Bread and Roses Without Shame or Fear
by Nicolas Guillen
National poet. Internationally known. Since youth, his poems have fought on behalf of the exploited.
President of the Writes and Artists Union (UNEAC).

Remarks to the First National Congress of Artists and Writers.
August 19, 1961

Comrades:

Like the blow of an ax, the dramatic night of Saint Sylvester, 1958, divided the history of Cuba into two parts, one with all the elements of Spanish colonialism and Yankee imperialist penetration, and the other with the elements that would initiate a new era, the era of true freedom.

The first ear had lasted ever since Spain took over the island at the end of the fifteenth century, seizing it by force from its native inhabitants; the second began in the middle of the twentieth century, when Fidel Castro's barbudos came down from the Sierra Maestra and defeated Batista's tyranny, thus inaugurating the greatest revolution of America and one of the most significant ones of the contemporary world.
 

Once again, an old Cuban problem arose, one for which no solution had been found by the best inclined patriots: national independence. The Cubans had struggled for independence for more than half a century with greatly different protagonists in the two main periods involved. This, of course, should not be taken in a military sense, but in terms of classes.

When Carlos Manuel de Cespedes defied the Spanish crown (represented in Cuba by General Larsundi) from his ranch "La Demajagua" in 1868, he did so in the name of a wealthy class: big landholders, slave owners, sugar cane planters, cattle raisers, coffee planters, who had seen two attempts at peaceful solution fail in their struggle against Spain—the movement for reform and the movement for annexation.

Had Madrid granted the reforms demanded by that progressive aristocracy —fiscal, administrative, and political reforms — the Yara outburst would have been delayed. Had the government of the United States consented to the annexation of Cuba to that nation, so ardently desired by El Lugareno and fought by Saco, we would all now be speaking English or, at any rate, as has happened in other places, a sort of jargon in which elements of both languages, the native and the acquired, would be mixed, without the spirit of either.

In the middle of it all —the reform and the annexationist movements — there was the African slave trade_. The slave trade put a stop to the liberating endeavors of the reformers, through a rebellion similar to that of Bouckman and his comrades in Haiti, and sent the annexationists in search of a strong state to protect the infamous trade in the face of England's abolitionist policy. Marx had said: "People who keep others in slavery cannot fight for their own freedom.

The Cuban slave owners therefore first had to adopt a revolutionary measure, the abolition of slavery, in order to follow the only course left open by Spanish intransigence that of armed rebellion. But that struggle came to an end, the victim of Cubans and Spaniards alike —of the latter, because they finally imposed their military power, which had been contained by the patriots for the last ten years, and of the former, because their egotism, intransigence, lack of discipline, the pride of some, undermined the resistance of all. The patricians prevailed over the patriots. The family traditions, caste rivalries, base ambitions, that darken the soul of many so-called leading people, clashed within the Army of Liberation during this initial era.

Fifteen years later, Marti would say:

"The Spaniard did not defeat us because of his courage, but because of our pettiness, only because of our pettiness..."

The second war against Spain, seventeen years after the first had ended, had as its main protagonists, not the wealthy liberals of '68, headed by Cespedes, but the people and the petty bourgeoisie, stirred by the brilliant words and actions of Jose Marti. During the period of uneasy peace that followed the first encounter, secessionist ideas spread throughout the country, under the protection of the freedom of the press won from the Spanish government; many of the most important problems of those days came to the level of public awareness or, at least, curiosity; favorable conditions for culture developed, although with regard to the economically less developed classes, this was of no avail. And the new class to which we have referred, the middle class, aided greatly by popular elements, took the place of the gret landholders who had planned the rebellion of 1868 and who, after the Zanjón Pact, abandoned the leadership they had assumed during the first half of the nineteenth century or took their place in the compromise autonomy movement.

There is no secret about what happened in the second war of Cuban independence. If in 1868 the insurgents were defeated by their own sins rather than by the Spanish military forces, in 1895 the people's uprising, already victorious against colonialist troops, had to yield ground before a new force, feared and foretold by Marti -- Yankee imperialism. The Government of the United States had no desire to help us when it intervened in the war between Cuba and Spain. On the contrary, that intervention gave a vigorous shake to the tree from which the fruit that Adams had desired since 1820 hung, so that it would fall into the basket prepared by McKinley in 1898: that fruit was no other than the island of Cuba.

The Treaty of Paris (at whose signing the insurgent government was not represented) in effect turned the former Spanish colony into a Yankee protectorate.

Wood, the proconsul sent by the Washington government. emphatically declared at the opening session of our First Constitutional Assembly in 1901 that approval of the Charter of the new Republic would not suffice, but that it was necessary to establish the nature of future relations between old Uncle Sam and his newborn nephew.

