In a very general sense, "culture" is whatever man has removed from its primitive, natural state, that is, everything that man, acting in a way that distinguishes him from other animals, has changed in some fashion. In that sense, culture is the product of man's humanness, of the spirit that makes him unique in creation. It is also the opposite of what is natural, and it is unlikely to exist where man is least able to act. Much of the earth, for example, is more or less hospitable to cultivation; it is the first habitat man has succeeded in generally adapting to his needs. But the air and sea are less accepting of change to accommodate human life. Fish and birds, in their elements, have adapted to them, and of course many land animals have similarly changed when necessary to survive. But man, not content to adapt to his environment, adapted it from the start. Although some other animals build or dig temporary nests or other dwellings, they leave no lasting sign of their existence; the history of the species begins anew every time a new member of the species is born. But human beings are never totally free, or poor, at their birth, because each one comes into a world that, to some extent, preserves the memory of his ancestors. That memory, that transferable inheritance which set us apart in the animal world, is culture.

From a materialist perspective, one could think of the cultural urge as a higher form of the instinct of self-preservation. From the lasting nature of his contributions to culture the creator can derive an illusion of immortality, and insofar as the artifact establishes previously non-existent means of communication with other branches of humanity, it also fosters the illusion of greater physical scope to the creator's. In Cuban cultural history the dances called areitos, of the Taíno Indians who inhabited the eastern part of the island before the Spanish conquest, are among the most ancient examples of that drive to preserve the self. The areitos combined songs and dance in the commemoration of great deeds of the tribe's warrior chiefs. They were a sort of epic through which the glories of the tribe were prolonged in time and space.

 In all cultural activity there is, then, a will to transcend temporal and spatial limits to human life. But when intellectual activity is subject to immediate, material objectives, as it is in Cuba, and is unable to reach beyond limits imposed by dogma, the ability to transcend is thwarted. As a result, cultural activity stagnates and becomes feeble, and eventually there ceases to be a true culture.

The origins of a national culture can be traced to the point where signs of a group identity can be found, a coalescence of aspirations, ideas, and ways of living expressed in a common heritage. In the case of modern Cuba, we can probably trace that point to the English invasion of the island in 1762. The occupation opened the island to international commerce and expanded the people's horizons as they were awakened to cultural activity in the English-speaking world. As a result, new needs generated in the population, and creativity was stimulated to satisfy those needs. The new outlook on life seemed to bind Cuban society. Thus the historical event was a cultural event: the upheaval brought by the English invasion was accompanied by a cultural transformation that became apparent in new ways of living and thinking, and the people formed a common heritage that was passed on to the following generations.

In principle every historical event is, or has the potential of being, a cultural event in the same way. But culture, understood as the free exercise of the intellect and the product of this exercise, becomes divorced from history when intellectual activity is not allowed to keep apace of history, when it is kept from moving with the times. Since human antiquity there have been periods in which the culture has seemed to outstrip the historical fame-- to have surpassed all expectations of what man could have produced in that span. But there have also been years, even centuries, in which time has seemed far in excess of man's cultural performance. Culture in Cuba has increasingly fallen out of step with history since the government began to use Stalinist methods to conform creative work to an unchanging dogma.

In a lecture delivered in 1925 to the Cuban Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País, Jorge Mañach analyzed what he called "La crisis de la alta cultura en Cuba" ("the crisis of high culture in Cuba"), correctly defining national culture as "the sum of numerous intellectual contributions that address a common ideal and are supported by a popular will that recognizes, appreciates and stimulates them."¹ The crisis that Mañach spoke of was a cultural stagnation that he attributed exclusively to the drain on energies produced by the long struggle to gain Cuban independence from Spain. This crisis, seen in that way (today we might see it differently, finding other causes) was a mere interruption. After the hiatus, there was nothing to prevent intellectual activity from drawing upon the national heritage.

But etymologically "crisis" has another sense too. It also means a deviation, break, or change that ultimately leads to a separation of elements that once were sufficiently cohesive to form an identifiable, integral whole. The current crisis in Cuban culture is closer to that meaning and qualitatively different from the crisis perceived by Mañach at the close of the first quarter of this century. He described not a break or deviation but a pause in the cultural process. As time has shown, the process commenced anew; building on what had gone before. At the moment of crisis in a potentially fatal illness, the symptoms having reached their worst, the patient will either begin to recover or will die. The crisis analyzed by Mañach was an episode that Cuban cultural life survived, taking on new vigor. Today's crisis is characterized by such sharp mutations and an environment so counterproductive to creativity that culture in Cuba is threatened with extinction.

