SPAN 44 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Hegemonic Masculinity, Edmundo Desnoes, Heberto Padilla
Week 7, Lecture 2: The Cuban Revolution
Impact on Intellectuals (1959-76)
Alli Carlisle
Cultural Reorganization
● Strong focus on education and cultural production
○ Effort to make Cuba an international cultural and artistic powerhouse
● The new institutions
○ ICAIC, 1959 (Cban Institute of Cinematographic Art nad Industry)
■ Octavio Cortazar’s For the First Time (1967, Por primera Vez)
● Showing rural population film/cinema for the first time; great divide between
urban/rural regions
■ Using cinema as a tool for education and unification
○ Casa de las Americas (1959)
■ Culturla house, center for literature; important in promoting literary culture IN cuba and
internationally; Cuba wants to set themselves as a foil to US
■ Founded by Haydee Santamaria, one of the Revolution’s few prominent women
○ UNEAC, 1961 (National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba)
ICAIC poster
● Holding up a camera, resembles a gun→ weapon/powerful tool to win for cultural battle(?): cuban flag→
nationalism
Uncle Sam poster
● Uncle Sam seen as an uncle-scrooge/unpleasant man; tied up by film→ using culture to win ideological
cultural battle
Fidel Castro, “Words to the Intellectuals”
CONTEXT
● Gathering of intellectuals (wrtiers, artists, filmmakers), in the Jose Marti National LIbrary in 1961
○ One of the series of gatherings to discuss culture
○ Response to anxieties about censorship after PM
● PM incident
○ ICAIC declined to screen PM, a short documentary (15 min) about Havana nightlife (Saba
Cabrera Infante and Orlando Jiminez Leal)
○ Working class subjects, Black/Afro-Cuban subjects dancing, drinking, and partying all night…
not considered appropriate “Revolutionary” behavior
Not revolutionary behavior nor being productive/model citizens; promoting vices
○ (Context: Bay of Pigs Invasion, Cuba’s public ideological struggle with the US)
○ Involvement of writers of Lunes de Revolucion journal
THEMES
● Genre: speech
○ It’s LONG (mutli-hour Castro speeches became a mainstay of Cuban public life)
● Fidel’s political rhetoric
○ Persuasive, manipulative: begins w/ defining freedom, ends with defining Revolution
○ Forceful, strong, idealistic, utopoian, nationalistic
● Ambiguity: “No rule of a general nature can be indicated”
○ ….an element of total power is the ability to control not just the game, but the terms on which it
is played
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
○ There is a line, but idk where it is
● The ever-present questiono f freedom: Form vs. Content
○ “FORMAL freedom was spoken of here. Everyone agreed with respect to formal freedom”
○ “The matter becomes subtle and actually turns to the essential point of discussion when
freedom of CONTENT is involved. [...] The most debatable point of this question is whether or
not there should be absolute freedom of content in artistic expression
● The (in)famous dictum: “Within the Revolution, everything: against the Revolution, nothing.”
○ … but what does that mean? (What’s considered insnide the revolution?)--> holding onto the
ability to create the terms; people determine the line
● Goal of cultural work in the Revolution: total transformation
● INstitutional change, spread of culture, education of massses
● Away from the individual, toward the masses
● Who really belongs here? Establishing the boundaries
○ “No one has ever assuemd that all men, or all writers, or all artists must be revolutionaries”
○ Revolutionaries or mercenaries? (not everyone is exactly a revolutionary, but counter-
revolutionaries are not acceptable)
■ Who’s in and who’s out? And the rules regarding this?
Che Guevara, “Man and Socialism in Cuba” (1965
● Interconnection of individual and masses
○ “Fidel and the mass begin to vibrate in a dialogue of growing intensity which reaches its
culminating point in an abrupt ending crowned by our victorious battle cry. “
● Intellectuals are not naturally “revolutionary”: many were sent to rural areas to reshape their
consciousness
○ ” To sum up, the fault of many of our intellectuals and artists is to be found in their "original sin":
they are not authentically revolutionary.”
○ “We do not want to create salaried workers docile to official thinking nor "fellows" who live under
the wing of the budget, exercising freedom in quotation marks. Revolutionaries will come to sing
to song of the new man with the authentic voice of the people. It is a process that requires time.”
● “Must construct a new man to construct a new society (note the very gendered language; ideal
masculine norm man))
○ “We can see the new man who begins to emerge in this period of the building of socialism. His
image is as yet unfinished; in fact it will never be finished, since the process advances parallel
to the development of new economic forms. “
Who belongs in the new Cuba? Military Units to aid production (UMAP 1965-68)
● Labor/reeducation camps; alternative to military service for conscientious objectors
○ Violent enforcement of normative (masculine) subjectivity
● punishment/quarantine for “anti-social” or “counter-revolutioanry” subjects: gay men, Jehovah’s
Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventists, clergy, other resisters
○ Intellectuals
● Abject conditions: forced hard labor, torture, imprisonment, malnutrition, filth, etc.
● Fidel Castro said in 2010 they were a “great injustice”
Tomas Gutierrez Aleas, Memories of Underdevelopment (1968)
● One of Cuba’s most important and best known filmmakers (very connected with ICAIC)
● First Cuban film shown in U.S. after Revolution
● Based on novel of same title by Edmundo Desnoes (1965)
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Strong focus on education and cultural production. Effort to make cuba an international cultural and artistic powerhouse. Icaic, 1959 (cban institute of cinematographic art nad industry) Octavio cortazar"s for the first time (1967, por primera vez) Showing rural population film/cinema for the first time; great divide between urban/rural regions. Using cinema as a tool for education and unification. Culturla house, center for literature; important in promoting literary culture in cuba and internationally; cuba wants to set themselves as a foil to us. Founded by haydee santamaria, one of the revolution"s few prominent women. Uneac, 1961 (national union of writers and artists of cuba) Uncle sam seen as an uncle-scrooge/unpleasant man; tied up by film using culture to win ideological cultural battle. Gathering of intellectuals (wrtiers, artists, filmmakers), in the jose marti national library in 1961. One of the series of gatherings to discuss culture. Response to anxieties about censorship after pm.
