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minated , and Castro, notwithstanding his defense of artistic freedom
during the discussions, summed up his ideas about the rights of art–
ists in the ambiguous phrase , "Within the revolution, everything;
against the revolution, no rights at all ."
Subsequent events confirmed that the Marxist view had tri–
umphed. Its influence in cultural matters was immediately dem–
onstrated at the First National Congress of Writers. In the Final
Declaration issued by the Congress, writers were told that they must
participate "in the great common task of enriching and defending the
revolution," and they were warned that literature would have to be
purified through "the most rigorous criticism." This was a Caribbean
echo of the criteria established at the Congress of[Soviet] Writers in
1934 by Andrey Zhadanov, Stalin's commissar of cultural affairs .
Shortly after the foreboding pronouncements of the writers'
congress in Havana, the National Union of Writers and Artists of
Cuba (UNEAC) was founded in imitation of the Union of Soviet
Writers . UNEAC's role was not, as some had hoped, to protect the
interests of artists but rather to protect those of the state in its bid to
control the arts. The means of control were put in place with the na–
tionalization of publishing houses and the institution of government
monopoly over the press and electronic media.
March 1962 found the liberal reformers and the Marxists de–
bating over solutions to the administrative problems that had come
to plague the country, and a few months later the rift between the
factions widened as a result of the announcement of Khruschev's de–
cision to withdraw Soviet missiles from Cuba. Humiliated by the
pull out, Fidel Castro reacted by adopting policies and views that
came to be known as the Castroite heresy .
In the next five years both factions, liberals and Marxists,
scored victories in the realm of the arts, but neither could claim to
have prevailed. For example, Che Guevara
esc~ewed
socialist real–
ism, but at the same time the only remaining group of writers who
had openly repudiated committed literature , the circle known as "El
Puente," was disbanded because the government found its members
to be "dissolute and negative. " A short while later, the UNEAC hier–
archy decided that Pablo Neruda should be condemned for having
visited the United States , and Cuban writers were obliged to chime
in , but contrary to the wishes of the Communists, Castro authorized
publication , albeit in a limited edition , of the novel
Paradiso,
by Jose
Lezama Lima, notwithstanding its depiction of acts of sodomy