Freedom and Culture

José Martí wrote that "in a country without freedom literature can only be a mourner or a courtesan."² That statement can generally be applied to culture in Cuba. It mourns the loss of something crucial to its existence, freedom, and it is like a courtesan in that it prostitutes itself to serve an alien function.

Any culture made to serve a dogma will cease to grow as a culture in the sense we have been giving the word, since dogma demands falsification of the past and isolation, under pain of punishment, from sources of creativity to the extent that they might question or differ from the dogma. A national culture develops by refinement of native values through free discussion among creative forces in the country and with the benefit of exposure to other cultures. As the opening observations suggest, man's ability to create a culture depends on his ability to shape or alter the milieu; he can transform his environment to the extent it is malleable, as we have seen from his molding of the earth, but not the air or the sea to the same extent. Even the most primitive form of cultivation of the earth is impossible if the necessary elements to manufacture tools or freedom to move about is lacking. Cultural activity without freedom is as sterile as the labor of a farmer chained to a plow on a granite field.

A vital culture without freedom of expression and information is inconceivable. Cuban culture in the nineteenth century was largely an itinerant culture, a culture in pilgrimage, precisely because the lack of freedom under Spanish colonial rule drove many of the country's finest intellects abroad. Cuba's cultural roots were transplanted to grow to New York, Madrid, Paris, and Mexico, among other foreign places. Felix Varela published his Lecciones de Filosofía in Philadelphia and edited a collection of poems by Zequeira y Arango in New York. The first editions of José Maria Heredia's poetry bear the imprint of publishers in Mexico and New York. The Cubans who followed them were legion: the humanist, José Antonio Saco; the lawyer, José Morales Lemus; the literary critic, Domingo del Monte; the naturalist, Felipe Poey; the composer, Ignacio Cervantes; the orator; Ramón Zambrana; the novelist, Cirilo Villaverde; Juan Peoli, the painter; Betancourt Cisneros, the costumbrista writer; Pedro Guiteras, the historian; Álvaro Reynoso, the scientist; the bibliophile, Bachiller y Morales; the essayist, Enrique Piñeyro; the physician, José Joaquín Albarrán; the university professor; Luis Felipe Mantilla; the engineer; Aniceto Menocal; and the best poets of the last century, Zenea, Teurbe Tolón, Isaac Carrillo, Federico Orgaz, José Joaquín Palma, Rafael Mendive, Torroella, Santacilia, the Urbach brothers and Juanita Borrero Echevarría; and above all of them, José Martí.

The love of freedom of expression and thought in Cuba grew out of the fight for those rights. The phenomenon can best be traced not in the artistic or literary creations themselves but rather in the political documents that have sought to guarantee those freedoms, without which cultural activity cannot thrive. In 1812, in the Constitution of the Cortes of Cadiz, Spain adopted a liberal program that abolished prior censorship. It stated that "all Spaniards"--which included Cubans at the time--had "freedom to write, print and publish political ideas without need for any license, review or approval prior to publication, subject to restrictions and responsibilities established by law."³ In the same year, the Cuban revolutionary, Joaquín Infante, wrote a political code for Cuba that also provided that thought and press would be free. The Constitution that another insurrectionist, Narciso López, drafted for a free Republic of Cuba in 1851, shortly before his execution, similarly stated: "Freedom of press and speech are recognized and sanctioned without further limitation than those required by the rights of others and public security."⁴ And the same provision was included seven years later in the Constitution adopted by the Cuban revolutionary organization of exiles in New York, "El Ave María."

