The Desired Revolution and the New Man: Assembling and Negotiating Cultural and Intellectual Practices in Revolutionary Cuba.

Abstract

The Desired Revolution and the New Man: Assembling and Negotiating Cultural and Intellectual Practices in Revolutionary Cuba In my dissertation, “The Desired Revolution and the New Man: Assembling and Negotiating Cultural and Intellectual Practices in Revolutionary Cuba,” I argue that the narratives of the Cuban revolution produced by its organic intellectuals (as well as by its main ideological drive, the so-called ‘new man’ [hombre nuevo]) have set in motion differential affective politics operating in the cultural field. These narratives operate via complex flows of ‘structures of feeling’ that generate the desire to desire the Cuban Revolution on the collective social body, inside and outside the island. The deepest social transformation was perhaps created by the people’s own identification with and desire for the revolution. It is my contention that this “desire” (as Deleuze and Guattari suggest) was partially created by mainstream/ pro-revolutionary intellectuals. Within this framework I propose to analyze the cultural transformations in Cuba since the early 1959 vis-à-vis the “structures of feeling” and “politics of affect” that dominate the revolution’s political apparatus. In sum, my dissertation details how Cubans have come to desire a ‘hegemonic Revolution’ – a desire maintained through the unstable equilibrium between consensus and repression (following Gramsci’s views), and how such a balancing act can be critically analyzed through an extensive body of cultural texts. These include ‘canonic’ films such as Fresa y Chocolate by Tomás Gutierrez Alea, and other films by Arturo Soto, Enrique Álvarez, Eduardo del Llano; novels, plays and short stories by Humberto Arenal (El sol a plomo and El mejor traductor de Shakespeare), Virgilio Piñera, José Soler Puig’s Bertillón 166, Manuel Cofiño, to name a few; foto-reportajes [photographic reports] from Cuban magazines; art installations from Pedro Pablo Oliva, Alexis Leyva Machado “Kcho,” Wifredo Lam, and Jorge Perugorría; historietas [comics] such as Juan Padrón’s Elpidio Valdés; as well as a number of interviews with intellectuals of this time period that I have conducted in Cuba and in the U.S. Cuban exilic communities.Ph.D.Romance Languages & Literatures: SpanishUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/62383/1/pporben_1.pd