Transforming ideology into heritage: A return of nation and identity in late socialist Cuba?

Late socialist Cuba

It is not surprising that Cubans grant culture a pre-eminent role amidst such hard times. To defend culture is to defend what we are. What we were. And what we will be. (Sanchez, 1992: 22) ¹

The initial implementation of mild reforms in the so-called ‘rectification process’ as a reaction to Gorbachev’s perestroika gave way to a devastating economic crisis known as the ‘special period in peacetime’ after the Soviet collapse. The catastrophe forced the Cuban revolutionary regime to modify most policies to the detriment of the system’s principles. Foreign investment, tourism and the use of dollars were allowed, and economic performance and profitability became an issue for state companies. These changes involved the reinvention rather than the reform of the socialist system (Azicri, 2000). In fact, late socialist Cuba became an ‘awkward and ironic blend of capitalist and socialist strategies for national development and economic recovery’ (Weinreb, 2009: 23) in a ‘sort of never-never land between communism and capitalism’ (Chávez, 2005: 1). The Cuban transformation has been interpreted as the end of communism (Rojas, 1998), as the emergence of a nationalist state capitalist system (Eckstein, 2003; Farber, 2011) and as another form of post-Soviet transition to democracy (Hernández-Reguant, 2009b). The complexity of the ‘special period’ is encapsulated in state propaganda. At a mall in Carlos Tercero in Havana, a sign read for years, ‘In the New Millennium, Sales + Economy + Efficiency = Revolution’.

To the dismay of die-hard pro-Soviet bureaucrats, revolutionary principles had to be combined with market logics and Cuban identity had to be reformulated in tune with multicultural international trends (Hernández-Reguant, 2009a). In the middle of daunting shortages of food, energy and transportation, the regime put forward a new constitution in 1992 that further glorified and emphasized the ideas of the ‘apostle’ and father of the nation, José Martí, while suppressing references to Marxism-Leninism. This entailed the symbolic separation of two tropes that had been hitherto considered analogous: nation and revolution. Moreover, a clearer division between culture and ideology was established, paralleled by a shift from a conceptualization of personal identity as based on internationalist and class-based ideas to one based on an emphasis on local values and places. The definition of Cubanness can now be conceived ‘as a matter of culture and heritage, rather than as an ideological commitment to revolution’ (Hernández-Reguant, 2009a: 70). As Frederik argues:

The definition of the national Cuban character has gone from Caliban, the colonized victim, to Creole nationalist, to bearded revolutionary fighter, to khaki-clad socialist Hombre Nuevo, and now, after the crisis of the special period, to what I call a hombre novísimo living in a para-socialist society, still socialist, but not necessarily on its way to capitalism. (2012: 13)

A series of campaigns including the ‘Batalla de Ideas’ (Battle of Ideas) and the ‘Libertad de los Cinco’ (Freedom for the Cuban Five), promote the defence of Cuban identity and cultural tradition against a real and perceived enemy, which ‘was no longer depicted solely by an antagonistic US, but something that was broader, more evasive, and thus, more dangerous’ (Frederik, 2009: 90). This evasive threat comprised globalization and neoliberalism, but also individualist behaviours and profit-making mentalities considered ‘capitalist’ (Rodríguez Manso and Pausides, 2011). For Bourdieu:

paradoxical and extra-ordinary situations call for an extra-ordinary kind of discourse, capable of raising the practical principles of an ethos to the level of explicit principles which generate (quasi-) systematic responses, and of expressing all the unheard of and ineffable characteristics of the situation created by the crisis. (1991: 129)

Among these ‘ineffable characteristics’ of the crisis, we can include the reawakening of a ‘banal’ and reified form of revolutionary nationalism and its customized myths, the activation of civil society, the emergence of harsh socioeconomic inequalities and a shift from a real to a symbolic war. This symbolic war can be conceived as a struggle for identity and memory with the aim of providing legitimacy to a decadent regime by resorting to the myth of external threat (Rojas, 2006: 434). The stage of the conflict has become a ‘dispute over the national heritage and the symbolic inheritance of the country’ (Rojas, 2007b: 23). This requires redefinition of the ‘aspects of Cuban culture that should be represented and maintained and the ones that should be used to ward off external contamination’ (Frederik, 2009: 90), which involves reworking the self-image and national narrative of the regime.

