[News] Without Culture, Freedom Is Impossible

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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*Without Culture, Freedom Is Impossible: The Thirty-Eighth Newsletter 
(2022)*


Roberto Matta (Chile), Cuba es la capital (‘Cuba Is the Capital’), 1963.

Roberto Matta (Chile), /Cuba es la capital /(‘Cuba Is the Capital’), 1963.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research 
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In 2002, Cuba’s President Fidel Castro Ruz visited the country’s 
National Ballet School to inaugurate the 18th Havana International 
Ballet Festival. Founded in 1948 by the /prima ballerina assoluta/ 
Alicia Alonso 
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(1920–2019), the school struggled financially until the Cuban Revolution 
decided that ballet – like other art forms – must be available to 
everyone and so must be socially financed. At the school in 2002, Castro 
remembered 
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that the first festival, held in 1960, ‘asserted Cuba’s cultural 
vocation, identity, and nationality, even under the most adverse 
circumstances, when major dangers and threats loomed over the country’.

Ballet, like so many cultural forms, had been stolen from popular 
participation and enjoyment. The Cuban Revolution wanted to return this 
artistic practice to the people as part of its determination to advance 
human dignity. To build a revolution in a country assaulted by colonial 
barbarism, the new revolutionary process had to both establish the 
country’s sovereignty and build the dignity of each of its people. This 
dual task is the work of national liberation. ‘Without culture’, Castro 
said, ‘freedom is not possible’.

Enrique Tábara (Ecuador), Coloquio de frívolos (‘Colloquium of the 
Frivolous’), 1982. Acrylic on canvas,140.5 x 140.5 cm.

Enrique Tábara (Ecuador), /Coloquio de frívolos /(‘Colloquium of the 
Frivolous’), 1982.

In many languages, the word ‘culture’ has at least two meanings. In 
bourgeois society, culture has come to mean both refinement and the high 
arts. A property of the dominant classes, this culture is inherited 
through the transmission of manners and higher education. The second 
meaning of culture is the way of life, including beliefs and practices, 
of a people who are part of a community (from a tribe to a nation). The 
Cuban Revolution’s democratisation of ballet and classical music, for 
instance, was part of its attempt to socialise all forms of human life, 
from the economic to the cultural. Furthermore, the revolutionary 
processes attempted to protect the cultural heritage of the Cuban people 
from the pernicious influence of the culture of colonialism. To be 
precise, to ‘protect’ did not mean to reject the entirety of the 
coloniser’s culture, since that would enforce a parochial life on a 
people who must have access to all forms of culture. Cuba’s Revolution 
adopted baseball, for instance, despite its roots in the United States, 
the very country that has sought to suffocate Cuba for six decades.

A socialist approach to culture, therefore, requires four aspects: the 
democratisation of forms of high culture, the protection of the cultural 
heritage of formerly colonised peoples, the advancement of the basic 
elements of cultural literacy, and the domestication of cultural forms 
that come from the colonising power.

Violeta Parra (Chile), Untitled (unfinished), 1966. Embroidery on 
sackcloth, 136 x 200 cm.

Violeta Parra (Chile). /Untitled/ (unfinished), 1966.

In July 2022, I delivered a lecture at Cuba’s Casa de las Américas, a 
major institution in Havana’s cultural life and a heartbeat of cultural 
developments from Chile to Mexico, that centred on ten theses on Marxism 
and decolonisation. A few days later, Casa’s director, Abel Prieto, also 
a former minister of culture, convened a seminar there to discuss some 
of these themes, principally how Cuban society had to both defend itself 
from the onrush of imperialist cultural forms and from the pernicious 
inheritance of racism and patriarchy. This discussion provoked a series 
of reflections on the process of the National Programme Against Racism 
and Racial Discrimination announced by President Miguel Díaz-Canel in 
November 2019 and on the process that led to the 2022 Family Code 
referendum (which will come to a popular vote on 25 September) – two 
dynamics that have the capacity to transform Cuban society in an 
anti-colonial direction.

Dossier no. 56 (September 2022) from Tricontinental: Institute for 
Social Research and Casa de las Américas, /Ten Theses on Marxism and 
Decolonisation/ 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=6e150e3839&e=d206d0a40d>, 
contains an expanded version of that lecture with a foreword by Abel 
Prieto. To give you a taste of it, here is thesis nine on the Battle of 
Emotions:

Antonio Berni (Argentina), /Juanito Laguna/, n.d.

