Caliban and Other Essays Roberto Fernandez Retamar ‘Translated by Edward Baker Foreword by Fredric Jameson University of Minnesota Press, MinneapolisCaliban: Notes Toward a Discussion of Culture in Our America A Question ‘A European journalist, and moreover a leftist, asked me a few days ago, “Does a Latin-American culture exist?” We were discussing, naturally enough, the r- ‘cent polemic regarding Cuba that ended by confronting, on the one hand, certain bourgeois European imellectuals (or aspirants to that state) with a visible coto- list nostalgia; and on the other, that body of Latin-American writers and artist ‘who reject open or veiled forms of cultural and political colonialism. The ques: tion seemed to me to reveal one of the roots of the polemic and, hence, could alse ‘he exprossed another way: "Do you exist?” For to question our culture is te ‘question our very existence, our human realty itself, and thus to be willing to take a stnd in favor of our irremediable colonial condition, since it suggest that ‘we would be but a distorted echo of what occurs elsewhere. This elsewhere is of ‘course the metropolis, the colonizing centers, whose “right wings" have ex: ploited us and whose supposed “left wings" have pretended and continue to pre= fend to guide us with pious solicinnde—in both cases with the assistance of Yocal intermediaries of varying persuasions. ‘While this fate is to some extent suffered by all countries emerging from co- onialism.—those couetries of ours that enterprising metropolitan intellectuals Ihave ineptly and successively termed barbarians, peoples of color, underdevel, ‘Ten ace appeared forte fit time in Cota de Lax Américas (Havant), 66 (Seprember On 23 November, this entry: [the island of Haiti), which they ssid was very large and that on it lived people ‘who had only one eye and others called cannibals, of whom they seemed to be very aftaid.”* On 11 December it is noted. . . that camiba refers in fact to the ‘people of El Gran Can,"" which explains the deformation undergone by the name ‘carib—also used by Columbus. In the very leter of 15 February 1493, “dated ‘on the caravelle off the island of Cenaria” in which Columbus announces to the world his “discovery,” be writes: “I have found, then, neither monsters not pews of any, save for one island [Quarives}, the second upon entering the Indies, ‘which is populated with people held by everyone on the islands to be very fero- cious, and who eat human flesb.”"* ‘This carib/cannibat image contrasts with another one of the American man preseated in the writings of Columbus: that of the Arauaco of the Greater An- filles—our Taino Indian primarily —whom he describes as peaceful, meek, and ‘evea timorous and cowardly. Both visions of the American aborigine will cicu- late vertiginously throughout Europe, each coming to know its own particular evelopment: The Taino wil be transformed into the paradisical inhabitant of « ‘opie world; by 1516 ‘Thomas Mare will publish his Utopia, the similarities of ‘which to the island of Cuba have been indicated, almost to the point of rapture, CALIBAN 7 ‘by Ezequiel Martinez Estrada.* The Carib, on te other hand, will become a can- ‘iba! —an anthropophagus, a bestial man situated on the margins of civilization, ‘who must be opposed to the very death. But thee is less of « contradiction than right appear a fist glance between the (wo visions; they constitule, simply, oP- tions in the ideological arsenal ofa vigorous emerging bourgeoisie, Francisco de ‘Quevedo translated ‘utopia as “there is no such place.”* With respect to these two visions, one might add, ‘'There is no such man.”” The notion of an Edenic ‘reature comprehends, in more conteraporary terms, a working hypothesis for the bourgeois lft, and, as such, offers an ides! model ofthe perfect society free from the constrictions ofthat feudal world against which the bourgeoisie isin fact struggling. Generally speaking, the utopic vision throws upon these Lands projects for political reforms unrealized inthe countries of origin. In this sense its line of development is far from extinguished. Indeed, it meets with certain pet petuators—apart from its radical perpetuators, who are the consequential revo~ futionaries—in the qumerous advisers who unflaggingly propose to countries emerging from colonialism magic formulas from the metropolis to solve the {rave problems colonialism has left us and which, of course, they have not yet resolved in their own countries. It goes without saying that these proponents of ‘There is no such place” are irritated by the insolent fact thatthe place does exist and, quite naturally, has all the virtues and defects not ofa project but of genuine reality. 'As forthe vision of the cannibal, it corresgonds—also in more contemporary terms—to the right wing of that same bourgeoisie. 1k belongs to the ideological taneral of politicians of action, those who perform the dirty work in whose fruits the charming dreamers of ulopias will equally share. That tho Caribs were as Co- lumabus (and, after him, an unending throng of followers) depicted them is about as probably as the existence of one-eyed men, men with dog muzztes or tis, oF ven the Amazons mentioned by the explorer in pages where Greco-Roman my- thology, the medieval bestiary, and the novel of chivalry all play their part. It is a question ofthe typically degraded vision offered by the colonizer of the man be js colonizing, That we ourselves may have at one time believed in this version ‘only proves 1o what extent we are infected withthe ideology of the enemy. It is typical that we have applied the term cannibal nt to the extinct aborigine of our isles but, above all, to the African black who appeared in those shameful Tarzan films. For itis the colonizer who brings us together, who reveals the profound similarities existing above and beyond our secondary diffesences. The colonizer's ‘ersion explains to us that owing to the Carbs” irremediable bestiality, tere was no alternative to their extermination. What itdoes not explain is why even before the Caribs, the peaceful and kindly Arauacos were also exterminated. Simply speaking, the two groups suffered jointly one of the greatest ethnocides recorded jn history, (Needless to say, this tine of action is still moze alive than the earlier ‘one.) In telation to this fact, it will always be necessary to point out the case of8 CALIBAN those men who, being on the fringe both of utopianism (which has nothing to do ‘with the actual America) and ofthe shameless ideology of plunder, stood in their tridst opposed to the conduct of the colonialists and passionately, Widly, and ‘alianly defended the flesh-and-blood aborigine. In the forefront of such men Stands the magnificent figure of Father Bartolomé de las Casas, whom Bolivar tailed “the apostle of America"” and whom Murt{ extolled unreservedly. Unfor ‘essay "De los canfbales" [On Cannibals), which appeared in 1580. There we find a presentation of those creatures who "retain alive and vigorous their gen- ‘ine, their most useful and natural, vitues and properies.”® ‘Giovanni Floro's English translation of the Essays was published in 1603. Not only was Flo a personal frend of Shakespeare, but the copy ofthe translation that Shakespeare owned and annotated is still extant. This piece of information ‘would be of no further importance but for the fact that it proves beyond a shadow fof doubt thatthe Essays was one of the direct sources of Shakespeare's last great ‘work, The Tempest (1612). Even one of the characters of the play, Gonzalo, who incarnates tho Renaissance humanist, at one point closely glosses entire tines ‘from Floro's Montaigne, originating precisely inthe essay on cannibals. This fact ‘makes the form in which Shakespeare presents his character Caliban/cannibal ven stranger, Because ifn Montaigne —in this case, as unquestionable literary Source for Shakespeare “there is nothing barbarous and savage in that nation eet except that each man calls barbarism whatcver isnot his own practice,” in ‘Shakespeare on the other band, Caltban/cannibal isa savage and deformed slave ‘who eanmat be degraded enough. What has happened is simply that in depicting Caliban, Shakespeare, an implacable realist, here takes the other option of the ‘emerging bourgeois world. Regarding tie utopian vision, it does indced exist in the work but is unrelated to Caliban; as was said before itis expressed by the harmonions humanist Gonzalo, Shakespeare thus confirms that both ways of considering the American, far from being in opposition, were perfectly reconci- ‘bie As forthe concrete man, present him inthe guise of an animal, rob him of his Tand, enslave him so as to Five from his tol, and atthe right moment exter tminate him: this later, of course, only if there were someone who could be de- fended on to perform the ardbous tasks in his stead, In one revealing passige, Prospero wares his daughter that they could not do without Caliban: "We cannot mins him: he does make our fie / Fetch in our wood, and serves in offices! that profit us"(12.311-13). The utopian vision can and must do without men of flesh and blood. After all, shere is no such place. ‘There is no doubt at this point that The Tempest alludes to America, thet its island is the mythification of one of our islands. Astrana Marin, who mentions the “clearly Indian (American) ambience ofthe island," recalls some of the 26° tual voyages along this continent that inspted Shakespeare and even furnished CALAN 9 trim, with slight variations, with the names of nota few of his characters: Mi- tanda, Fernando, Sebastian, Alonso, Gonzalo, Setebos.* More important than this is the knowledge that Caliban is our Carib. ‘We are not interested in following all the possible readings that have been ‘made of this notable work since its appearance,” and shall merely point out some interpretations. The first of these comes from Erest Renan, who published his idearna Caliban: Suite de “La Tempéte’” in 1878."° In this work, Caliban is the jncarnation of the people presented in their worst fight, except that this time his conspiracy against Prospero is successful and he achieves power —which inept tude and corruption will surely prevent him from retaining. Prospero lurks in the darkness awaiting his revenge, and Ariel disappears. This reading owes less to ‘Shakespeare than to the Paris Commune, which had taken place only seven years before, Naturally, Renan was among the writers of the French bourgeoisie who ‘savagely took part against the prodigious “‘assault of heaven.”"!" Beginning with this event, his antidemnocratic feeling stiffened even further. “In his Phitasophi- cal Dialogues," Lidsky tells us, “he believes thatthe solution would We in the creation of an élite of intelligent beings who alone would govern and posses the seereis of science.""!? Characterstcally, Reman’s aristocratic and prefascit elit- ‘sm and his hatred of the common people of his country axe united with an even greater hatred for the inhabitants of the colonies. tis instructive to hear him ex- press himself along these lines. “We aspire [he says] not only to equality but 1o domination, The country of a foreign race must again be a country of serfs, of agricultural Taborers or industrial workers. tis not a question of eliminating the ‘inequalities among men but of broadening them and making them faw.'? ‘And on another ovcasion: ‘The regeneration of the inferior or bastard races by the superior races is Within the providential human order. With us, the common man is nearly always a declassé nobleman, bis heavy hand is better suited to ‘handling the sword than the menial tool. Rather than work be chooses to fight, that is. he returns to his first state. Regere imperio populos — that is our vocation. Pour forth this all-consuming activity onto countries: which, like China, are crying aloud for foreign conquest. .. . Nature hhas made a race of workers, the Chinese race, with its marvelous ‘manual dexterity and almost no sense of honor; govern them with jpstice, levying from them, in return for the blessing of such a ‘government, an ample allowance for the conquering race, and they will te satisfied; a race of tillers of the soil, the black . . . a race of masters and soldiers, the Furopean race. . . Let each do that which he ts made (for, and all will be well."