This article explores the materialization of a new self-image and national narrative in late socialist Cuba through the study of museums and monuments. If for truth ‘to be settled in the memory of a group it needs to be presented in the concrete form of an event’ (Halbwachs, 1992: 200), then it is necessary to account for how ideological changes take on material form and consider the consequences this might bring to the social field. The article results from long-standing historical and ethnographic research on the uses of heritage and memory in revolutionary Cuba, with a focus on Havana. The study involved the investigation of hitherto unexplored museum and monument archives and the carrying out of interviews with more than a hundred people involved in the Cuban heritage field, both in Havana and in the provinces. The article suggests that the replacement of Marxist-Leninist idioms by discourses of local identity is a rhetorical strategy that does not imply any deep socio-political change in terms of freedom of expression. In addition, it sheds light on the process of materializing ideology into heritage, whereby the regime attempts to gain legitimacy by compressing spatial and temporal coordinates, with the aim of providing a sense of historic depth to new ideological discourses and campaigns. I focus on three tropes of authorized heritage discourse (Smith, 2006), which result from a separation of culture and ideology enacted by the regime. The first trope stems from the belief that culture needs to be protected against external enemies and from attempts to incorporate local and personal identities within the new nationalist doctrine and national narrative of the regime through a reframing of education, history, memory and museums. The second trope aims at the detachment of Marxism-Leninism from Cuban national identity. The third trope involves the effort to align the public symbolic order with the new official ideology through the creation of museums and monuments. Although these three tropes can be explored separately for analytic purposes, they overlap and work together in practice.

The return of individual identity in the new national narrative

Despising our heritage, or using it for commercial purposes, goes against the true scientific attitude regarding cultural features … the use of heritage for commercial purposes … undermines its relation with cultural identity because it is mediatized by processes of thoughtless touristic promotion. Unlike this situation of cultural wreckage in the capitalist world, socialism has been a staunch advocate of the cultural heritage of the past. (Arjona Pérez, 2004 [1986]: 38)

The period from 1990 up to the present can be interpreted as an attempt within the Cuban history and heritage field to disentangle ideas of nation and personal identity from Marxism-Leninism, ² while at the same time sustaining a commitment to the revolution as a political process. Die-hard Sovietizing bureaucrats such as the ex-director of cultural heritage, Marta Arjona Pérez, had to readapt their discourse to align with the new times. In fact, she shifted from an understanding of museums as vehicles of propaganda to considering them as representatives ‘of the personality of our people, expressed in artworks and constantly evolving up to present’ (Arjona Pérez, 1990: 86) Furthermore, for Arjona Pérez ‘the local spirit, and the nation, are the crucial raison d’être of these institutions’ (1990: 86). Gradually, the Cuban authorized heritage discourse incorporated and emphasized notions of cultural identity, belonging, quality of life and ecology that appealed directly to the individual. At the same time, it steadily abandoned the Marxist-Leninist philosophy of history and messianic temporality in the attempt to reconnect ideology with the ‘real’ histories of individuals.

Marxism-Leninism had articulated Cuban identity based on a nationwide homogeneous conception of class that ‘challenged the foundation, scope, and validity of personal identity’ (Flikke, 2006: 279). The aim had been the uprooting of people from their traditional myths and worldviews and the creation of the new man. While the democratization of eastern European socialist countries entailed a return of identity based on their traditions and national myths, Cuba has not undergone a similar process. This has ‘brought about a mingling of the old and the new man, something charged with ambivalence and pragmatic difficulties to be transmitted clearly’ (Frederik, 2009: 100). Although all my interviewees agree about the emphasis on personal identity after 1990, the content of that identity remains undecided. For Kapcia (2008: 107), ‘banal nationalism’, folk memory and customized myths took over, while education gained an even more prominent role.

Transformations in education and the teaching of history are fundamental as history produced by the Cuban Communist Party (CCP) informs museums and articulates the transmission of official versions of the past. For education bureaucrat Díaz Pendás:

the 1990s did away with dogmatic conceptions imported from the USSR … and now we are trying to turn towards identity, drawing on culture for the understanding and forging of a historic memory. There is an effort to use history to reconcile people with their identity as a nation, with their cultural essences, integrating them with the locality, promoting social history … to find the elements of integration between nation and nationality. ³

He recognizes, however, that despite the collapse of the USSR, ‘the Soviet handbooks, the materialist approach to history, and the Marxist-Leninist vision of reality, still influences the teaching of history’. ⁴

His words convey a sense of political opening and change that is in stark contrast with the content of his books, which are filled with ideological empty rhetoric and citations of Soviet authors (e.g. Díaz Pendás, 2008). In fact, only a small sector of critical academic historians has started to assume a different approach to history, while official history taught to children remains mostly unchanged (Rojas, 2006: 386). The emphasis on local identity promoted by CCP provisions in the early 1990s only resulted in the creation of a Master’s degree on ‘regional history’ at the Institute of History. After that, ‘museums had to start working hand in hand with local historians, carrying out serious research of the republican period and including the history of the revolution in the museums’. ⁵

