The Cuban Hypothesis: Aesthetics and Politics of Continuity & Rupture since the Radical Sixties

Abstract

The different discourses (political, aesthetic, historiographic) that dispute since the 1960s the currency of Cuba’s recent past have consistently articulated their narratives around the figures of continuity and rupture—from the “new man” in a new Cuba to the existence of a Cuba “post Castro.” In actuality, these tropes, which refer to the passage of time, have been employed instead to discuss the synchronic relationships between political subjects and state politics—between society and government, the people and the leadership, Cuba and Fidel. In this dissertation, I challenge the rhetorical inversion of historical and political terms by proposing an alternative articulation of these synchronic agents of politics. The exceptionality of the process of social revolution in Cuba consists in a form of politics where power is never neither a predicate exclusive to the state or the people nor a negotiation of periodic tensions between them, but is always simultaneously held by both. This dissertation historicizes the material and symbolic conditions of possibility of this dual power to produce three critical, historiographic, and theoretical interventions. Firstly, to offer a mode of reading that makes the instances of actualization of this dual power visible in the forms of representation that registered it, primarily in Cuban cinema and literature. With the theoretical help of political historian Theda Skocpol and philosophers Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière, I rethink the category of the “special plans” utilized in the economic history about the second half of the 1960s to define the elements and dynamics of dual power in Cuba and argue their effects in the cultural field and the realm of everyday life. Mass mobilization, rather than an economic strategy, constituted a form of political participation that was lived of as a social pharmakon, as I read it in the testimonies and creation of Silvio Rodríguez and Cintio Vitier. It was also in those actions of mass voluntary labor that Cuban cinema evolved both institutionally and aesthetically, a progression that is more evident in the theoretical writings of Julio García Espinosa and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea. New cinematic forms were found in literal sync with the radicalization of political participation in the different special plans launched during the decade and documented by the core of Cuba’s film industry—the Noticiero ICAIC Latinoamericano. The figures of historical continuity and rupture are also forms of negotiating in the surface of cultural production the realms affected by the historical process of a social revolution, between everyday life and the historic event; that is, these tropes need to be read as a negotiation of the degree of importance of the revolutionary process, what it managed to generate for the future, as well as the level of agency of its Cuban participants—between subjective transformation or the formation of a political subjectivity. By thinking about the quotidian in terms of Bruno Latour’s new materialism, I rename a popular genre of film comedies from the 1980s as Socialist Costumbrismo to highlight its connection with the new country’s material realities, social relationships, and the political logics and collective fictions that sustained it. I revisit a series of understudied short films from this genre to disentangle contemporary forms of establishing cultural memory about the Cuban past from an archival curation of the material culture of the time that renders the latter obsolete and devoid of relevance for the post Soviet present. Against that archival drive in projects such as the online collections Cuba material and the Archive of Cuban Socialism (ARCHUS), I read these shorts by filmmaker Enrique Colina with Diana Taylor’s ideas about the repertoire to restitute their revolutionary potential and the implicit collective forms of politics to the material everyday life they represent. Secondly, this dissertation theorizes the changing forms of the Cuban dual power to rethink the history of the Revolution against the prevalence of historiographic narratives of rupture in the interpretation of contemporary cultural production. Critics approach the Cuban visual and literary production in the decades after the dissolution of the Soviet Union as retreating from a utopian future, mourning a revolutionary past, or coping with a paranoid present. This critical description portrays a cultural scene devoted to dispassionately represent an omnipresent societal suspicion towards any collective project. The final chapter of this dissertation questions this portrayal and reveals, on the contrary, a deeply politically engaged cultural field invested in a programmatic retelling of the revolutionary aftermath. By employing Žižek’s political translation of Freud's different conceptualizations of trauma, I register a semantic and narratological change in the usage of the motif of death and interpret it as a central signifier of a new politics of memory at work on the Island. Based on the traditional Marxist and Perry Anderson’s concepts of ideology, I read a historical form of discursivity in literary works by Leonardo Padura, Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, Karla Suárez, Eduardo del Llano, Fabián Suárez, and Ahmel Echevarría Peré, as well as in films by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Daniel Díaz Torres, and Jorge Perugorría. Lastly, this dissertation—engaging with the work of Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, Jacques Rancière, Bruno Bosteels, Jodi Dean, and others—reintroduces the Cuban experience in contemporary debates about emancipatory theories—that is, Cuba as a hypothesis.