Within the utopian framework, the meaning of life was obscured by a future we were relentlessly heading toward. In the dystopian framework, we find that that future is already here, that it happened “the other day,” while we were still planning for it.
And so tomorrow is just another day, a future that is neither perfect nor immutable. It is only this, what is happening right now, and it caught us by surprise on this Caribbean island, a place that is also—we must not forget—a model for the world.
In the midst of such change—which unleashes opinions as acrimonious as those around the delayed publication of Orwell’s novel—we see a new generation that had its awakening in the twenty-first century, for whom the Revolution and the Berlin Wall are ancient history, a graduating class that grew up in the midst of the erosion of state monopoly over their lives, that has struggled from birth with a burgeoning economy as varied as their ideological references, topics, and life stories.
These Latin American millennials are developing in a world of social media and the international expansion of terrorism, in a precarious, do-it-yourself world in which they unabashedly examine national circumstances and are fully willing to participate in a globalized culture.
Rather than a spontaneous generation, this is a simultaneous generation, one that has known how to take advantage of the recent opportunity to become “self-employed” in Cuba, and taken it further, to self-determination.
This is not to say that they do not suffer from the usual Cuban complaints and conflicts, but something about their pragmatism reveals their insolence—they know they hold the keys to the future.
They are beyond utopia but before apocalypse. Perhaps this is because they live in the apotheosis, at the banquet of consequences in which every single dish of Cuban history is passing before their eyes.
6.
“We are not making a revolution for future generations. . . . We are working and creating for our contemporaries.”
So said Fidel Castro at the National Library, during the monologue presented in two sessions that has come to be known as his “Speech to Intellectuals.” It was April 1961, and both the speaker and the Revolution—the same revolution that was made with his generation and for his generation—were still young. This statement reveals a clear conviction regarding the generational nature of revolutions, and an overwhelming pragmatism: if a revolution is not generational, if it only plans for some yet-to-be-shaped person in the future, who then can sustain it while it is happening?
Attendees—the intellectuals who were listening to the words—were hit with this statement 105 minutes into his speech. (Today, we can hear the entire speech on YouTube, and who knows, maybe one day we will be able to watch it, too.) Just a short while earlier, Fidel Castro had offered his illustrious audience another phrase that would remain the guiding principle behind Cuban cultural policy: “With the Revolution, everything. Against the Revolution, nothing.”
Given that history is also written in slogans, Fidel’s statement regarding the generational nature of revolution—with and for that generation—was eclipsed by this other one, which established the boundaries of what was allowable, as if the limits of political contemporaneity were subject to the limits of artistic freedom: up to this point, you’re with, and after this point, you’re against.
Fifty-five years after his “Speech to Intellectuals,” having turned ninety and fulfilled the destiny he created for himself, Fidel Castro ceased to exist. His death, and the subsequent mourning, plunged the country into a profound silence. The ubiquitous reggaeton that pours from taxi windows disappeared. The funeral procession bearing his ashes on their way back to the source—the guerrilla invasion in reverse—silenced even the hymns. A certainty opened up that an entire era was traveling along with Fidel in his funeral procession.
Because his death did not just pause the soundtrack of recent times—it revealed that the generation responsible for the Revolution was coming to an end. If there was any doubt in this regard, Fidel’s successor soon cleared it up, stating he would step down as president in 2018 (though all indications are that he will continue to lead the Party until 2021).
Thus, Raúl Castro’s last year as Cuban head of state, 2017, coincides with Donald Trump’s first year as American head of state. And so the children and grandchildren of the generation that carried out the Revolution—for whom it was carried it out—will have to take the reins in Cuba.
The time has come for the “New Man” that Che Guevara envisioned—that collective Frankenstein shaped by those who never experienced the Batista regime—to get with the times, accept responsibility for his own political contemporaneity, and find, for the first time, a balance between the era he lives in and the power he holds.
With the death of Fidel Castro, various analysts predicted a U.S. naval blockade to prevent a mass exodus to Miami. They prophesied that the repressive political apparatus of the state would be dismantled. They foresaw the ultimate collapse of the system (“No Castro, No Problem”).
But none of this happened. This may be because, having seen our future so manipulated, we Cubans have lost all respect for futurology. And yet this essay, written in February 2017, will also attempt to divine what is to come, so it, too, is no stranger to daring and indifference.
Now, in an era of post-Revolution meets post-democracy, someone born during the Revolution will most likely ascend to the presidency. This individual will undoubtedly come from the state and Party apparatus. It is unthinkable, however, that such an individual could ever possess the absolute power held by Fidel or Raúl. (They might even be a front man for the real power held by the army.) And the changes that began with Raúl will inevitably continue, as the options to go back become increasingly disastrous.
Handicapped by what it means to have potential in Cuba—essentially an invitation to beheading—Vice President Miguel Díaz-Canel (born in 1960 in Placetas, Villa Clara province) has a good chance to become this post-Castro Castroist.