*Thesis Nine: The Battle of Emotions*. Fidel Castro provoked a debate in 
the 1990s around the concept of the Battle of Ideas, the class struggle 
in thought against the banalities of neoliberal conceptions of human 
life. A key part of Fidel’s speeches from this period was not just what 
he said but how he said it, each word suffused with the great compassion 
of a man committed to the liberation of humanity from the tentacles of 
property, privilege, and power. In fact, the Battle of Ideas was not 
merely about the ideas themselves, but also about a ‘battle of 
emotions’, an attempt to shift the palate of emotions from a fixation on 
greed to considerations of empathy and hope.

One of the true challenges of our time is the bourgeoisie’s use of the 
culture industries and the institutions of education and faith to divert 
attention away from any substantial discussion about /real/ problems – 
and about finding common solutions to social dilemmas – and towards an 
obsession with /fantasy/ problems. In 1935, the Marxist philosopher 
Ernst Bloch called this the ‘swindle of fulfilment’, the seeding of a 
range of fantasies to mask their impossible realisation. The benefit of 
social production, Bloch wrote, ‘is reaped by the big capitalist upper 
stratum, which employs gothic dreams against proletarian realities’. The 
entertainment industry erodes proletarian culture with the acid of 
aspirations that cannot be fulfilled under the capitalist system. But 
these aspirations are enough to weaken any working-class project.

A degraded society under capitalism produces a social life that is 
suffused with atomisation and alienation, desolation and fear, anger and 
hate, resentment and failure. These are ugly emotions that are shaped 
and promoted by the culture industries (‘you can have it too!’), 
educational establishments (‘greed is the prime mover’), and 
neo-fascists (‘hate immigrants, sexual minorities, and anyone else who 
denies you your dreams’). The grip of these emotions on society is 
almost absolute, and the rise of neo-fascists is premised upon this 
fact. Meaning feels emptied, perhaps the result of a society of 
spectacles that has now run its course.

>From a Marxist perspective, culture is not seen as an isolated and 
timeless aspect of human reality, nor are emotions seen as a world of 
their own or as being outside of the developments of history. Since 
human experiences are defined by the conditions of material life, ideas 
of fate will linger on as long as poverty is a feature of human life. If 
poverty is transcended, then fatalism will have a less secure 
ideological foundation, but it does not automatically get displaced. 
Cultures are contradictory, bringing together a range of elements in 
uneven ways out of the social fabric of an unequal society that 
oscillates between reproducing class hierarchy and resisting elements of 
social hierarchy. Dominant ideologies suffuse culture through the 
tentacles of ideological apparatuses like a tidal wave, overwhelming the 
actual experiences of the working class and the peasantry. It is, after 
all, through class struggle and through the new social formations 
created by socialist projects that new cultures will be created – not 
merely by wishful thinking.

It is important to recall that, in the early years of each of the 
revolutionary processes – from Russia in 1917 to Cuba in 1959 – cultural 
efflorescence was saturated with the emotions of joy and possibility, of 
intense creativity and experimentation. It is this sensibility that 
offers a window into something other than the ghoulish emotions of greed 
and hatred.

Nicolás Guillén honours Alicia Alonso at the Unión Nacional de 
Escritores y Artistas de Cuba (‘National Union of Writers and Artists of 
Cuba’), Havana, 1961.

Nicolás Guillén honours Alicia Alonso at the National Union of Writers 
and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC), Havana, 1961.

In the early years after 1959, Cuba convulsed with such surges of 
creativity and experimentation. Nicolás Guillén (1902–1969), a great 
revolutionary poet who had been imprisoned during Fulgencio Batista’s 
dictatorship, captured the harshness of life and the great desire for 
the revolutionary process to emancipate the Cuban people from the 
wretchedness of hunger and social hierarchies. His poem ‘Tengo’ (‘I 
Have’) from 1964 tells us that the new culture of the revolution was 
elemental – the feeling that one did not have to bow one’s shoulders 
before a superior, to say to workers in offices that they too are 
comrades and not ‘sir’ and ‘ma’am’, to walk as a Black man into a hotel 
without being told to stop at the door. His great anti-colonial poem 
alerts us to culture’s material foundations:

I have, let’s see,
I’ve learned to read,
to count.
I’ve learned to write,
and to think,
and to laugh.
I have, yes, I have
a place to work
and earn
what I have to eat.
I have, let’s see,
I have what I have to have.

At the close of his foreword to the dossier, Abel Prieto writes, ‘we 
must turn the meaning of anti-colonial into an instinct’. Reflect on 
that for a moment: anti-colonialism is not just the ending of formal 
colonial rule, but a deeper process, one that must become ingrained at 
the instinctual level so that we can build the capacity to solve our 
basic needs (such as transcending hunger and illiteracy, for instance) 
and build our alertness to the need for cultures that emancipate us and 
do not bind us to the flashy world of unaffordable commodities.

Warmly,

Vijay

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