CUBANTHROPY

A Cuban essayist, critic, and art curator reflects on various aspects of the Cuban socialist revolution, subsequent capitalist experiments, and ongoing tensions with the U.S.

In these brief, pointed essays published in Spanish-language periodicals since the 1990s, de la Nuez, who left Cuba in 1991 and lives in Barcelona, shows how Cuba managed to weather its socialist revolution, despite the fall of the Soviet Union, and has not embraced democracy since the death of its seminal founder, Fidel Castro, and retirement of his brother, Raul, in 2021. Instead, the author argues that Cuba has embraced “an ecstasy of exceptionality” and has chosen “to go it alone.” He looks at some of the aspects of this exceptionalism through the last three decades, mostly in the world of arts and culture. These include the parade of intellectuals through Cuba since the 1960s, “ever ready to give theoretical support to the so-called Cuban way”; the cunning “iconocracy” employed by Fidel in pictures and movies to spread the Cuban mystique (“Castro never needed a spin doctor”); and a “post-communist” New Left that has forgotten the countless problems under the previous dictator, Fulgencio Batista, accepted the ideology of the free market, and “found refuge in less rugged landscapes.” Indeed, notes de la Nuez, Batista “has made a comeback as the great Cuban hashtag.” The author also discusses the Cuban “rhapsody” portrayed in works by Che Guevara, Wim Wenders, Steven Spielberg, and Oliver Stone, among others, and the nostalgia regarding music and cars. He writes movingly of the Cuban diaspora, of which he is a part, and he introduces us to elements of the new Cuban economy, which he calls the “catharsis of controlled hedonism.” When a Cuban press finally published Nineteen Eighty-Four, in January 2016, “there was no shortage of people pointing out how belated the publication of this masterpiece was.”

Trenchant observations on the enduring Cuban mystique.