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Reinscribing the Aesthetic: Cuban Narrative and Post-Soviet Cultural Politics

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La literatura cubana est de esta y Encuentro quiere subrayarlo y celebrarlo. Cuban literature is on a roll, and Encuentro wishes to draw attention to it and celebrate it. Jess Daz

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JAMES BUCKWALTER-ARIAS is an assistant professor of Spanish at Hanover College. His articles on contemporary Cuban literature will appear this year in Cuban Studies and Encuentro de la cultura cubana. This essay is adapted from a book project on Cuban literary narrative written after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

N HIS INTRODUCTORY REMARKS TO THE 1998 SUMMER ISSUE OF THE Madrid-based journal Encuentro de la cultura cubana, Jess Daz announced that Cuban literature est de esta is on a roll (De esta 3). Guillermo Cabrera Infante had won the 1998 Premio Cervantes; Ral Rivero had won the Journalists without Borders award; Eliseo Alberto had won the Alfaguara award for his novel Caracol Beach; Dana Chaviano had won the Azorn award for her novel El hombre, la hembra y el hambre; and two new publishing houses in Spain, Colibr and Casiopea, had announced their plans to foreground the literature of Cuba in their catalogs. Signicantly, of the motivos de alegra reasons to celebrate that Daz cited, all six originated outside Cuba (3). Of the four Cuban writers mentioned, only oneRiverowas living in Cuba at the time this issue of Encuentro was published. And the Journalists without Borders prize, of which he was the recipient, is itself awarded from overseas, in this case for journalism written for non-Cuban publications. If Cuban literature est de esta, the esta is not, by this account, taking place in Cuba. Dazs claim is tendentious and controvertible, but it does constitute an event in itself, insofar as it dramatizes the changing conditions under which such a statement can be made, plausibly, to a large readership. A change has taken place, if not, as Daz goes on to suggest, in terms of the quality and prolicacy of Cuban litera-

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ture, then certainly in terms of the way it is received byand marketed foran international, Spanish-speaking readership. For the rst time since the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, a recently exiled Cuban writer can imply that the institutional locus of Cuban culture is no longer Cuba but rather la metrpoli the metropolitan center, from which Cuba gained its independence precisely one hundred years earlier. The ideal locusor perhaps the only possible locusfor an encuentro gathering among members of what Daz describes as a cultura fracturada fractured culture (3), that vantage from which Cuban culture can project itself into the international imaginary, is, in other words, the international market that the Cuban Revolution has had so much stake in resisting and to which it has provided such institutional alternatives as Casa de las Amricas, the ICAIC, and the UNEAC. For many on the political left around the world, these institutions have represented alternatives to the wholesale commodication of cultural artifacts; these were new kinds of institutions for which the culture industry of the West, some argued, had no category, no conceptual framework. But Encuentro is grounded in the premise that the cultural institutions of the Cuban Revolution can no longer oer such a space, if indeed they ever did; the rigid cultural politics and material bankruptcy of these institutions have rendered them all but irrelevant. Dazs celebratory rhetoric, then, would herald the death of that collective project to which he and many of the collaborators on the magazine devoted the better part of their lives. In no small measure it is the collapse of the socialist bloc in Eastern Europe that makes it possible for Daz to employ such rhetoric in the 1990s, that makes it possible to cast Encuentro as the post-socialist broker of Cuban culture and distinguish itself ideologically from the earlier cultural projects of Cuban exiles, which may have been more easily dismissed by the left as reactionary. The

events of the late 1980s and early 1990sthe fall of the Berlin Wall, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the loss of Soviet subsidies in Cuba and the resulting economic crisis on the island, the disappearance of the Eastern European market for Cuban literature, the enduring paper crisis, and the impoverishment of the islands cultural institutionsset new parameters for discourse on Cuban culture around the globe. The historical juncture that has come to be known as Cubas special period in times of peace becomes the occasion, therefore, for reexamining the cultural paradigms that after the rst thirty years of socialist government nd themselves so embattled. The conditions that make it possible for Daz to declare, in Spain, that Cuban literature est de esta will not be easily appreciated by many on the island, for simple material reasons: the books written by Eliseo Alberto, Dana Chaviano, and Guillermo Cabrera Infante and those published by Colibr and Casiopea are not sold in Cuba. The journalism of Rivero is not only unpublished in Cuba but banned. Meanwhile, fewer books are published on the island than before 1990, the number of copies printed is comparatively small, and second editions generally do not follow because of the lack of money and materials, regardless of how quickly a book sells out. When Cuban writers are published abroad and their books are sold on the islandin Havana bookstores catering to tourists, for examplethe cost is prohibitive. A book published in Spain might sell for fteen or twenty United States dollars, roughly the equivalent of what a Cuban university professor earns in a month. The revalorization of popular commercial culture under way in some academic circles in the West, therefore, may seem alien in a Cuba that is witnessing a recommercialization of its culture but whose citizenry has little access to the new commodities. Moreover, to the extent that the consumer able to pay for books and compact discs by Cuban artists lives overseas, the products