As we have seen, however, it was only the common people who were kept in cultural backwardness.

For the Cuban wealthy class found better means to educate itself, now in centers of the greatest academic importance, such as the University and Seminary of Saint Charles (in which Varela taught), now in private schools "for whites only," such as El Salvador," directed by Luz y Caballero, "San Aanacleto" of Men-dive, where Marti studied, and others.

This explains how, at the time when Humboldt arrived in Havana, in the midst of circumstances already explained, there were individuals like Dr. Romay, who brought vaccination to Cuba, like Father Caballero, a wise lecturer in philosophy, like the poets Zequeira and Rubalcava, like the economist Arango y Parreño, who had the means to develop themselves, intellectually, within their country or abroad.

These were also the times (as Sergio Aguirre has noted) when the Cuban nationality began defining itself, due to the meeting in the Cuban colonial population of the elements that Stalin believed vital for the integration of a nation.

This is true to the extent that, together with these figures and perhaps even above them, there was an outstanding man who would herald the struggles for Cuban independence, the first man who spoke seriously of separating the colony from the mother country, and, above all, of the need to do it through a revolution_, I am referring to Father Varela.

As a writer, as an intellectual, Varela devoted himself to the independence of Cuba. During the first moments of his immersion in the public life of the Colony, he felt attracted by Autonomy, but only for a short time. He soon understood that the only way out was a revolution, and the only goal absolute independence.

Varela did not preach reform, much less annexation. He openly demanded the total separation of the island from the distant peninsula to which it was bound, and as he himself said, he wanted itan island in politics as it is in nature." Who but this man of sickly appearance and fragile build spoke so strongly in those days to the current Spanish monarch, the hateful Fernando VII? These are his words: "Whether Fernando wants it or not, no matter what his vassals in the Island of Cuba may think, revolution in that country is inevitable. The difference will be only in the time and the manner; I would like the matter to be considered from this point of view."

But if he did not return in person, his ideas did. The newspaper "El Habanero" came, Six issues of the seven that he probably published from 1824 to 1825 have reached our days. His was a rather erudite newspaper, very much of the times, and his pen produced the material that enriched the publication, articles on scientific, political, and literary subjects above all, political, devoted to the independence of Cuba.

Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring, to whom our revolutionary Cuba owes so much affection and tribute for his firm anti-imperialist stand, has said of Varela that "he taught the intellectuals of his age and of the ages to come that they should not isolate themselves irresponsibly in an ivory tower, but that precisely because they were intellectuals they had to concern themselves to a higher degree with national problems in order to enlighten and guide their peoples..."

In this sense, Varela anticipates and foreshadows Marti. And Marti and Varela (the latter at the beginning of the century and the former at the end) express the birth and continuity of Cuban intellectual revolutionary unrest in response to foreign oppression. This unrest is a thread that begins in the wise priest, passes through Cespedes, continues through our Apostle, and reaches Fidel Castro, who is waging a victorious war against imperialism, and in whose thought and action revolutionary impetus -- of a truly popular character — reaches the most far-reaching consequences, not the liberal ones derived from the French Revolution, of a hundred years ago, but those arising from the great October Revolution at the threshold of the twentieth century.

As for Marti, it would not be correct to look in his works for a Marxist concept of class struggle: he did not have it, nor could he have it clue to his ideological formation. But it is quite certain that in his time and environment, without a conscious and developed mass of workers, Marti was a progressive revolutionary, who tried to solve problems whose mere definition gave proof of an extraordinary political vision: distribution of the land in a feudal country: racial equality a few years after the abolition of slavery; denouncement of the reactionary clergy; predominance of the people in the face of aristocratic influence; unmasking of United States imperialism when it was but a shadow on the political horizon of the Island; armed revolution and national liberation.

Today imperialism is in crisis. Latin America is awakening and Cuba is showing the way, not with a magisterial spirit, but as a consequence of the historical role conferred on her by virtue of national circumstances. But it was Marti — revived in Fidel Castro,— who pointed out the direction that Cuba should take. His are these words, written in 1886:

"From independence to the present, America has never been faced by an issue that required more prudence, that compelled greater alertness, that demanded a clearer and more minute examination. than this invitation by the United States. The United States, powerful and determined to extend its sway over America, is asking the less powerful American nations, tied to European countries by free and profitable trade, to form a league against Europe and to stop trading with the rest of the world. Spanish America freed itself from the tyranny of Spain; and now, after^. weighing the background of the invitation, it is urgent to say, because it is the truth, that the time has come for Spanish America to declare its second independence. And why go as allies in the flower of youth," he continues later, "into the war the United States is preparing to wage with the rest of the world? Why does it have to fight its battles with Europe on the republics of America and test its colonizing system on free nations?"