*fo CALIBAN It is unnecessary to gloss these lines. which, as Césaire righily says, came from the pen not of Hider but of the French fumanist Ernest Renan. ‘The inital destiny of the Caliban myth on our own American soil is a surpris- ing one. Twenty years after Renan had published his Caltban—in other words, in 1898—the United States intervened in the Cuban war of independence against Spain and subjectod Cuba to its tutelage, converting her in 1902 into ber first ‘eocolony (and holding her until 1959), while Puerto Rico and the Philippines ‘became colonies of a tradtional nature. The fact~which had been anticipated by Mart years before —moved the Latin-American intelligentsia. Elsewhere I have recalled that “‘ninety-cight” is not only a Spanish date that gives its mame to a ‘complex group of writers and thinkers of that country, but its also, and perhaps ‘most importantly, a Latin-American data that should serve to designate a no less ‘complex group af witers and thinkers on this side of the Atlantic, gencrally known by the vague name of modernistas.'* It is “*ninety-eight"—the visible presence of North American imperialism in Latin America already foretold by ‘Marti, which informs the later work of someone like Dasfo or Rod6.. ‘Jn a speech given by Paul Groussac in Buenos Aires on 2 May 1898, we have ‘am early example of how Latin-American writers ofthe time would react to this situation: Since the Civil War and the brutal invasion of the West [be says}, the Yankee spirit had rid itself completely of its formless and ‘“Calibanesque”” body, and the Old World has contemplated with disquiet and terror the newest civilization that intends to supplant our own, declared to be in decay." “The Franco-Argentine writer Groussac feels that “ous” civilization (obvi- ously understanding by that term the civilization of the “Old World,” of which ‘we Latin Americans would, curiously enough, be a part) is menaced by the Cal- ibanesque Yankee. t seems highly improbable thatthe Algerian of Vietnamese ‘writer ofthe time, trampled underfoot by French colonialism, would have been ready to subscribe tothe first part of such a eriteion, tis also frankly strange to see the Caliban symbol—in which Renan could with exactitude see, if only 10 abuse, the people being applied to the United Stares. But nevertheless, despite this blurred focus — characteristic, on the other band, of Latin America's unique situation —Groussac's reaction implies a clear rejection of the Yankee danger by Latin-American writers. This is not, however, the first time that such a rejection twas expressed on our costinent. Apart from cases of Hispanic writers such as Bolivar and Mart, among others, Brazilian literature presents the example of Joaquin de Sousa Andrade, of Soustindrade, in whose strange poem, O Guesa rrane, stanza 10 is dedicated to “*O inferno Wall Street,” of conrupt stockbrokers, petty politicians, and businessmen. cauBAN 11 Awhich were reproduced in La Razin of Montevideo on 6 May 1898. Developing vik embellising the idea outlined in t, Rod published in 1900. atthe age of tweary-nine, one of the most famous works of Latin-American Ieratre: Aric? rer the best of what Rod6 did not hesitate to call more than once “our civil Jaton’ (223, 226), In his words, just asin those of Grovssac, this civilization vas identified not only with ‘our Latin America” (239) but with ancient Roma- Th if uot with the Old World as a whole. The identification of Caliban with the ‘Unued States, proposed by Groussac and popularized by Rod6, was certainly 8 Tnistake, attacking this eror from one angle, José Vasconcelos commented that aE the Yankees were only Caliban, they would not represent any great ddangee "But this is dousless of Title importance next to the relevant fact at the danger in question had clearly been pointed out, As Benedet rightly ob- ttorved, “Perhaps Rodé erred in naming the danger, but he did not ert in is rec- cognition of where it lay." Sometime afterward, the French writer Jean Guéhenno—who, although sovely aware of the work by the colonial Rod6, Knew of course Renan's work from memory —restated the lttr’s Caliban thesis in his own Caliban parle [Caliban speaks], published in Pais in 1929. This time, however, the Renan Jdentfication of Caliban with the people is accompanied by a postive evaluation ‘St Caliban, One must be grateful to Guchenno’s book-and itis about the only thing for wich gratitde is due—for having offered forthe fist ime an appeal ing version ofthe character But the theme would have required the hand or the rage of a Paul Nizan to be effecively realized.” ‘Mach sharper are the obsecvations ofthe Argentine Anfbal Ponce, in his 1935 wodk Humanismo burgués y humanismo proletario. The book which a suudent of Che's thinking conjectures must have exercised {influence on the latter™*—de~ Sotes the third chapter to “Ariel; or, The Agony of an Obstinate Tusion.” tn Commenting on The Tempest, Ponce says that those four beings embody am en tie era: Prospero is te enlightened despot who loves the Renaissance; Miranda, his progeny; Caliban, the sffering masse (Ponce wil Use quote Renn, but not Gadneeso}: and Ariel, tbe genius of the air without any tes to life." Ponce points up the equivocal narare of Calban's presentation, one that reveals “a Porous injustice on the part of a master.” In Ariel he sees the intellectual, tied to Prospero in “less burdensome and crude a way than Caliban, but also in hisCALIBAN service.”” His analysis of the conception of the intellectual (“mixture of slave and mercenary") coined by Renaissance hurcanism, a concept that “taught as nothing else could an indifference to action and an acceptance ofthe established order” and that even today is for the imellecual in the bourgeois world “'the ‘educational ideal of the governing clases,”” constitutes one of the most penetat~ ing essays writien on the theme in our America ‘But this examination, although made by a Latin American, still ook only the European world into account, For a new reading of The Tempest —for a new con- sideration of the problem—it was necessary to await the emergence of the colo- nial countries, whick begins around the time of the Second World War. That abrupt presence led the busy technicians ofthe United Nations to inven, between 1944 and 1945, the term economically underdeveloped area in order to dress in anractive (and profoundly confusing) verbal garb what had vot then been called colonial area, ot backward areas." ‘Concurrently with this emergence there appeared in Paris in 1950.0. Man- ‘noni’s book Psychologie de ta colonisation. Significantly, the English edition of this book (New York, 1956) was 10 be called Prospero and Caliban: The Psy- chology of Colonization. To approach his subject. Mannoni has created, no les, what he calls the “Prospero comples,"* defined as “the sur of those uncon- scious neurotic tendencies that delineate at the same time the ‘picture’ of the pa- temalist colonial andthe portrait of “the racist whose daughter has been the ob- ject of an (imaginary] attempted rape at the hands of an inferior being.” “™ In this book, probably forthe first time, Caliban is identified withthe colonil. But the odd theory thatthe latter suffers from a "*Prospero complex” that leads him neuroticaly to require, even to anticipate, and naturally to accept the presence of Prosperofcolonizer is roundly rejected by Frantz Fanon in the fourth chapter (“The So-Called Dependence Complex of Colonized Peoples" of his 1952 book Black Skin, White Masks. ‘Although he is (apparently) the first writer in our world to assume our iden- tification with Caliban, the Barbadian writer George Lamang is unable to break the circle traced by Mannoni: ‘Prospero (says Lamming) has given Caliban language; and with it an unstated history of consequences, an unknown history of future intentions, This gft of language meant not English, ia particular, but speech and concept as a Way. a method, a necessary avenue towards areas of the self which could not be reached in any other way. Tt is this ‘Way, entirely Prospero’s enterprise, which makes Caliban aware of possibilities. Therefore, afl of Caliban’s furure-—for future isthe very ‘ame of possibilites—must derive from Prospero’s experiment, which is also his risk, Prosided there is no extaordinary departure which ‘explodes all of Prospero's premises, then Caliban and his future n0W belong to Prospero . . . Prospero lives in the absohute certainty that CALIBAN 13 Language, which is his gift to Caliban isthe very prigon in which Caliban’ achievernents Will be realized and restricted.” In the decade of the 1960s, the new reading of The Tempest ultimately estab lished its hegemony. In The Living World of Shakespeare (1964), the Englishman John Wain will tell us cat Caliban has the patos of the exploited peoples everywhere, poignantly expressed at the beginning of a three-hundred-year wave of European colonization; even the Lowest savage wishes to be left alone rather than be “educated” and made to work for someone else, and there is an ‘undeniable justice in bis complaint: ‘*For 1 atm all the subjects that you bave,! Which once was mine own king." Prospero retorts with the inevitable answer of the colonist: Caliban has gained in knowledge and skill (hough we recall that he already knew how to build dams to eatch fish, and also to dig pig-nuts from the soil, as if this were the English ‘countryside). Before being employed by Prospero, Caliban had no language: .. thou didst not, savage,’ Know thy own meaning, but ‘wouldet gabble like/ A thing most brutish.” However, this kindness has been rewarded with ingratitude. Caliban, allowed to live in Prospero's cell, has made an attempt to ravish Miranda. When steruly reminded of this, he impentinently says, with 2 kind of slavering guffaw, “Oh ho! ‘Oh ho! —would it have been donel Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else’ Ths isle with Calibans.”” Our own age [Wain concludes), Which is much given to using the horrible word “"miscegenation,”” ought to have no difficulty in understanding this passage.” ‘At the ed of that same decade, in. 1969, and in a highly significant manner, Caliban would be taken up with pride as our symbol by three Antilian writers — ‘each of whom expresses himself in one ofthe three great colonial Tanguages of ‘the Caribbean. In that year, independently of one another, the Martinican writer ‘Aimé Césaire published his dramatic work in Prench Une tempéte: Adaptation de ‘La Tempéte”” de Shakespeare pour un thédtre négre; te Barbadian Edward Brathwaite, his book of poems Islards, in English, among which there is one dedicated to "Caliban" and the aubhor of these tines, an essay in Spanish, “Cuba hasta Fidel,” which discusses our identification with Caliban.“* In Césaire's Work the characters are the same as those of Shakespeare. Aricl, however, is & ‘mulato slave, and Caliban is a black slave; in addition, Esha, “a black god- devil” appears. Prospero's remark when Ariel retums, fll of scruples, after hav- ing unleashed following Prospero's orders but against his won conscience ~the tempest with which the work begins is curious indeed: “Come now!” Prospero ‘says to him, °*Your crisis! It's always the same with intellectuals!” Brathwaite’s ‘poem called ‘Caliban’ is dedicated, signficantly, to Cuba: ““In Havana that morning... .