On October 10,1868, the day of the uprising that began Cuba's Ten Years' War for Independence, the head of that revolt, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, signed a Manifesto that declared:

No one can ignore that Spain governs the Island of Cuba with a bloodied, iron hand...depriving it of all political and religious freedom.... The Cubans cannot speak, write or even think.... Spain has promised to respect the rights of Cubans on numerous occasions, but to date its word has not been kept.... The Island of Cuba cannot be deprived of the rights that other people enjoy, and it cannot permit others to say that it knows only how to suffer.... Declaring ourselves an independent nation, we demand religious observance of the imprescriptible rights of man.⁵

The last Basic Law of the Cuban Republic in Arms, the Constitution of 1897, provided that "all Cubans shall have the right to express their ideas freely."⁶ This concept was preserved in the "Provisional Constitution" of October 20,1898, which governed during the U.S. occupation of Cuba until May of 1902. It said, "Free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the inviolable rights of free men, and all people shall be entitled to speak, write and publish about any subject, and they shall be responsible for that freedom."⁷

Cuban thought of the nineteenth century in the area of the rights of men is perhaps best expressed in the writings of José Martí. About freedom of speech and thought he wrote: "Every time a man is deprived of the right to think I feel a child of mine has been murdered."⁸ On another occasion, in his essay "Three Heroes," on Bolívar, San Martín, and Hidalgo, Martí wrote: "Freedom is the right that all men have to be honest and to think and speak without hypocrisy."⁹ The year before his death he wrote to Máximo Gómez: "Respect for the freedom and ideas of others, of even the most wretched being, is my fanaticism, If I die, or am killed, it will be because of that."¹⁰

And in 1887 he wrote the following to express how the world is closed to one who lives in a state without freedom and how he misconstrues the outside world as a result, since his impression of knowledge is naturally distorted:

He who lives under an autocratic creed is like an oyster in its shell that sees only the prison that confines it and believes, in the darkness, that it is the world. Freedom gives the oyster wings, and the portentous battle heard inside the shell turns out, in the light of day, to be the natural motion of life-blood in the world's vigorous pulse.¹¹

From the foundation of the Cuban Republic in 1902 until the promulgation of the Socialist Constitution in 1976, Cuba preserved the principle of freedom of speech and thought in each of its constitutions, without subjecting the exercise of those freedoms to the support of any political doctrine. Indeed, the Constitution of 1940 spelled out in great detail how those freedoms were to be protected from government curtailment. Article 33 of the 1940 constitution provided as follows:

Every person shall be entitled to express his ideas verbally, in writing or through any other graphic or oral means of expression, without prior censorship, using for the purpose any or all accessible methods of dissemination. An edition of books, pamphlets, records, films, periodicals or other publications of any nature shall only be subject to confiscation if it injures people's reputations, social order or public tranquility, and only upon an order issued by a competent judicial authority, but without limiting liability arising out of any criminal act involved.¹²

Even the constitutional amendments and statutes adopted under the dictatorship of Machado and Batista recognized those freedoms in principle. In practice, the arbitrary use of censorship by the Batista regime was one of the major abuses that prompted the revolutionary movement. Fidel Castro's early declarations regarding the 26 of July Movement to overthrow Batista's government stated unequivocally that the revolution was "identified with and based on the ideals of Martí" and declared its "absolute and reverent respect for the Constitution given to the people of Cuba in 1940," adopting that Constitution as the official law of the revolutionary movement.¹³ Indeed, Castro's self-defense at his trial for participating in the assault on the Moncada army barracks in 1953 was based on the rights guaranteed by the Constitution of 1940. Later Castro organized the "Manifesto" of the July 26th Movement around thoughts of Martí, stating in the opening lines as follows: "The ideas that give this struggle its basic reason for being...are the same ones that inspired our wars of liberation, that later find their best and most concrete expression in the political thought of the martyr of Dos Ríos: José Martí is the ideological source of the 26th of July Movement."¹⁴

From Castro's expeditionary landing in Cuba on December 2,1956, until Batista fled the island some three years later; the constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and information were almost continuously suspended. That denial enhanced the people's respect and appreciation for those rights, and their exercise became associated with opposition to the dictatorship.

Culture and Revolution

The overthrow of Batista in 1959 marked the beginning of a period of great cultural activity in Cuba. Many artists and writers who had been living abroad returned to the country, and others who had merely been existing without stimulation or who had not been able to practice their professions found encouragement and support in newly established cultural centers or in old ones that were brought back to life.

