Overview

Grounded in painstaking research, To Defend the Revolution Is to Defend Culture revisits the circumstances which led to the arts being embraced at the heart of the Cuban Revolution. Introducing the main protagonists to the debate, this previously untold story follows the polemical twists and turns that ensued in the volatile atmosphere of the 1960s and ’70s. The picture that emerges is of a struggle for dominance between Soviet-derived approaches and a uniquely Cuban response to the arts under socialism. The latter tendency, which eventually won out, was based on the principles of Marxist humanism. As such, this book foregrounds emancipatory understandings of culture. To Defend the Revolution Is to Defend Culture takes its title from a slogan – devised by artists and writers at a meeting in October 1960 and adopted by the First National Congress of Writers and Artists the following August – which sought to highlight the intrinsic importance of culture to the Revolution. Departing from popular top-down conceptions of Cuban policy-formation, this book establishes the close involvement of the Cuban people in cultural processes and the contribution of Cuba’s artists and writers to the policy and praxis of the Revolution. Ample space is dedicated to discussions that remain hugely pertinent to those working in the cultural field, such as the relationship between art and ideology, engagement and autonomy, form and content. As the capitalist world struggles to articulate the value of the arts in anything other than economic terms, this book provides us with an entirely different way of thinking about culture and the policies underlying it.

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9781629631042

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Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt has written a tremendous book, one that allows us to imagine what culture might look like in a free society--a society where art and culture are not dictated by a market, and can be developed and expressed freely--limited only by the imagination. This opening of the imagination as to what is possible is achieved through a detailed cultural and political description of the early years of the Cuban Revolution. Gordon-Nesbitt finds a wonderful balance between expressing the unencumbered prioritization of cultural expression in Cuba and the various challenges that this process faced. --Marina Sitrin, author, They Can't Represent Us! Reinventing Democracy from Greece to Occupy

This immensely detailed and extensively documented academic work will be much appreciated by Cuba specialists and scholars of art and culture. Publishers Weekly

Author Information

Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt is a writer and researcher dedicated to exploring the politico-economic conditions underwriting artistic practice. Her work has been extensively published in anthologies, monographs, catalogues and journals. She cofounded salon3, a multidisciplinary arts organization in London and was a curator at the Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art in Helsinki. Jorge Fornet has been director of the Centre for Literary Research at Casa de las Américas, where he also codirects the eponymous journal. He is the author of El 71. Anatomía de una crisis and has written widely on Latin American literature.

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