That dark, inquisitorial period lasted much more than five years. It did not, as some would like to pretend, end in 1976.
Fornet first utilized this expression in January of 2007 during his appearance at an event convened by fellow essayist Desiderio Navarro with the blessing of the Ministry of Culture, and by which Fornet attempted to resolve the so-called “email storm.”
That storm, also known as “the little war of emails,” was provoked by the fawning presentations on the TV programs “Impronta” and “La Diferencia” (hosted by singer Alfredo Rodríguez) of Luis Pavón and Jorge “Papito” Serguera, executors of the cultural policies of that period—the former as president of the National Council of Culture (CNC), the latter as director of the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television (ICRT).
During his appearance in that roundtable, and in his attempt to do some belated damage control by minimizing the era as much as possible (and above all, by not indicating who bore the primary responsibility for it) Fornet understated matters by employing the term, “five-year period.”
That dark, inquisitorial time lasted much longer than five years. It did not, as some claim, end in 1976, when the National Council of Culture was replaced by the Ministry of Culture, with Armando Hart at the helm; several more years would elapse before the darkness would begin to dissipate in the early 1980s.
Nor did it start in 1971 with the Congress of Education and Culture, and the Heberto Padilla affair. For a long while already, dark clouds had been gathering over writers and artists. Before the commissioners, irritated by the homoerotic tone of Chapter VIII of Paradiso, ordered Lezama Lima‘s monumental novel to be removed from bookstores and turned into pulp; before the ordeal visited upon Heberto Padilla and Antón Arrufat for their books Fuera del juego and Los siete contraTebas, respectively, began in 1968; before that Stalinist ectoplasm who would sign his name as “Leopoldo Ávila” (and whose authorship remains unknown, whether it was actually “Lieutenant” Pavón, José Antonio Portuondo*, or both of them in a duet) began to fire mercilessly at writers from the pages of Verde Olivo, the magazine of the Revolutionary Armed Forces.
Several years before Lieutenant Armando Quesada* ordered the burning of the Guiñol Nacional puppets related to Afro-Cuban traditions in 1971, considering them to represent “backwardness, underdevelopment, the stuff of black santeros,” other figures in official culture, imbued with “revolutionary fervor,” were already setting themselves up as inquisitors.
In October of 1963, one of the most Stalinist cultural commissars of the regime, the scholastically Marxist Mirta Aguirre, declared: “In the hands of dialectical materialism, art can and should be an exorcism, a form of knowledge that contributes to sweeping the dark shadows of ignorance from the minds of men, a precious instrument for replacing the religious conception of the world with [Marxism’s] scientific conception, and a timely Marxist resource for the defeat of philosophical idealism.”
In 1965, a recalcitrant and obtuse extremist like Magaly Muguercia believed she was capable of deciding that Cuban theater had to be “an obligatory socialist expression.”
The writer and folklorist Samuel Feijoo, on April 15, 1965, in order to get in tune with that statement from the Union of Young Communists that screamed “Out with the homosexuals and the counterrevolutionaries from our schools,” and anticipating the UMAP by a few months and the Parametración*** carried out by the Evaluation Commission of the CNC in the early 70s by six years, published in the newspaper El Mundo a commentary entitled “Revolution and Vices,” in which he stated:
“This most virile country, with its army of men, should not and cannot be expressed by homosexual writers and artists. Because no homosexual represents the Revolution, which is a matter of men, of fists and not pens, of courage and not trembling, of integrity and not intrigue, of creative courage and not cheap surprises. Because the literature of homosexuals reflects their epicene natures, as Raúl Roa said. And true revolutionary literature is not and will never be written by sodomites… Destroy their positions, their procedures, their influence. That is what is called revolutionary social hygiene. They must be eradicated from their key positions on the frontier of revolutionary art and literature. If we lose a dance group because of this, we are left without the sick dance group. If we lose an exquisite literary figure, the air becomes cleaner. Thus, we will feel healthier while we create new virile figures emerging from a brave people.”
The witch hunt against artists and intellectuals would reach its climax with Fidel Castro’s speech in April 1971, at the closing of the Congress on Education and Culture. But the scribes of official culture and some of those who suffered from Stockholm syndrome yesterday, when speaking of the Grey Decade, prefer to reduce it to a five-year period and avoid mentioning that the responsibility for that dark and sad period lay with Fidel Castro, beginning with his “Words to Intellectuals” in June 1961**, and culminating 10 years later with the closing speech of the Congress on Education and Culture.
Luis Pavón, Papito Serguera, Armando Quesada, and other anti-cultural henchmen, however extremist they may have been, were merely the underlings with limited authority who, in compliance with “the instructions from above,” were charged with carrying out those aberrant policies to bring artists and intellectuals in line and “within the Revolution.”
Translator’s Notes:
*Portuondo and Quesada are pictured in this Translating Cuba article, Cuban Writer Jorge Ferrer Releases the Recordings of Heberto Padilla’s ‘Confession.’
**A reference to a speech by Fidel Castro on June 30, 1961, in which he set limits to the free expression of artists and writers: “Within the Revolution, everything; outside the Revolution, nothing.”
****Parameterization/ parametración: From the word “parameters.” Parameterization is a process of establishing parameters and declaring anyone who falls outside them (the parametrados) to be what is commonly translated as “misfits” or “marginalized.” This is a process much harsher than implied by these terms in English. The process is akin to the McCarthy witch hunts and black lists and is used, for example, to purge the ranks of teachers, or even to imprison people.
Translated by: Alicia Barraqué Ellison