°* writes Brathwaite, ‘It was December second, nineteen fifty-six./14 CALIBAN It was the first of August eighteen thirty-eight. It was the twelfth October four- teen ninety-two./ How many bangs how many revolutions?" Our Symbol (Our symbol then is not Ariel, as Rod6 thought, but rather Caliban, This is some- thing that we, the mestizo inbabitants ofthese same isles where Caliban lived, see with particular clarity: Prospero invaded the islands, killed our ancestors, en- slaved Caliban, and taught him his language to make himself understood. What else can Caliban do but use that same language —today he has no other —to curse him, to wish thatthe “red plague” would fall on him? I know no other metaphor more expressive of our cultura situation, of our reality, From Tapac Amara, Ti radenies, Toussaint-Louverture, Simén Bolivar, Father Hidalgo, José Artigas, Bemardo O'Higgins, Benito Juérez, Antonio Maceo, and José Marti, to Emi- liano Zapata, Augusto César Sandino, Julio Antonio Mella, Pedro Albizu ‘Campos, Lazaro Cérdenas, Fidel Castro, and Emesto Che Guevara, from the Tinea Garcilaso de la Vega, the Aleijadinho, the popular music of the Antilles, José Hernindez, Eugenio Marfa de Hostes, Manuel Gonzélez Prada, Rubén Darfo (yes, when alls said and done), Baldomero Lilfo, and Horacio Quiroga, to Mexican muralism, Heitor Villa-Lobos, César Vallejo, José Carlos Maridtegui, Bzequicl Martinez Estrada, Carlos Gardel, Pablo Neruda, Alejo Carpentier, Ni- colés Guillén, Aimé Céssire, José Maria Arsuedes, Violeta Parra, and Frantz Fa- rnon—what is our history, what is our culture, if nt the history and culture of Caliban? ‘As regards Rod6, if it is indeed true that he erred im his symbols, as has al- ready been said, itis no less true that he was able to point with clarity to the {restest enemy of our culture in his time —and in ours —and that is enormously ‘important. Rod6’s limitations (and this is not the moment to elucidate them) are responsible for what he saw unclearly o failed t9 see at all.” But what is worthy ‘of note in his case is what he did indeed see and what continued to retain a certain amount of validity and even virulence. Despite his failings, omissions, and ingenuousness [Benedetti has also said], Rod6's vision of the Yankee phenomenon, rigorously situated in its historical context, was in its time the first launching pad for odaer Tess ingenuous, better informed and more foresighted formulations to come... the almost prophetic substance, of Rod's Arielism still retains today a certain amount of validity." ‘These observations are supported by indisputable realities, We Cubans be- come well aware that Rod6’s vision fostered late, less ingenuous, and more rad- ical formulations when we simply consider the work of our own Julio Antoni ‘Mella, on whose development the influence of Rodé was decisive. In ““Intelec- cAUIMAN 15 tuales y tartufos"fTntllectuals and Tartffes) (1924). a vehement work written at the age of twenty-one, Mella violently attacks the false intellectual values of the time —-opposing them with suck names as Unanuno, José Vasconcelos, Inge- tieros, and Varona. He sites, "The intellectual isthe worker of the mind. The ‘worket! That is, the only man who in Rod6’s judgment is worthy of life... he who takes up his pen against iniquity jas as others take up the plow to fecundate the earth, ofthe sword to liberale peoples, or a dagger to execute tyrants." Mella would again quote Rod6 with devotion during that year® ard in the fol- Towing year he was to help found the Ariel Polytecbnic Institute in Havana.” It js opportune to recall that in this same yeas, 1925, Mella was also among the founders of Cuba's first Communist party, Without a doubt, Rod6’s Ariel served asa “launching pad” for the meteoric revolutionary career of ths first organic “Marxist-Leninist in Cuba (who was also one ofthe first on the continent.) "As farther examples of the relative validity that Rodé's anti-Yankee argument ‘retains even in our own day, we can point fo enemy attempts 10 disarm such ao argument, A strange case is that of Emir Rodriguez Monegal, for whom Arie, in dition to “material for philosophic or sociological meditation, clso contains ‘pages of a polemic nature on politcal problems ofthe moment. Acd it was pro= Geely this secondary but undeniable condition that determined its immediate popularity and dissemination.” Rod's essential position against North Ameri- ean penetration would thus appear to be an afterthought, a secondary fact in the ‘work. It is known, however, thet Rod6 conceived it immediately after American inerveation in Cuba in 1898, as a response to the deed. Rodriguez Monegal says: “The work thus projected was Ariel In the final version only nw9 direct allusions are found 10 the historical fact that was its primary motive force; . . . both allusions enable us to appreciate how Rodé has transcended the inital historical circumstance to arrive fully at the sential problem: the proclaimed decadence of the Latin race.” ‘The fact that a servant of imperialism such as Rodriguez Monegal, afficied swith the satne “"Notdo-mania” that Rodé denounced in 1900, tries so coarsely to cemasculate Rodé's work, only proves tha it does indeed retain a cenain virulence {nts formulation— something that we would approach today from ather perspec- tives and with other means. An analysis of Ariel —and this is absolutely not the ‘occasion to make one—would lead us also to stress how, despite his background ‘and his antiJacobianism, Rods combats in it the anidemoccatic spirit of Renan and Nietzsche (in whom be finds “an abominable, reactionary sprit” [224)) and exalts democracy, mora) values, and emulation, But undoubtedly the rest of the ‘work has lost the immnediacy that its gallant confrontation of the United States ‘and the defense of ovr vaiues still reralns.16 CALIBAN Pat into perspective, itis almost certain that these Tines would not bear the ‘name they have were it not for Rod's book, and I prefer to consider them also as ‘a homage to the great Uruguayan, whoce contenary is being celebrated this year ‘That the homage contradicts him on not a few points is not strange. Medardo Vitier has already observed that “if thete should be a return to Rod6, { do not believe that it would be to adopt the solution he offered conceming the interests of the life of the spirit, but rather to reconsider the problem."°° In proposing Caliban as our symbol, [am aware that itis not entirely ours, that itis also an alien claboration, although in this case based on our concrete reali- ties. But how can this alien quality be entirely avoided? The most venerated word in Cuba—mambi—was disparagingly imposed on us by our enemies atthe time of the war for independence, and we still have not totally deciphered its meaning. Tt seems to have an African root, and in the mouth of the Spanish colonists im- plied the idea that al independentstas were so many black slaves—emancipated by that very war for independence —who of course constituted the bulk of the liberation army. The independentistas, white and black, adopted with honor something that colonialism meant as an insult, This i the dialectic of Caliban. To offend us they call us mambf, they call us black: but we reclaito as a mark of slory the honor of considering ourselves descendants of the mambi, descendants of the rebel, runaway, independentista btack—never descendants of the slave holder. Nevertheless, Propero, as we well kaow, taught his language to Caliban ‘and, consequently, gave him a name. But is this his true name? Let us listen to this speech made in 1971: ‘To be completely precise, we sill do not even have a name; we stilt ‘have no name; we are practically unbaptized whether as Latin ‘Americans, Ibero-Ameticans, Indo-Americans. For the imperialists, we are nothing more than despised and despicable peoples. Af least that ‘was what we were. Since Girén they have begun to change their thinking. Racial contempi-—to be a Creole, to be a mestiza, to be black, to be simply, a Latin American, is for them contemptible.” ‘This, naturally, is Fidel Casto on the tenth anniversary of the victory at Playa Gnd, ‘To assume our condition as Caliban implies rethinking our history from the other side, from the viewpoint ofthe other protagonist. The other protagonist of The Tempest (or, 28 we might have said ourselves, The Hurricane) is not of ‘course Ariel but, rather, Prospero.”® There is no real Ariel-Caliban polarity: both ace slaves inthe hands of Prospero, the foreign magician. But Caliban is the rude and unconquerable master of the island, while Ariel, a creature of the air, al- thovgh also a child ofthe isle, i the intellectual as both Ponce and Césire have seen, CALIBAN 17 ‘Again Marti ‘This conception of our culture had already been articulaiely expressed and de- fended in the last century by the frst among us to understand clearly the concrete ‘situation of what he called — using a term I have referred t several times— "our tmestizo America”: José Mart to whom Rod6 planned to dedicate the first Cu- ‘ban edition of Arie! and about whom he intended to write « study similar to those he devoted to Bolivar and Artigas (see 1359, 1375), a study that in the end he ‘unfortunately never realized, ‘Although he devoted numerous pages to the topic, the occasion on which Mart offered his ideas on this point in a most organic and concise manner was in hi 1891 article “Our America.‘" 1 will limit myself to certain essential quota- tons, But I should first like (0 offer some observations on the destiny of Marti’s work, ‘During Mart’ lifeime, the bulk of his work, seatered throughout a score of continental newspapers, enjoyed widespread fame. We know that Rubén Dario called Marti Maestro" (as, for other seasons, his politcal followers woul also call him during his lifetime) and considered him the Lain American whom he ‘most admired, We shall soon see, on the other hand, how the harsh judgments on ‘the United States that Marti commonly made in his articles, equally well Know in his time, were the cause of acerbic criticism by the proYankee Sarmiento. But the particular manner in which Marts writings ciculated—he made use of journal: ism, oratory, and letter but never published a single book —bears no litle respon sibility forthe relative oblivion into which the work of the Cuban hero fell after his death in 1895. This alone explains the fact that nine years after his death— and twelve from the time Mart! stopped writing forthe continental press, devoted fas he was after 1892 to his political tasks—an author as absolutely ours and as far ‘above suspicion as the twenty-yearold Pedro Hentiquer. Urefia could write in 1904, in an article on Rod's Arif, thatthe latter's opinions on the United States are "much more severe than those formulated by two of the greatest thinkers and tnost brilliant psycho-sociologists of the Antilles: Hostos and Marti." Insofar as this refers to Mart, the obvervation is completely erroneous: and given the exemplary honesty of Henriquez Urefia, it led me, first, to suspect and later, £0 ‘Verify that it was due simply tothe fact that during this period the great Domi: ‘can had not ead, had been unable 10 read, Marti adequately. Marti was hardly published atthe time, A text sch asthe fundamental “Our America" is a good example of this fat. Readers of the Mexican newspaper EI Partido Liberal could hhave read it on 30 January 1691. {tis possible that some other local newspaper republished it,*' although the most recent edition of Mart's Complete Works does not indicate anything in this regard. But its most ikely that those, who did rot have the good fortune to obtain that newspaper knew nothing about the arti- cle the most important document published in America from the end of the pastCALIBAN century until the appearance in 1962 of the Second Declaration of Havana—for almost twenty years, atthe end of which time it appeared in book form (Havana 1910) inthe irregular collection in which publication of the complete works of ‘Marti was begun. For this reason Manuel Pedro Gonzélez is correct when he as- serts that during the first quarter of this century the new generations did not know Marti, “A minimal portion of his work” was again put ito circulation, starting withthe eight volumes published by Alberto Ghiraldo in Madrid in 1925. Thanks to the most recent appearance of several editions of his complete works —actu- ally sil incomplete~ “he has been rediscovered and reevaluated." Gonzdlex is thinking above all of the dazzling literary qualities of this work ("the literary glory” as he says). Could we not add something, then, regarding the works’ fun damental ideological aspec's? Without forgetting very important prior contribu- tions, there are sll some essential points that explain why today, after the triumph of the Coban Revolution and because of it, Mart is being “rediscovered and re- evaluated.” It was no mere coincidence that in 1953 Fidel named Marti as the intellectual author of the attack on the Moncade Barracks nor that Che should use quotation from Mart(—“t is the hour ofthe furnace, and only light should be seen” —to open his extremely important ""Message to the Tricontinental Con- sgress"” in 1967. If Benedeti could say that Rodo's time “was different from out ‘own... his tue place, his true temporal homeland was the nineteenth cenary,”” went ay on the oer hod ta Marte pas wash rand, te ‘noment, this era of ours, which simply cannot be understood without a knowledge ofthis work. “ cod anon sero hf ta inowlede,ecu of he woseeusanes ed was nied oF ina limited way to the early generations of thi to Sogn hao base tient of sulvoqen rel agunens oo 8 “fast launching pad” as well-intentioned but at the samme time as weak as the nineteenth-cenrury work Arie, what can we say of more recent authors to whom editions of Martf are now available but who nevertheless persist in ignoring hisn? {Tam thinking, of course, not of scholars more or less ignorant of our problems but, om the contrary, of those who maintain a consistently anticolonatist aitude, ‘The only explanation of this situation is a painful one: we have been s0 thor- oughly sieped in colonialism that we read with real respect only those anticolo- silist authors disseminated from the metropolis. In this way we cast aside the greatest lesson of Mart; thus, we are barely familiar with Artigas, Recabarten, ‘Mella, and even Mariétegui and Ponce. And I have the sad suspicion that ifthe extraordinary texts of Che Guevara have enjoyed the greatest dissemination ever accorded a Latin American, the fact that he is read with such avidity by our peo- ple is to a certain extent duc to the prestige his name has even in the metropolitan capitals —where, to be sure, he is frequently the object of the most shameless ‘manipulation, For consistency in our amticolonilist ate we must in effect ‘tm to those of our people Who have incarnated and illustrated that attitude in CALIBAN 18 their behavior and thinking.