These days mark the centenary of La crisis de la alta cultura en Cuba (The Crisis of High Culture in Cuba), the conference where Jorge Mañach made his first analysis of the Republic. With what he called “a kind of laboratory positivism,” Mañach pointed out countless shortcomings: a lack of disinterested intellectual production, the decline of colloquium, the decline of the professorship, a crisis in journalism, a crisis in public speaking, and the decline of literature in general. These were all symptoms of “a crisis of ethics and a crisis of culture” perceived, of course, in contrast to the splendor of the 19th century, especially its first six decades. At that time, the best Creoles, forced out of politics, devoted themselves to promoting culture and civilization; it was the era of Saco y Heredia, Luz y del Monte, Varela, and Poey; a zenith from which high culture would do nothing but decline, first during the period that Mañach calls executive, since the War of 68, by banishing “contemplation,” would have destroyed the unity of culture, producing a spiritual misery that persists in the phase he calls acquisitive, that is, the Republic. In line with the regenerationist discourses of Fernando Ortiz, such as “Let us be today as they were yesterday” (1914) and La decadencia cubana (1924), Mañach contrasts those golden colonial times with the rust of the republic: “Disinterest was followed by greed; discipline by pugnacious disorder; integrity of ideal aspiration by sterile diversification; collective seriousness by ‘choteo’, which became a typical feature of our Cuban identity.”
Attempting a similar exercise today is like looking into an abyss: a century later, high culture in Cuba survives in a comatose state. So much so that the situation in 1925 seems to us like a peak; what Mañach defines as an “era of decline” almost takes on, for us, the place occupied in his nostalgic discourse by “the cults of ’36,” the most fruitful decades of the 19th century. “We are not in a moment of agony, but of crisis. Crisis means change. Perhaps today’s very young people already carry in their spirit the glimmer of a resurgence,” said Mañach, setting himself up as the spokesperson for a generation that had had its baptism of fire in the Protest of the Thirteen. Then came other efforts in the field of literature and the arts, which were closely linked to politics at the time: the novel Fantoches 1926, the Manifesto of the Minorista Group, the revista de avance, the Arte Nuevo exhibition, the literary supplement of the Diario de la Marina…
It would be difficult to find anything similar today. We are not in crisis but in full agony. Rather than the moderate optimism of a Mañach, we identify with the melancholic pessimism of the previous generation, which abounds in allegories of national frustration, often a collapse, as in “La agonía de la garza” (The Agony of La Garza), a story by Jesús Castellanos, and in “Nao, esquife, tierra” (Nao, Skiff, Land), an essay by José Antonio Ramos, possibly the most moving testimony, along with José Manuel Poveda’s “Elegía del retorno” (Elegy of Return), of the desolation of those writers who read Nietzsche as gospel in a country that revealed itself to them, between American penetration of the economy, rampant political corruption, and the indifference of the masses toward any literary endeavor, as a petit pays chaud. “In Cuba,” wrote Poveda, always hyperbolic, in one of his ‘vernacular chronicles,’ ‘the business of history is very simple […]: before we were a dependent colony, and now we are an independent colony.’ History, for him and other writers of his generation, had become a farce; a matter of packaging, merely formal; the core was always the same: the colony.
And that was precisely what Mañach’s generation set out to remedy. “Isn’t it time we dispelled this touching agricultural resignation we have as a people and turned our minds to other possible manifestations of collective energy: industry and culture, for example?” he asked. The clinical diagnosis, the “scrupulous objectivity” of the analyst, as Mañach calls it in his lecture, was already a step forward. National culture is, in his words, “a set of numerous individual contributions, consciously oriented towards the same ideal and backed by a social consciousness that recognizes and stimulates them,” so that decline can be due to three types of causes—individual, organic, or social—that is, culture does not advance because individual contributions are scarce, because they are disorganized, and because they lack social support.
Well, these last two factors have only become more acute in recent decades. In a famous essay, Virginia Woolf spoke of a “room of one’s own,” a metaphor for the economic independence that women writers needed in order to devote themselves fully to their vocation. But we all, women and men, need that room of our own, a certain sufficiency of material means to facilitate the execution of a work. And in bourgeois society, these means come, unless one has an inheritance, mainly from institutions, both public and private. Mañach, the sober prophet of the “nation we are missing,” delivered his 1925 lecture at the Economic Society of Friends of the Country. At that time, he was publishing his costumbrista chronicles on Havana in El País. And I find it revealing that the word “country” is repeated in both places, because that is precisely what we are missing, a century later: something more elementary, more primary, less metaphysical than the nation. Unlike their Spanish, Mexican, or Argentine contemporaries, Cuban writers survive in the open: without newspapers, television, radio stations, or universities where they can earn a living. They have no country. We are all stateless.
That loss—perhaps greater than any of those lamented by the writers of the Republic—has been like a huge leap backward to the Spanish colonial era: once again, Cubans are forbidden from engaging in government, but unlike then, we do not have a literate elite with abundant resources and institutions to promote culture. As has been pointed out so many times, projects such as Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana (Encounter of Cuban Culture) have been exceptional in exile, and are now a thing of the past. The desert is growing. It is therefore necessary to correct the above: exaggerating Poveda’s hyperbole (which it certainly is, because Cuba was not a colony in 1917), it could be said that, having lost the country—the nation, as a spiritual entity— survives in exile—we have regressed, even beyond those two colonial phases mentioned above, to the previous, even more primitive phase of factory work, in a regression that has no parallel in the history of Cuba.
