Kate Quinn, "Cuban culture and intellectuals in the age of perestroika"
Abstract of a paper to be presented at the New Socialist Approaches to History seminar, Institute of Historical Research, November 10th 2003.
The recent arrest and imprisonment of some eighty dissidents in Cuba has once again thrown into sharp relief the question of intellectual freedom under the Revolution. Seen within historical perspective, however, such events can be read as part of a larger process of 'opening up' and 'closing down' which has characterized the Revolution for the last forty-three years. This paper will examine a time in Cuban history when both tendencies seemingly existed in tandem: the 'Rectification Period', initiated in 1986. The main intention of this paper is to examine the cultural implications of Rectification, and through these, to assess where Rectification sits within Cuba's apparently contradictory processes of opening up and closing down in the intellectual and cultural sphere. Specifically, I want to focus on two main cultural outcomes of the Rectification process: firstly, how it reopened debates on the notion of criticism within the Revolution; and secondly, how it significantly re-imagined the place of the intellectual, and even the place of culture, within the Cuban revolutionary state.
As far-reaching processes of economic and political reforms unfolded in the Soviet Union under the guise of perestroika and glasnost, Cuba's Rectification process implemented 'counter-reforms' aimed at re-establishing the "ideological purity of the Revolution" (Fidel Castro). Critics -where they discuss the matter at all - are divided over the impact of Rectification policies on Cuban culture. Some argue that the 1980s were characterised by a veritable "cultural renaissance" (Esther Pérez) with writers, artists and film-makers openly challenging both the political and aesthetic mores of the Revolution. Others suggest that Rectification brought nothing more than a "cheap glasnost" (Enrico Santí) which ultimately reaffirmed the subservience of intellectuals to the state. In exploring the complexities of the state's stance on culture in the period, my paper highlights the limitations of both these positions.
Rectification undoubtedly opened a window for debate and dialogue between the state and Cuba's cultural practitioners. Importantly, it also created a space for significant re-interpretations of some of the shibboleths of Cuban cultural policy, including, for example, ideas about mass culture, the role of the intellectual, the application of economic mechanisms to the cultural field, and 'sacred' cultural policy texts (such as Castro's 1961 'Words to the Intellectuals'). Such re-assessments on the part of the state, I argue, not only reveal significant modifications of previous cultural policy thinking, but also suggest that the state had in fact taken on board criticisms long maintained (privately or publicly) by intellectuals themselves. While rectification in some ways drew intellectuals back into the fold, however, when the real implications of Soviet glasnost and perestroika were acutely felt on the island, intellectuals were cast once more as the weak underbelly of the Revolution.