Reconstruction 8.4 (2008)
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Shifts and Continuities: The Ideological Evolution of José Rodríguez Feo / Robert Lesman
Abstract: Cuban editor, translator and literary critic José Rodríguez Feo (1920-93) has received insufficient attention from scholars of Cuban cultural history. Though he was wealthy, fluent in English, and educated at Harvard, he decided to stay in Cuba and commit to Castro's revolutionary cultural agenda. Though this fact is surprising, the seeds of Rodríguez Feo's Marxist commitments can be seen in the early stages of his career, when he was co-editor of the literary magazine Orígenes (1944-56). Rodríguez Feo's knowledge of U.S. history instilled in him a distaste for the injustices of imperialism. His education and fluency in English did not shape him into a reflexively pro-American member of the Cuban elite. Instead, they instigated a commitment to anti-imperialism that developed into a strict allegiance with Castro's political and cultural agendas.
<1> In 1945 the young Cuban editor, translator and essayist José Rodríguez Feo (1920-93) addressed a letter to his co-editor, the poet José Lezama Lima. A year before, the two had launched what would turn out to be the most important Cuban literary journal of the century: Orígenes: Revista de arte y literatura. In the letter, Rodríguez Feo described his stay at the sugar mill owned by his uncle: "Dear friend: I am spending a few days at the sugar mill, exceedingly pleasant days. It's marvelous to see this monster grind, with hundreds of workers toiling day and night. . .and to hear my uncle 'talking business.' Today, taking on a rural role, I went to witness a baseball game between Contramaestre and Central Vertientes, whose result was 1 to 0 in our favor, after twelve innings and a home run by a black man, from Contramaestre, who was bigger than a horse." ["Querido amigo: Estoy pasando unos días en el ingenio, días sumamente agradables. Es maravilloso ver este monstruo moler, los cientos de obreros trabajando días y noches . . . y oír al tío 'hablando negocios.' Hoy, aceptando el rol campestre, fui a presenciar un juego de pelota entre Contramaestre y Central Vertientes, cuyo resultado fue de 1 a 0 a favor de nosotros después de doce innings y un home-run de un negro más grande que un caballo, de Contramaestre"] (Correspondencia 35). Later in the letter, he moved to his favorite topic: the books he found while exploring the city of Santiago.
<2> In the introduction to the 1989 edition of his collected correspondence with Lezama, Rodríguez Feo, at 78 years old, reflected upon that first letter written when he was 25, noting how his uncle's sugar mill had changed names from "América" to "América Libre" and reflecting on the social conditions that made that leisurely missive to Lezama possible:
For a haute bourgeois young man of 25 years, those days spent in the country couldn't have been anything but "exceedingly pleasant," as was the marvelous sight of the sugar mill grinding the cane cut by workers toiling day and night. . . The passage faithfully shows the social conditions of a young man who, a year earlier, with the money that the sweat of those laborers provided him, had founded, with Lezama Lima, the magazine Orígenes. [Para un joven de 25 años de la alta burguesía, aquellos días pasados en el campo no podían ser sino "sumamente agradables," al igual que la maravillosa vista del ingenio moliendo la caña cortada por obreros que trabajaban día y noche. . . El pasaje muestra fielmente la condición social del joven que un año antes, con el dinero que le proporcionaba el sudor de aquellos trabajadores, fundaba junto a Lezama Lima la revista Orígenes.] (Correspondencia 9)
It is crucial that scholars studying the Cuban Revolution take note of the evolution of this very privileged young intellectual, who imagined that country life meant watching baseball games and innocently listening to his uncle "talk business," into a committed cultural laborer for socialist Cuba. This committed socialist, near the end of his life, analyzed his past and underlined the material conditions of his cultural production in the decades before the revolution. Rodríguez Feo was a remarkable figure in Cuban cultural history not simply because he used that sweat-stained money to found one of the most important Spanish-language literary journals of the 20th century, but also because he was an example of a very wealthy member of the cultural elite who stayed in Cuba after the revolution, sacrificing much of his wealth and privilege to the cause of socialism and contributing his considerable cultural capital to the official projects of a socialist Cuba.
