Revolutionary Cuban culture in review: Theories, tensions, triumphs, and the struggle for universal social change

Abstract

The article, in essence, reconsiders revolutionary Cuban cultural policy, focusing on what many have come to perceive as a highly contested issue: the revolution's theoretical perception and practical decree in terms of ‘expressive freedoms’. The biggest challenge, conceivably, that confronted and continues to plague Cuba's cultural leadership, has been to carve out a clear path that defends the revolution at all costs against Western imperialist offensives, and allows full expressive rights to artists, writers and intellectuals. Despite this ‘dilemma’, for the most part Cuba's cultural policies, goals and strategies positively enriched the nation's intellectual, educational and artistic levels. Moreover, despite the presence and perils of doctrinaire elements in Castro's regime, leading cultural figures sought to oppose the rise of socialist realism, Stalinism's widely contested mode of cultural expression. While Cuba's radical cultural workforce does not explicitly seek to uphold or endorse the revolutionary regime per se, it is apparent that, on its own terms, it is intimately aligned with the quest to pursue universal social change.