But whoever becomes the next leader, he will not be commended to history and will have no mythical aura about him, but a life story very much like any one of his compatriots. He will have gone from school to work in the countryside, idolized the same sports heroes of Cuban socialism, and watched the same television series glorifying State Security agents. His family will be split between the diaspora and the island. He will have fought in Nicaragua, Angola, or another of the Cold War’s hot zones. He will have listened to Nueva Trova ballads and answered the call to volunteer. He will have sworn allegiance to socialism and joined in the chorus of “We will be like Che!” He will be familiar with latrines, promiscuity, solidarity, and the cruelty of massification. He will know collectivization and impudence as ways of life under Cuban socialism, and the freedom of the flesh, or sexual freedom—where the spirit of the law is out of reach and of no effect. And he will come from a position of Absolute Truth to lead a country in an era now known as “post-truth.”
The next government will be a direct descendant of reforms not Revolution, Raúl not Fidel, globalization not Cold War, at a time when the advantages of the Cuban Adjustment Act will end sooner than the disadvantages of the embargo. And so it will have to channel the discontent through fewer available escape valves. (Cuban immigrants in the United States will see their privileges disappear, and the normalization of Cuba means it will experience not only the justice that is found in other countries, but the injustices as well.) On the domestic front, Communist militants—an ever-shrinking group—will no longer be sufficient to make the government legitimate, and though the government’s plans may not include opening up a multiparty system, it will have to allow more political diversity.
This New Man in power will have to exchange the future perfect for the future possible. And he will have to accept that socialism and capitalism are not, by any means, what the Revolution and the opposition promised they would be in their moments of glory.
Marx warned that people are more attached to the times they
live in than to their parents. And the era that will embrace generational change in Cuba will face it in the midst of an extreme crisis not only in terms of Cuban socialism, but in terms of all political models. We have seen firsthand how the fall of communism led to calamity in the liberal world order and democracy itself, now in open conflict with the free market.
What, then, will Cuba become? A liberal republic, when liberalism is taking its dying breath? A post-Communist country open to shock therapy? An Antillean emirate with different laws for locals and foreigners, workers and investors, the powerful and the people? A dynasty? An exemplar of the Chinese model? Will it discover the formula that will allow it to, finally, combine socialism and democracy as it follows a new Cuban way?
For now, a combination of a one-party system and private enterprise is what’s on the table, an emulation of the Vietnamese model. For a generation of millennials, messianism is not a viable political style and sacrifice is not the way to future redemption.
In 1960, a year before Fidel’s “Speech to Intellectuals,” Sartre spoke to almost the same audience, in the same place, the National Library. He, too, offered a few thoughts for posterity, which he later compiled in his book Hurricane over Sugar, in which he carefully examines the generational nature of the Revolution: “Given that revolution was necessary, circumstance appointed the young to carry it out. Only the youth felt enough outrage and anguish to undertake it, and only they were pure enough to see it through.”
Presumably, Cuba after Fidel Castro will not be forced into another revolution. But this new generation will, at the very least, need to design its own political approach to its own times.
Whether he is absolved or condemned by history, Fidel Castro will surely never be forgotten by it.
7.
When society begins to collapse, hysteria tends to appear. But the opposite reaction can also occur: people go through a calamity behind a veneer of absolute calm. This is exactly what happened in the last years of communism in the Soviet Union, in a society built on the conviction that communism was eternal.
In the book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation—a title that says it all—Alexei Yurchak called this state of shock “hypernormalization.” Published in 2005, the book was used eleven years later as the basis for British filmmaker Adam Curtis’s documentary HyperNormalisation. In his film, Curtis goes beyond the fall of communism to include the fake world that financial institutions and large corporations have designed for us.
When we speak of Cuban capital, it is important to point to the sense of eternity that has always accompanied political and economic life in Cuba, and the connection between the immortal socialism of the future and the remnants from a time in capitalism when things were built to last (from vintage cars to fridges, from houses to tunnels).
What is at risk now is not only a form of government or an economic system, but this sense of eternity. Cubans have a growing awareness of mortality—made more noticeable by the death of Fidel himself—which hints at the finite nature of everything that has been built.
At this juncture, our socialist side (wanting to maintain that socialism is eternal) insists that the transition has already happened. Meanwhile, our capitalist side (wanting to make liberalism eternal) insists that the transition is yet to come. For the former, Cuba improves, changes, evolves, but will never reject communism the way the Eastern bloc countries did. For the latter, the transition is not even here yet, for the simple reason that until there are multiparty elections, until the market economy has been implemented across the board, and until there is plurality of media, it simply cannot happen here.
What neither side seems to see is something potentially much simpler. It’s not that the transition is unnecessary, as some would state. And it’s not that the transition has not yet begun, as others would conclude. It’s that, for a long time now, the only political reality in Cuba has been a state of transition. This transitional situation has become enormously comfortable, as it manages an endless limbo without a future.