<3> The seeds of the committed revolutionary that Rodríguez Feo was to become can be found in his thinking as a young man, though they may not be visible at first glance. Going back to the letter of 1945, a careful reader notes that despite a lack of awareness of the problematics of privilege, the young writer did describe the sugar mill as a "monster." This single term can be taken as emblematic of an incipient sociopolitical consciousness. As I will try to demonstrate, though Rodríguez Feo's early literary activity of the Orígenes years seems on the surface to be elitist, escapist, non-committed, and academic, the young literato's studies in history, particularly the history of the United States in the 19th century, infused a nascent form of political engagement into his cultural discourse.
<4> Rodríguez Feo was born in Havana in 1920 to a wealthy family. He attended high school and college in the United States, receiving an undergraduate degree from the History and Literature Program at Harvard. At Harvard he developed his expertise in the cultural, political and economic history of the United States, studied the High Modernist English language poets of the early 20th century, and tried his hand at English-Spanish literary translation. All of these activities had a direct effect on the literary magazine he was to found with Lezama in 1944, shortly after his return to Cuba. During the Orígenes years, Rodríguez Feo spent long periods of time abroad, primarily in the United States, but also in Mexico, England, Spain and France. He attended Middlebury College's summer school in 1946 and 1947, where he studied Spanish and Latin American literatures. In 1947, he began graduate studies in Spanish literature at Princeton, though he never completed them. During these extensive travels, Rodríguez Feo compiled a long list of contacts with English and Spanish language writers of international importance. Rodríguez Feo's command, not only of two languages, but also of the literary and cultural histories connected to those two languages, facilitated his unique contributions to Orígenes.
<5> The time Rodríguez Feo spent in the U.S. had complex and contradictory effects. First, at Middlebury and Princeton and in New York City, he made contacts and solicited submissions from Spanish and French authors, not just North Americans. Second, his increasingly familiarity with the United States fostered a critical attitude to many facets of its culture, especially its history of economic exploitation and inequality. The translation of materials and experiences from the U.S. into Rodríguez Feo's intellectual projects was not a simple and predictable process. The young lover of U.S. literature gradually developed into a committed Marxist and strident critic of the individualism and greed of the North.
The Orígenes years
<6> Rodríguez Feo's knowledge of the English language and of U.S. literature left its mark on Orígenes from the beginning. Through his editorial labors, work by U.S. poets Elizabeth Bishop, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Allen Tate, and William Carlos Williams appeared in a magazine that was otherwise dominated by contributions from Cuban, Spanish and French writers. Orígenes was a journal whose stated mission was to elevate Cuban culture above the public corruption, ignorance and cynicism that was believed to have degraded the national character. This process was to be brought about not by engagement in explicit political protest, but rather by operating in what was imagined as a purer realm, uncontaminated by the corruption of the political sphere. A 1949 editorial statement proclaimed that political "frustrations" could be overcome by drawing on deeper "reserves" of artistic creativity (Desintegración 61). By engaging in rigorous and candid explorations of human experience and the human capacity for creativity, Orígenes imagined it could renew the moral foundations of the nation, a necessary prerequisite to fixing its broken system of government. Rodríguez Feo's inflection of this mission was crucial; his work asserted the importance of opening up the national cultural project to a productive dialogue with the U.S. At this point in his career, Rodríguez Feo's critical discourse was not explicitly political, but his future political commitments could be found germinating in every sphere of his efforts. Already, two facets of his developing intellectual disposition can be identified: first, his interest in exploring the contrasts between a "Puritan" U.S. culture and a "Catholic" Cuba/Latin America, and second, the grounding of his work in historical documentation. The young writer began to formulate an understanding of the cultural differences between Cuba and the U.S. and to see those differences as relevant to an understanding of the development of capitalism and imperialism in the U.S. He subsequently began to appreciate the danger of the imperial dominance of the United States over Cuba.