The literature of the period is a good example of the phenomenon. The creative fever of the early years of the revolution was a striking change from the cultural lethargy of the final years of the Batista dictatorship. If we look at what was being published in 1958, 1959, and 1960, we find a significant increase in new titles. For instance, during the first year of the revolutionary period, the number of novels published doubled, and in the next year, the number tripled. In 1958 not a single new theatrical piece was published, but during the following two years, there were more than twenty new plays or new editions of plays. The same thing happened with poetry: the number of poetry collections published in 1959 was twice the 1958 number, and in 1960 there were three times as many volumes published. Another interesting aspect of the phenomenon was an increase in the size and number of editions of masterpieces of world literature, including great works as different as the Quixote and Days and Nights, by Konstantin Simonov, Robinson Crusoe and Doña Bárbara. The same reawakening of interest in theatrical literature brought the publication of plays by Anouilh, Chekov, Brecht, and Arthur Miller, along with editions of plays by the Cuban dramatists Carlos Felipe, Virgilio Piñera, and Marcelo Salinas.

One of the most significant events in this process was the First Festival of Cuban Books in 1959, which was held under the direction of Alejo Carpentier. Editions of 250,000 copies of some books were launched in connection with the Festival. The following, for example, began to circulate widely: Cecilia Valdés, by Cirilo Villaverde, El pensamiento vivo, by Enrique José Varona, Álvaro de la Iglesia's Tradiciones Cubanas, an anthology of poems edited by Nicolás Guillén, one of short stories edited by Salvador Bueno and a third, of poetry, edited by Cintio Vitier. That same year the first Casa de las Américas literature prizes were awarded. Cash awards were given for poetry, plays, novels, short stories, and essays. From today's perspective the most curious aspect of the competition is the composition of the juries; they included Alejo Carpentier, Jorge Guillén, Jorge Mañach, Lino Novas Calvo, and Enrique Labrador Ruiz. Less than a year later two of them--Mañach and Novas Calvo--were living in exile; a third, Labrador Ruiz, left Cuba sometime later.

Not long after the creative explosion, a struggle for control began between two irreconcilable groups. One was the old guard of the Cuban Communist Party; the other came out the nationalistic July 26^th Movement. The latter force was centripetal in that it impelled aspirations inward, toward established Cuban goals and solutions. The former was centrifugal since it projected outward in search of Cuba's future. The centripetal force can be seen as a continuation of the philosophies and political constructs of Cuba's nineteenth century fighters for independence and twentieth century liberal, nationalist thinkers. The centrifugal force is much akin to nineteenth century currents that favored continued colonial rule of Cuba by Spain or annexation of the island to the United States and twentieth century political platforms that relied on and furthered American influence in the country. The colonial mentality was the same, even though the foreign imperial center had changed, and with it the foreign social order that the centrifugalists proposed.

The struggle was waged on all fronts, and in the cultural arena it can be traced through the pages of two periodicals: Hoy and Revolución. The former was the official organ of the Communist Party; the latter attacked the Communists, accusing them of slavishness toward Moscow and collaboration with the Batista regime. In its weekly literary supplement, Lunes de Revolución, it published whatever the editors thought might be of interest to the readers in the areas of current developments in philosophy and the arts, and it did so without partisan censorship.

In April 1961, knowing of the impending Bay of Pigs invasion, Fidel Castro declared that the Cuban revolution was a socialist movement. Having broken relations with the United States, he thus sought to ensure protection from the U.S.S.R. The Cuban Communist Party, the strongest link to the Soviet Union, decided that a country that had avowed socialism could no longer tolerate a periodical run with a Western-type liberal eclecticism as an official organ of government policy. With the support of Alfredo Guevara, director of the Cuban Institute for Cinematography, the Communists most closely involved in cultural matters, José Antonio Portuondo and Edith García Buchaca, decided to bring the struggle to a head. As often happens in such things, the showdown occurred over a minor matter. The director of Lunes at the time was the novelist Cabrera Infante. His brother had directed a short film called "P.M." about night life in certain zones of Havana where the more Bohemian elements of Cuban youth met for what were sarcastically called "glorious socialist nights." In fact, the film was not really objectionable, except insofar as it revealed a set of social facets that could not conceivably be the basis for building a Communist society. The ensuing controversy was resolved at what are referred to as the "Discussions" held at the National Library.

A sort of tribunal was set up under the direction of orthodox Communists, and the discussions were attended both by writers and artists, including many who worked for Revolución, and by high government officials, including the Cuban President, Osvaldo Dorticós, who supported the Communists' complaints.

