IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 3 ENGLISH | Page 91

The Social Beat of
Alternative culture *
Nilo Julián González Preval
Plastic Artist, Poet
Founding Member, ACETATO Producciones
Omni Zona Franca
Havana, Cuba

A

ll nations have a rhythm that can be followed through the beat of their people’s
forces and energies. They vibrate according to the country’s time and social cycles. In
Cuba, following Latin America’s recent historical
patterns, we have lived the last 50 years under
military dictatorship’s pressure. Since 1959, it
paved the way for censorship and loyalty to political systems alien to our incipient republican and
social traditions.
Fidel Castro and interested others who supported
him out of fear held now famous meetings with
Cuba’s intellectuals in the National Library.
There they established the bases for a programmed and systematic reconstruction of
Cuba’s cultural history. Nothing prior to 1959 had
any value; nothing after 1959 should occur outside the revolution, i.e., outside the politico-military domination imposed on a people that sadly
followed the passion’s impulse and with which it
was expected one could change the ills inherited
from the frustrated independence of a republic dependent upon the American market, that only
served the interests of a bourgeois sugarocracy
addicted to the pleasures of the cabaret and
rhumba.
There is a motive for heated discussion that crops
up more and more frequently in Cuban intellectual circles: the inability of the nation to finish and

culminate essential collective projects like Independence and the Republic, or the revolutionary
project itself. The Cuban nation has left many
things half completed; there have always been individual circumstances that have pointed the way,
even though no one has followed them most of
the time.
These individual circumstances, whether political, scientific or cultural, are part of the entirety
of Cuban culture. They form part of the history of
alternative Cuban culture; their alternative message reaches us today regarding the effort exerted
by an important segment of our population to democratize our society.
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