*? Ané for this. there is no case more useful than that of Marti. Tknow of no other Latin-American author who has given so immediate and $0 coherent an answer to another question put to me by my interlocutor, the Euro- pean journalist whom I mentioned atthe beginning ofthese lines (and whom, if Pe did not exist, | would bave had (o invent, although this would have deprived ine of his friendship, which I trust wil survive this monologue): “What relation- Ship," this guileless wit asked me, “does Borges have tothe Incas?” Borges is “almost a reductio a¢ absundum and, in any event, shall discass him later. But it js only right and fair to ask what relationship we, the present inhabitants of this “America in whose zoological and cultural heritage Europe has played an unques- ‘iooable part, have to the primitive inhabitants ofthis seme America — those peo- ples who constructed or Were in the process of constructing admirable cultures lind who were exterminated of martyred by Europeans of various nations, about “hom neither a white nor black legend can be build, only an infernal truth of blood, that, together with such deeds as the enslavement of Africans, constitutes their ternal dishonor. Marti, whose father was from Valencia and whose mother ‘was from the Canaries, who wrote the most prodigious Spanish of his—and ‘our-—age. and who came to have the greatest knowledge of the Euro-North ‘American culture ever possessed by a man of our American, 2180 asked this ques- tion, He answered it as follows: "We are descended from Valencian fathers and ‘Canary Island mothers and feel the inflamed blood of Tamanaco and Paramaconi coursing through our veins, we sce the blood that fell anid the brambles of ‘Mount Calvary as our own, along with that shed by the naked and heroic Coracas as tey struggled breast to breast with the goazalos in thei iron plated armox.* presume thatthe reade, if he or she is nota Venezuelan, will be unfamiliar swith the names evoked by Mart{. So was I. This lack of familiarity is but another proof of our subjection to the colonialist perspective of history that has been im- oxed on us, causing names, dates, viscumstanccs, and truths to vanish fe our ‘Consciousness. Under other circumstances but closely related to these —did not the bourgoois version of history try to erase the heroes of the Commune of 1871, the martyrs of } May 1886 (significantly reclaimed by Mami)? At any rate, Ta- ranaco, Paramaconi, ‘the naked and heroic Caracas" were natives of what is today called Venezuela, of Carib blood, the blood of Caliban, coursing through this veins, This vill not be the only time he expresses such an idea, which is cen- tral to his thinking. Again making use of such heroes, he was to repeat some- time Inter, “We must stand with Guaicsipuro, Paramaconi heroes of Venemuola, ‘probably of Carib origin), and not with the flames that burned them, nor with the ropes that bound them, for with the steel that beheaded them, nor with the dogs that devoured them.’ Marts rejection of the cthnocide that Europe practiced is total, No less total is his identification with the American peoples that offered heroic resistance to the invader, and in whom Marti say the satura forerunners of2 CALIBAN the Latin-American independentistas. This explains why in the notebook in ‘which this last quotation appears, he continues writing, almost withoot transi- tion, om Aztee mythology (“no less beautifl than the Greek"), on the ashes of Quetzacoatl, on “Ayachucho on the solitary plateau,”” on “Bolivar, like the sivers."7 Masti, however, dreams not of a restoration now impossible but ofthe furure inegration of our America—an America rising organically from a firm grasp of its true roots tothe heights of authentic modernity. For this reason, the first quo- tation in which he speaks of fecling valiant Carib blood coursing through bis veins continues as follows: Itis good to open canals, to promote schools, to create steamship lines, to keep abreast of one’s own time, to be om the side of the vanguard the beautiful march of humanity. But in order not to falter because of a lack of spirit or the vanity of a false spirit, itis good also to nourish ‘oneself through memory and admiration, through righteous study and loving compassion, on that fervent spirit of the natural surroundings in which one is bom—a spirit matured and quickened by those of every race that issues from such surroundings and finds its final repose in them. Polities and literature flourish only when they are direct. The ‘Ametican intelligence is an indigenous plumage. Is it not evident that ‘America itself was paralyzed by the same blow that paralyzed the Indian? And until the Indian is caused to walk, America itself will not begin to walk well. [“AAA,"' 337] Marts identification with our aboriginal culture was thus accoropanied by a complete sense of the concrete tasks imposed upon him by bis circumstances. Far from hampering him, that identification nurtured in him the most radical and ‘moder eriteria of his time inthe colonial counties. ‘Naturally, Mart's approach to the Indian was also applied to the black.“® Un- fortunately, while in his day serious inquiries into American aboriginal cultures (which Martt studied passionately) had already been undertaken, only in the twentieth century would then appear similar studies of African eultres and their considerable contribution to the makeup of our mestizo America (see Frobenius, Delafosse, Suret-Canale; Ortiz, Ramos, Herskovits, Roumain, Metraux, Bastide, Franco). © And Mart died five years before the dawning of our century. In any cvent, in his treatment of Indian culnure and in his concrete behavior 19- ‘ward the black, he left a very clear outline of a “bartle plan’ in tis area. ‘This is the way in which Mart forms his Cafibanesque vision of the culture of ‘what he called “our America.” Marti is, as Fidet was later to be, aware of how difficult it is even to find a name that in designating us defines us conceptually. For this reason, after soveral attempts, he favored that modest descriptive for smula that above and beyond race, language, and secondary circumstances em- CALIBAN 21 braces the communities that live, with their common problems, “from the (Rio) Bravo to Patagonia,"* and that are distinct from “European America.” T have already said that although itis found scattered throughout his very numerous ‘writings, this conception of our culture is aptly summarized in the article-mani- festo "Our America,” and I direct the reader toi: to is insistence upon the idea that one cannot “rule new peoples with a singular and violent composition, with Iw inherited from four centaries of free practice in the United States, or nine- teen centuries of monarchy in France. One does not stp the blow in the chest of the plainsman’s horse with one of Hamilion’s decrees. One does not clear the con- sealed blood of the Indian race with a sentence of Sieyés”; to his deeply rooted ‘concept that “the imported book has been conquered in America by the natural tan. Natural men have conquered the artificial men of learning. The authentic imesiiza has conquered the exotic Creole’ (my emphasis); and finally to his fun- damental advice: ‘The European university must yield to the American university. The history of America, from the Incas to the present, must be taught letter perfect, even if that of the Argonauts of Greece is not taught, Our own Greece is preferable to that Greece that is not ours. We have greater need of it. National politicians must replace foreign and exotic politicians. Graft the world onto our republics, but the trunk must be that of our republics. And:let the conquered pedant be silent there is no homeland of which the individual can be more proud than our unhappy ‘American republics. ‘The Real Life of a False Dilemma Ieis impossible not to sce inthis text—which, as has been sai, summarizes in lightning fashion Marts jodgment on this essential problem—his viclentrejec- tion of the imposition of Prospero (‘the European university [,] .. . the Euro- ‘pean book [,] -. . the Yankee book", which "must yield" 10 the reality of Cal- fan ("the Latin] American university (.] - . . the Latin American enigma’): The history of America, from the Incas to the present, must be taught letter perfect even, if that of the Argonauts of Greece is not taught. Our own Greece is preferable to that Greece that isnot ours.” And lacr: “Common cause must be nade with the oppressed so as to secure the system against the interest and cus- toms of the oppressors.” ‘But our America has also heard, expressed with vehemence by a talented and ‘energetic man who died three years before Marti’s work appeared, the thesis that ‘was the exact opposite: the thesis of Prospero.% The interiocutors were not called then Prospero and Caliban, but rathes Civilization and Barbarisrm, the title Uhat the Argentinean Domingo Faustino Sarmiento gave to the first ediion (1845) of his great book on Facundo Quiroga. 