In January, I had stepped off the airplane in Havana fresh with the anticipation of change. It was hard not to be excited about traveling to a Cuba on the verge of normalization, whatever that might mean. More encouraging still had been the reaction of ordinary, and especially young, Cubans to the news, as merriment overtook the streets of our island neighbor. “People were pretty much throwing themselves in the streets and celebrating,” one young man told me. Or, as another Cuban friend had put it in the briefest of New Year’s messages: “Long live Obama!”
Six months later, July 20 marked the official resumption of diplomatic relations with the reopening of embassies in Havana and Washington. Amidst the photo ops and musical interludes in the U.S. press, it was easy to miss another story that Cuban media circulated with an intensity suggestive of significance. This was the meeting of the Tenth Congress of the UJC, or Cuba’s Young Communist League, and, if one is to judge from Cuban coverage, the war is far from over. “President Obama has said that even if the strategy has changed, the objective remains the same,” reported a delegate from Holguín. In the words of a Granma representative, “the number of students with low grades in Cuban history, is the number of students vulnerable to ideological subversion.”
Between these two impressions—euphoria over political opening and concern about imperialist aggression—lies the open wound of a generational divide
Between these two impressions—euphoria over political opening and concern about imperialist aggression—lies the open wound of a generational divide: on one hand, the young people who have long “dreamed of airplanes,” imagining that their only possibilities lay on the other side of the Florida straits, and, on the other, state officials and their youthful partisans painting that alienation as a political liability.
Generational struggle is as old as the Cuban Revolution itself, and it would be easy to exaggerate the novelty of this round. Already in the 1960s, young people learned to regard their parents—sometimes literally—as the obstacles to revolutionary advance. Unlike their children, middle-aged Cubans were tainted with the sin of having grown up “before.” And so, in ways great and small, the state began to adopt a parental role, albeit never on the level hyperbolically imagined in the “Pedro Pan” exodus. In literacy campaigns and special schools, officials worked to forge a corps of loyal foot soldiers, and many young people undoubtedly experienced this as liberating and galvanizing. But, by the mid-1960s, young Cubans would also end up targets of that state-cum-parent, disparaged for imbibing foreign music (the Beatles), fashion (tight pants), and sexual expression (read: homosexuality). Prodigal sons and daughters, even when they were not: state repression of cultural manifestations politicized phenomena that were rarely dissident in principle.
Young people may be Oedipally destined to battle their parents, but I have been surprised by the virulence of cultural conflicts during my own travels to Cuba. The past few years have witnessed reggaetón’s dizzying rise to popularity and, along with it, denunciations of what officials have come to call “social indiscipline.” Euphemisms often hide as much as they reveal, and social indiscipline is no exception: EcuRed, Cuba’s Wikipedia, defines it as the “complete absence of a behavior considered normal and expected within the context in which it is produced.” In practice, social indiscipline has come to condense multiple sins of generations past—from catcalling to trash dumping, loud music and workplace theft. As Nora Gámez Torres argued in her 2012 article “Hearing the Change: Reggaetón and Emergent Values in Cuba,” the consumerist desires of reggaetoneros and their young fans have thereby been depicted as paradigmatic violations of socialist decency.
The tone of the battle has ramped up in response to imminent political change, even if it remains largely discursive for now. Popular culture has again been subject to damning assessments, with the cultural consumption of young people painted as a political threat. This was one of the pressing missions identified at last month’s UJC Congress, where delegates pledged to “defend the revolution, be it from a direct military intervention or from an avalanche of pseudo-culture, customs and values promoted by capitalism.”
So just how estranged are young Cubans? Is the state right to present their cultural tastes as the key to socialist survival? Recent events may offer some tentative answers.
In an instance of uncanny doubling, December 17 saw the announcement of a quite different set of “new laws” at the hands of popular reggaetón artists. In a video released on that day and shot on the island by Los Desiguales with El Yonky, Eddy K, and Gilbert Man—several of whom now live in Miami—the singers act out what amounts to a Scarface-esque fantasy of mafiapocalypse. In its depiction of a turf war between gangs, “No hay break” relies on violent imagery little seen in any Cuban cultural medium. Indeed, much about it feels strangely un-Cuban. A rejection of perceived foreignness in turn characterized the reactions of many Cubans to the video, at least as we can judge from comment threads on Facebook and YouTube. As one viewer put it, in a firmly worded response: “No to violence. We might not have much food, or much money either, but we also don’t have much violence. Don’t promote this s***.”
