"Hasta sus últimas consecuencias". Dialécticas de la Revolución Cubana

Abstract

This dissertation analyses the tense relationship between aesthetics and politics within the Cuban revolution and its aftermath. It reads a variety of materials --Ernesto Guevara's ideas about guerrilla warfare and the "New Man"; the copious non-fiction writing about the Revolution produced by foreign intellectuals who visited the island in the sixties (Jean-Paul Sartre, Susan Sontag, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada); the "novela policial revolucionaria" (revolutionary detective novel), Cuba's major contribution to Socialist Realism; and finally the melancholic image of post-socialist Cuba in fiction literature and photographic pictures depicting Havana urban ruins (Cuban writers Pedro Juan Gutiérrez and Antonio José Ponte, North American photographers Andrew Moore, Robert Polidori and Michael Eastman)-- as so many instances of what philosopher Alain Badiou calls the "Passion for the Real", that paradox defining the 20th century in which the will to go beyond appearances, mediation and representation ends up in new simulacra.

In all of the different periods of the revolutionary era -the utopian sixties, the Soviet seventies and eighties, and the post-communist "special period"-, it traces how this "passion for the real", in Slavoj iek's words, "culminates in its apparent opposite, in a theatrical spectacle." Such a paradox is at the core of what I call "dialectics of the revolution", as it veers from the masses as subject of politics to the masses as object of politics, from the instantaneous Revolutionary Event to the eternal Revolutionary Regime, from a radically utopian to a rather melancholic mood. Situating the Cuba revolution in the greater historical context to which it belongs -a century haunted by the radical desire to transcend the separation of art and politics proper to bourgeois society-, allows me not only to shed light on revolutionary art in socialist Cuba, but also on the issue of revolution itself as a work of art. I show how the Revolution, which claimed to overcome the sort of alienation that Marxist tradition has called reification or spectacle, becomes commodity and spectacle produced and consumed in a vicious circle.