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that get funded and distributed in la metrpoli will attend, one assumes, to the ideological and cultural demands of that market. It is not surprising, then, that the texts I discuss here, written by resident Cubans and recent exiles, express a profound disenchantment with contemporary Cuba, a bitter disillusionment with the socialist project to which the nation has devoted the last four decades. There is an intense nostalgia for prerevolutionary Cuban culture, a reassertion of a brand of aesthetic discourse the socialist government emphatically rejected, a will to free art from political exigencies, and a reinscription of a romantic idea of artistic genius that the revolution disavowed. The Orgenes literary group in particularwhich included such writers as Jos Lezama Lima, Cintio Vitier, and Eliseo Diegois exalted in much recent literary and critical writing. The gures repudiated by government officials in the 1970s and early 1980s for their elitist aesthetic ideology and their apparent indierence to urgent political struggles emerge in recent writing as champions of artistic freedom, as writers too committed to art as such to allow themselves to become instruments of a political project. Their aesthetic discoursea politically unaligned discourse, some would claimemerges as the highest expression of true, individual liberty, while the emancipatory discourse of revolution, which has envisioned liberty in explicitly collective terms, is increasingly associated with totalitarian politics and mediocre art. The great Cuban writers adopted by the revolution, Alejo Carpentier and Nicols Guilln, now pay for their former privilege con el desinters de muchsimos lectores with the diminished interest of so many readers (Ponte 8). And many Cuban writers who became known during the revolutionfor their socialist realism, for exampleare seldom discussed at all anymore. This essay is a response to these trends, a meditation on the relation between, on the one hand, the ourishing of a pre- or

extrarevolutionary aesthetic discourse in recent literary narrative and, on the other, the debilitation of the socialist metanarrative and the concomitant reinsertion of Cuban culture into the international market. The relation between historical development and narrative rendering is a great deal more nuanced and provocative than the prevailing disillusionment might suggest. Beyond the disenchantment and its attendant nostalgias, the texts discussed here are bound together by a deep preoccupation with the changing role of art in Cuba, with arts increasingly complex role both in the cultural politics of Cubas socialist government and in the economic relations of the international market. While most of the texts I discuss are not set in the special period, they speak nevertheless to the interval in which they are written and published, a period in which the socialist cultural paradigm is severely shaken but in which the reclaimed aesthetic discourse is arguably out of step, in a number of ways, with Cubas present-day economic, political, and cultural realities. Return of a Repressed Aesthetic Much recent Cuban literature reasserts a brand of aesthetic discourse the regime repressed for the rst thirty years or so of power. The partial reabsorption of Cuban literature by a transatlantic publishing market and the regimes diminishing control over cultural production make it possible for Cuban writers to turn the tables on the ocial revolutionary narrative by casting the individualistic, arguably romantic artist as hero and the government ocial, formerly vaunted as the peoples representative, as antagonist. In the process, however, the revived extrarevolutionary aesthetic is thrust into a narrative environment so profoundly dialogic, politically charged, and historically specific that the generally ahistorical, universalizing discourse bumps up against its own limitations, as it were. The

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artist-protagonistsnovelists, poets, playwrights, theater directorsborrow heavily from a modernist aesthetic discourse that explicitly rejects commodication, but they do so precisely as Cuban culture, including literature, is recommodied. The reinscription of this extrarevolutionary aesthetic discourse, then, in texts that are set in revolutionary Cuba and circulate for the most part in overseas markets is framed, ideologically, by a tension between the embattled socialist superstructure and the reintroduced capitalist base. Cubas suspension, as it were, between a state and a marketplacea Cuba in which neither the socialist state nor global capitalism can be said to be the cultural dominantis played out in the personal and interpersonal dramas of various characters, who run the gamut from ctional to biographical. I focus here on the confrontation between the artist and the government ocial in part because, in reinscribing this drama, recent texts make a case, implicitly or explicitly, for an alternative cultural politics. They do so by exposing, in a manner peculiar to narrative, the contradictions that underlie the cultural politics of Cubas socialist state, a liberal notion of individual freedom associated with the market, and an art-for-arts-sake ethos that claims for the creative mind an independence from the institutional constraints of both state and market. Narrative becomes a space in which the social contradictions and philosophical blind spots that undermine progressive cultural politics can be exposed and developed in a special way. In the dialogic imagination of the novel, after all, contradiction may represent dramatic resource rather than cognitive lapse. In the novel and short story, a socialist realist aesthetic and a highmodernist aesthetic can encounter each other almost in the manner of antagonists. The novel and short story thrive, at the same time, on the tension between a narrative that aims to represent lived psychic and social experiencein the gure of the narratively situated

