Aesthetics and Foreign Policy

tropical socialism. My remarks here on the subject of hermeneutics and aesthetics have their inception in my dismay at comments made to me upon my return from this voyage by various friends, family, colleagues and certain left intellectuals of my acquaintance suggesting that the term in Cuba was oxymoronic: Cuban culture, being state-sponsored, has the status of propaganda rather than culture, I was told; I was also frequently and somewhat tautologically assured that only showed us what they wanted us to see. Let me try to outline at least three of the dominant cultural paradigms that allow us to refuse the status of Culture to culture in Cuba. First, of course, is the one that says that the free expression of the self is the sine qua non of culture. second says that official culture or even affirmative culture is not culture, because authentic culture (ours) is eminently negative. legacy of the avant-garde, or an index of what is sometimes called its institutionalization, is the pervasive belief that authentic high culture's underlying principle is revolt and rebellion. (Susan Sontag: The task of the writer is to promote dissidence.) Whether this rebellion is meant to take place against society, or only against previous art, depends on the degree of autonomy culture is thought to have from the rest of social life. Included in and informing this second paradigm is the historical slippage of the signifiers of revolt and rebellion from the work of art to the figure of the artist as rebel-hero, arguably a ritual enactment of the negation paradigm. A somewhat more perverse

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