Bad Handwriting in La Joven Cuba (23) / Regina Coyula

Translator’s note: These posts are a series of comments Regina has posted in the blog “La Joven Cuba.”

With regards to exegesis, one could say that Lenin was the first revisionist, a tendency that we in Cuba know in passing. I say in passing because they didn’t study the texts of Gramsci, Plekhanov, Rosa Luxemburg; Trotsky was the antichrist. Marcusse did not qualify as a Marxist. I speak of the years before the fall of socialism.

After reading your work [in La Joven Cuba], it seems that not much has changed in the landscape, with the aggravation of the cited “Cuban socialism,” where there will be many adaptations, but not a single philosopher, where I imagine those booklets full of quotes from Fidel. How could it not be mission impossible to pretend thatFrankenstein motivates a student !

Continuing with the exegesis, we may come to the conclusion that Marxism has passed from being a theory; that in Russia in 1917 and Cuba in 1959 there were social revolutions that undertook a semantic adoption of terms, but did not give rise to the embryonic communist, that Marx was right in saying that social formations have to be exhausted to bring about a change.

Clearly one has to be open to new philosophical currents. Marxism is 150 years old and the world has changed in a way that neither Marx nor anyone else could imagine. Therefore it would be better to study Marxism as one more doctrine while we concentrate on finding solutions to bringing the country out of the economic crisis and the crisis of values that it is in, without looking for labels, without putting everything under the ideological microscope. If we even have the luxury of a José Martí, we don’t need to look any further.

January 13 2012