personageand the philosophical discourses that aim, in contrast, at a disembodied reason and propositional coherence. Jess Dazs Las palabras perdidas, Eliseo Albertos Informe contra m mismo, and Leonardo Paduras Mscaras are three examples of narrative texts that in challenging the revolutions thoroughly instrumentalist cultural policies also problematize the notion of the autonomous objet dart projected almost reexively, in much cultural discourse, onto the concept of the commodity. But the most explicit, strident critique, in all three novels, is leveled at the regime. This critique, framed by the encounter between artist and the government ocial, can be thought of as a restaging of the most memorableand for many deeply traumaticdialogues between intellectuals and government ocials that took place in the 1960s and 1970s. In June 1961, for example, the nations artists and intellectuals gathered in the National Library in Havana to discuss, as Castro stated in the events closing remarks, si debe haber o no una absoluta libertad de contenido en la expresin artstica whether or not there should be absolute freedom of content in artistic expression (Palabras 7). His conclusion established the parameters for discourse in the revolution from that moment on. Since the revolution is of and for el pueblo the people, Castro argued, no one belonging to the formerly privileged class of artists and intellectuals has a right to speak against it:
[D]entro de la Revolucin, todo; contra la Revolucin nada. Contra la Revolucin nada, porque la Revolucin tiene tambin sus derechos y el primer derecho de la Revolucin es el derecho a existir y frente al derecho de la Revolucin de ser y existir, nadie. (11)
[W]ithin the Revolution, everything; against the Revolution nothing. Against the Revolution nothing, because the Revolution also has its rights and the rst right of the Revolution is the right to exist and in opposition to the right of the Revolution to exist, there can be no one.

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The revolution and the speakerCastroare implicitly and unassailably one. The artists and intellectuals, according to a logic that may seem oddly familiar, are either with us or against us. Ten years later, in 1971, during what came to be known as the caso Padilla Padilla affair, Castro addressed the First National Congress on Culture and Education. Although the audience was Cuban, he clearly had in mind those foreign intellectuals who just three weeks earlier had written the Cuban leader para . . . pedirle reexamine la situacin que este arresto [del poeta y escritor Heberto Padilla] ha creado asking him to reexamine the situation that this arrest [of the poet and writer Heberto Padilla] has created. Padilla, according to the signers of the letter, had simply ejercido el derecho de crtica dentro de la Revolucin exercised the right to criticize from within the Revolution (Padilla 123; emphasis mine). In his closing remarks, Castro characterizes certain foreign intellectuals critical of the revolution as seores liberales burgueses and agentillos del colonialismo cultural liberal bourgeois seores and petty agents of cultural colonialism, a reference to the letters many signers, who included Simone de Beauvoir, Italo Calvino, Julio Cortzar, Marguerite Duras, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garca Mrquez, Juan Goytisolo, Octavio Paz, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Mario Vargas Llosa. Castro states unambiguously that the revolutions artistic criteria are political, or instrumental:
Para nosotros, un pueblo revolucionario en un proceso revolucionario, valoramos las creaciones culturales y artsticas en funcin de la utilidad para el pueblo, en funcin de lo que aporten al hombre, en funcin de lo que aporten a la reivindicacin del hombre, a la liberacin del hombre, a la felicidad del hombre. Nuestra valoracin es poltica.(Discurso 28) For us, a revolutionary people involved in a revolutionary process, we value cultural and

artistic creations in terms of their utility to the people, in terms of what they contribute to mankind, in terms of what they contribute to mans revindication, to mans liberation, to mans happiness. Our criteria are political.

He thus defines a revolutionary aesthetic in terms opposed to those in which the aesthetic category was originally formulated. In the late eighteenth century, the aesthetic was conceptualizednegatively, as Georey Harpham points outas not desire, not utility, not politics (135). In the revolution, in contrast, the work of art subserves ethico-political imperatives. When Castro employs the term aesthetic, however, a somewhat different argument emerges:
No puede haber valor esttico sin contenido humano. No puede haber valor esttico contra el hombre. No puede haber valor esttico contra la justicia, contra el bienestar, contra la liberacin, contra la felicidad del hombre. No puede haberlo! (28) There can be no aesthetic value without human content. There can be no aesthetic value against mankind. There can be no aesthetic value against justice, against well-being, against liberation, against the happiness of mankind! There cannot be such a thing!

Castro seems to suggest here that aesthetic value cannot simply subserve a rational, progressive political agenda, since true aesthetic judgment is of a piece with ethical judgment. He does not develop this idea further, but he begins to make the familiar case for the inextricability of ethical and aesthetic judgment. This state-decreed aesthetic theory was standardized in the revolutions problematic art-as-weapon trope, and the paradigm remained unchallenged, and therefore underdeveloped, for the next twenty or thirty years. Post-Soviet Cuban writers begin to talk back to Fidel, albeit indirectly, chronicling the repressive effects of the governments institutionalization of a presumably self-evident