'do not believe that autobiographical coom2 CALIBAN fessions are of rauch interest here, but since 1 have already mentioned, by way of selfinflicted punishment, the forgettable pleasures of the westems and Tarzan films by which we were innoculated, unbeknownst (us, with the ideology that we verbally repudiated in the Nazis (I was twelve years old when the Second ‘World War was at its height), must also confess that only afew years afterward, 1 read this book passionately. In the margins of my ofd copy, I find my enthu- siasms, my rejections of the "tyrant ofthe Republic of Argentina’ who had ex- ‘claimed, ‘Traitors to the American cause!" I also find, a few pages later, the ‘comment, “Tt is strange how one thinks of Perén,”” It was many years later, spe= cifically after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 (when we began 10 live and to read the world in another way), that I understood I had not been on the best side in that otherwise remarkable book. It was not possible to be simulta- neously in agreement with Facundo and with “Our America.” What is more, “Our America””—along with a large part of Mart’ entire work —~is an implicit, and at times explicit, dialogue with the Sarmiento theses. If not, what then does this lapidary sentence of Mart's mean; “There is no battle between civilization and barbarism, only betwoen false erudition and nature."” Bight years before “Our America" appeared (1891)—within Sarmiento’s lifetime —Marti had al- teady spoken (in the sentence I have quoted more than once) ofthe “pretext that civilization, which is the vulgar name under which contemporary European man ‘operates, has the natural right to seize the land of foreigners, which is the name «given by those who desire foreign lands to every contemporary human being who {does not come from Europe or European America." Tn both cases, Mart re- Jects the false dichotomy that Sarmiento falling into the trap adrotly set by the ‘colonizer, takes for granted. For this reason, when I said sometime ago that ‘in ‘coming out on the side of ‘barbarism’ Marti foreshadows Fanon and our ‘Revolution’? (a phrase that some hasty people, without noticing the quotation marks, misunderstood—as if Fanon, Fidel, and Che were apostles of barbarism), 1 wrote “barbarism” in tis way, berween quotation marks, to indicate that in fact there was not such state. The presumed barbarism of our peoples was vented with erude eynicism by “those who desire foreign lands"; those who, with equal effrontery, give the ‘popular name” of “civilization” to the “con: temporary” human being who comes ‘from Europe or European America.” ‘What was surely more painful for Marti was to see aman of our America —a man ‘whom, despite incurable differences, he admired in his positive aspects» —fll {nto tis very grave error. Thinking of figures such as Sarmiento, it was Martinez Estrada (who bad previously written so many pages extolling Sarmiento) who in 1962 wrote in his book Diferencias y semefanens entre los patses de la América Latina {Similarities and Diffecences among Latin-American Countries}: ‘We can immediately establish the premise that those who have worked, fn some cases patriotically, to shape social life in complete accordance CALAN 38 ‘with models of other highly developed countries, whose practices are the result of an organic process over the course of ceaturtes, haye betrayed the cause of the trve emancipation of Latin America. ‘ack the necessary information to discuss here the virtues and defects of this bourgeois antagonist and shall Tit myself to pointing cut this opposition to Marth and the coherence between his thought and conduct. As a postulator of ‘Civilization, which be found incarnated in archetypal form in the United States, te advocated the extermination of the indigenous peoples according to the savage Yankae mode; what is more, he adored that growing republic to the north that had by mid-century sill not demonstrated so clearly the flaws that Martt would Teter discover. In both extremes—and they are precisely that: extremes, margins of their respective thinking—he and Mart differed isreconcilably. ; aime Alazrak;i bas studied with some care ‘“El indigenismo de Marti y el antin- digenismo de Sarmiento" (The indigenism of Mart{ and te ani-indigenism of ‘Sarmiente] 2° Iefer the reader interested in the subject co this essays ere shall ‘only draw on some of the quotations Srom the works of both included in that Study, T have already mentioned some of Mari’s observations on the Tndian. Alazraki recalls others: ‘No more than peoples in blossom, no more than the bulbs of peoples, ‘were those the valiant conquistador marched upon: with his subtle ‘raftiness of the old-time opportunist, he discharged his powerful firearms, It was a historic misfortune and a natural crime. The ‘wellformed stalk should bave been Tet standing, the entire lowering ‘Work of Nature could then be seen in al its beauty. The conquistadors stole a page from the Universe! And further: Cf all that greatness there remains in the museum scarcely a few gold ‘cups, afew stones of polished obsidian shaped like a yoke, and one or ‘pwo wrought rings. Tenochtitlin does not exist, nor Tulan, the city of the great fair, Texcuco, the city of the palaces, is no more. Indians of today, passing before the ruins, lower their heads and move their lips as if saying something; they do not put om their hats again ontil the ruins are left behind. For Sarmiento, the history of America is the “bands of abject races, a great con tinent abandoned to savages incapable of progress." If we want to know baw he {nterpreted the maxim of his compatriot Alberdi that “to govern is to populate, ‘we must read this: “Many difficaltes will be presenled by the occupation of so. “Cxtensive a country; bt there will be no advantage comparable to that gained by the extinction of the savage tribes.”? That is to say, for Sarmiento, to govern is ‘also to depopulate the nation of its Indians (and gauchos), And what of the heroes2% CALIBAN of the resistance against the Spaniards, those magnificent men whose rebellic ; 5. ant men whose rebellious ‘blood Mart felt coursing through his veins? Sarmiento has also questioned him- self shout them. This is his response: ‘ For us, Colocolo, Lautaro, and Caupolicén, notwithstanding the noble tid civilized gud with which Dey are adored by Ercl, re nothing ‘more than a bandful of loathesome Indians. We would bave them hanged today were they to reappear in a war of the Arauicanos against Chile, a country that has nothing to do with such rabble. sh mys eo pt cee wool rsa pet" ses in the odious sense of impious, immoral, ravisher and impostor —is synonymous: See eerie Ceorean nae tries." And while for Mart{, “there is no racial hatred, because there are to the auther of Conflicto y armonias de las razas en América {Conflict and Harmony among the Races in America] bases himself thus on pseudoscientific Temay be very unjust to exterminate savages, suffocate rising civilizations, conquer peoples sho are in possession of a privileged pe of nd. Bat hanks to tis inj, Ameri, ited of remaining abandoned (0 the savages, incapable of progress. is fiir tm the most beautiful and most progressive of those that people the earth "Thanks to these injustices, Oceania is filled with civilized peoples, Asia begins to move ander the European impulse, Africa sees the times of Carthage and the glorious days of Egypt reborn on her coals. Thus, the population of the world is subject to revolutions that recognize inmutable laws; the strong races exterminate the weak ones and the civilized peoples supplant the savages in the possession of the earth. ‘There was no need then to cross the Atlantic and seek out Renan to hear such words: a man ofthis America was saying them. The fact is that if he did not learn {heron this side ofthe ocean, they were at east reinforced for him here — nat in cour America bot in the oer, “European (,] America,” of which Sarmiento was the most fanatical devotee in our mestizo lands during the nineteenth century. ‘Although in that century there is no shortage of Latin Americans who adored the ‘Yankzes, our discovery of people among us equal to Sarmiento in their devotion to the United States would be due above all to the ranting seqoyism in which our ‘tenieth-century Latin America has been so prodigal. What Sarmiento wanted for Argentina was exactly what the United States had achieved for itself. The last ‘words he wrote (1888) were: “We shal catch up tothe United States. . . . Let us ‘becoame the United States." Fis travels in that country produced in him a genuine CALAN 35 edazzlement, a neverending historical orgasm. He tried to establish in his pomeland the bases for an enterprising bourgeoisie, similar to what he saw there, Tis present fate makes any commentary unnecessary. ‘What Marti saw in the United States is also sufficiently well known that we need not dell upon the point. Sufice it to recall that he was the first militant [ntimmperalist of our continent; that he denounced over a period of Fifteen years ‘the erude, inequitable, the decadent character of the United States, ané the con tinued existence therein ofall the violence, discord, immorality, and disorder for ‘which the Hispano-American pooples are censured”"%; that @ few hous befose this death on the batiefield, he confided ina letter to his great friend, the Mexican Manuel Mercado, “Everything J have done to this day, and everything I shall do is tothat end [,).- toprevent in time the expansion of the United States into the ‘Antilles and to prevent her from falling, with ever greater force, upon our Amer- ican lands.” ‘Sarmiento did not remain silent before the criticism that Marti-— frequently from the very pages of La Nacién—leveled against his idolized United States. He ‘commented on one occasion on this ineredible boldness: ‘Don José Marti lacks only one requirement to be a journalist... He thas failed to regenerate himself, to educate himself, s0 to speak, to Teceive inspiration from the country in which he fives, as one receives Food so as to convert it into life-giving blood. . . . { should like Marti to give us less of Marti, less of the purebred Spaniard, and les of the South American, and in exchange, alittle more of the Yankee—the new ype of modem man... Icis amusing 0 hear a Frenchman of the Courier des Etats-Unis laughing a the stupidities and political ‘Scompetence of the Yankees, whose institutions Gladstone proctaims the supreme work ofthe human race. But to criticize with magisterial ‘ais that which a Latin American, a Spaniard, sees there, with a confett of political judgement transmitted to him by the books of other Rations as if trying to see sunspots through a blurred glass—is ¢© 40 the reader a very grave injustice and lead him down the path of perdition, Let ther not come t0 us. then, with thei insolent mii of South Americans, semiSndlans and sem-Spnirés, 10 find evil’ Sarmiento, who was as vehement in his praise as his invective, here places “Martf among the "*semi-Indians.”” This was in essence true and for Martf @ point ofpridr but we have already sen what it implied in the mouth of Sarmiento,» FPor these reasons, and despite the fact that highly esteemed writers have tried to point out possible similarities, {think it willbe undersood how dificult iis ro iteepta parallel between these two men, such asthe one elaborated by Emeterio 'S. Sentovenia in the 262 sloppy pages of Geno y accién: Sarmiento y Mart. & sample will suffice: according to this author, *’Above and beyond the discrepant2% CALIBAN cies in the achievements and limitations oftheir respective proj ¢ projections concerm- ing America, there does emerge a coincidence [sic] in their evaluations [those of Sarmiento and Marts] of the Anglo-Saxon role in the development of political sm sack ise Git fried the eos of wal emancgaton ia We New ‘This luxuriant undergrowth of thought. syntax, and metaphor gives some in icon of what or cult wa ie when we were prof he ee word” of ‘which Me. Santovenia (as well as being one of Batista’s ministers in his moments of leisure) was so eminent a representative, On the Free World [Bot the portion of the free world thst corresponds to Latin America can boast today of much more memorable figures. There is Jorge Luis Borges, for exam- ple, whose name seems to be astociated with " memorabe.”” The Borges I have ‘in mind is the one who only a short time ago dedicated his (presumably good) translation of Whitman's Leaves of Grass to United States President Richard ‘Nixon, It is true that Borges wrote in 1926, “I want to speak tothe Creoles —to ‘those who feel their existence deeply rooted in our lands, not to those who think ‘the sun and the moon are in Europe. This is a land of bora exiles, of mea nos- talgic forthe far-off and the foreign: they are the real gringos, regardless of their ppatentage, and Ido not address myself to them.’* Iti also true that Sarmiento is ‘resented at that time as a “North American Indian brave, who loathed and mis- ‘rized anything Creole.” But the fact is that Borges is not the oo who has ‘gone down in history. This “*memorious"” individual decided to forget the litle ‘ook of his youth, that e wrote ony few yeas afer having been a member of ‘the sec, the blunder, called Ultraism. "In his eyes that book and the ideas in it were also a blunder. Patheticaly faithful to his class,” it was a different Borges ‘who would become so well known, etain such great cizculation abroad, and ex- ‘Petience the public acclaim of innumerable literary prizes some of which are 0 ‘obscure that he would seem to have awarded them himself. The Borges in ques- tion, to whom we shall dedicate a fow lines here, is the one who echoes Sar ‘miento's grotesque ““We belong to the Roman Empire,” with this declaration not ‘of 1926 but of 1955: I believe that our tradition is Europe."