Intellectuals have played a key role in processes of change in all times and places. This was true throughout Cuba’s revolutionary processes and remains the case today. I have mixed feelings about the current situation. I think that part of Cuba’s intelligentsia (most of it in the nation’s capital) has a pointed, energetic and pro-active task at hand. Intellectuals are split into two tendencies: one that is more radical and extreme (and extremes are never good); and a second that is more centrist, in line with the current need for change and involvement with it. There is also an “academic intelligentsia” that confines its work to intellectual arenas and is thus unable to engage in social change, as well as another more “artistic” intelligentsia that is a bit more involved and which I prefer, but which also falls short of effective social engagement in key moments. I believe that the majority of these intellectuals, which ought to be a driving force in the current process of change and actualization of the Cuban economic and social model, are blocked or self-blocked. They engage in catharsis at specific junctures only to return to paralysis and immobility, moving more slowly than what the changes require. Obviously this is not the best way for Cuban intellectuals to fulfill their historic role.
In Cuba a lot of things are in motion, pushed along by the government whether because it is aware of the urgent need for change or because of a lack of a better option to preserve its principles.
This is all well and good, but proves problematic when it comes to implementation, whether at the national, provincial, or municipal levels. The government maintains a discourse of change and creates laws to legitimate changes, but in practice their implementation is inconsistent; the changes carried out do not live up to what was planned or what is needed. This is to say, there is a feeling of change, but intellectuals should have a more active, a more important responsibility at this juncture.
As for me, I don’t consider myself part of the intellectual class because I don’t identify with its codes of behavior and self-presentation even though I meet the general definition. I do personally feel a historical commitment to my time and place; or rather to the time and place of those who share this journey with me. But this is why for the past ten years or so, I have distanced myself from that intelligentsia mainstream, and cast my fortune as Marti proposed:
“with the poor of the earth I will cast my luck… the mountain stream pleases me more than the sea.”
I prefer to engage in transformative projects at the grassroots, with diverse social actors and community-based experiences, like the Cuban Network of Popular Educators operated by the Martin Luther King Center, and the Demanos Group’ local steering committee. It is from this perspective that we can identify, plan, develop, and follow community-development projects, including those related to food security, local empowerment, and communication.
We are a group of people with shared feelings and vision, with a clear idea of what we want and how to achieve it, and with a strong commitment to Cuba and the Cuban people in our current historical moment. Not everything is as we wish and need, but we are like a little grain of sand that can help shape the mountain that is required in the national context. Every action we take has a goal. At the center of the project we are dreaming of is a nation that does not succumb to dominant capitalist logics nor to the servile complacency of a hypothetical and idyllic socialism.
Rather, we dream of a nation that fosters subjects who are critical, committed, and dedicated to creating a project like that which Martí described: “with all and for the good of all,” men and women.
I am not sure that the current power structure in Cuba was designed with this historical role for its intellectuals in mind. This is an original sin that will sooner or later take its toll.
— Alcides García Carrazana
Translation from the Spanish by Laura-Zoe Humphreys and the editors.
Alcides García Carrazana is a trained journalist, a Professor of Communication at the University of Granma, and President of the Cuban Association of Social Communicators (Granma chapter). He is also a grassroots organizer (a ‘popular communicator’).
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