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human content as artistic imperative: Che Guevaras hombre nuevo, for examplethe new man the revolution would produce in a glorious socialist futureis experienced as an exclusionary model, as a political mechanism for repressing deviance; the years 1970 to 1975, in which socialist realism dominates Cuban literature, are referred to as el quinquenio gris the five gray years; the homosexual writers Jos Lezama Lima and Virgilio Piera become emblems of misunderstood, unappreciated genius, of neglect or mistreatment by the revolutions cultural institutions; the UMAP camps of the 1960smilitary-run work centers where homosexuals, artists, and other dissidents were internedloom over the texts; the cultural history of prerevolutionary Cubathe popular music of Celia Cruz, for examplehas to be vindicated and reinscribed into the collective memory; controversial books are disguised with the jackets of ocially sanctioned books and circulated among trustworthy friends; Cubans denounce the ideological diversionism of friends and family members to government ocials, signing the denunciations with false names; the job of implementing the revolutions cultural policies falls to rigid, small-minded bureaucrats. Of Poets and Bureaucrats Jess Dazs novel Las palabras perdidas The Lost Words, published in Spain in 1992, concerns the Cuban governments repression of a group of young writers who try to publish a literary magazine in Havana in the 1960s. According to the narrative, the novel itself is the fruit of that eort: including poems, stories, and essays written by its characters, it is in a sense the literary magazine the young writers had tried to publish in Cuba. The critique of the Castro governments cultural policies is obvious here, and the published novel represents a triumph over those policies. The text is both chronicle of repression and tangible evidence of the victory of the artist over the bureaucrat.

While it details the governments repression of the literary magazine, the magazines eventual completion in novel form, as rendered by the character el Flaco, is left to the readers imagination. It could be argued, then, that the implied arena of triumph for el Flaco and his novel (textually identical to Dazs), that space of freedom in which the writer is nally able to redeem his artistic vision and those of his friends, is the free market where Daz publishes Las palabras perdidas and subsequent novels as well. In such a reading, the novel might be said to imply a congruence among an ethos of artistic freedom, a notion of aesthetic autonomy, and a free-market rationale according to which the Daz novels circulate. The ideal of an art independent of mundane social practices and institutions, however, is considerably more problematic in this novel than the triumphalist narrative would suggest. On one occasion, the character el Gordo interviews Lezama Lima in the poets home on Trocadero Street, in Havana, and as Lezama speaks, el Gordo muses to himself that the poet perteneca a una especie en extincin, la de los aristcratas del espritu, para quienes el establo de los best-sellers deba apestar a estircol belonged to a species on the verge of extinction, the aristocrats of the spirit, for whom the stalls of best sellers must reek of manure (135). But the prerevolutionary aristocratic aesthetic sensibility that the characters reassert is inscribed in a novel that is postrevolutionary in its historical perspective and narrative conventions. It is also a novel whose commodity status is undeniable, despite its characters contempt for consumer culture. The novel contains a materialist subnarrative, moreover, in which the relations of power among the young writers effectively deconstruct the space of freedom in which an artist creates without interference, without pressure, without influence. Long before the stories, poems, and articles are denounced by a government bureaucrat, they are subjected to an intense peer critiqueeven ridicule at times

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and to a laborious and self-conscious rewriting, which is clearly carried out with peers in mind. The space ms all de toda contingencia beyond all contingency in which the writers literary hero Lezama Lima situates himself by la ciclnica fuerza genitora de su obra the cyclonic generative force of his literary corpus is idealized in the novel but never represented; we never see the characters in such a space (135). The notion of a creative process indierent to cultural institutions and unswayed by interpersonal power relations is rendered romantic, then, even though this notion is an article of faith for the characters. The arguably modernist aesthetic ideology they reinscribe is out of step with both the novels historical setting (1960s Cuba) and the authors historical present (1990s Spain). Eliseo Albertos memoir, Informe contra m mismo Report against Myself (1997), takes a dierent tack, reasserting an extrarevolutionary aesthetic discourse by turning a state surveillance apparatus into a full-edged literary genre. The title refers to the reports or informes that thousands of Cubans have written about neighbors, friends, co-workers, and relatives since the triumph of the revolution in 1959. These reports form part of ocial records on the political inclinations and activities of the citizenry. In 1978 Cuban ocials ask Alberto to write an informe about his father, the famous poet Eliseo Diego, who has been receiving visits from foreign intellectuals. Alberto complies with the request, signing his informe Pablo. Informe contra m mismo, then, published in Spain almost twenty years after the original informe was commissioned, constitutes an ironic coming out and coming-of-ageas well as an ingenious commodicationof a genre shaped by thousands of Cuban writers over the previous four decades. Early in the book, Alberto muses that perhaps it is the literary quality of his writing that eventually makes Cuban ocials lose interest in the case: Deben haberse cansado de mi prosa potica, de mi lirismo, de mis ccio-