*6? Te might seem strange that the ideological fiiation of such an energetic and ‘lustering pioneer would come to be manifest today in a man s0 sedate, a writer ‘such a¢ Rorges—-the archetypal representative of a bookish eulture that on the surface seems far removed from Sarmiento’s constant vitality. But this srange- ress only demonstrates how accustamed we ate to judging the superstructural ‘products of our continent. if not ofthe whole world, without regard to their con ‘rete structural realities. Except by considering these realities, how would we cAUBAN 27 recognize the insipid disasters who are the bourgeois intellectuals of our time as ‘descending fom those vigorous and daring thinkers ofthe rising bourgeoisie? We ‘View they expound im order to orient ourselves properly and outline ther trae Filiations, The dialogue we have just witnessed between Sarmiento and Mar! ‘vas, more than anything else, @ class confrontation. independently of his (clas) origin, Sarmiento isthe implacable ideologue of an Argentine bourgeoisie tt is attempting o transport bourgeois policies of the ‘metropolitan Gentzts (particularly those of North America) to its own country. To be successful, it muet impose itself, like all bourgeoisies, pon the popular Classes: it must exploit them physically and condema them spiritually. The man- ter in which a bourgeoisie develops atthe expense of the popular classes’ bra Tatization is memorably demonstrate, taking England as an example, in some of the most impressive pages of Das Kapital. “European America."’ whose capi tariom suceeeded in expanding fabulously —unkampered as it was by the feudal- istic order —added new circles of hell to England's achievements: the enslave ment of the Negro and the extermination ofthe indomitable Indian. These were the models to nich Sarmiento looked and which he proposed to follow faithy filly. He is perhaps the most consequential andthe most active of the bourgeois ideologues on our continent during the nineteenth century. Martf, on the other hand, s a conscious spokesman of the exploited classes. “Common cause must be made with the oppressed,” he told us, “90 a8 to secure the system against the interests and customs of the oppressors."" And; since be. ginning with the conquest Indians and blacks have been relegated to the base of the social pyramid, making common cause withthe oppressed came largely tobe the same as making common cause with Indians and blacks—which is what Mart! does, These Indians and those blacks had been intermingling among them selves and with some whites, giving rise tothe mestizaje that is atthe root of our ‘America, where—according to Mart{—“‘the authentic mestizo has conquered ‘he exotse Creole.” Sarmiento is a ferocious racist because he isan ideologue of the exploiting classes, in whose ranks the "‘exctic Creole” is found, Mart is rad- jcally antiacist because he isa spokesman forthe exploited classes, within which the three races are fusing. Sarmiento opposes what is essentially American in fonder to inculcate —with blood and fire, just as the conquistadors had tried to So~alien formulas bere. Marti defends the autochthonous, the genuinely Amer ican, This does not mean, of course, that he foolishly rejected whatever positive Clements might be offered by other realities: ""Craft the world onto our repub- fica,” be said, "bot the trunk must be that of our republics,” Sarmiento also Sought to graf the world onto vu sepublice, but he would have their rrunks UP Tooted in the process. For that reason, ifthe continuators of Martf are found in ‘Mella and Vallejo, Fidel and Che, and jn the new culture of revolutionary Latis ‘Amotea, the heirs of Sarmiento (in spite of his complesty) ae, in the final al"28 CALIBAN 41s, the represenatves ofthe Argentine vce-bourgeosie, They ae, moreover, fete css, because the dream of bourecs development that Sarno en- visaged was not even a pss. Thee wae simpy no way an eventual Ager- tne bourgecisie cold develop. Latin America war late areal to that festa, fr as Martgui wrote: "The tne of free competition in the capitalist economy has ome to an end, in all areas and in every apoct. We are now in an era of me- opis, of empires. The Latin-American counties are experiencing a eld enim comet otal The oni sins aa Wal "The fate of sch counties, with : i tas Te nthe capitalist order, i that of simple Tcorported into what is called with it of unintentional amor the “ee world," our counties inspite of ot hil, anthems, flags, and presidents Srould inaugurate a ew form of hot being independent neoolonalsm. The bourgeoisie, for whom Sarmicnt had outined such defightful posible, be ame no more than an vie boutgeosi, a modes Tocl shareholder in imperial exploitation frst the English, then the North American, “iis this igh that one sees more clery the connections between Sa riento—whose name is associated with grand pedagogical projects, immense paces always, shpe-and Borg, the mention of whom evoke ior hat Tiulipy th sae miserable age, unfathomable labyrinths, anda sad, ily li brary, But apart from his, if the “American-ness” of Sarmiento is always aken for granted (although itis obvious in him, this isnot to say he represens the poritve pole of thit""Amercan-ness"), T have never been able to understand Wy its denied to Borges, Borges ia typical colonial writer, the representative {rong us of no»-pewerlss class for whom the act of writing and be is well tare ofthis, for be isa man of diaboloialinteligenoe it more ike the act of reading. He is nota European writer; there is no European writer Uke Borges. But here ae mary European wrter~fom Teeland to the Geman expesion- jsus—whom Borges has read, shuffled together, coated. European writes be- tong to very concrete and provincial taditions-teaching the extreme ease of @ Péguy, for example, who boasted of never having rad anything but Bench au- thers, Apar om afew pesos of pillogy, who recive aay for i, here is only one ype of person sho really knows in its entirety the literature of Eu- rope: the colonial. Only inthe case of mental imbslance can alarmed Argentine wrt ever boat of having read nothing but Argentine or even Spanish-lan- (puage-autors, And Borges is not imbalanced, On te contrary, he is an ox- tremely eid man, one who exemplifies Marts idea that inteligence is ony tne and ot necessary the Best pact of aman. "The wing of Borges comes direct from his reading, in a peculiar process of phagocytosis that denies him clealy asa colonial and the representative of ying clas. For him the creation par excellence of culureis brary; or beter Sets a museum~-a place where the producs of euler from abroad are aser- CALIBAN bled, A museum of horrors, of monsters, of splendors, of folkloric data and ar- tifacts (those of Argentina seen with the eye of a curator)—-the work of Borges, ‘writen in a Spanish difficult to read without admiration, is one of the American scandals of our time. ‘Unlike some other important Latin-American writers, Borges does not pretend to be a leftist, Quite the opposite. His position in ths regard leads bim to sign @ petition in favor of the Bay of Pigs invades, to eal fr the death penalty for Debray, or to dedicat a book to Nixon. Many of his admirers who deplore (or tay they deplore) these acts rintan that there isa dichotomy in the man that its him, on the one hand, to write stightly immortal books and, on the other, {o sign political dectarations that are more pueric than maliciows. That may well te- It is also possible that no such dichotomy exists and chat we ought to accus- tam ourselves to restoring unity tothe author of "The Garden of Forking Paths.” BBy that Io not propose that we should find errors of spelling or symtax in bis clegant pages but rather that we sead them for what, inthe final analysis, hey ae: the painful testimony ofa class with no way out, diminished co saying in the Noice of one man, ‘The world, unfortunately, is real: 1, unfortunately, am anges" it is interesting thatthe writing/teading of Borges is enjoying @ particularly favorable reception in capitalist Europe at the moment when Euzope is itself be- coming colony inthe face of the “American challenge." Ina book ofthat very fie, Jean Jacques Servan-Schreiber explains with unmasked cynicism, “Now then, Europe i not Algiers or Senegal!" In other words, the United States can- ‘pont do to Europe what Europe did to Algiers and Senegal! I have bad news for Europe it seems that, inspite of everything, they can indeed doi; wey Rave, in fact, been doing it now for some time. And i this occurs in the area of econom- jes-along with complex politcal derivations—the European cultural super: “troctute is also manifesting obvious colonial symptoms. One of them may well be the apogee of Borges's wriing/teading Bot of course the heritage of Borges, whose kinship with Sarmiento we have already scen, must be sought above all in Latin America, where i will imply a further decline in impetus and quality. Since this is nota survey, but rather a sim- ple eseay on Latin-American cule, T shall restrict myself to a single example; Tam aware that it is a very minor one; but itis nonetheless a vali symptom. T ‘hall comment on a small book of criticism by Carlos Fuentes, Le nueva novela ‘ispanoamericana (The new Spanish-American novel). vAe apokesman for the same class as Borges. Fuentes also evinced leftist whims in his younger days. The former’s Ef tariaRo de mi experanza (The extent ‘Of my hope) corresponds tothe latter's La muerte de Artemio Cric [The death of ‘Artemio Cruz}, But to continue judging Fuentes by that book, without question fone of our good novels, would be as senseless as continuing to judge Borges bY his early book —the difference being that Borges, who is more consistent (and injo CALIBAN all ways more estimable; Borges, eventhough we differ so greatly from him. is a truly important writer), decided w adopt openly hs postion as a man of the Right, while Puentes operates as such but atempts fo conserve, from time to ‘ime, a leftist terminology that does not ack, of course, references to Marx. In ‘The Death of Artemio Cruz, a secretary who is fully integrated into the system synthesizes his biography in the following dialogue: “You're very young. Haw old are you?” “Twenty-seven.” “When did you receive your degree?” “Three years ago. But...” ag(h Jt oF Marin So much tat even wrote my Besson sup “It ought to be good training, Padila."* “But practic is very different." “is that what you ate, a Marist” “Wel, all my friends were, It’s a stage one goes though."® ‘This dialogue expresses clearly enough the situation of a certain sector of the Mexican intelligentsia that, though it shares Borges's class circumstances and be- havior patterns, differs from him for purely local reasons, in certain superficial aspects. 1am thinking, specifically, of the so-called Mexican literary mafia, one ‘of whose most conspicuous figures is Carlos Fuentes. This group warmly ex- ‘pressed its sympathy for the Cuban Revolution unti, in 1961, the evolution pro- lamed itself and proved tobe Marxist-Leninist thats, a revolution tat has itsforeftonta worker peasant alliance. From that day on the support ofthe mafia grew increasingly diluted, up o the last few months when —-taking advantage of the wild vooiferation occasioned by a Cuban waiter’s month in jail—-they broke obstreperously with Cuba. ‘The symmetry here is instructive: in 1961, at the time of the Bay of Pigs, the only gathering of Latin-American writers to express in a manifesto its desire that Cuba be defeated by mercenaries in the service of imperialism was a group of Argentines centered around Borges. Ten year ater, in 1971, the only national circle of writers on the continent to exploit an obvious pretext for breaking with ‘Cuba and culminating the conduct of the revolution was the Mexican mafia. Itis 4 simple changing of the guard within an identical attitude, Tn that Tight one can better understand the intentions of Fuentes’s short book ‘on the new Spanish-American novel. The development of this new novel is one of the prominent features of the literature ofthese past few years, and its cireu- CALIBAN 31 {ation beyond our borders i in large part owing tothe worldwide atention oor ontnens has enjoyed since the triumph of the Cuban Revotetion in 1959.5) Togieally, this new novel has occasioned various interpretations, numerous sutigs, Tha of Carlos Fuentes, despite its brevity Gess than one hundred pages). Somprehends a thorooghgoing position paper on iteranue and politics that Slearly symbesizes a shrewd rightist viewpoint within our countries. TFosntes is quick to lay his card on the table, In the first chapter, exemplaily enuiled "Civilization and Barbarism,” he adopts for openers, as might be eX ested, the test of Sarmiento: during the nineteenth cenery ‘it is possible for Baty one drama to unfold in this medinm: that which Sarmiento established in the Subtle of Facundo--Chvilization and Barborism.”’ That drama constitwes the confit “of the first one hundred years of Latin-American society and its novel." ‘The narrative corresponding to this conflict comprehends four: factors: irom essentially alien [to Whom’) natural onde,” which was "the real Latin~ ‘American protagonist”; the dictator on the national or regional scale: the ex poved masses, and the fourth factor, “the writer, who invariably stands on the eof cillieation and against barbarism’ (11=12; my emphasis). This, ceord ing to Pueres, implies "2 defense of the exploited,” but Sarmiemo revealed ‘what it consisted of in fact, The polarity that characterized the 1900s, he contin Med, does not go unchanged in the following century. “In the tweneth century the intellectual bimself fs forced to struggle within a society that is. iotemally tnd externally, much more complex," complenty owing t0 the fact chat these Govntres wil be penetrated by imperialism, while sometime later there will take face "a revll and upearge... inthe underdeveloped word.” Among the inter Jarional factors that aust be taken ito account in the twentieth century, sociale Tom, is one that Puenes forget to include. But he slips inthis opportune formula: ‘Swe have the beginning ofthe transition from epic simplism to dialectical com- plexity” (13). “Epic simpism” was the nineteensh-cenury struggle in which ccorfing to Fuentes, “the writer (he means writers like him) invariably stands ‘nthe side of ezvlization and against barbarism,” that is, becontes an uncondi- Sonal servant of the new oligarchy and a harsh enemy of the American masses, “Dialectical complexity” is the form that collaboration takes in the wwentieth century, when the oligarchy in question has revealed itself asa mere intermediary for imperialist interests and "the writer” such as Fuentes must now serve two inasters. Even when itis question of such well-heeled masters, we have known Since tho Holy Scriptures that this does imply a certain “dialectical complexity” expecially when one attemps to make everyone believe one i in fact serving & ‘hed master the people. Notwithstanding its slight omissions, the synthesis of {ered bythe lucid Fuentes of one aspect of imperialist penetration in our countries is imerestng. He writes: In order to intervene effectively in the economic life of eachCALIBAN Latin-American country, it requires not ary ruling {lett whol ay of sess npc sdmntsaton, commer, publicity, business management, extractive and refining industries, banking, transportation, and even entertainment: bread and circuses. General Motors assembies auromobiles, takes hore profits, and sponsors television programs. (14) ‘As s final example (even though that of General Motors isa Iways valid) it ight te bern mere efi to iain CTA; soih nuns th Bayo igre jon ané pays, via transparent intermediaries, for the review Mundo nuevo, one of whose principal ideologues was none other than Carlos Fuentes. a Mitte plilpremies enabisd, Pune ges ono poste iin ber premites before concentrating on the authors he wil study (Vargas Llosa, et. Garcia Marquez, Cortzts, and Goytisolo) and concluding with more observations of a politcal nature. Iam not interested in lingering over his crid- ism pe se but simply in underscoring afew ofl ideological ines, which ar, {in any case, apparent at times, this li a thoroughgoing ideological inmyos nt: at times, this litle book seem: ing ideological ‘A critical appreciation of literature requires that we start off wi ecclesia a et iciam? The modest opinion of Krystina Pomorska ‘ ican? Th mote ; ‘Would seem acceptable. Ac- 1 « «she defends the following thesis: every critical method is a ‘generalization upon the literary practice of its time. Critical methods in the period of classicism were elaborated as a function of classical literary works, The criticism of the comentes reiterates the principles {the irrational, the psychological, ec.) of romanticism itself. tang csr Sp nea nn techn ae bie te poetics of other literatures, that is, not the Spanish-American, Al) Seca a acaySes Sama ie rr unex he A Capi wom om pte “boom'? have tried in vain to disclaim, the undertaking seed by. "he new ea teeant aarermemererae eet cheer mae appear accomplished by now or “surpassed” in the natrative of ¢ ‘countries — implies a reinterpretation of our history. Indifferent to this Cee ee ee ‘new perspectives the revolution has afforded our America and which is in 0 rept erin dA ih ‘to know the continent about which there is so much discussion —Fuentes dissi- cauiaaN 8 tes the flesh and blood of our novels, the extiism of which weuld require, Fefore anything else, understanding and evaluation of the vision of history re ented in them, and. as 1 have said, calmly applies 10 the schemes derived from ‘ther Hteratures (hose of capitalist countries), now reduced to mere linguistic speculations. “The extraordinary vogue enjoyed by linguistics in recent years has moved ‘more than one person to conelde that the twentieth century, which isthe ¢=5 tury of so many things, would seem to be above all the century of linguistics." ‘We, in contrast, would say that, among those “many things,” the establishment of socialist governments and decolonization carry much more weight 8s, ou Standing features ofthis concay, I might add as a madest personal example of ‘ioe vogue that as recently as 1955, when I was a stadent of linguistics under stndé Martine, linguistic matters were confined in Paris to university lecure tate. Outside the classroom we talked with our friends about literature, philos- phy, and plies. Only afew yeas later, Finguisics—whose structuralist crortion, as Lévi-Strauss described it, encompasses the other social sciences aren Paris the obligatory theme of aft discussion. In those days erature, phi- Tooopity aad politics all an afoul of structuralists. (Lam speaking of some Years gor proved sracToralim seems tobe of he decline. However, in ot art of the world the insistence on such an ideology will lst for sometime yet) ‘Now Ihave no doubt that thre exist specifically scientific factors to which we can credit ths vogue of Finguistcs. But 1 aso know that there are idevlogical feasons for it over and above the subject matter itself, With respect «0 iterary vragies it is not difficult to determine these ideological reasons. Tndoed. the vir tues and Timitations of critical strategies ranging from Russian formalism 9 French strucuralism cannot be shown without them, And amnang ‘hem is the at- erp at ahistorzaion peculiar to a dying clas: a clas that tiated its trajoctery veh daring utopia in order to chase away time and that endeavers mow, in the ace of adversity, to arrest that trajectory via impossible uchronic. In any case as must recognize the convergence between these stics and thelr respective aoe verminous Iterature. However, ben Fuentes glasses over the concrete reality ff the current Spanish-American novel and altempts to impose upon it systems ‘Gerived from other biteratures and other critical methodologies, he adds — with a typially colonial attude—a second level of idelization to fis critica outlook eee word, this is summed up in his claim that our present-day 2arrative —like thot of apparently coetaneous copiualist countries —s above all feat of lane guage. Such a contenion, among other things, allows tim co minimize wicsty Neryting in that naveaive having t do with a clear historical coneretion, Fut fhermore, the manner in which he lays the foundations of his linguistic approach Semonstates a pedantry and a provincialism typical of the colonial wishing to Semonstate to those in the metropolis that he too is capable of grappling with Fashionable themes namely, themes from abroad—and! wishing atthe samo time‘34 CALIBAN ‘to enlighten his fellow countrymen, in whom he is confident of finding an i tne even eer tna his ov, Ts ihe st fig he peso ‘Change comprehends the categories of process and “ speech, of Gachrny; structure comprebends those of system and language, of synchrony. The point of interaction for al these categories is the word — ‘hich ens ichvony and syicoy, ech and agsag oagh along with process and system, through the event and discourse themseives.(33) cre ent even ‘These banalities (which any handy little linguistics manual could bmn Shld ace mae hans Foates ering ‘best he an here a consistent vision of our literature, of our culture —a vision ‘that, significantly, coincides in its essentials with that proposed by writers like Eis Rodis ‘Monegal and Severo Sarduy. “Teis revealing that for Puente the thesis ofthe preponderant wert meiner en widow which there would simply not exist a modern Spanish-American ‘novel, since, according to Fuentes, ‘‘the ultimate significance’* of that prose is to ear witness, first off, that Latin America is licking a language and must therefore establish one.”" This singular triumph is achieved by Borges, Puentes ‘continued, ‘‘in his creation of a new Latin-American language, which, by pure contrast, reveals the li, the acquiescence and the duplicity, of what has tad tionally passed for ‘language’ among us" (26) [Naturaly, based on such extra the shistorizaton of erature can attain tru os expressions. We learn, for example, that Witold Gombrowicz’s. Pornog- ‘could have been related by a native of the Amazon jungles an teint natal 0 cla nth aaj expan he difference between Gombrowicz and the possible narrator ofthe same initiation myth in a Brazilian jungle, Rather, it is explained precisely by the possibility of combining discourse in different ways. Only on the basis ofthe universality of linguistic structures can there be conceded, a posteriori, the peripheral data regarding nationality and class, (22) ‘And consequently, we are told as well that “itis closer tothe truth, in the first insane, 0 undersiand ie cenit in Spanish-American literature as related t0 ‘characte literary endeavor” (24; era 2 rary endeavor” (24; my emphasis), rather than “The old obligation to denounce is transformed into a much Trou ont: the cel catorson of everything ha as oe ‘spoken in our Jong history of lies, silences, rhetoric, and academic CALAN 3E compictes. To imvent a language isto atielate all hat history has concealed. (30, my emphasis) ‘such an interpretation, then, allows Fuentes 1 have his cake and eat it t00, Thus aneeived,Ieranure not only withdraws from any combatant role (hese degraded tyra clever adjective: “the old obligation to denounce’), bt is wihdraval ir flor being areeat, becomes a ‘*much more arduous enterprise,” since it i 6 serrtate ne less than “all that history hos concealed.” Further on we ate tld thar our true language isin the process of being discovered and created and that wig he very at of discovery and creation it thcaten, na revolutionary wd, We ‘ahole economic, politcal, and social structure erected upon a vertically false language" (94-95; my emphasis). ‘Phisshrowd, while atthe sare time superficial, manner of expounding right: ving concerns in left-wing terminology seminds vs though its dificult to fer get fora singe moment —that Fuentes i a member of the Mexican Werary ines fia the qualities of which be has attempted to extend beyond the borders of Bis ‘country. "Parahermore, that these arguments constitute the projection onto literary ques tions of an inherently reactionary politcal plasform is not conjecture. This i said thuoughout the ile book and is particularly explicit nits final pages. Besides the wellknown attacks on socialism, there are observations like this ove: “Perhaps the sad, imraediate future of Latin America will see fascist populis fa Peronist sort of dictatorship, capable of carrying out various reforms only xchange for a suppression of revolutionary impulse and civil liberties” (56) ‘The ‘civilization vs. barbarism” thesis appears not to have changed in the least, ‘Bot in fact it has-—it has been agravated by the devastating presence of Imperi- alsm in ovr counties. In response to this reality, Fuentes erects a scarecrow: Ihe ‘announcement that there is opening before us 4 prospect even more grave. That is, in proportion