Brilliant or cruel, the product of logic or superstition, longed for by the masses or fabricated by tyrants, for centuries the future defined history and relationships between people. It sowed power and inspired resistance. The pyramids and the Great Wall of China were the future. The catapult and the locomotive were the future. Da Vinci and Verne were the future . . . as were a dog in space and a man on the moon. The future was the French Revolution and democracy, the Bolsheviks and Mao’s Long March. The future belonged to the printing press and free trade, to the steam engine and communism.
Our parents worked, went to war, and participated in the Revolution precisely so their children could have a better future than they did. And thus the future is also everything that, one fine day, never came to pass.
The future’s decline is not only connected to the end of communism, but has as much to do with the growing awareness of the finite nature of capitalism. The Spanish archaeologist Eudald Carbonell is convinced that capitalism will disappear in the twenty-first century not through revolution but through a process of “thermal death.” He states as much in a book with the suggestive title of El arqueólogo y el futuro (The archaeologist and the future).
For an archaeologist to offer these clues about tomorrow could, at first blush, seem ironic. This is especially true because he does not speak metaphorically but from the perspective of someone who has spent a life digging in the ground, convinced that the mystery of our future cannot be found in foresight but through excavation. And that is because the future has not been postponed; it has been concealed. Thus we need to bring it into the light, not sit and wait for it.
If the future is already here, if it is this, what we are living through now, we had better dig through the surface layers that obscure it, not continue to ponder the layers of patina that cover it.
This is no easy task, of course. It is hard to speak of the future when we are surrounded by the refrain that our youth have no future. It is hard to clamor for the future in the midst of those who have been denied it.
A half century ago, in The Book to Come, Maurice Blanchot tackled something similar when he questioned the future of literature. One section, entitled “On an Art Without Future,” could not be more explicit. The paradox, the novelty, is that it is precisely in this lack of a future that Blanchot found the code by which to map out a tomorrow. And because there is at least one advantage to the future of someone without a future: “the power and the glory” can no longer be a corollary to the process of the Revolution but is instead the exceptionally precarious condition on which to start all over again. “All great art originates in an exceptional fault.”
That future Blanchot envisions brings Moby Dick to mind, the unattainable whale that stirs up dreams of greatness on the horizon. For us Cubans, it’s not a whale, but a marlin. It is that beast besieged by sharks that the fisherman in The Old Man and the Sea knows he needs to haul back to the coast as proof of his truth and his greatness.
It is the beast we need to plant on the shore, to bear witness to the fact that we have battled it, that it is here, and that we can—at last—call it our contemporary.
THE PERSONAL MOVIE
TRIBULATIONS OF
“THE GOOD DEMONS”
BY VLADIMIR CRUZ
TRANSLATED BY CECILIA MOLINARI
The guajiros of the Escambray Mountains, in Cuba’s geographical center yet on the absolute periphery of the country’s cultural activity, became acquainted with the movies before the theater.
Shortly after the revolutionary triumph of 1959, the mobile movie trucks arrived, sent by the recently founded Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC), and after the peasants’ initial fright and fascination, the movies turned into something normal for them.
The theater arrived almost a decade later. It reminded the guajiros of the movies somewhat, although this time the truck didn’t carry a projector and film canisters, but rathe
r the actual artists, whom the guajiros observed as they prepared the stage, set up the lights, ate, and, at nightfall, gave the performance. In other words, unlike the ethereal figures projected by a beam of light onto a screen, they saw people in all their humanity, and perhaps that is why they began to call the theater “the personal movie.”
It must be said that back then the adaptive capacity of the Escambray peasants, a traditional sector of society not at all inclined to sudden changes, was blossoming more profusely than the romerillo plant. In a short amount of time, those mountains had seen Che’s column of rebels; the people who rose up against the triumphant Revolution, called bandidos; and the militia who battled those bandidos. And the peasants themselves actively took part in each one of those stages. In that same period, they went from agrarian reform, which gave them the land, to the cooperatives, which asked them to return it so it could be integrated into a collective structure. The process was not easy and caused an upheaval throughout the entire area, especially in the Lucha Contra Bandidos, the War Against the Bandits, of great importance to the consolidation and establishment of the revolutionary government, which forced each family to take sides, sometimes causing huge rifts, with one son on each team—there were even a few who, puzzled, tried to join a troop of insurgents who were characters in a play.
Those were revolutionary times, and perhaps fiction came to help the peasants understand the limits of reality, always so imprecise in Cuba, and to ease them into a new era.
However, I don’t think any of them imagined, or had the time to stop and contemplate, that behind the well-lit and made-up characters on the screen, backed by the magical machinery of films, there were human beings as real as the ones getting out of the trucks to perform the plays, who also worked and ate, and sometimes got drunk, just like them, and even less that the distant lives of those people, their despair and misery, not just of the actors, but of all the people working in a movie team, are part of the film, influencing and sometimes determining its result.
Cuba on the Verge Page 5