nes intiles They must have got tired of my poetic prose, my lyricism, my useless ctions (22). There is a sense here, as elsewhere in the book, that a works artistic value and political utility are inversely related. It is not simply that the state should not intervene in the literary arts but that a literary sensibility somehow denatures political writing. The combination of insightful political analysis and ambitious formal experimentation in Informe contra m mismo, however, destabilize that assumption. Political and literary discursive conventions are so thoroughly interwoven that the reader is compelled to ask how, ultimately, the two categories can be distinguished and to what extent both are drawn together by their shared performative qualities. The notion that art and politics represent varieties of performance rather than a stark antithesis is particularly evident in Leonardo Paduras detective novel Mscaras (Masks [1997]). In 1970s and 1980s Cuba, detective ction emerged as the most widely read and most effective literary medium for socialist political education. The genre lends itself well to an explicit didactic agenda within the revolutionary (but by this time thoroughly institutionalized) politics of good versus evil, revolutionary versus counterrevolutionary. By the 1990s, however, socialist detective heroes are neither fresh nor convincing. Indeed, Padura argues in Modernidad, posmodernidad y novela policial that publishers and prizeawarding institutions applied low aesthetic standards all along to ensure that detective ction imparted instructive and appropriate political messages. Instead of withdrawing from history and politics into a realm of pure art in Mscaras, however, Padura appropriates both the icons of Cuban high modernism and the propagandistic conventions of revolutionary detective ction. His protagonist, the police detective Mario Conde, is an agent of the state, of course, but also an aspiring writer, and we learn in the nal novel of the series, Paisaje de otoo, that he writes all four novels

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himself after retiring from the police force. It happens that his literary vocation has been at odds with the political system since his student days, when he wrote a short story for a school literary magazine, which the administrators later refused to publish. As in Dazs novel, the socialist bureaucracy suppresses the young writers literary magazine and threatens its would-be founders with punishment. Again, the published text we read is a vindication of youthful literary aspirations; the artist is eventually able to realize his vision and present it to us in tangible, textual form. But pure art does not simply win out over mere politics; an allegory of performance subsumes both. The victim of the novel is in drag when he is murdered, dressed as Virgilio Pieras character Electra Garrig, from the play of the same name. His murderer, we learn, is a highly placed government ocial. The theater, in other words, allegorized in the figure of Pieras Electra, is brutalized by the regime. The same theater, whose playwrights were marginalized in Cuba and whose emblem, Electra, is murdered in Paduras novel, nally triumphs on yet another allegorical level, as the gure of performance subsumes and coimplicates the terms art and politics. The allegorical dimensions of the novel are signicant because Cubas revolutionary detective ction generally has been characterized by criticsincluding Padura himselfas excessively allegorical and didactic and insufciently artistic and realist. Although Paduras novel certainly critiques the revolutionary paradigm of detective ction, it is no less allegorical than its precursor. It begins with an epigraph from Pieras play Electra Garrig in which the Pedagogue describes Havana as una ciudad en la que todo el mundo quiere ser engaado a city in which everyone wishes to be deceived, thus reinforcing the metaphor of masks, which serves as the novels title, and introducing the theater allegory. Performance becomes the organizing gure that enables Paduras critique of the regime and of

its revolutionary detective novel: the victim dresses up as Electra Garrig and stages his own murder; the murderers political career, we learn, is one long performance, his identity an elaborate mask; and the protagonists job, as both detective and writer, is to tell the most convincing story possibleto perform with language alone, in other words, what others have staged. If Paduras novels succeed artistically where the revolutionary detective novel faileda judgment I neither venture nor contest hereit is not because they are less political, less didactic, or less allegorical. The reader is compelled to ask, therefore, whether the familiar art-propaganda dichotomy might be less useful here than the model of art as political performance or of politics as theatrical performance. We have looked briefly at three novels here, but similar arguments can be made about a number of recent narrative texts by Cuban authorsfor example, Senel Pazs novella El lobo, el bosque y el hombre nuevo (Mexico, 1990), Antonio Jos Pontes El libro perdido de los origenistas (Mexico, 2002), and the other three novels in Paduras Mario Conde series (published in both Cuba and Spain). In all these texts, the artists freedom from or deance of state manipulation is prized, and the relation between artistic performance and political ideology is foregrounded and reinscribed. The incompatibility of authentic art and political persuasion, an article of faith for a number of protagonists and even for some contemporary literary critics, is contravened by the narrative structure and the rhetorical strategies of the text. The autonomous space of artistic creation is alluded to but not represented; what we see instead is a thoroughly politicized literary environment in which artistic freedom is encroached on not only by the state but also by peers, in which the notion of freedom is both constituted in and delimited by ingrained cultural expectations. Literary writing is inuenced by rivalry and ridicule, social performance and interpersonal

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alliance, and saturated with political rhetoric and political history. Signicantly, recent writing does not reproduce or approximate the aesthetic sensibility of the literary giants to whom the texts pay homage. Lezama, for example, is the literary hero of Pazs story; Lezama Lima, Alejo Carpentier, Eliseo Diego, and Nicols Guilln preside over Dazs novel; Lezama and Carpentier are, for Alberto, los dos prodigiosos hemisferios del cerebro the two prodigious hemispheres of the brain (158); Virgilio Piera is the central literary icon in Paduras mystery. But the texts in which these literary gures appear are very much of their time, structured very differently, at the syntactic and narrative levels, from Lezamas neobaroque, Carpentiers real maravilloso marvelous realism (8) or Pieras Cuentos fros. The contemporary texts are in fact so removed stylistically from the revered Cuban precursors that in those passages in which the language of Lezama and Carpentier is approximated or actually quoted, the effect of distance from those worksthe historical, cultural, and ideological distanceis dramatic. The modernist giants of twentieth-century Cuban letters are thus recuperated and left behind in the same gesture, simultaneously venerated and surpassed in an arguably postmodern pastiche. The economic and cultural transformation of Cuba after the collapse of the Soviet Union has undoubtedly helped secure the prestige of gures like Lezama and Piera. Writers like Padura, Daz, Ponte, and Alberto can engage in dialogue with the literary giants and talk back to Fidelas Lezama and Piera could not aord to doin large measure because foreign markets have opened to them and because a foreign readership has been particularly receptive, in the post-Soviet era, to narratives of disillusionment with socialist politics. These developments have made it possible for both islanders and exiles to write for much the same readership and to make similar arguments. The disillusionment with the socialist project,

