Toward a Cuban October

Abstract

The reactions generated by the televised homages in early 2006 to Luis Pavón, 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 Antón Arrufat, Senel Paz, Miguel Barnet, Reynaldo González, 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 Américas. 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, Pavón 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.