<7> In his 1945 essay "Moby-Dick y El Aislamiento Heroico" ("Moby-Dick and Heroic Isolation"), while ostensibly engaging in a task of literary criticism, Rodríguez Feo also developed a cultural and political agenda. The madness of Ahab represented for Rodríguez Feo the pathology of the North American soul. An individualism rooted in Calvinism produced isolated and suffering individuals where there should be joyful and loving communities. A communitarian Catholicism motivated Rodríguez Feo's diagnosis. Ahab was a counterpoint, an example against which the Cuban might fashion himself. Rodríguez Feo was acutely interested in differentiating the Catholic from the Protestant, privileging and defending the former category: "With a concept of the person like the one that animates Catholic novelists, a Protestant hero like Ahab could never be created." ["Con un concepto de la persona como el que anima a los novelistas católicos no se podría jamás crear un héroe protestante comparable a Ahab"] (18). Though he gave no explicit characterization of a Catholic concept of the person, the reader can infer that such a person should be seen, and sees himself, as more intimately bound to others. As a result of his immersion in community, as opposed to his violent strivings on behalf of his own desires, he lives a more joyful life. In a 1951 essay on André Gide, Rodríguez Feo explicitly associated the French author's "torment" and "tribulations" with his "Puritan" predilections (56). It bears noting that Rodríguez Feo was reading Gide's journals at the time he was composing his analysis of Moby-Dick. Clear theological distinctions underlie Rodríguez Feo's arguments: Catholics are more joyful because, unlike Calvinist Protestants, they do not have to wonder if they are saved, but instead need only love one another and do good works to ensure their place in heaven. Gide, the uncertain Protestant, was consumed by moral questionings (56), whereas the Catholic need only heed the moral Rodríguez Feo identifies as the backbone of Moby-Dick: "Ahab's salvation, and that of all men, depends on his ability and his capacity to love others. This is the supreme lesson of Moby-Dick" ("La salvación de Ahab, la de todos los hombres, depende de su habilidad y su capacidad de amar a sus semejantes. Esta es la lección suprema de Moby-Dick" (21).
<8> It is important to understand that Rodríguez Feo's nascent anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist thinking was steeped in a theological and cultural Catholicism--theological in its assertions about salvation, and cultural in its celebration of social characteristics like alegría, communitarianism, and an artistic creativity that mimics divine Creation. The journal he was editing with Lezama, himself a profoundly, if idiosyncratically Catholic writer, was explicitly framed as a spiritual project. National renewal was to emerge from the transformation of the soul through art. Rodríguez Feo's early critiques of North American materialism were typically juxtaposed with assertions of the importance of "spiritual" values, as can be seen in his essay on George Santayana, published in 1944. The Cuban critic expressed admiration for Santayana because the latter evidenced a faith in "...man's spiritual values in the face of a historical moment that demands, as a saving reality, practical values, and a morality of action justified by material success..." ["...los valores espirituales del hombre frente a cualquier momento histórico que exige como realidad salvadora valores prácticos y una moral de acción justificada por el éxito material..." (35)].
<9> In no sense should the prominence of religiosity in Rodríguez Feo's early rhetoric be seen as contrary to the development of a socialist consciousness. It is important to remember that in Latin American contexts, Catholic and Marxist thinking are not always at odds. They are, of course, powerfully fused in the doctrine of liberation theology, which is a creed that other Orígenes contributors who stayed in Cuba after the revolution, like the poets Cintio Vitier and Fina García Marruz, identified with explicitly [1]. Though religious identity and Marxism melded in Rodríguez Feo's thinking in the 1940s and 50s, after the revolution, he did not express the same allegiance with liberation theology that some of his colleagues did, and religious concerns receded from his writing. This process coincided with a broader process through which Rodríguez Feo adjusted his interests to align them more strictly with the cultural agendas of Castro's government. In contrast, Vitier and García Marruz became explicitly revolutionary poets while asserting their religiosity at the same time.
<10> The range of Rodríguez Feo's interest in the literature of the U.S. was broad. In addition to his essay on Melville, in 1945 the reader is also surprised to find an essay by the prominent Southern agrarian writer Allen Tate. The translation of the deeply conservative essay "The New Provincialism" for publication in Orígenes seems a strange occasion for the furthering of a leftist political agenda, yet the essay made assertions that found sympathetic resonances in Rodríguez Feo's future identification with the revolution. The most significant of these were the importance of valuing the local and the agrarian over cosmopolitan snobbery and the role of historical understanding to proper governance. Tate's regionalism, translated into Spanish and into the context of a Cuban cultural agenda, can be read as anti-imperialist invective. Similarly, the role of historical documentation in contesting the abstract hegemonic claims of a repressive system of power was central to both Tate's and Rodríguez Feo's agendas. Tate's conservatism translated, for Rodríguez Feo, into a template of concepts for the creation of a culture of resistance to American imperialism. Tate's essay was published in the Virginia Quarterly Review in the spring of 1945, after its Spanish version in Orígenes. Though it asserted certain positive values like tradition, Tate's defense of regionalism in the essay was carried out largely through an opposition to the hegemony of the capitalist, technological and internationalist North. Franklin D. Roosevelt functioned as a symbol of all of these tendencies. Roosevelt's internationalism amounted to "rules of plunder which look like cooperation" (267). In a deconstruction of Roosevelt's 1941 "Four Freedoms" speech, Tate deploys a criticism of industrial capitalism:
We guarantee the world freedom from want. We had better. . .for nineteenth-century industrial capitalism and our own more advanced technology have made it very difficult for "backwards peoples" (to say nothing of ourselves in small units and groups) to make their living independently of someone else nine thousand miles away. (268)
When we examine this critique, Rodríguez Feo's interest in the essay is understandable. The Cuban intellectual was clearly in the process of formulating an understanding of the threats posed by cultural and economic systems of the U.S., and these systems were largely dominated by what Tate specifies as the imperialist North.
