Art and Identity
Soma: The Pill Against the Whistle and Laughter of Culture
Manuel Cuesta Morúa Historian and Political Scientist Arco Progresista Party’ s Spokesperson Platform New Country’ s National Coordinator Member of Citizens for Racial Integration Committee( CIR) Havana, Cuba
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et ' s remember. In one of the best accomplished anti-utopias attempting to describe the human emptiness in every project for building a perfect society— Brave New World( 1931), by Aldous Huxley— one of his characters introduces us into the soma. What’ s soma? It’ s a pill that combines all the advantages of both Christianity and alcohol, without going through any of their drawbacks. I must make it crystal clear that my mention of Christianity will not imply any value judgment herein. On the planet Ford, inhabited by scientifically tailored human beings, it is enough to ingest soma to achieve that blissful state of well-being and perfection, in which everyone is happy and life goes by with programmed pace and normality. If Christianity— by exercising its greatest virtue— condemns the orgies to which alcohol can lead, soma preventively takes effect to exculpate the consequences of drunkenness through the purifying work by Christianity, previously tasked to empty sex of all its erotic charge and to endow it with a public function: the necessary release of social stress. So, do not worry: we are sinning without sinning. Soma’ s prodigious effect. But we learn that the perfect society of Brave New World may not be so conclusive. On planet Ford, a singular and corrosive character impertinently parades: The Savage, who reminds us that there are human marriages, sex for pleasure, and some mysterious nooks and crannies where mankind moves away from utopias due to that stubborn perseverance of human nature beyond the human planning. And even if they keep on being given to us, life becomes life by constantly betraying the utopias. Well then. It has been a long time since the cultural discourse by the powers that be in Cuba was assigned the soma’ s function to sublimate the contradictions in social life, which began to surface with the revenge of cultures, in all their diversity, about the discourse on Culture( like that, in capital letter). Let ' s say that our soma was rounded up by the ideological laboratory in the late 80 ' s and early 90 ' s against both the unstoppable return of tradition through religious life and aesthetics, and the breakthrough of modernity with the advent, for example, of Arte Calle( Street Art) and young heterodox thinkers gathered in something that was called Grupo Paidea. Let’ s recall also that there was a time when the discourse on culture did not need to cross-dress as a pill, like soma. Quite the opposite. That was a time dominated by the socialist real constructivism and narcotics were not necessary; the utopian alienation was lived with youthful arrogance, to produce everything again, and the only
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