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.From the cultural supplement Lunesde Revolución to Pensamiento Crítico via Casa de las Américas, the CubanRevolution followed a tortuous history between the ill-defined pluralism andexuberance of the early years and the militancy of the later part of the decade;between a new dawn of freedom to which Cuban intellectuals were quick toreact and the high levels of political control of intellectual productioncharacteristic of the early 1970s.20 In the process, sections of the Cubanintellectual field came into contact with their European counterparts.21The following section uses signposts provided by some of these publi-cations in order to explore the changing nature of the positions, roles, anddilemmas of the intellectual in the Cuban Revolution while outlining theformative process and contours of the groups and generations thatconstituted a Cuban version of the New Left.It presents two intellectualgenerations and the processes that led to their respective periods ofdomination as well as the way in which the message of the New Left wastransferred from one to the other through a common formative experi-ence in the university.The Early Days: Lunes de RevoluciónThe short but influential life of Lunes de Revolución (Lunes) exemplifiesalmost perfectly Cuba s rapid transition from the exuberance characteris-tic of 1959 and the radicalization dominant by the end of 1961.As partof the revolutionary commitment to culture, Lunes s beginnings can beunderstood in the same context that gave birth to the Imprenta Nacional(National Publishing House) and the ICAIC in March 1959.22 Itachieved a run of 100,000 copies and soon was identified as a space forthe returned intellectuals (Fornet in Rosquette, 1992: 2).However, itsfirst editorial clearly stated that Lunes did not have a previous politico-philosophical position (Editorial, 1959a: 2), not surprising as one of itsfeatures was its lack of a fixed editorial team.Instead, it was organizedloosely around key figures such as Carlos Franqui, Virgilio Piñera, PabloArmando Fernández, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, José Antonio Baragaño,Antón Arrufat, Oscar Hurtado, and Humberto Arenal.This informalstructure was similar to that of other international intellectual currents at Cuba 35the time, notably the British New Left, which gathered around a Londoncoffeehouse, The Partisan.In the literary field, there was an enormously wide range of interests,from the new emerging Cuban intellectual scene, to international figuresof high renown such as Sartre, Neruda, and Camus as well as NorthAmerican black writers Julian Mayfied and Sarah E.Wright, reflecting thehigh importance the periodical attached to the international contribu-tion.23 Thematically, almost anything found space in the pages of Lunes,from surrealism to existentialism, to the theatre of the absurd, in the truerevolutionary spirit of engagement with universal culture that stemmedfrom the diagnosis of Cuba s cultural situation as highly deficient.As itsinitial editorial pointed out, the first duty of the magazine was to bring toCuba the very best of universal culture to make up for the lost time(Editorial, 1959a).Interestingly, the late 1960s brought the opposite pro-ject by emphasizing a specific Cuban intellectual discourse, particularlyby Edmundo Desnoes and Roberto Fernández Retamar, in a CulturalOffensive in which the universe was deemed as colonizing and thosewho argued in favor of it as colonized. From the very beginning, it was obvious that a single, coherent posi-tion was absent in the magazine.A number of different currents were pre-sent in the Lunes group, mostly writers who belonged to the previousgeneration of Orígenes, Ciclón, and Nuestro Tiempo as well as those who,exiled in the 1950s, returned to Cuba in the wake of the rebel victory.They also represented two distinct intellectual generations that would befundamental to some of the later conflicts and transformations at the endof the decade in ways somewhat similar to those of the European NewLeft.Notably, signs of discordance were soon revealed when certain ele-ments in the younger generation argued that literature and art had to becloser to the political, social, and economic aspects of society (Editorial1959a).This was clear from the continuous crossing of disciplinaryboundaries to cover political as well as literary topics, a characteristic thejournal shared with its European and North American counterparts.Thisfeature gave the paper a markedly anti-imperialist character, not surpris-ing since many of its authors belonged to the 1933 generation of a frus-trated revolution in Cuban history (Kapcia, 2000).A dominant anti-imperialist ideology can clearly be detected in thedenunciatory nature of the many articles and references to the Algerianwar that found their way into the publication.This was particularlyimportant because these articles were censored by the French government,as was the case with Alleg s testimonies of the systematic use of torture bythe French military in Algeria.In this sense, Lunes shared political posi-tions that in France were reserved for the progressive New Left press such 36 Cuba and Western Intellectuals since 1959as Les Temps Modernes or L Observateur.The anti-imperialist stance becamea clearer conviction as the Revolution embarked on its rapid succession ofnationalizations in the summer of 1960 during a period of increasing con-frontation with the United States
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Tematy
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