in case, they also romp on the dunghill. The paradox is that, as we can read in the great pages of Humberto Eco’ s novel, the clergy needs to live and to know the world that is denied to others. If an articulating and hegemonic role is played with regard to the entire social space and, let’ s say, through soma, it must be played going deep down into the areas which need control. And so, the clergy becomes conservative, because it consumes— from the power position— the very world that is denied to others, just in order to control it. What’ s the outcome? Those who prohibit laughter and whistling are now laughing and whistling. Already the Cuban cultural clergy, living its own police and historical drama( that’ s the plot in The Name of the Rose), ingests the soma it was previously giving to others, and appears before us as civil society, as an alternative world to its very own, as a dissident, as NGOs, as a blogger and as a twitterer, as an entrepreneur, as priests of Santeria or Palo, as lover of the Christians’ god, as Abakuá of all revolutions, as gay or lesbian out of and without closet, and as a feminist amid the military reverberations by the alpha types in power( Commander, Visionary, Strategist, and Executor). The cultural clergy says it’ s also revolution, although entering these worlds precisely means to deny it. Why? Because once you get into them, you are forced to produce an individual discourse, even weak, just as you are obliged to pedal by yourself while riding a bicycle. All the opposite is the Cuban revolution, which produces a single discourse from above to be consumed and reproduced by everyone below. And for such a reason, continuing with the metaphors, the means of transportation par excellence of the revolution is the bus. It’ s driven. Thusly, wherever we find the whistle and laughter generated by culture from its most authentic source, the society, it also appears the soma provided by the cultural discourse coming from the powers that be. They try to reread and to redirect the world that surprises them. And so, ridiculous and medieval retrograde situations arise, for example, the realities and the legitimacy of private property in the self-employed work, fictionally discussed in a UNEAC meeting by a writer as a novelistcurator, not as a citizen. From the utopia in Brave New World through the conservatism in The Name of the Rose, we arrive to the dead-end situations in the novel Catch-22( 1961), by Joseph Heller. Set in World War II, this novel served as a bedside book for the peace movement in the 60s, and also to describe the psychological perversity that may be driven by ambition. A colonel named Cathcart wants to be promoted to general and sends his pilots to the most dangerous missions. One of them, Yossarian, tries to abandon his mission claiming mental illness. The response expresses the catch: only the insane people accept air missions. His displeasure, on the contrary, showed that he was mentally sane; therefore, he can fly. Up there we come, in a Catch 22 upside down. We, the Cubans, are capable of flying, but since we were born revolutionaries— as we were told—, we cannot flight if we want to remain being Cubans. Because being Cuban means being revolutionary, per the dictates of the powers that be issued through the cultural clergy. The problem of perfect societies is that, once they fail, they cannot be rebuilt. To appeal to Culture( in capital letters) implies recognizing, through the sublimation of words( something very consubstantial with the scholastic origins of thought in Cuba), that order cannot be saved in the real society with all its miseries and contradictions, with its fissures and unconnected fragments, with its uncommunicative languages, and its rebellious aesthetics and ethics.
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