582
PARTISAN REVIEW
The Ministry of the Interior has been promoting these socialist
thrillers through a competition for the best such story of the year.
According to the official guidelines, the winning entry must "have a
didactic character and be a stimulus for prevention of and vigilance
against all acts that are antisocial or against the people's power." In
1979 the award went to the novel
Aqui
las arenas son mas limpias,
by
Luis A. Betancourt. As ludicrously described on the bookjacket, it is
a story about a Cuban State Security agent's infiltration of the counter–
revolutionary organization Alpha 66, which conducts acts of aggres–
sion against Cuba from Miami, in strict collaboration with the CIA.
The author enters into the complex microcosm of anti-Cuban ter–
rorism to reveal the titanic work of this agent-work that can only be
successful when ajust ideology rules the conscience of man-and to re–
iterate the tireless efforts of the U. S. secret service agencies against our
country. The pages of this book are a true testimony of the work that is
accomplished day after day by the men of our security forces in their
open struggle against the imperialist enemy.
The genre has become so popular among the censors and contest
judges that it has recently been introduced to the theatre.
While these forms have developed in response to the party line
on the function of literature, others have become popular as safe
harbors for those who wish to avoid conflict with the censors. An–
thologies of Cuban classics and biographies, for example, as well as
collections of documents and historical essays have for this reason at–
tracted some writers .
However, literary criticism has since 1970 been the handmai–
den of official policy on culture. The function of criticism has been
reduced to spotting books that will serve as tools for mass–
indoctrination and to presenting them in a favorable light with the
appropriate sprinkling of remarks on style or aesthetic achievement,
real or imagined, even though such considerations are lip service to
values that no longer really matter in Cuban literature. Thus,
prefaces and reviews are little more than a series of cliches adapted
to suit the genre and work in question.
If
it is prose fiction, the critic
may stress the author's "socialist, scientific and revolutionary con–
sciousness" and his "devotion to the people" in presenting an "epic of
the vanguard's revolutionary zeal in the face of the new socialist duties
and objectives." In discussing poetry, drama, and essays, the critics