it would appear, is now shared by all. It is not only possible now but politically meaningful and commercially viable for writers to become the kind of resistant spectator that Diana Taylor describes (21), possible and necessary for them to answer Castros political performances with their own. Jos Quiroga writes, In the introduction to his Teatro completo, Virgilio Piera remarked that no dramatic author could compete with the theatrical pose of Fidel Castro entering Havana [in 1959], acclaimed by multitudes, adored by all (135). But as the collective enthusiasm faded and as Castros indefatigably optimistic political performances increasingly strained credibility, it became possible for writers to compete with his pose, to counter his political-theatrical performances with texts that make performance itself both explicit subject matter and overarching allegory. In reprotagonizing language, they underline narratives performative dimension. Between a State and a Marketplace It may be unfair to assume that because much Soviet-era Cuban literaturesocialist realism, for example, or testimonial literatureis said to privilege political criteria above all else, it tends to be not aesthetic or less aesthetic than more self-consciously literary prerevolutionary or post-Soviet Cuban writing. But this assumption is clearly made in a number of recent narrative texts and, for that matter, in some recent critical writing. It is powerful and produces some startling results. Appearing to reassert in literary writing the primacy of aesthetic criteria over ethical or political criteria, a number of postSoviet narrative texts actually go a long way in destabilizing the aesthetic category. Recent historico-narrative inquiries into the revolutions cultural politics dramatize, at the very least, the extent to which the category of the aesthetic is undertheorized, not only in socialist cultural discourse but also in a modernist discourse that snis at mass culture or

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in celebrations of mass culture. Whether the work of Piera and Lezama is more aesthetic than or aesthetically superior to the work of such writers as Manuel Coo or Miguel Barnet is not as important here, in this essay, as the fact that such judgments are more commonly assumed than meaningfully argued. The very adequacy of aesthetic judgment to literary writing may become suspect; we may ask, with Paul de Man, whether the equation of literariness with aesthetic response is not the result of some fundamental confusion. It is probably tting that the coherence or integrity of a reinscribed pre- or extrarevolutionary aesthetic discourse should be so strained in recent Cuban narrative. A combination of historical and literary developments appear to force to the surface what has been perplexing all along about the category of the aesthetic. Since its emergence in the eighteenth century, aesthetic discourse has been riddled with contradiction. Terry Eagleton argues that although the aesthetic is inseparable from the construction of the dominant ideological forms of modern class-society, and indeed from a whole new form of human subjectivity appropriate to that social order, it nonetheless provides an unusually powerful challenge and alternative to these dominant ideological forms (3). Eagletons narrative of eighteenth-century thought may sound strangely familiar in contemporary Cuba:
The emergence of the aesthetic as a theoretical category is closely bound up with the material process by which cultural production, at an early stage of bourgeois society, becomes autonomousautonomous, that is, of the various social functions which it has traditionally served. Once artefacts become commodities in the market place, they exist for nothing and nobody in particular, and can consequently be rationalized, ideologically speaking, as existing entirely and gloriously for themselves. (89)

The reassertion of a more traditional aesthetic discourse in post-Soviet Cuba, a discourse

often assumed to be apolitical, does indeed coincide with the aesthetic artifacts newly achieved autonomy from the states social functions, with the reabsorption of this artifact by a market economy, and with the emergence of a very small group of Cuban literary entrepreneurson and o the islandwho until the 1990s received essentially all their income from the Cuban state. A modernist antimarket aesthetic sensibility may provide, in accordance with Eagletons narrative, a powerful challenge and alternative to [the] ideological forms dominant in Cuba and the world at large. Lezama and Piera, for example, can represent a strategy of resistance to both the authoritarian state and the newly invigorated market for things Cuban. On one hand, these writers were marginalized by the revolution and were perhaps unincorporable to the islands cultural politics, at least until the mid-1980s. They symbolize opposition to the discriminatory, authoritarian politics of the state. On the other hand, the Orgenes literary group has come to represent a Cuban high modernism that thumbed its nose at the market, so the group becomes a symbol of opposition on that front too. Their challenge to the market may be undermined, however, by the fact that the recent texts in which Lezama and Piera emerge as major gures are very much a part of the revived Cuban culture industry. Their challenge to the state may be undermined, as Ponte points out, by the relatively recent appropriation of the Orgenes legacy by the regime. One might conclude that the ourishing of a repressed aesthetic rhetoric in Cuban literature goes hand in hand with the enervation of socialist politics and the islands turn toward the market. There would seem to be a match between autonomous aesthetic objects and freely exchanged commodities, despite the aesthetes rejection of consumer culture. The reinscription of more traditional, nonmilitant aesthetic discourse in recent Cuban narrative also coincides with a crisis