<11> Rodríguez Feo must have been interested in "The New Provincialism" not just because of its anti-imperialist content, but also for its historicist methodology. Tate's regionalism was a system of thought that emphasized concrete historical and sociological data. The regionalist wants to know, for example, "...what is the structure of Southern society? What was it in the eighteen-forties and fifties?" (271). In contrast to his fellow contributors to Orígenes, Rodríguez Feo was a sociologist and a historian at heart. The question of the nature of U.S. culture is a question of social conditions and their evolution over time. We can see the Cuban writer exercising this kind of approach in his exegeses of the Calvinist origins of Gide's thought and Melville's (anti)-hero Ahab. Over time, the tendency to employ historical analysis as part of an anti-imperialist political agenda became more and more prominent in his writing. The fact that Rodríguez Feo facilitated the publication of Tate's anti-imperialist invective in Orígenes is an important marker of this fundamental intellectual evolution for the young Cuban thinker.
The end of Orígenes and the beginning of the revolution
<12> After twelve years, Orígenes came to an end, when Rodríguez Feo and Lezama entered into a rancorous dispute over the publication of personal attacks between the Spanish poets Vicente Aleixandre and Juan Ramón Jiménez [2]. After his falling out with Lezama, Rodríguez Feo went on to found the magazine Ciclón with the author Virgilio Piñera in 1955. Though the journal explored what seem to be purely literary, aesthetic, philosophical, and psychoanalytical concerns like surrealism and the theater of the absurd, a significant political commitment underlay these explorations. The magazine's investigations of sexual, psychological and philosophical possibilities were meant to offend the deeply conservative bourgeois sensibilities of 1950s Cuba. As Rodríguez Feo remembered, speaking near the end of his life, the magazine was "...aggressive in its attacks against the bourgeois values of a corrupt and decadent class" ["...agresiva en sus ataques contra los valores burgueses de una clase corrompida y decadente"] (Pérez León 74). Rodríguez Feo and Piñera suspended publication in 1957 after the arrival from Mexico of Castro and his band of revolutionaries. After the triumph of the revolution, Ciclón was quick to establish its commitment to the cause. Publishing one final issue in the spring of 1959, Rodríguez Feo and Piñera put forth a manifesto entitled "La neutralidad de los escritores." This text virulently criticized writers who hoped to be considered "neutral" at the beginning of the revolutionary struggle in 1956 and 1957, but whose silence, the authors assert, was a form of collaboration with Batista's regime: "Can these writers deserve the respect of our revolutionary youth, when they did not have the civic commitment to withdraw their intellectual collaboration with the overthrown regime?" ["Pueden estos escritores merecer ahora el respeto de nuestras juventudes revolucionarias cuando no tuvieron entonces el civismo de retirar su colaboración intelectual a la obra cultural del régimen depuesto?" (n.p.)]. With this manifesto Rodríguez Feo effectively announced his decision to stay in Cuba and commit to the revolutionary cause. Nonetheless, despite its ex post facto alliance with the revolution, the explorations of psychological and sexual marginalities in Ciclón were an odd match for the normative discursivity--stoic, masculine, and heterosexist--of Castro and other framers of the new cultural ethic. It is possible that this was an unspoken reason for its sudden dissolution in the first year of the revolution.
