The “New Man” in Cuba: Culture and Identity in the Revolution

Abstract

For scholars who grew up considering the Cuban Revolution to be a beacon for the world, it is a challenge to engage in serious criticism of Cuba after 1959, as if it may somehow be a betrayal of their own utopian ideals. Ana Serra notes that she certainly felt that personal conflict in examining the subjectivity that informs several novels of the Cuban Revolution, a subjectivity made all the more complicated and poignant because it operates within the institutional discourse rather than at the margins of exclusion. One of Serra’s most effective images, which also sets the unifying theme for the book, is of the socialist “new man” accompanied in the novels by his shadows, the Others whom the bureaucrats of culture excluded from the utopian project, either because of perceived weaknesses or faulty attitudes or conduct or because ambiguity in the arts translated automatically as ambivalence and doubt in an age of doctrinal certainty.Serra presents this struggle within each literary text through an abundant analysis of representations of the utopian paradigms in official discourse (speeches, articles, posters, film), skillfully integrating a dazzling range of critical scholarship and original interviews into the conceptual matrix, and referencing the central problematic of each chapter to the most pertinent theoretical works. The strategies vary, from tracing the intellectual genealogy of the material (for example, Sartre and Camus for Edmundo Desnoes’s Memorias del subdesarrollo) to framing the discussion of Daura Olema García’s Maestra voluntaria (about the 1961 literacy campaign) with the benefit of chronological distance and hindsight on the first empirical experiences, using J. Elspeth Stuckey’s 1991 Violence of Literacy as a crucial source.Serra combines historical, political, and literary-cultural elements effectively in her chapter on Miguel Cossío Woodward’s Sacchario, the novel of the 1970 zafra, the failed megaharvest that resulted in a public acknowledgment of failure by the political leadership. What the late Ambrosio Fornet celebrated as a definitive novel about the “epic vanguard” in which the protagonist merges with the collectivity, Serra sees as a novel in which “the narrator as craftsman takes centre stage,” prevented by “the pleasure of the text” from “disappearing behind the unity of the nation he has created.”Manuel Cofiño’s La última mujer y el próximo combate is deconstructed as a novel where female identities remain trapped largely in traditional functions. For this chapter Serra draws largely on Laura Mulvey’s work on women in cinema, and she explores the intersection of race and gender in the mulata character through history as a symbolic representation of the nation.The chapter on Pablo Armando Fernández’s Los niños se despiden opens with a refutation of Martínez Estrada’s notion that the Cuba of the revolution was Thomas More’s dream come to fruition. By untangling the novel’s enmeshed chronologies, Serra arrives at an alternative reading: the retrospective on the demographic movements before the revolution can become a metaphor for the post-1959 migrations, and the children’s departure for the countryside is a remnant of hope for the utopian project beyond the institutionalized revolution. Nonetheless, Serra also supports the view that this novel is an important key to the understanding of Cuban identity, in which family, home, nation, and history are inseparable.Finally, Serra turns to Leonardo Padura Fuentes’s tetralogy and its protagonist, Lieutenant Mario Conde, who emerges in the 1980s as a unique expression of the current of discontent with corruption and political opportunism. Serra calls these novels “a tribute to the withering away of revolutionary ideology and the current search for alternate ideologies or narratives in Cuba” (p. 170), yet in response one might argue that Conde, in his relentless struggle to unmask and combat the corruption of the utopian project, is in fact the representation of the new man, albeit an increasingly isolated one. As a questioner and an observer of events and cultural shifts he acts fundamentally as a true revolutionary, along the lines proposed by Che Guevara and by the young Marx before him.The introduction is a delicately balanced survey of the critical literature and of the central issues facing Cuban intellectuals between 1959 and the 1980s. The entire monograph is rich in resources and interdisciplinary linkage; critical concepts are freed from strict disciplinary constraints and arcane jargon, and the cultural history of the Cuban Revolution is elucidated through its ambiguities and contradictions. It is an intelligent exponent of the value of cultural studies and makes Cuban studies accessible to a wider scholarly community.