te the widening of the abyss berween the geometric expansion of the technoeratic world land the arithmetic expansion of our own ancillary societies, Latin Rimerica is being transformed into 2 world that is superfluous [Fuentes’s emphasis} to imperialism. Traditionally we have been exploited Countries, Soon we will not even be that {my eraphasis). It will no Tonger be necessary to exploit us, for technology will have succeeded ioeto a large extent it can already —mamufacturing substitutes for our single-product offerings [96] {In light ofthis, and recalling that for Fuentes the revolution has no prospects jn Latin Americe—he insists upon the impossibility of a “second Cuba’” 6) tind cannot accept the varied, unpredictable forms the process will assume we Should almost be thankful that We are not “superfluous” to imperilit techool-36 CALIBAN ogy, that it is not manufacturing substitutes (as “it can already") for our poor have lingered perhaps longer than necessary on Fuentes because he is one of the most outstanding figures among the new Latin-American writers who have set out fo elaborate in the cultural sphere a counterrevolutionary platform that, at {easton the surface, goes beyond the coarse simplifications ofthe program “Ap- pointnent with Cuba," broadcast by the Voice of (the United States of) America. But the waiters in question already had an adequate medium: the review Mundo ‘Nuevo [New World], financed by the CIA,” whose ideological foundations are summed up by Fuentes’ short book in a manner thatthe professorial weightiness ‘of Emir Rodriguez Monegal or the neo-Barthean fltterings of Severo Sarduy the magazine's other two “‘ries""—would have found difficult to achieve. That publication, which elso gathered together the likes of Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Suan Goytisolo, is to be replaced shortly by another, which will apparently ryan oe oes san a along with a few additions. 1am speaking, review |. A fusion of the two tiles of he view Le tls speaks for itself: Mundo The Future Begun “The endeavor to include ourselves in the ‘free world”’—the hilarious name that capitalist countries today apply to themselves and bestow in passing on their op- ‘pressed colonies and neo-colonics—is ¢ modern version of the nincteenth-cem- tury attempt by Creole exploiting dasses to subject us to a supposed “civli- zation”; and this later, in its turn, is a repetition of the designs of European ‘conquistadors. fn all these cases, with only slight variation, itis plain that Latin ‘America does not exist except, atthe very most, a8 a resistance that must be cvercome in order to implant trie cure, that of “the modern peoples who gral ify themselves with the epithet of civilized.’ Pareto's words here recall so well those of Mart, who wrote in 1883 of civibzation as “the vulgar name under ‘which contemporary European man operates.” In the face of what the conquistadors, the Creole oligarchs, and the impert lists and their flunkies have attempted, our culture —taking this term in its broad historical and anthropological cnse—has been ina constant process of forma- tiom: our authentic culture, the culture created by the mestizo populace, those descendants of Indians and blacks ard Europeans whom Bolivar and Artiges led so well; the culture of the exploited classes, of the radical petite bourgeoisie of José Mart, of the poor peasantry of Emiliano Zapata, of the working class of Luis Emilio Recabarren and Jestis Menéndez: the culture “of the hungry Indian ‘masses. of the landless peasants, ofthe exploited workers" mentioned in the Sec- ‘ond Declaration of Havana (1962), “of the honest and brilliant intellectuals who CALIBAN 37 abound in our suffering Latin-American counties"; the culture of a people that ow encompasses “a family numbering two hundsed million brothers” and that “has said: Enough! and has begen to move. “That culturelike every living culture, especially at its dawn-is on the move. Ithas, of course, its own distinguishing characteristics even though it was born.-like every culture, although inthis ease in a particularly planetary way— cof a synthesis. And it doesnot limit itself i the least to a mere repetition ofthe ‘lements that formed it. This is something that the Mexican Alfonso Reyes, ‘though he directed his attention to Europe more offen than we would have ‘wikhed, has underscored well. On speaking with another Lafin American about the characterization of our culture as one of synthesis, he says: Neither he nor I were understood by our European collegues. who thought we were referring to the résumé or elemental compendium of the European conquests. According to such a facile interpretation, the synthesis would be a terminal point. But that i pot the case: bere the syrubesis i the new point of departure, a structure composed of Prot ahd dispersed elements that—like all structures—transcends them and Contains in itself new qualities. H,0 is not only a union of hydrogen and oxygen; it is, moreover, water. “This is expecially apparent if we consider thatthe “water” in quostion i formed not only from European elements, which are those Reyes ernphasizes, but also from the indigenous and the African. But even with his limitations, itis stil within Reyes's capacity to state at the end ofthat piece: 1 say now before the tribunal of international thinkers wthin reach of iy Voice: we recognize the right to universal etizenshig which we have ‘won, We have errived at our majority. Very soon you wll become used to reckoning with us. “These words were spoken in 1936. Today that ‘'very scon' has already ar rived. If we were asked to indicate the date that separates Reyes's hope from our 4959, the year the Cuban Revolution tiumphed. One could also go along mark ing some ofthe dates that are milestones in the advent of tht culture, The fist, relating to the indigenous poops’ resistance and black slave revolts against Eu- opean oppression, are imprecise. The year 1780 is important: it maks the uprs- {ng of Tapac Amara in Peru, In 1803, the independence oF Haiti. In 1810, the ‘beginning of revolutionary movernents in various Spanish colonics in America — overnents extending wel into the century. In 1867, the victory of Judrez over Maximilian. In 1895, the beginning of the final stage of Cubu's war against Spain a war that Mart foresaw 25 a action against emerging Yankee impeti- ‘hom, Ia 1910, the Mexican Revolution. fn the 1920s and 19306, Sandino'sre-38 CALIBAN sistance in Nicaragua and the establishment on the continent of te working class 1s a vanguard foree. In 1938, the nationalization of Mexican petroleum by Cér- denas. In 1944, the coming to power of a democratic regime in Guatemala, ‘which was to be radicalized in office. In 1946, the beginning of Juan Domingo Perén's presidency in Argentina, under which the “‘shirtless ones” would be- ‘come an influential force. In 1952, the Bolivian revolution, In 1959, the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. In 1961, the Bay of Pigs: the first military defeat of ‘Yankee imperialism in America, andthe declaration of our revolution as Marxist- Leninist. In 1967, te fall of Che. Guevara while leading a nascent Latin-Amer- ican army in Bolivia. In 1970, the election of socialist president Salvador Al- lende in Chile. ‘These dates, seen superficially, might not appear to have a very direct rela- ‘tionship to our culture. But, in fact, the opposite is true. Our culture is—and can ‘only be—the child of revolution, of our mutisecular rejection of all colonia!- ‘Our cuture, like every culture, requires as a primary condition our own existence. I cannot help but cite here, although E have done so before elsewhere, ‘one of the occasions on which Martf spoke to this fact in the most simple and itluminating way, “Letters, which are expression, cannot exist," he wrote in 1881, ‘so long as there is no essence to express in them. Nor will there exist a ‘Spanish-American literature until Spanish America exists," And further: “Let us Inanent now that we are without a great work of art; not because we do not have that work but because it is sign that we are still without a great people that ‘would be reflected init." Latin-American culture, then, has become a possi- Dility in the first place because of the many who have struggled, the many who still struggle, for the existence of that“ great people” that in 1881, Mart still referred to a8 Spanish America but that some years later he would prefer to mame, more accurately, “Our Ametica."” ‘But this is not, of course, the only culture forged here. There is also the cul- ture of ani-America, that ofthe oppressors, of those who tried (or are trying) to impose on these lands metropolitan schemes, or simply, tamely to reproduce in a ‘provincial fashion what might have authenticity in other countries. tn the best of ‘eases, (0 repeat, it is a question of the influence of those who have worked, in some cases patriotically. to shape social life in accordance with models of other highly developed countries, whose practices are the result of an organic process over the course of centuries land thas] bave betrayed the cause of the tue emancipation of Lain America ‘This anti-America culture is still very visible. It is still proclaimed and perpers- ‘ated in structures, works, ephemerides. But without a doubt, it is suffering the pangs of death, just like the system upon which it is based. We can and must contribute 0 a true assessment of the history ofthe oppressors and that of the caLBAN 8 ‘oppressed. But of course, the triumph of the latter willbe the work, above all, of those for whom history is function not of erudition but of deeds. [tis they who vill achieve the definitive triumph ofthe true America, reestablishing — this time ina different light—the unity of our immense continent. “Spanish America, {Latin America—eall it what you wish,”"wrote Maridtegui, ‘will not find its unity in the bourgeois order. That order divides us. perforce, into cy natonalims tis for Anglo-Saxon North Americe To consummate and draw to a close capitalist civilization. The future of Latin America is socialist.” ‘Such a future, which has already begun, will end by rendering incomprehensible the idle question about our existence, And Ariel Now? “The Ariel of Shakespeare's great myth, which we have been following in these notes, is, as has been said, the intellectual from the same island as Caliban.” He ean choose between serving Prospero—the case with intellectuals of the anti- ‘American persuasion—at which he is apparent!y unusually adept but for whom he is nothing more than a timorous slave, or allying himself with Caliban in his for true freedom, It could be ssid that [am thinking, in Gramscian terms, above all of the “traditional” intellectuals: those whom the profetariat, even during the period of transition, must assimilate in the greatest possible nom- ‘ber while it generates its own “‘organic" intellectuals, Tis common knowledge, of course, that a more or less important segment of intellectuals at the service of the exploited classes usually comes from the ex: ‘loiting classes, with which they bave broken radically, This is the classic, to say the leat, ease of such supreme figures as Marx, Engels, and Lenin. The fact had been observed already in The Communist Manifesto (1848) itself, where Marx and Engels wrote: In times when the class struggle ncars the decisive hour, the process of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact, within the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a Small section ofthe ruling class cuts itself adrift and joins the revoluonary clas, the class that holds the furure in its hands . .. [SIO trow a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat and, in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised Themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical overeat as a whole.” If this is obviously valid with regard to the most highly developed capitalist nations the ones Marx and Engels bad in mind in the Manifesto somethingCALIBAN more must be added in the case of our countries. Here that ‘portion of the bour- somipatt ceatagen ts rupture: except for that sector proceeding organically from the exploited classes, the inteligentsia that considers itself revolutionary est break all tes with its

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