<13> Though Ciclón receded from view, Rodríguez Feo moved on. Very shortly after the publication of Ciclón's final issue, Lunes de Revolución (1959-61), the weekly arts and literature supplement to the newspaper Revolución was founded by Carlos Franqui, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and Pablo Armando Fernández. Rodríguez Feo contributed a number of important essays to what turned out to be a highly influential forum for Marxist political and cultural debate. Lunes' first editorial proclaimed that the revolution offered the Cuban artist the first opportunity to enjoy a position of relevance and importance in his culture: "Now the revolution has broken down all barriers and allowed the intellectual, the artist, the writer, to integrate himself into national life, from which we were alienated before" ["Ahora la Revolución ha roto todas las barreras y le ha permitido al intellectual, al artista, al escritor integrarse a la vida nacional, de la que estaban alienados" (Una posición 1)]. Continuing the tradition of previous journals like Ciclón, Lunes claimed not to ally itself with any particular system of thought, though its political commitment to the revolution was explicit. Lunes claimed it would be faithful, not to schools of thought, nor to strict aesthetic templates like social realism, but rather to the project of "drawing closer to life itself" ["acercarse más a la vida" (1)]. Franqui, in his memoir Family Portrait with Fidel, asserted that his goal for the journal was to bring high culture to the masses: "Our thesis was that we had to break down the barriers that separated elite culture from mass culture. We wanted to bring the highest quality of culture to hundreds of thousands of readers. We were motivated by a motto we got directly from José Martí: 'Culture brings freedom'" (129). Given that at its apex the circulation of Lunes was 250,000 (Luis 254), it can be inferred that the magazine was largely successful in this goal.
<14> At its inception, Lunes was the ideal forum for Rodríguez Feo, given that the latter also possessed what the revolution came to deem a contradiction: an interest in high culture and a commitment to social justice. In a 1960 issue of Lunes, Rodríguez Feo published "Hablando con Piñera," an imagined dialogue between a reader and critic on the difficulty of understanding the Cuban author Virgilio Piñera's absurdist writings. In this text, Rodríguez Feo is of course, the "Critic," the Harvard-educated scholar conversant with Spanish, French, German and English language traditions, though he also clearly demonstrates his political concerns: "We must situate our artists in their social and economic context in order to understand their reactions their society's corruption. Perhaps the most unforgivable crime that many have committed was to create a literature that turned its back on the national drama," the critic proclaims ["Hay que situar a nuestros artistas en su medio social y económico para explicarnos sus reacciones ante esta sociedad corrompida. Quizás el crimen más imperdonable que han cometido muchos fue hacer una literatura a espaldas del drama nacional]" (45). In this exhortation to read literature in the context of the socioeconomic conditions of its production, Rodríguez Feo makes explicit a view that could be inferred from analyzing his early efforts as editor, critic and translator for Orígenes.
<15> Furthermore, in "Hablando de Piñera," one finds what seems at first to be an offhand comment about poetry that nonetheless provides an important indication of Rodríguez Feo's future direction. The critic complains: "too much poetry has been written, and. . .we have abandoned forms of expression that are more appropriate for representing our society's situation" ["se ha escrito demasiad[a] poesía y. . .hemos abandonado otras formas de expresión más adecuadas para simbolizar la situación de nuestra sociedad"] (45). Rodríguez Feo came to see poetry, the most important genre for him during the Orígenes years, as an elitist pastime. With this assertion, he implicitly criticized himself; poetry represented for him a phase of his career in which he was too enamored with North American literary figures and not critical enough of the pernicious effect of U.S. culture on Cuban culture. In a 1961 essay in Lunes, he criticized Cuban writers' historical fascination with U.S. culture, asserting that they had fallen prey to a "propaganda" effort aimed at "...keeping us entertained so that we would not perceive what was happening behind the curtains" ["...mantenernos entretenidos para que no percibiéramos lo que ocurría entre bambalinas" (Villena 77)]. The explicitly committed Rodríguez Feo of the 1960s and 1970s turned his focus not only to Cuban literary history, but also to prose in general, with the implicit assertion that poetry was a means of expression that tended towards escapism, aesthetic indulgence and conservatism. He edited a number of anthologies of short stories throughout the 1960s, including a collection of Russian short stories in 1968.
<16> Rodríguez Feo's critical essays published during the first decade of the revolution represent both a return to his earliest interests and an active participation in the new ideological framework for cultural production under the revolutionary government. "Walt Whitman y Norteamérica" and "Reflexiones sobre la sociedad norteamericana en el siglo XIX" evidence the critic's considerable expertise in 19th century U.S. history and literature, and carry forth solid, well documented indictments of unbridled capitalism and imperialism. Rodríguez Feo spends a significant amount of time attacking North American individualism, via, for example, a strenuous critique of Emersonian transcendentalism. This emphasis is driven by a Marxist ideological orientation that privileges collectivity and identifies individualism as complicit with the crimes of capitalism. One also hears echoes of Rodríguez Feo's early efforts at explaining differences between the U.S. and Hispanic America in the opposition of the Puritan to the Catholic. Though he operated in a Marxist context hostile to religion, Rodríguez Feo was able to maintain what was always an interest in upholding a cultural Catholicism rather than a dogmatic one.
