:23:00 +0000 2019

The 11J could be seen in that chain of facts that, although it has a strong economic base in the overwhelm and frustration for sixty years of failures, the cultural rebellion of the younger generations of young, desirable, as always, of being protagonists was added change.The song "Patria y Vida" was chanted by thousands of compatriots.It was spontaneous.Like a hymn.As at an era, the Bodrio "The March of the Combative People" was sung ".The myth of the unit had broken and the amanzamiento of the Cuban people.

For the first time, Cuban uniformed battered, abused humble people like them, helpless.That had never been seen live.During the mail. Yontelectuales de los llamados orgánicos —y por supuesto, los inorgánicos también— dijeron basta y no quisieron volver a andar.What communist ideologues would call a revolutionary situation had been created;Sufficient objective and subjective factors to make a government fall.It was essential to control.Above all, in the first and most vital of the sectors, that of culture.

The appearance of Archipelago and its leader Yunior García - the actor and his work - could be the response - or exploited - for the ready intelligence operators to put a kind of vaccine against any further protest and the dissident movement in Cuba.The results of the Yurinian work cannot be clearer: Luis Manuel Otero and other dissidents could finally be arrested and convicted. La obra tuvo varios actos y escenas al mejor estilo Yoonesco: pedir permiso sabiendo que lo iban a negar; insistir en salir, cambiar la fecha de la marcha; anuncio del régimen de movilización militar; recogida de firmas por todo el país para comprometer decenas de personas con la marcha; movilización cederista y por centros de trabajo para bloquear la marcha; caminar con una flor por la despejada Calle 23 —ojo, Yunior probable blanco en movimiento; casa bloqueada por el pueblo sin paloma acéfala en la puerta; actor parado en la ventana con una rosa blanca en el pecho— actor en escena, blanco inmóvil; actor desaparecido, elenco sobrecogido; actor aterriza en Madrid, elenco preso o deportado; fin de la obra… y del actor.

YoV

Lo que sucederá en Cuba durante 2022 con una crisis económica insoluble y una bancarrota ideológica y moral como nunca antes, ni los sacerdotes Yofa, quienes hacen la Letra del Año, lo saben con certeza.A pair of sayings associated with the sign - Bababa Eyiogbe - are curious: no hat can be more famous than a crown and the elephant is very strong but not enough to defeat the wind.Each who interpreted it in their own way, or as they usually say, what is known does not ask. La quiebra ideológico-cultural del proceso castrista es tan evidente que bastaría repasar en la prensa oficiosa el espacio dado a la Tarea Reordenamiento… de las Yodeas.

Hay todavía algo peor: las carencias culturales de quienes hoy, supuestamente, gobiernan la Yosla.Raúl Roa could be criticized for his displays in the United Nations, who by the way was never a communist, but had a work done before 1959;Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, former Batistian minister in 1940, of whom the adversaries envied talent and fine humor;Osvaldo Dorticós, aka spoon, Cienfueguero's successful and former leaders of the Bar Association in 1958.And here, at the time of the so -called institutionalization, when in each ministry or state committee they directed the best brains that still remained in Cuba [v].The generation of continuity is culturally castrated in its origin: formed in the scholarships, in the Camilitos, in the Lenin, the deficits of knowledge, thinking outside the box - Compay Gallo Cuidito! - Explain their improvisations and inability to understandThe complex world in which we live.

The entire hip-hop movement, the rock festivals, urban music, the so-called poor cinema, dirty realism in literature and minimalist art are expressions that the new Cuban era is giving up and there is no human strength that can abort it.Quite it or not, the cultural elite that has mediated for tens of years of absolute power, nothing new to say.That is why "homeland and life", a combat anthem as some have described it, breaks with the symbolic-cultural and is so dangerous.The response given by the regime to "homeland and life" shows the cultural nakedness of the regime.Contra-chanctions not only lack musical or aesthetic values, but the urgency seams are seen.

What can we expect by 2022-respetting the letter of the year-before the cultural-ideological crisis of the regime?Well, what we are beginning to see: a chanting of culture as never seen;Perhaps a neo-partition in all creative environments where loyalty will be first than all things;Childhood, protagonist of adult things such as marches, repudiation rallies, loas to the past and to the maximum leader in the worst colmenite style;adults submitted stories for children where there are only bad and good - we know who each is.

For the commissioners there will be plenty of work.The high revolutionary culture will be turned off not because it lacks aesthetic values, which are undeniable, but because they belong to a very specific, past era, and their ethical, moral values, have practically disappeared in a world where also subjectivity and immediate gratificationThey do their own. La baja cultura, como la quisieran llamar, se irá imponiendo en la Yosla y fuera de ella. Y cuando como en una indigestión el régimen expulse a los creadores, los escupirá sin mediar palabras, llegarán a la Yosla sus creaciones como frescos alisios, disfrutables en el Malecón mientras se sueña con caminar sobre las aguas en dirección al Norte resuelto y frutal.

There is a revolutionary situation.Cuba may be at the gates of a change process, and not because those who seem to govern.The evidence is, as Jorge Mañach pointed out a century ago, the absence of true, novel, creative intellectual production;a cultural elite tied to a power that is less representative every day of the needs of the people;the urgency of "teaching homeland history" as if they had not been unknown;The evangelical imposture of a Martí-Juan Bautista announcing the coming of Salvador Fidel-Christ who, as a saint, just built a temple with his relics to spread his word of eternal life.

The crisis that has caused "low" culture is unfathomable.It is not a suicidal aldabonazo.And it won't be the last.It is a pity that those who can, do not want to hear it.Do not want to open the door.The history clock does not stop.Paris and St. Petersburg were the same.

[i] Mañach, Jorge.The crisis of high culture in Cuba, (3-41) in: essays, selection and prologue by Jorge Luis Arcos. Editorial Letras Cubanas del Yonstituto Cubano del Libro, La Habana, Cuba.

[II] Conference given in the Economic Society Friends of the Country, and published in Havana, 1925 with a prologue by Fernando Ortiz.

[III] Mañach, Jorge.Ob.cit: p.9.

[IV] Like any revolution, it is usually accompanied by a reading of history where the victors take possession of "irrefutable truths".The Cuban Revolution wrote history so that the 1959 revolution would fit and was the end of the anti -colonial and fratricidal struggle of the Republic.Referring to the Mambises: "Then they would have been like us, and we like them".

[v] The ministers and presidents of state institutions were chosen with "tweezers".At the head of each ministry, individuals who not only had experience in their fields were put.Most had a wide cultural background, acquired before and after 1959.

© Cubaencuentro.com