Nearly eighty years have gone by since an intellectual, a writer-poet-politician, uttered these words. Today Cuba is not a Spanish colony ruled from Madrid, nor a United States protectorate ruled from Washington. But it is waging its second war of independence, foretold by our Apostle, against imperialism, also foretold by him. We are in this struggle, as intellectuals like Varela, Céspedes, and Marti, were in the struggle against Spain in the days of our first war of independence.

It seems evident, however, that the complex of economic-social relations on which Cuban society prior to the Revolution was based has undergone a profound change. The agrarian and urban reforms, as well as the nationalization of our economy, are incontrovertible and accomplished facts. They will be followed by the industrialization of our country, which has already started, so that we may be able to help ourselves to be not only free, but also independent.

Now then, all this, which favors the Cuban people as no other people in America have ever been favored, is causing harm to someone, for there is no action with 'out a reaction. Whom? It is useless to delay the answer: it is damaging Yankee imperialism, which, when the last stronghold of the Spanish colonial empire collapsed in our continent, replaced that decadent power with its ever-growing military, economic, and political might; that is, as long as the Socialist power had not yet arisen.

In another sense, that change to which we have referred also affects the Cuban intellectual process, it affects the intellectuals in their life and in their works. In a good or in a bad sense? It would indeed be strange for the revolution to promote the betterment of the people of Cuba and single out the intellectuals as the only ones to be mistreated.

I believe that the change is extremely positive for the intellectual worker. Before him is opening a world that is different from the one in which he has lived until now, and not only different, but vastly superior, for his work will cease to be a source of profit for the capitalist who in other systems lives, in the most subtle and diverse fashions, off the intelligence of others.

I should add immediately that intellectals do not constitute a social class; they have no independent, individual interests in a system of production. Their activity is controlled by the interests of the class they serve. Under capitalism these interests are those of the exploiting class, which obtains intellectual work at a price lower than its use value. But this is not all. It should be stated that at times, without the intellectual being aware of it, or (as in the more conscious cases) forced to thwart his innermost desires, he becomes the propagator of the ideology of capitalism, the very system which enslaves him.

Under Socialism the intellectual serves the people, and the people serve him, respecting and exalting his human nature, securing him a livelihood and means of creation, surrounding him, in short, with the affection of the masses, without impairing his personal freedom and creative genius.

Now, does this mean that capitalist culture should he swept away and mechanically replaced by a full-blown socialist culture, without considering the past? I am extremely sorry to differ from those who have an affirmative answer to this question.

It is a grave error to deny the important part played by the bourgeoisie in the birth and development of socialist culture_. Ambitious as our forces may be, despite everything the Revolution may be able to do —and it can do much,— it would be impossible to endow Cuba with a proletarian culture, as if by prescription, without taking into consideration the former culture in its most developed and progressive forms.

During the days subsequent to the October Revolution, Lenin stopped those who, in a great hurry and with no knowledge of dialectics, endeavored to build a socialist culture upon nothing. What could be done with Pushkin's poetry, they would ask themselves, or with Rafael's portraits? The answer they gave themselves was the following: they had to create an art and literature for the workers, with no ties whatsoever with the old bourgeois forms. Myakowsky ,--,whose literary career began under the influence of Italian futurism — headed the iconoclasts.

No culture is born spontaneously, said Lenin. Without bourgeois techniques, without the art and the science of the defeated class, it is impossible to create a culture that will serve the victorious class. The Leninist theory is quite simple: to gather the culture of capitalism and build socialism with it. That is to say, a given class cannot create its own culture if it does not take and assimilate what mankind has produced until the birth of that class. "Proletarian culture," Lenin also said, -does not arise from unknown sources,it does not issue from the brains of those who call themselves specialists in proletarian culture. It would be absurd to believe so. Proletarian culture must evolve from the natural development of knowledge won by mankind under the feudal and bourgeois yokes.

This is the theory of cultural heritage.

For us Cubans, that heritage is composed of everything done Cuba with regard to culture from "El Son de la Ma Teodora." and "The Mirror of Patience" to the music of Roldán and Caturla, indcluding Marti and "El Cucalambé."

However, our richest cultural period was undoubtedly in the past century when, under the protection of productive leisure made possible by slavery, the enlightened bourgeoisie was able to devot,s itself to its cultural inclinations. To parody a famous phrase of En gels, perhaps it could be stated that without African slavery, there could not have been bourgeois culture during the 19th century.

Now, we have the right to ask ourselves if that bourgeoisie. which appeared and reached its peak in the course of a century. created its own culture, distinct to such a degree that we could speak of it as we speak of the French or English culture, for instance.