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for the international left. As some academics confess their disenchantment with metanarratives, revolutionary writing loses cachet in the First World university. As I indicated earlier, a number of socialist realist authors seem to have faded from the Cuban cultural imaginary altogether. Just as the socialist revolutionary narrative grows pass for many First World academics and young Cuban intellectuals alike; just as serious discussion of the revolutions socialist cultural project and its literary practitioners dries up in much journalistic and academic writing around the world; just as global capital, instead of nally being contained, is more consolidated than ever; and just as the Cuban economy and its culture industry appear about to be swallowed up by multinational corporations, an aesthetic sensibility with no ties to any oppositional political praxisexcept perhaps for its prioritizing of art over the impositions of the stateseems to emerge as the paradigm of freedom for a signicant number of Cubas most admired writers. One begins to suspect, almost reexively, that traditional aesthetic discourse and market rationale are complicit after all, that both art object and commodity may be all too easily subsumed by the concept of free particulars, as Eagleton demonstrates (ch. 1). As if the relation between aesthetic ideology and market ideology were not complicated enough, we are dealing in Cubas case with a postcolonialor, rather, neocolonialsituation. As long as books by Cubas best-known contemporary writers o and on the island are easier to acquire for the middle-class Spanish speaker not living on the island or the First World scholar (e.g., through Amazon.com) than for even the best-educated and -paid Cuban, authentic Cuban literary artifacts, it would appear, are primarily for export. Cuban writers o and on the island supply the literary raw material, while the text is elaborated into a commodity abroad, more often than not in the former metrpoli. The market seems

to have picked up in Cuba where the socialist state left o, leaving no opportunity to think about alternative cultural politics, alternative systems of publishing and distribution, about a possible third way. Orgenes may come to represent such an alternative, in retrospect, but that paradigm is ultimately irretrievable: there is no longer a literary aristocracy in Cuba, in the older, economic sense, no Jos Rodrguez Feo to foot the bill, as he did for the Orgenes crowd. In terms of contemporary cultural praxis, the Orgenes revival (if it can be called that) would seem to oer contemporary Cuba little more than a fantasy about a space for creative genius beyond state and market, a space in which political and economic exigencies are magically rendered irrelevant. The space beyond all contingency may have been imaginary all along, but the fantasy can still be projected onto a prerevolutionary literary group that happened to include a millionaire patron. In recent Cuban writing, extrarevolutionary aesthetic discourse in general and origenista aesthetic discourse in particular are not merely reinscribed but also resituated and reinflected. Cubas twentieth-century literary icons and their aesthetic sensibilities are situated diegetically in the Cuba of the 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s, and reconstructed from a distinctly post-1989 or postBerlin Wall vantage. The simple act of situating aesthetic discourse in a profoundly dialogic and historically recognizable narrative context necessarily puts stress on the category of judgment, which was conceived early on in terms of the presumably universal and ahistorical mental faculties of reason and understanding (see Kant). Situating a specific aesthetic subtradition, moreover, at the center of a historical power struggle between the artist and the politician has the eect of historicizing and materializing what was never intended by Enlightenment philosophers to be framed in that way. The theoretical inquiry urged by the recent redeployment of such gures as Lezama

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and Piera, I conclude, may be more productive than the symbolic opposition these gures have represented to existing cultural politics. Symbols of opposition are incorporated easily enough, after all, by both the state and the market, which is exactly what is happening with Piera and Lezama today. The redeployment of these icons in recent writing explores in a manner unique to narrative the potential for terror inscribed in the epic of socialist revolution, the potential for complicity with the ruling class inscribed in much traditional aesthetic discourse, and the emancipatory impulse common to both Cuban socialist and traditional aesthetic discourses. As a discursive medium that depends on antagonism for its eect, narrative is uniquely suited to dissecting these discourses, to laying bare their social and historical contradictions, and to capitalizing on their progressive potential. A great deal depends on whether critics view these contradictions as repressed, because unarticulated, or dramatized, because so evident. Either way, the relations between the state and the arts, between political and aesthetic ideologies, and between indoctrination and entertainment are so persistently foregrounded in recent Cuban writing and so persistently complicated by extratextual factors, narrative structure, and discursive heterogeneity that at the very least the texts place a responsibility on the readeron the literary critic, the historian, the political theoristto reexamine the fundamental social-cultural contradictions that actually existing socialist states and actually existing capitalist markets have neglected. Literary texts will do nothing in themselves, of course, to mitigate or exacerbate the neocolonization of Cuban culture, but if the narratives discussed here demonstrate one thing convincingly, it is that the literary imagination and the political imagination are mutually constitutive, regardless of what a protagonist may think or a literary icon represent. The politico-literary imagination is so constituted in narrative structure,

in fact, and narrative rendering so governed by performative criteria that a more sophisticated theorization of this categorical interdependence is probably a precondition for a more progressive cultural politics. It becomes painfully clear in post-Soviet Cuba, after all, that neither releasing the literary artifact into the free market nor subordinating it to a univocal and thoroughly institutionalized revolutionary narrative has had the liberating eect these strategies promise.