Fidel Castro spoke at the third discussion. In his statement, known as the "Address to the Intellectuals," he said: "The revolution defends liberty; the revolution has brought the country a great number of liberties; the revolution cannot in essence be an enemy of liberties; if the concern of some is that the revolution may choke their creative spirit, that concern is unnecessary and is without cause." Then he stated the following, often repeated words: "What are the rights of writers and artists, be they revolutionaries or not? Within the revolution, all; against the revolution no rights."¹⁵ Of course, that statement did not define necessary terms or borders: how far the revolution reached, at what point or how art could harm it, or even what or who constituted the revolution--important questions at the time.

In the end, the Communists came out ahead. Lunes de Revolución was suspended because of an alleged lack of paper, the distribution of "P.M." was banned, and those who had been the target of the Communists' attack were sent off to diplomatic posts or other activities removed from their normal cultural sphere.

It was not long before the meaning of Castro's Address to the Intellectuals was further clarified. In August 1961, at the First National Congress of Writers and Artists, José Antonio Portuondo artfully suggested what was coming for Cuban writers. The revolutionary process, he indicated, would change the people's literary tastes and, as a result, the writers' creative act would naturally have to change as well. Indeed, as Marxist orthodoxy gained ground, so too did the objective that the cultural worker become a creator of the new socialist man and the socialist society in which he would live. In the Final Declaration issued by the Congress, writers were told that they must participate "in the great common task of enriching and defending the revolution," and they were warned that literature would have to be purified through "the most rigorous criticism."¹⁶

Shortly after the foreboding pronouncements of the writers' congress in Havana, the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC) was founded in imitation of the Union of Soviet Writers. UNEAC's role was not, as some had hoped, to protect the interests of artists but rather to protect those of the State in its bid to control the arts. The means of control were put in place with the nationalization of publishing houses and the institution of government monopoly over the press and electronic media.

Once control of the present has been gained, so that intellectual activity is subject to the will of the state, the government, as George Orwell suggested, is free to control and reshape the past. A conveniently revised version of the past, in turn, makes control of the future possible. The rewriting of history is crucial to the process. The historian becomes the architect of the facts he deforms to fit a preconceived materialist mold.

In Cuba the process was clearly announced, in 1963, when José Antonio Portuondo wrote:

One pressing need brought to the fore by the triumph of the Socialist Revolution is the need to study the historical process of Cuba in the light of Marxism-Leninism.... We still do not have a good study of our historiography that will permit us to follow the development of our written history step by step as a thoroughly classist expression .... Through a Marxist-Leninist interpretation of history, history ceases to be a cold recounting of past events to become a scientific study of a dynamic process in which the past is the foundation and antecedent of the impetuous movement toward the future. A movement of which the historian is a witness and a conscious protagonist. Hence, the creative and combative sense that must characterize the historian's works.¹⁷

Before 1971, then, there were some signs that Castro might successfully resist pressure to reduce intellectual activity to a mere tool for creating the new socialist man and society For example, in 1965 Castro replied as follows when the journalist, Lee Lockwood, asked whether conditions might improve for non-Marxist writers:

The day will come when all the resources will be available, that is, when such a book (a novel containing counterrevolutionary sentiments) would not be published to the detriment of a textbook or of a book having universal value in world literature. Then there will be resources to publish books on the basis of a broader criterion, and one will be able to argue whatever one wishes about any theme. I especially am a partisan of the widest possible discussion in the intellectual realm. Why? Because I believe in the free man, I believe in the well-educated man, I believe in the man able to think, in the man who always acts out of conviction, without fear of any kind. And I believe that ideas must be able to defend themselves. I am opposed to the blacklists of books, prohibited films, and all such things.¹⁸

In 1971 the Cuban government officially adopted a policy that renders culture a vehicle of Communist doctrine. Neo-Stalinist techniques for implementing the new cultural policy were implanted that year at the First Congress on Education and Culture in Havana. The scene was set by a series of acts designed to terrorize the intellectual community. First there was the imprisonment of Raúl Alonso Olivé, a government official who helped the French economist René Dumont during his stay in Cuba. Dumont's book questioned the wisdom of Cuban economic policy and expressed doubts about its success. Then there was the arrest of the poet, Herberto Padilla, followed by his forced public confession, so reminiscent of Boris Pasternak's.