At the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, we can in fact point out some literary and scientific figures of a certain importance. However, just as at the mouth of rivers flowing into the sea, at that moment in Cuban culture there was an area of two currents: the incipient nationhood and the colony it opposed.

Let us take the case that can best illustrate our ideas, that of the poets Rubalcava and^. Zequeira. Both of them tried to express their own accent, not from within, but from without. Some –not many--, of their less presumptuous and lengthy poems are expressive of Cuban feelings in an objective and external manner, pleasant reactions to the gifts of Cuban nature, such as the poems Zequeira dedicated to the pineapple and those Rubalcava dedicated to tobacco and Cuban fruits.

However, although in both_, cases the subject is Cuban, the approach:" is not. Both poets belonged'to Spanish neo-classicism and were therefore permeated by the spirit of the 18th century and the Spain. of Phillip V. That was a century which, as has been stated, was not the century of fantasy, but of thought, not of the poets, but of the philosophers. The poetry of both (above all Zequeira) is inflexible. pompous, grandiloquent, rhetorical; they inherited it from Quintana and Gallego, both Moratines, without coming near the vigor that these at times achieved.

We should also take into account ;this point the atmosphere of slavery blanketing the Island during most of the 19th century. it was not until the beginning of the 20th century that a man like Don Fernando Ortiz, breaking through the walls of prejudice and studied the Negro contribution to the formation of our national culture, as another Professor Nina Rodriguez, had done in Bahia. That would have been impossible under slavery, for only a few could then understand the role of the African slave as a living element of Cuban society," an element as alive and important as the Spanish white.

Among those who, even in the remote year of 1836, understood this quite well, was the Colombian (although raised in Cuba) writer, Don Félix Tanco. In a letter sent that year to his friend Domingo del Monte, he says the following: "And what is your opinion of Bug-Jargal? I wish that one of us had written that novel. Think it over well. The Negroes of the Island of Cuba are our poetry, and we must not think otherwise: and not only the Negroes, but the Negroes and the whites all mixed together to create the portraits. the scenes... thus may our Victor Hugo be born, and let us know once and for all what we are, painted with the truth of poetry. inasmuch as we know through figures and philosophical analysis the sad wretchedness in which we live..."

Once we have reached this point, someone will surely ask whether the only possibility for writers and artists in this Revolution is to commit themselves to it. Isn't there room for pure art? Isn't there any room for free creativity? Of course there is. Fidel Castro, in his "Words to the Intellectuals," said "...the Revolution defends freedom: the Revolution has brought a great deal of freedom, and if someone is concerned with the possibility that the Revolution will stifle the creative spirit, that concern is ill-founded and has no justification whatsoever..." But Fidel also said that "...the state of mind of all revolutionary artists and writers, or of the artists and writers who understand and find the revolution justifiable, must be: what dangers threaten the Revolution, and what can we do to help the Revolution?"

I believe the answer is simple: to give, not only the spirit, but the flesh _*body and soul, like lovers. Yes, we want and desire freedom. It is an essential possession. Man has always struggled for it and always will. But it is not an absolute possession, for nothing absolute exists. Why is it that freedom is demanded? To attack the Revolution? We say: NoI Freedom to justify poverty, glorify human (or inhuman) exploitation and praise imperialism? We again say: No! Freedom for reactionaries and fascists to conspire against our people and accumulate millions of pesos with which to pay mercenary invaders and devaluate national currency? Freedom for that? Well, we Cuban artists and writers again shout: No! We do not want freedom to be used by our own executioners, to turn us once more into slaves.

At a meeting of Cuban intellectuals a short time ago, I heard a fellow writer demand very seriously the freedom to write love poems, here, in Cuba. I was surprised, because I was not aware that any such prohibition existed. In the Soviet Union, in China, in the people's democracies, the poets write love poems and madrigals to, the moon, flowers, and pretty women, or those who seem pretty to them, to the poets. The newspapers and magazines of those countries welcome such poems, if their literary quality deserves it. Can anybody oppose this?

However, the story goes that during the last war a Soviet poet sent Stalin a book of love poems, which he had written during those dramatic days, a book of intimate, egotistic, recondite passion, and unbridled delivery. Artillery thundered on all fronts: the Nazis tightened their ring of blood and fire on Stalingrad; thousands upon thousands of men and women fell to rise no more. They asked Stalin what he thought of the work, and he answered: "Very interesting, and even very good. But only two books should have been printed: one for her and another one for him."

Comrades:

We have met in glorious and difficult days. The Cuban Revolution is consolidating its achievements and marching forward in pursuit of new victories. The world has fixed its eyes upon this doi in the Caribbean, hardly noticeable on the map, but dramatically inserted into American history, into world history.