Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo, Translator: Joanne Gómez
In art, like in politics, the speeches of epigones, now free of the
original guilt of the Messiah, start attempting a liberal rereading of
the revolutionary scripture and end up being pure fascism. The Cuban
intellectual Fernando Rojas, beyond his high governmental charge (every
now and then the rumor that he will replace Abel Prieto circulates with
horror in the Cuban literary camp), has no reason to be the exception.
Half a century after an adjustment in incidental accounts, Rojas
relaunches Fidel Castro's Words to the Intellectuals from 1961, to the
future. He does not want to let the archeologists be the ones who exhume
the fossil violence of the document. To interpret is to sanitize. And
Rojas bets on ideologizing what was such a concrete act: to put the gun
over a desk at the Biblioteca Nacional, the National Library.
It's about, of course, an attempted coup against Cuban culture. A
process of terminal "red"-ization. And hopefully that maneuver will be
successful, beyond his scientific demagogy and his republican cadence of
Stalinist party in power. Because the full health of any culture is only
attained under the obscene boot of a despot. Because without censure
there is no moral resistance that might yield limited creativity (cue
the developing world's yawns for our aesthetic exile). Because the
future depends on equal parts victim and torturer, where right now
Fernando Rojas incarnates that second role (leading role and not at all
supporting) with historic chivalry.
So then, the next decade promises to be both gray and luminous in
Rojas's perspective. There will be debates of an anti-dogmatic style
about the big mistakes of the Revolution's past. The bureaucracy will be
bureaucratically memorialized for the one-thousandth nine-hundredth
fifty-ninth time. There will be rescue rectifications, even for the
non-revolutionary writers who don't get to be incorrigibly reactionary
(I myself might be saved on a little plank there). The rage of Cabrera
Infante and Reinaldo Arenas will be bleached, like the iniquitous irony
of Virgilio Piñera and the atrocious cunning of Lezama were, in their
moment, bleached as well. The barbarism of Lydia Cabrera will be
folklorized and the stridencies of Celia Cruz will be obligatory. In the
meantime, the market will continue being a medieval tool in the
mummified hands of the State: the illusion always immersed inside the
institution. It's the theory of the ripe carrot versus the tyranny of an
olive green whip.
Applause, close ovation: that's how the Cuban press transcribed the
translation of Fidel Castro's calligraphers. And Fernando Rojas
should've finished off like that Granma's grammar in his last speech. He
should not have felt pity for that coda that no one in Cuba, except me,
will concede him. In fact, applause and closed ovation is the least that
the monolithic ideal that betrays him from paragraph to paragraph
deserves, the ones that suppurate an anti-intellectual disdain that
would be better articulated, in terms of author, in one of those novels
about the loneliness of a dictator previously sadistic and now senile.
Fernando Rojas magnanimously pardons his new captive children's lives
(little happy men that are panic-stricken by him or flirt with him, but
definitely children lost in the forest, that sooner or later, will be
corrected by the political Peter Pans who care for them). There is no
way to avoid his good intentions when brandishing a paved paper like
it's the sole Law. Our Rojaspierre in the ministry knows that the
illiteracy of the Cuban audience is in direct proportion to their high
educational level. Everyone wants to create, ergo it will then be very
easy to make them believe first. And later we will agree on heroes and
tombs, as well as grants and voyages, but always complicitly between
companions, because out there and in here citizens are sharpening their
knives, that never-as-useful than today unscrupulous and insatiable
counterrevolution.
Nonetheless, in spite of the enlightened effort of Rojas, clucking out
of context "inside the Revolution, everything; against the Revolution,
nothing," forwarding the phrase without reading the rest of that
primitive speech, exaggerating its character of cultural apartheid and
nullifying the semantic subtleties of socialism, maybe it has been the
luck of a minimal vengeance, inconsistently transgenerational, almost an
anonymous tweet that doesn't remember what user it came out of, a
discontinued vanishing line before the megalomaniac monologue of decades
and decades of the Maximum Leader in his tribunal grandstand. It seems
that each one has the bad date he deserves.
Translated by: Joanne Gomez
July 6 2011
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