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PARTISAN REVIEW
Bolshevik victory . There, works are read and discussed in the pres–
ence of watchdogs from the State Security police .
If
an author de–
cides to enter his manuscript in a literary competition or submit it
for publication in one of the literary periodicals or by a state publish–
ing house, he must present it with a detailed description of his back–
ground - identifying his immediate family, his political activities,
community service, participation in voluntary work projects, etc.–
and a recommendation from his place of employment, which must
refer to his political attitude, his revolutionary conduct, and his per–
formance as a worker.
The juries and editorial committees consist of party members
and yes-men whose loyalty to the government has been clearly dem–
onstrated. They judge works according to established criteria and
the political background of the author. Those are the appropriate
standards according to an official statement handed down by the
Second UNEAC Congress, which was held in 1977 . At the Con–
gress, Cuban writers were told that the Union would only promote
"the creation and dissemination of literature that serves to mold the
thinking of the general public through its ideological content and
aesthetic quality." Members ofUNEAC , they were told at that time,
are expected to continue their studies of Marxist-Leninist doctrine
"so that their works may reflect the essence of social phenomena with
the greatest possible depth."
Given these standards and strictures, the works accepted by the
state publishing houses have much in common. To please the au–
thorities, they strip reality of its gray areas for the sake of clear, eas–
ily digestible contrasts , or they dress official slogans and catchwords
in thin fictional disguise to serve an overriding didactic aim. They
bear out the fears for literary creativity expressed by Che Guevara in
his criticism of "the rigid forms of socialist realism," which he de–
scribed as a kind of "straight-jacket on artistic expression" with which
one can give only "a mechanical representation of a social reality that
one would like to see, the ideal society nearly devoid of contradic–
tions or conflicts." To achieve this vision, Guevara added , "one looks
for simplifications , what everyone can understand , which is what the
bureaucrats comprehend . This approach nullifies authentic artistic
exploration and reduces culture to a mere representation of the so–
cialist present and of the past which is dead and therefore safe."
Whether or not the literary standard imposed on Cuban writers for
the past ten years is referred to as "socialist realism" the stultifying
interpretation of culture and the results are the same .