<17> Viewing the essay "Hablando de Piñera" in the context of Rodríguez Feo's ideological evolution, the reader can see the conversation with an imagined interlocutor as also a public proclamation of commitment to the project of strictly coordinating Marxist concerns with cultural work. This process of carefully calibrating his rhetoric was informed not simply by Marxist thinking, but rather by the particular form of Marxist cultural criticism that Castro hoped to instigate in Cuban intellectuals. By imploring Cuban artists to respond directly to social issues and by declaring his own intention to distance himself from the elitism of poetry, Rodríguez Feo clearly signaled a shift toward a position that was more consistent with the cultural agenda of Castro. By doing so, he lay the groundwork for future success within the cultural apparatus of the revolution, where Lunes, its founders Franqui and Cabrera Infante, and many other writers, would fail, ultimately becoming pariahs [3]. In this way, "Hablando" can be read as a kind of orthodox counter-discourse within the heterodox Marxism of Lunes. Ultimately, Franqui and Cabrera Infante's desire to maintain a forum for free exploration of aesthetic, philosophical and political questions ran afoul of the revolutionary government. Castro held an infamous series of "conversations" with writers that resulted in his declaration of the revolutionary government's right to censor writing that was not deemed sufficiently committed to the communist cause.
<18> Where Franqui rebelled against Castro's attempts to control the activities of intellectuals, Rodríguez Feo clearly decided to align himself with Castro's agenda. In his 1961 essay "Martí y la revolución cubana," he defended Castro's decision to nationalize foreign-owned industries and seek Soviet support and protection in the face of imminent imperialistic threats from the U.S. (9, 12). Rodríguez Feo drew on the breadth of his erudition to construct his argument, linking the ideologies of the revolution to the political thought of the Cuban independence hero José Martí. Writing in 1966, he defended Castro's "Palabras a los intelectuales," a contradictory speech given in June of 1961 that asserted both the right to artistic freedom and the imperative that the intellectual devote his labors to the progress of the revolution. For Rodríguez Feo, it was an "illuminating" speech that "laid the foundation for a literature and an art in which each artist could exercise complete freedom in terms of what theme and what style to employ" ["...sentó las bases para una literature y un arte en los cuales cada artista podía ejercer plena libertad libertad en cuanto al tema y al estilo a emplear" (Aquí 9)]. Artistic freedom should be permitted, as long as the ideological goals of the artist were clearly tied to the revolution. In a 1961 essay in Lunes, he asserted that "...all intellectual labor should be tied to the interests of the nation" ["...toda tarea intellectual tenía que estar vinculada a los intereses más altos de la patria" (Villena 82)].
Conclusion: evolution and continuity
<19> The story that is generally told about the Cuban Revolution describes an exodus of elites from the island in 1959 and the early 1960s. It is important to examine Rodríguez Feo's case, as it provides a counterexample. Though Rodríguez Feo's wealth and familiarity with the United States seemed like reasons for immediate departure for Miami, he stayed. Ironically, the Cuban intellectual's study of U.S. history and culture fed his commitment to the revolution. Rodríguez Feo's wealth, education, mobility and proficiency in English allowed him a detailed and broad understanding of the U.S., and this understanding fed a critical stance that evolved into an anti-imperialist and Marxist position. Though Rodríguez Feo, by his own admission, spoke Spanish imperfectly and was more knowledgeable about U.S. literature than he was about Spanish-language literature after graduating from Harvard (Correspondencia 14), his closeness to the U.S. never erased his sense of being different. The United States seemed to him a profoundly materialistic culture, yet, (here another irony can be detected) the wealthy young Cuban felt that spiritual and artistic values should supersede acquisitiveness. While writers like Melville offered him a window into the tragic isolation of the Protestant individualist, Rodríguez Feo continued to believe in the power of collectivity, a power that can be observed in the communitarian ethos of Orígenes before it is evident in later Rodríguez Feo's Marxist thinking. Finally, his knowledge of U.S. history fed his disgust with the injustices of predatory capitalism and arrogant imperialism.
