Revolution, the Intellectual and a Cuban Identity: The Long Tradition

Abstract

The literary explosion in the wake of the revolutionary victory in Cuba in 1959 is, by now, well documented. The protagonists of this explosion-either those committed to the Revolution, those critically sympathetic, disenchanted or frankly hostile-have all become a part of the known Latin American literary panorama. As yet, however, except at a basic survey level, there has been little attempt to synthesize studies of the component parts into a coherent view of the whole, which examines the deeper structures of the overall pattern. In particular, apart from a superficial relating of the patently political literature to the revolutionary process itself, there has been little successful attempt to locate all the literature, including that which is less obviously 'political', within its social and political context. The purpose here is, thus, to offer a perspective of the 'literary explosion' of the first decade or so, which will be neither exclusively 'political' nor 'literary', but one that synthesizes both aspects. Such a perspective centres on the theme of the search for identity. There are three aspects to this. First, the argument that, to a certain extent, the central theme of all post-1959 literature (up to 1970) was the search for identity, individual or collective. Secondly, the argument that this concern was, in turn, simply a new manifestation of a tradition that, by 1959, was already well established, and often closely related to external developments. Thirdly, that this in turn represented a part of a wider Cuban tradition, a political search for identity, which has run through Cuba's independent history until today. Identity is defined here as a sense of belonging, of location (geographical, political, generational, etc.), of self-awareness and self-belief, and of pride-in one's self, one's origins and one's context, as distinct from others. The essence of the whole argument, therefore, is the permanent existence of two parallel strands: a political search for ideology, articulation and identity, that preceded and followed 1959; and a literary search for an individual and collective identity. However, these two have frequently merged in a further tradition, that of the politically committed Cuban intellectual. 'Context' is, of course, basic to the argument about identity and also a convenient and relevant point of departure here. For, although the Cuban Revolution can only be properly understood in the specific context of its time and place, to see the process exclusively in that light is to see a oneor