This essay shows the impossibility of the idyllic dream of Spanish domination over Cuba and shows... more This essay shows the impossibility of the idyllic dream of Spanish domination over Cuba and shows the dilemmas of the colonial Cuban leading class, the sacarocracy, on the one hand worried about the increase in the Black population, which was necessary as labor, and also worried about the risk of political rebellion. Politics and economy stand in stark contradiction, making Arango’s autonomism non-viable.
The reactions generated by the televised homages in early 2006 to Luis Pavon, Jorge Serquera, and... more The reactions generated by the televised homages in early 2006 to Luis Pavon, Jorge Serquera, and Armando Quesada—deposed officials who had occupied important posts in the Cuban cultural hierarchy—may be seen as part of the country’s post-Soviet experience. Three decades after they were fired, the former leaders aroused a heated polemic on Cuba’s cultural policy in the 1970s. Prestigious intellectuals Anton Arrufat, Senel Paz, Miguel Barnet, Reynaldo Gonzalez, and Desiderio Navarro began an email exchange into which, within days, many more writers and artists from several generations entered. A formal complaint was lodged with the Ministry of Culture and a colloquium on the five-year gray period of Cuban culture (1971–1976) was organized at the Casa de las Americas. Cuban publications in exile followed the collective protest carefully, although they also criticized several Cuban intellectuals, whom they accused of limiting themselves to timorous attacks on figures with no real political influence within Cuba today. As many observed, Pavon and company—diabolical though they may have been—were no more than bureaucrats, merely names that stood for a much vaster system marked by the imposition of Soviet models on the conduct of cultural activities.
This essay shows the impossibility of the idyllic dream of Spanish domination over Cuba and shows... more This essay shows the impossibility of the idyllic dream of Spanish domination over Cuba and shows the dilemmas of the colonial Cuban leading class, the sacarocracy, on the one hand worried about the increase in the Black population, which was necessary as labor, and also worried about the risk of political rebellion. Politics and economy stand in stark contradiction, making Arango’s autonomism non-viable.
The reactions generated by the televised homages in early 2006 to Luis Pavon, Jorge Serquera, and... more The reactions generated by the televised homages in early 2006 to Luis Pavon, Jorge Serquera, and Armando Quesada—deposed officials who had occupied important posts in the Cuban cultural hierarchy—may be seen as part of the country’s post-Soviet experience. Three decades after they were fired, the former leaders aroused a heated polemic on Cuba’s cultural policy in the 1970s. Prestigious intellectuals Anton Arrufat, Senel Paz, Miguel Barnet, Reynaldo Gonzalez, and Desiderio Navarro began an email exchange into which, within days, many more writers and artists from several generations entered. A formal complaint was lodged with the Ministry of Culture and a colloquium on the five-year gray period of Cuban culture (1971–1976) was organized at the Casa de las Americas. Cuban publications in exile followed the collective protest carefully, although they also criticized several Cuban intellectuals, whom they accused of limiting themselves to timorous attacks on figures with no real political influence within Cuba today. As many observed, Pavon and company—diabolical though they may have been—were no more than bureaucrats, merely names that stood for a much vaster system marked by the imposition of Soviet models on the conduct of cultural activities.
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Papers by Ernesto menendez-conde