<20> Opinions concerning Rodríguez Feo's commitment to the party line tend to correspond with the commentator's experiences with the revolutionary government. One finds, on the one hand, scathing accusations like those of Cuban exile writer Héctor Santiago, who asserts that Rodríguez Feo became a spy and an informant for State Security. On the other hand, one finds the defense of Cuban writer Reynaldo González, who asserts that Rodríguez Feo was a principled Marxist, a participant in the heroic literacy campaigns, and a defender of his friends and colleagues against unjust ideological attacks (384-85). Ultimately, the scathing criticism of enemies like Héctor Santiago do not explain how such a privileged person would decide to remain in Cuba when a life of luxury was available to him in Miami or elsewhere. The depth and continuity of Rodríguez Feo's commitment to Castro's revolutionary Cuba is clear in his faithful work within the cultural organs of the Communist Party for decades after 1959. The full story of Rodríguez Feo's work after 1959 is still incomplete in scholarly literature on Cuba. Perhaps the reason for this fact is the fact that his story defies easy categorizations.
Works Cited
Cabrera Infante, Guillermo. Mea Cuba. Madrid: Alfaguara, 1999.
Castro, Fidel. "Palabras a los intelectuales." Política cultural de la Revolución Cubana: documentos. Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1977.
Franqui, Carlos. Family Portrait with Fidel. NY: Random House, 1984.
González, Reynaldo. Espiral de interrogantes. Havana: Editorial Electrónica CubaLiteraria, 2004. <www.cubaliteraria.cu/libro/online/descarga/E00005.pdf>
Luis, William. "Exhuming Lunes de Revolución." CR: The New Centennial Review 2.2 (summer 2002): 253-83.
Pérez León, Roberto. Tiempo de ciclón. Havana: Unión, 1995.
Rodríguez Feo, José. "André Gide, Icaro sin sol." Orígenes 27 (1951): 56-9.
---. "George Santayana: Crítico de una cultura." Orígenes 1 (1944): 35-8.
---. "Hablando de Piñera." Notas críticas. Havana: Unión, 1962, 41-52.
---. "Martí y la revolución cubana." Notas críticas. Havana: Unión, 1962, 7-19.
---. "Moby-Dick y el Aislamiento Heroico." Orígenes 6 (summer 1945): 15-21.
---. Prologue to Aquí once cubanos cuentan. Montevideo: Arca, 1966, 7-12.
---. "Reflexiones sobre la sociedad norteamericana en el siglo XIX." Notas críticas. Havana: Unión, 1962, 63-74.
---. "Rubén Martínez Villena." Notas críticas. Havana: Unión, 1962, 75-82.
---. "Walt Whitman y Norteamérica." Notas críticas. Havana: Unión, 1962, 21-39.
Rodríguez Feo, José and José Lezama Lima. "La otra desintegración." Orígenes 21 (spring 1949): 60-1.
Rodríguez Feo, José and Virgilio Piñera. "La neutralidad de los escritores." Ciclón 4.1 (January-March 1959): n.p.
Santiago, Héctor. "Virgilio Piñera: un personaje de sí mismo." El ateje 2.5 (October 2002-January 2003). <www.elateje.com/0203/especial%20020307.htm>
Tate, Allen. "The New Provincialism." Virginia Quarterly Review. 21.2 (spring 1945): 262-72.
---. "El Nuevo Provincialismo." Trans. Rodolfo Tro. Orígenes 8 (1945): 32-40.
"Una posición." Lunes de Revolución 23 March 1959: 1.
Notes
[1] Husband and wife and important poets Vitier and García Marruz visited Ernesto Cardenal, the Nicaraguan priest, poet and liberation theologian, at his Nicaraguan community Solentiname in 1979. García Marruz paid tribute to Cardenal, to figures like the Nicaraguan revolutionary Augusto César Sandino, and to the poor of Nicaragua in her collection of poems Apuntes nicaragüenses. Vitier and García Marruz published the collection Viaje a Nicaragua together in 1987. [^]
[2] A detailed account of the events that led to the schism between Rodríguez Feo and Lezama can be found in Roberto Pérez León, Tiempo de Ciclón. [^]
[3] Franqui left Cuba in 1968, Cabrera Infante in 1965. The former's disputes with Castro in the early years of the revolution are vividly narrated in Franqui's memoir Family Portrait with Fidel. Cabrera Infante builds a damning case against Castro in Mea Cuba. [^]
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