Soon thereafter, that rejection was reinforced on an official level by the spectacular arrest of Gilbert Man, who had managed to build a small fiefdom in his Guanabacoa neighborhood with profits from Miami credit card fraud. (Indeed, reggaetoneros seem to forecast a legal cooperation between Cuba and the U.S., with megastars Chacal y Yakarta facing fraud charges in Miami at the hands of their former promoters). In an unparalleled state use of informal distribution networks, the Ministry of the Interior leaked a video of the arrest, which proceeded through an excruciating display of the reggaetonero’s clothes, cars, and electronics. The message should have been clear: in a neat inversion of 1960s campaigns against “ill-gotten gains” of the bourgeois past, Cubans were being asked to denounce a renegade from revolutionary morality (not to mention U.S. legal codes). “Under capitalism, thuggery is a prestigious profession,” proclaimed one Cuban editorialist, “do we want it in Cuba?”
Thuggery, no—but capitalism…perhaps? Young Cubans manifest little reverence for the Socialist state that once inspired their elders’ allegiance. Meanwhile, the partisanship of some young people for unfettered capitalism, at least on the microeconomic level, can seem dangerous to their parents, who retain memories of what U.S. economic penetration once looked like in Cuba. In a culture in which price and productivity are estranged from clear referents, older generations view their children’s affection for designer clothes and U.S. lifestyles as a sign of naiveté.
Ultimately, of course, the dimensions and pace of capitalization lie beyond the control of young people and their parents alike. Those who worry about its implications are undoubtedly justified, especially in a Havana that now regularly sees beggars sleeping on the streets. Even the new leisure geography of the capital, with its trendy restaurants and clubs, is priced far beyond the reach of ordinary Cubans. When the embargo is finally lifted, U.S. business owners and cultural promoters will lose little sleep over the threat of cultural imperialism or wealth stratification, for that matter.
In Cuba, the problem is not that young people have decided to take charge of their own cultural consumption. It is rather that they have been given so little opportunity to do so.
But official admonitions about social indiscipline and cultural mesmerism effectively miss the point. Cultural democratization is inherent neither to capitalism nor socialism; both systems, in their way, work to inhibit it. Cuban voices are right to critique the mechanisms of cultural distribution in the U.S., but what if they were to turn that lens back on themselves? In Cuba, the problem is not that young people have decided to take charge of their own cultural consumption. It is rather that they have been given so little opportunity to do so.
I have said that the terms of this debate are hardly new. It is worth pointing out just how old they are. In 1913, Cuban intellectual Enrique José Varona took to the pages of Cuba Contemporánea to denounce the country’s “disastrous descent into social indiscipline,” thereby launching an ongoing public debate (1). Varona was voicing a widely felt pessimism among Cuban intellectuals about the disappointing state that had succeeded independence in 1898, along with the “immaturity” of popular political engagement. In the words of Manuel Márquez Sterling, “indiscipline” was a “consequence of the lack of preparation for certain exercises of freedom; the absence of a clear horizon in the possession of our destinies; the nonexistence of principles to organize everything that is, in our country, still to be organized” (2). Varona, too, pointed to the missing weight of a formerly authoritarian state: a salutary development, but a potentially anarchic one, too.
It is not hard to see a direct line between the political pretensions of elites past and present. In moments of uncertainty, Cuban officials and intellectuals have often cast blame at the social habits of those located outside of state power. If revolutionary leaders once again see anomie before them, though, is that not also a symptom of the state? Cuban history tells us that culture wars are always and inevitably political.
Notes
(1) Enrique José Varona, “Nuestra indisciplina,” Cuba Contemporánea 2, no. 1 (May 1913): 12.
(2) Manuel Márquez Sterling, Alrededor de nuestra psicología (Havana: Imprenta Avisador Comercial, 1906), 66.
Photo: “Our project’s fundamental clay is young people.” Havana billboard. By Valentos SG.