NOTES
I am indebted to Daniel Balderston, Paul Apostolidis, and Jos Buscaglia-Salgado for their insightful readings of earlier versions of this essay and for their invaluable suggestions. Casa de las Amricas was founded by Haydee Santamara in 1961 and serves as a center for research, a meetinghouse for writers, artists, and intellectuals, and a publisher of books and magazines. It also awards literary and artistic prizes. The ICAIC (Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematogrcos) was founded in 1961 to organize, fund, produce, and publicize Cuban cinema. Like Casa de las Amricas it also publishes cultural magazines and awards prizes. The UNEAC (Unin de Escritores y Artistas Cubanos), a Cuban writers union founded in 1961 by Nicols Guilln, is a cultural center and meetinghouse. It also publishes books and magazines and awards literary prizes. For an enthusiastic appraisal of Cubas cultural institutions, see Jameson. I borrow the term post-socialist from Romn de la Campas Cuba on My Mind (ch. 6). Rivero is among the dissident journalists who were imprisoned by the Cuban government in March 2003. There is no nancial incentive to reprint even bestselling books, since sales do not cover the costs of publication and distribution. Unlike books and compact discs, lms remain accessible in Cuba. Admission to a theater is generally two pesos (about ten United States cents), perhaps a hundredth of the average monthly salary. The Cuban film industry, however, has been adversely aected by the loss of Soviet subsidies. Fewer lms are being made, and more of those being made are coproductions, primarily with Spain. Moreover, Cuba no longer has the means to buy the rights to the great variety of international lms it had exhibited in the 1970s and 1980s. For a critique of the misticacin del hecho creador mystication of the creative act, see Collazos et al. 10.

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A search for Manuel Coo in the MLA Bibliography, for example, yields fourteen articles, only one of which was written since 1990, and that article is a critique of committed literature published in Encuentro, the magazine discussed in the rst pages of this article (Vzquez Daz). If aesthetic experience is generally understood to derive from a concordance between object of contemplation and perceiving subject, it is dicult to imagine how the art-as-weapon metaphor plays out. How do artist, audience, and the enemy implied by the metaphor graft onto the art-weapon duality? Does a progressive work of art do some kind of violence to a receptive audience? How might it do violence to an indierent or hostile audience? None of these contemporary writers was publishing outside Cuba before the late 1980s. These entrepreneurs do not belong, it should be stressed, to a dominant social class. In spite of their relatively good earnings, contemporary Cuban writers who reside on the island and publish abroad are always at risk of being marginalizedexpelled from such state institutions as the writers union (UNEAC) or actually imprisoned. Their earnings, in other words, do not translate into political power or privilege. One only need consider the spectacular success of Wim Wender and Ry Cooders documentary Buena Vista Social Club and its Grammy-winning compact disc to sense the potential for a remarketing of the old Cuba, now dilapidated, for the new tourist.

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. Palabras a los intelectuales. La Habana: Consejo Nacional de Cultura, 1961. Collazos, Oscar, et al. Literatura en la revolucin y revolucin en la literatura. Mxico, DF: Siglo XXI, 1970. de Man, Paul. The Resistance to Theory. The Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. 320. Daz, Jess. De esta. Encuentro 89 (1998): 34. . Las palabras perdidas. Barcelona: Anagrama, 1992. Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990. Guevara, Ernesto. El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba. El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba. New York: Pathnder, 1992. 5171. Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. Aesthetics and the Fundamentals of Modernity. Aesthetics and Ideology. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1994. 12449. Jameson, Fredric. Foreword. Caliban and Other Essays. By Roberto Fernndez Retamar. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989. viixii. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Philosophical Writings. Ed. Ren Wellek. New York: Continuum, 1991. 127246. Padilla, Heberto. Fuera del juego. Miami: Universal, 1998. Padura, Leonardo. Mscaras. Barcelona: Tusquets, 1997. . Modernidad, posmodernidad y novela policial. La Habana: Unin, 2000. . Paisaje de otoo. Barcelona: Tusquets, 1998. Paz, Senel. El lobo, el bosque y el hombre nuevo. Mxico, DF: Era, 1991. Piera, Virgilio. Cuentos fros. Buenos Aires: Losada, 1956. . Teatro completo. La Habana: R, 1960. Ponte, Antonio Jos. El libro perdido de los origenistas. Mxico, DF: Aldus, 2002. Quiroga, Jos. Homosexualities in the Tropic of Revolution. Sex and Sexuality in Latin America. Ed. Daniel Balderston and Donna J. Guy. New York: New York UP, 1997. 13351. Taylor, Diana. Disappearing Acts. Durham: Duke UP, 1997. Vzquez Daz, Ren. Crtica de la literatura como compromiso: La cuentstica de Manuel Coo. Encuentro de la cultura cubana 1 (1996): 10712.