“A political revolution that triumphs brings with it, seemingly inevitably, a successive period of apathy, ideological destitution, and deprivation of the appetite for ideals,” Mañach pointed out in his aforementioned lecture on independence, but the anti-Batista revolution followed a very different pattern, more similar to that of the anti-Machista revolution, which Mañach understood in 1933 as a kind of “dramatization of the Cuban.” More than drama, in relation to 1959, we could speak, strictly speaking, of tragedy: that was a huge mistake, the hamartia of an entire people, an accident with such devastating consequences that, however contingent it may have been (and it was, very much so), we have to understand it as destiny. On another occasion, echoing a phrase by Hugo about the French Revolution of 1848, I spoke of “days of fire, years of smoke.” We are still living in those long years of smoke, paying, like some unfortunate character in Greek mythology, for the hubris of having believed ourselves to be the center of the world.
In high culture, as is well known, there was first a period of effervescence—in which Mañach himself participated, incidentally: he was a judge for the first Hispanic American Literary Contest, which in 1965 was renamed the Casa de las Américas Prize—when new institutions, magazines, publishing houses, and scholarships for writers and artists were created. But after that prosperity, which lasted, despite the progressive advance of dogmatism, until the end of the 1960s, a cataclysm ensued, consummating what was foreshadowed in the destruction of so many private libraries in those early days of fire. Here, once again, Mañach comes to mind: it is said that his library was reduced to pulp after the mob stormed the professor’s house following his exile in October 1960. There it was, with renewed fury, that rebellion of the masses that Mañach had already deplored in his early writings, heavily influenced by Ortega y Gasset, when he wrote, for example, that “this little republic has lived, despite all current and past appearances, under a full-fledged democratic dictatorship of numbers.”
If Mañach’s entire cultural project can be summed up, in a way, in that statement from his “Public Letter to Medardo Vitier,” according to which “what is urgently needed in Cuba is to reestablish communication—which was lost with the Republic—between the minority and the masses,” that new, excessive rebellion of the masses—which was, in many ways, both the consequence and the ruin of everything that Mañach’s generation had achieved, which was no small thing— came to criminalize high culture, in an anti-intellectualism much worse, because it was institutionalized, than that lamented by the writers of the first republican generation, and by Mañach himself in the next, in their traditional speeches. The institutions where he exercised his teaching profession were destroyed: the senate, the university, the free press; with the minority purged, only the masses remained: that reconciled, self-sufficient community that Marxist orthodoxy called “the nation in and of itself,” where that other distinction that Mañach pointed out in his 1925 lecture—between high culture and public education—was also overcome after the disastrous First National Congress on Education and Culture.
And here we are, in the endless years of smoke, taking stock. Mañach spoke of the “nation we are missing.” I think of the books we are missing, the necessary flip side of that massiveness of socialist culture. They are, above all, works of criticism and history, because it was that tradition, the intellectual rather than the strictly literary, that was least able to resist the catastrophe. Unlike political censorship, “cultural politics” leaves no loopholes, and the imposition of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy in the 1970s had such devastating effects that even half a century later we have not overcome them. While during the civil-military dictatorship in Argentina people continued to read Deleuze and Lacan and the university survived in hiding, in Cuba there was no way not only to renew, but even to save higher education when the country, which ten years earlier had been removed from the global market, was then removed from the market of ideas.
As a result, we are missing so many books. Off the top of my head, I can think of a book on the ABC (Mañach’s participation in this unique organization is, incidentally, one of the least known chapters of his political militancy); a history of the PSP, recounting in detail the many entanglements of that party, including the so-called “August error”; and the process of the “micro-faction”; an intellectual biography of Fernando Ortiz (if he had been Argentine, he would already have three or four); one of Varona (idem); a history of ideas in Cuba (again, the comparison with Argentina is revealing, to our detriment; think of books such as Nuestros años sesenta and En busca de la ideología argentina by Oscar Terán, which have no Cuban equivalents); a study of La Habana Elegante, not just the magazine but the whole fascinating literary field that also includes La Habana Literaria and El Fígaro, where, amid absinthe intoxication and French symbolists, literature finally emerges in our country as something auratic, on the margins of literary discourse.
In fiction—which, in my opinion, is in relatively good health, unlike literary criticism, which is poorer and more provincial—I nevertheless miss a dimension that I believe has to do with a certain view of history, of its violence. Thinking again of Argentina, the perspective on the 19th century in a novel such as Piglia’s Artificial Respiration is not found among us, nor is the way in which an event such as the “tragic week” is approached, also from the perspective of family chronicle, in Juan Forn’s María Domecq. Slavery, on the other hand, seems to be a particularly under-explored theme in recent Cuban literature, a significant gap (here the comparison would be with American literature: I am thinking of a novel like Beloved by Toni Morrison). There are also episodes such as the “guerrita de los negros” (the little war of the blacks)—which appears in several very good chapters of El navegante dormido by Abilio Estévez, but there is no novel about the “guerra del 12” (the war of 1912). And someone should write the story of the unusual narrator of “Los chinos” (Hernández Catá, 1923), from his origins in a wealthy family to his fall into a motley crew of workers where all the races of the world were mixed together.
