[unauthorized translation]
[A Cuban novelist character recalls his and the Castro government’s past]
Zoilita and I entered the History Department of the Humanities School in the terrible year of 1971. It was barely months after the devastating Congress of Education and Culture, which approved the theses and policies that dictated who could and couldn’t be artists representing a revolutionary country, or work as teachers in a social system, or be young militants aspiring to the role of New Man. That Congress sowed social and psychological terror in the island’s cultural world. Like an invader it radiated as far as university halls (as I discovered the day I matriculated), becoming in some people like a solid chunk of magma, fallen from the sky, a heavy mass that you couldn’t even cut with a power saw and that covered all spaces, burning off any disagreement.
I recall that members of Party or Youth cells bore the aura of enlightened ones. Their militancy empowered them. But the truth is that even those chosen ones were afraid. Everyone monitored everyone else, absolutely everyone: professors, students, librarians and even the janitors were afraid. The militants feared each other, because anyone could be betrayed, accused, repudiated, and parametered, as they said (now it’s called canceled). And, to protect and defend themselves, people either kept their mouths shut, or, better yet, stood at whatever podium to speechify about political reaffirmation and lead acts of Marxist-Leninist faith with the required pinch of Stalinism. And denunciations, one of the consequences generated by fear, and fueling even more fear, proliferated, just like verdolaga.* Because, as is well known, generating fear is the sine qua non for exercising control.
*Purslane
With hundreds of artists marginalized, dozens of writers excluded, many professors and students expelled or punished, every one of us got the messager and applied our survival strategies. No one who liked to read dared, for instance, to say he was reading – or might have read – Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Cabrera Infante or Cortázar, much less Lezama Lima and Virgilio Piñera, not to mention Orwell or Borges or Solzhenitsyn. Ideally, you would carry under your arm La última mujer y el próximo combate by Manuel Cofiño – you remember that there was once a Manuel Cofiño? Has anyone gone back to read the then celebrated, popular, much republished Manuel Cofiño? Not by chance did this socialist realist novel win the Casa de las Américas prize that year, then to be immediately published and copiously reprinted. Or declare that your favorite writers were, let’s say, the Sholokhov of Virgin Soil Upturned or Nikolai Ostrovsky of How the Steel Was Tempered.
At the same time, when the semesters of Historical Materialism and Dialectics, History of Philosophy and of the World Workers’ Movement, Political Economy of Socialism, Scientific Atheism or that incredible course, Scientific Communism (this curriculum reveals a lot about our context, doesn’t it?) started in our major, of course you knew that you had to raise an altar to Marx, Engels, Lenin and comrade Stalin. And, needless to say, never – even if in delirium, with a fever of a 107 – allow yourself to utter the name Gramsci or that of Sartre, at that time repudiated; much less that of one Leon Trotsky unless you were calling him a traitor to the working class, false prophet and, very emphatically, revisionist, which was the lowest level of degradation to which a thinking being could descend.
If you had the vocation or the need to write and you started to do it in that era, what kind of literature could you imagine yourself writing? Or, better yet, if you wanted to make a living writing, could you conceive of writing in a style different from what was expected, promised, almost required? It was in the atmosphere of this artistic school (ideo-aesthetics, to be precise) in which I discovered that I liked to write, I still don’t know why – to tell stories more than to dig through History. Besides that, the environment also determined historians’ possible interests and projections. They were divided into two irreconcilable groups: Idealists and Marxists. And we, needless to say, could only wear the uniforms of the latter.
[A newly retired accountant and his psychiatrist and close friend, ponder Cuban life]
“So, aside from doing nothing, what are you going to do from now on?
“Survive, until I get tired…And I want to tell you that I’m really tired – this thing of working all your life just to be poorer and have to keep working so I don’t die of hunger…”
“Work at what?”
“Night watchman at some nouveau riche guy’s house, landscaper, house painter, what do I know – whatever comes up that I can do. Although no one paints because there’s no paint, and in my neighborhood no one takes care of the gardens because what’s the point. I’m going to see if there’s room for an accountant for the son of a friend who’s got several businesses and is rich now. No exaggeration, he is really rich…and he’s a Babalawo who initiates santos, preferably foreigners. Fuck, Pedro Luis, I don’t know what your stalwart Communist parents would have thought of all this. Look what we’re living through. They were so sure of social progress, of the ascent of History toward a society of equals, right?”
The old man smiled as best he could.
“Rodolfo, they would have justified all of it. They would say that History advances in spirals and that sacrifice is a test that strengthens us. That we’ve been victims of a merciless American blockade, the longest in modern history. And, like the good Stalinists they were, they would recall in passing Khrushchev ‘s wimpiness and Gorbachev’s betrayal. How many times do I have to tell you this, kid? Communism is not a philosophy or an ideology – or it was at the beginning, but then, for those who kept believing, it became a religion and, like all of them, demanded faith and acceptance of dogma, with liturgies included. Does that explain it?”
“Almost all of it. Although adding the collateral damage that, with that step toward religious faith, they stripped out historical materialism and the dialectic and even the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.”
“That doesn’t matter. And the truth is that it didn’t matter from the beginning. Just faith and the class struggle…Oh, and control and electrification, as Lenin said. The important thing was to believe in a historical process wisely led by infallible and eternal leaders – the problem is that only gods are. So, as a transitive matter, a leader conjugated with infallibility and omnipresence implies…divinity. But I’m an atheist.”
“That explains more. And, in addition, the reason we’re so fucked? That this country is emptying out? That people have to practically scratch at the wall to get something to eat every day? Or does it also explain that because of the national disaster there are some smarter guys, like this Babalawo businessman I mentioned, who are getting rich selling the food that the State doesn’t guarantee and that sometimes is the only food available because this State has collapsed? Don’t mess with me.”
“Listen, I’m not messing with you. None of this is my fault.”
Rodolfo agreed and motioned with his hand in a gesture of apology, and then immediately shook his head.
“Or the issue is power, not giving up power? This is what really matters to them?”
“You’re really going strong today…”
“And all that about faith…does that also explain that now I have to go look for a paintbrush or a machete in order to survive?”
“That too, that too…Look, you know it: Hilda [the psychiatrist’s wife, a doctor] and I live more on the presents her patients give her than from her salary and my retirement…” He paused and lowered his voice. Don’t go around talking about this…but Hilda has pretty much set up an examination office in one of the rooms back there. She takes care of her good and old patients here at the house…and I think she wouldn’t charge you…”
“Not bad…And your old patients, like me, when we come to hassle you…we don’t pay or gift you anything?”
“Maybe a bottle of rum or a little package of coffee, if that…You actual nutcases love to act crazy and you’re cheapskates or totally broke…But, wait a minute, don’t spin in circles and throw up. What the fuck is going on with you now that you’re got this suicidal impulse and the awful way you look? But before I start, let me give you some advice: Don’t go around repeating what we’ve been talking about…And much less even think about taking to the streets with a poster, for god’s sake.”
Rodolfo agreed, because he could be careless, though not that much. And it was obvious that the doctor knew him better than he knew himself.
