The Immense Culture That Defines Us

Acting in accordance with high ethical and patriotic values will always imply opposition to "mirages of superiority" wrapped in seductive proposals and the sapping of our creative spirituality to satisfy a de-nationalizing market

Author: Manuel López Oliva | informacion@granmai.cu

October 23, 2020 15:10:16

Bodegón, by Amelia Peláez.

When thinking about Cuban Culture, we often recall what it once was, in the hard times when our identity and conscience were taking shape during the 19th century, with symbols and expressions of collective affirmation. On occasion Cuban culture is reduced to a system of evidence that reflects or recreates, in a recognizable manner, elements of our archipelago’s flora and fauna, rural landscapes, sites of Independence battles, or the distinctive characteristics of a Creole people, our most common physiognomic, psychological and mytho-genesic features.

There are also those who see our culture as a hedonist, stereotypical "postcard game," confusing it with the backwardness that creeps into certain mentalities and customs; or present it only as a set of personalities, creations and works - original or reproduced - of literature, philosophical thought and the arts.

To understand cultural manifestations exclusively as those that delight cultured and uncultured sensory perception, entertain, catalyze the need for movement and eroticism of the body, or constitute ornaments of greater or lesser complexity and price, is nothing more than to overlook the basics of culture: its condition as active memory and a reflection of human development on a national scale and in its global interrelationships. Legitimate culture implies the fullness of human beings, as well as the expression of what is treasured subjectively or contributes to our greater improvement.

Hence, handcrafted and technical invention, instruments and furniture of varied utility, buildings and arrangement of the urban visual field, the daily sense of existence and ways of communicating, gastronomic and curative practices, so-called "culinary art" and certain modalities of pleasure, as well as domestic traditions and the education of senses, contribute to the fabric of cultural forms and channels. Nor is it possible to exclude ethics and science from culture, or individual community ties and health awareness, good publicity and journalism, conversation and books, sensitivity translated into gestures and moments of introspection; as well as religious rituals and the design in their various material expressions.

Speaking of the "cultural universe" implies designating a collection of references and "things," in addition to the relevant environmental and intimate fields, which cannot be split apart into the specific profiles of certain institutions, associations and ministries. This is why, in the Cuban Ministry of Culture’s foundational period, it was decided, at the highest level of state leadership, that this institution should be the leading entity for the vast diversity of cultural processes within the entire society and the state. Thus, developing cultured persons and spaces would not be the exclusive task of professionals or amateurs (aesthetic and anthropological), but a mission of greater scope, which would link different sectors of the country in the necessary programs to apply - in our context - the idea put forward by Marx when he noted, "If conditions shape human beings, it becomes necessary to humanize the conditions."

Cultured individuals must integrate their culture, evolve in their sentiments, and develop solid principles based on the good of compatriots and humanity. The universality of culture requires transcending a certain identification constructed within the environment in which one lives, to develop concern for the destiny of the human race. The heroic work undertaken around the world by Cuban doctors and nurses' brigades is an authentic cultural act, since they have saved bearers of traditions, persons of tribal ancestry, and dissimilar individuals participating and creating the contemporary landscape designed according to canons of imagination. To deny the well-deserved Nobel Peace Prize to these missionaries of health would be an anti-culture decision, since preserving human lives operates, in the end, within the realm of humanism implicit in universal culture, expressed in scientific, beneficial, aesthetic, environmentalist efforts, that reveal the truth and dignified personal behavior.

An unquestionable interaction exists between the personality of Cubans and our culture, which is reshaped by the conduct of each generation.

Thus denying authentic culture can lead to the dissolution of the national personality into codes and behaviors which generally bear axiologies and neo-colonizing ideas. To globalize via pretentious patterns, taking a subordinate position with respect to transnational Cultural Capital, based on market interests and the desire to transcend underdevelopment, but renouncing the native substance, is not the same as projecting oneself internationally based on local sources and lived circumstances. A relationship of interaction with other cultures of the world, and not servile dependency on imported models, was what nourished the Modern and Late-Modern artwork of renowned figures of Our America, to the degree that their works garnered high prices in auctions characterized, at the time, by the quality and genuine contributions of pieces sold.

To act in accordance with high ethical and patriotic values, based on a nationality characterized by its profound universality, will always imply opposition to "mirages of superiority" wrapped in seductive proposals and the sapping of our creative spirituality to satisfy a de-nationalizing market. Awareness of traps that use conventions, organizations, spectacular events and our own evaluation and promotion practices to hinder the development of a genuinely Cuban cultural conscience is key to understanding the value of "changing the rules of the game" as Armando Hart said, on more than one occasion.

We leave a handprint on Cuba’s cultural fabric everyday, and it marks and conditions us in various ways. Our culture serves as a record, and at the same time it works as a mirror allowing us to recognize and evaluate ourselves.

It allows us is to ubnderstand how to operate with the instruments, syntactic resources, methods of creation and strategies to extract meaning offered by tendencies, groups and countries that act within internationalized cultures.

A cultured attitude consists of nourishing ourselves with what is available to us as enriching and renewing, without doing so as passive mimics. If we take as an example a component of artistic culture, the visual arts, we must understand that it is as simple and uncreative to faithfully reproduce the external appearances of reality - as was done in post-academicism and imposed in the most orthodox Socialist Realism - as it is to copy the ways of successful foreign artists, repeat recycled practices of aesthetic re-contextualization and Non-Objective Art, or use styles accepted by commercial standards in vogue, in order to ensure sales. What appears to be the freedom to choose foreign paradigms that open doors for us in terms of business, is often another way to live happily in the "invisible cage" Che described.

Gramci’s concept that influenced the guiding ideas of the oft-ignored 1968 Havana Cultural Congress - where I as able to see first hand that culture was not limited to literary and artistic expressions, or to the conservation of tangible and intangible heritage – is one I had learned before, as something natural, in daily life during my ealy years in Manzanillo. The theoretical notion of "organic intellectuals," manifested in practice by the Literary Group in that city and its magazine Orto (which included professionals of various types), and likewise that understanding of the cultural as cultivation and externalization of human diversity, were vital concepts fundamental to my vocation and attachment to essential values of the nation.

Nourished by the "symphonic" nature of popular cultural processes, in 1963 we established the first Casa de Cultura in Cuba in a building in Manzanillo, which was only one of the milestones in the vast wealth of cultural work done across the entire nation, in that revolutionary decade of dreams and battles. I will always be grateful to all those who opened my eyes, during my childhood and adolescence, to appreciate the broad array of occupations and creative acts that live on within culture; to understand the necessity of cultural work with multidisciplinary guidance from various spheres of our material and spiritual reality; and, at the same time, to feel that all true renewal and discovery, in art, comes from within each one of us, like a prodigious gush of blood.