The Final Declaration enunciated by the Congress stated: "Cultural media cannot provide the means for encouraging more false intellectuals, who are distant from the masses and the spirit of our revolution, and who try to pass off snobism, eccentricity, homosexuality and other social aberrations as expressions of revolutionary art."¹⁹

Fidel Castro himself repeated at the Congress the same kinds of cultural policy statements that the old guard of the party had been making for more than a decade. The following is an example:

In a collectivist society, culture is a mass activity.... We will fight against all attempts to render us a colony in matters of ideas and aesthetics. We do not pay homage to false values that reflect the structure of societies that look down on our people.... We, a revolutionary people going through a revolutionary process, rate cultural and artistic creations by their usefulness to the people, what they contribute to man.... Our evaluation is political.²⁰

After those declarations came purges that forced writers and other artists and educators out of their jobs and that excluded them from cultural activity. Some were thrown into prison. Then came the First Congress of the Communist Party, which framed the legal bases for these Stalinist tactics that were stifling culture. The Resolutions adopted by that Congress provide: "Art under socialism presupposes, as a condition for its development, a high degree of ideological quality and technique and the new outlook on the world that socialism brings; not a servile imitation of a cultural heritage, but its reevaluation and continuity.... Socialist society requires of art that it contribute to the education of the people through aesthetic enjoyment."²¹

The philosophy underlying the resolutions is expressed in the Cuban Socialist Constitution of 1976. Article 38 of the Constitution states that "artistic creativity is free as long as its content is not contrary to the Revolution." But that statement of freedom of expression must be read in the light of the general caveat (in Article 61) that no constitutional freedom can be exercised in a way that is "contrary to the existence and objectives of the socialist state."²²

Since the promulgation of the Constitution, the cultural policy of the Cuban government has not changed. The objective of transforming culture in accordance with Marxist-Leninist tenets was restated at the end of 1977 at the Second Congress of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba, and the Ministry of Culture declared that the principles adopted in 1976 would obtain "for a long historical period."²³

Conclusion

The completion of this paper coincided with the release of the Seventh Report on "The Situation of Human Rights in Cuba" by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States. The conclusions released in that report confirm the foregoing comments, emphasizing the official repression to which writers and other artists and intellectuals have been subjected--a state of affairs that has brought on the current cultural crisis in Cuba.

Addressing government intolerance of cultural expression the report states: "The Commission has received testimony that indicates that ideological discrepancy has been the reason for preventing the publication of some works of art. This has been facilitated by the fact that all Cuban publishing houses are in the hands of the State, so that only material approved by the authorities may be published."²⁴

It goes on to say the following with respect to the circumstances faced by cultural workers:

The Commission is aware that a number of artists have been pressured in various ways, to prevent them from expressing their social and political concerns through their art. In many cases, this has included imprisonment, prohibition from leaving the country, denial of permission to carry out certain kinds of work appropriate to their skills and training, etc. These various forms of pressure have led in some cases to the inhumane practice of obtaining "confessions," by which several artists have publicly rejected past association with certain artistic trends that have been considered antagonistic to the government in Cuba.... The result of these intolerant practices is the disappearance of any trace of criticism of the government or the system from Cuban artists. At the same time, through use of all of the channels that the government controls, there has been marked promotion of all works of art that support the government and the Communist Party.²⁵

The final comments in the report on the subject are as follows:

The Commission considers that there is no freedom of the press in Cuba such as would allow political dissent which is fundamental in a democratic system of government. On the contrary, the oral, written and televised press is an instrument of the ideological struggle and, notwithstanding the self-criticism that is transmitted by these channels, even that follows the dictates of the group to the lower levels.... The Commission regards as reprehensible the limitations on the freedom of artistic expression imposed by the government of Cuba, and the pressure and punishment applied to artists who do not share the official ideology or who dissent from the political practice of the authorities.²⁶

The foregoing analysis has focused on the need for freedom in a culturally vital society, particularly in Cuban society, which has had a long tradition of commitment to freedom of expression. Until the Socialist Constitution of 1976, Cuban laws have never permitted the subordination of freedom of expression to official doctrine or governmental policy; the only limits to that freedom had been the rights of the members of society. Cuban Marxists-Leninists have rejected that tradition subordinating culture to Communist Party doctrine and goals and in the process have stifled culture. Thus, the crisis is directly associated with the imposition of a foreign ideology and a break with Cuba's cultural heritage. As happened in the nineteenth century, Cuban culture has had to take refuge in exile, where it will continue to develop until the island can again provide the necessary climate for cultural life.