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among some of the homosexual characters. And so ground was
gained and lost by both sides.
Then in 1967 political events seemed to give the liberals the up–
per hand. In that year Castro publicly berated the Kremlin for its
foreign policy , its failure to support the Guevara expedition to Boli–
via, and its interpretation of the doctrines of Marx and Lenin in gen–
eral. At the time, the Cuban President , Osvaldo Dortic6s, said with
more than a hint of pride, "We have our little heresy. " This political
challenge was carried over into the cultural arena and culminated in
two important events. First, in late 1967 the
Salon de Mai
of Paris was
invited to Havana to display the
ultra-avant-garde
of Western Euro–
pean art. Castro was making an obvious show of independence and
a play for leadership in cultural affairs by being host to a collection of
works that could be considered far more "decadent" and "bourgeois"
than those included in the "modernist" exhibit of paintings held six
years earlier in Moscow to Khruschev's great displeasure. Second,
foreign writers and artists were invited to participate in a highly–
publicized Cultural Congress in Havana at the beginning of 1968,
and Castro seized the opportunity to taunt Moscow again . To the
resounding applause of his international audience, he repeated his
criticisms of Soviet foreign policy and contrasted the solidarity
shown by intellectuals from all over the world with Guevara's adven–
ture to the indifference and hostility to it shown by the Soviet Union.
In literature the period of the heresy was very productive.
It
seemed as if Stalin had just died in Havana; 1967 was reminiscent of
the "Year of Protest" (1956) in the Soviet Union, when Vladimir
Dudintsev succeeded in publishing
Not From Bread Alone
and Pasternak
presented his manuscript of
Dr.
Zhivago
without being punished. In
Cuba, as a consequence of a similar relaxation of censorship , awards
were given in 1968 to three works that would soon after be criticized
for their "ideological elements frankly opposed to revolutionary
thought":
Fuera deljuego ,
by the poet Heberto Padilla;
Siete contra Te–
bas,
by the dramatist Ant6n Arrufat; and the short story collection
Condenados de Condado,
by Norberto Fuentes. From 1966 to 1968, the
peak of the "little heresy," Cuban writers were able to experiment
with language and narrative structure untrammeled by the con–
straints of socialist realism. Their imaginative achievements in prose
fiction were such that, between the publication of
Paradiso
(1966) and
that of
El mundo alucinante
(1969), by Reinaldo Arenas, the Cuban
novel seemed to be in the vanguard of the experimental "boom" that
was going on in Latin America.