For Marrero Oliva, who designed and implemented dozens of municipal museums in Havana province, ideological changes could be felt in museum work:

Previously, it was forbidden to display traitors to the fatherland in the museum, but now it is possible to talk about them and to show their legacy, as well as that of other intellectuals and professionals who left Cuba.… Museum scripts must adapt to the current times. Before, all museums had a room of martyrs, which were extremely boring … and they all resembled each other, from side to side of the island. ⁶

Although the official and highly ideological national narrative has not disappeared from Cuban museums, most museums have created new rooms dedicated to ethnographic collections of minorities or to local intellectuals, artists or musicians. In some cases, as in Guanabacoa, the functions of the museum are articulated in three different and spatially separated buildings: the traditional exhibition, the area of martyrs and the house of artists. In terms of museography, the aesthetic conception of museums has gradually shifted towards minimalism as a reaction to Soviet flamboyance (Figure 1). Young architects have attempted to create museum designs in tune with contemporary international trends. This ‘aestheticization’ of museum displays is perceived by Sovietizing bureaucrats as a betrayal of the real function of the museum as a conveyer of ideological ‘information’. This is the case even if, as young architects repeatedly argued during interviews, they have never been allowed to change a bit of the museum content and narrative. The separation between form and content inherited from Soviet models is still in place, although the opening to different aesthetic paradigms reveals at least the potential contestation of the dominant model.

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Figure 1.

Changing museum aesthetics: on the left, the Museum of Villa Clara in the 1980s follows Soviet museographic criteria. On the right, the Museum of Morón after a rearrangement in 2010 under minimalist criteria.

In terms of content and narrative, museum scripts were reworked at a national level through a process called ‘recategorization’, emphasizing local identities and relevant figures while avoiding references to the CCP or Marxism-Leninism. The utmost representative of Cuban museums, the Museum of the Revolution, stripped its exhibition of all references to previous ideological discourses. Pictures and banners of Marx, Engels, Lenin and communism and references to the ‘shared past’ with other socialist countries were removed. In the 65-page version of the script that the museum plans to implement in 2016, there is only one reference to Lenin and Marx. ⁷ The analysis of dozens of museum scripts in the ‘recategorization records’ of the National Center of Cultural Heritage (CNPC) reveals the commitment of museums throughout Cuba to incorporating local identities in their exhibitions and deploying a more inclusive national narrative in terms of identity. Usually, CNPC bureaucrats in Havana have made corrections and suggestions to the scripts sent by the museum curators. In the case of the Municipal Museum of Banes, CNPC bureaucrats were not happy with the renewed script proposal sent for review by local museologists in Banes and suggested the following requirements to approve it:

The new local narratives had to converge with a nationwide narrative following Fernando Ortiz’s (1987) concept of transculturation, the mixing of Spanish, Afro-Cuban and indigenous cultures. Although Ortiz had fled the country and therefore had been considered a traitor, his ideas have become mainstream in late socialist Cuba. For instance, the new script developed in the Municipal Museum of San Luis attempted to combine revolutionary and transculturation tropes:

The convergence of aboriginal and Spanish cultures in the natural territory of Cauto Cristo underpinned our socioeconomic development based on agriculture and livestock, which are symbols of our identity and the backdrop of our rich cultural traditions and revolutionary struggles. ⁹

In the museum of Pilón, most of the nine objectives set out by the staff for the new exhibition emphasize cultural history and local identity, while none of them refers to struggles, heroes or class identity. ¹⁰ The local is no longer seen as a particular actualization of an abstract national narrative but rather as ‘a crucial actor in shaping national culture’. ¹¹ For instance, the city of Manzanillo is no longer conceived as the product of a dialectical succession of struggles resulting in a ‘rebellious’ town, as the original script had it, but rather as ‘the symbiotic outcome of cultural traditions, multiple ideas and aesthetics, local facts events and characters and specific identitarian processes’. ¹²

Although these changes might seem compelling, a closer look reveals their continuity with previous ways of thinking about history and conceiving the nation. The new scripts simply replace the previous Marxist-Leninist jargon with idioms of cultural identity, but history, time and identity are understood in a deterministic, reified and causal fashion derived from Soviet models. The notion of a Cuban nation born from ‘transculturation’ replaces the idea that Cuba was forged through ‘revolutionary struggle’, but personal identity is similarly blurred under reified categories (indigenous, Afro-Cuban or Spanish). Meanwhile, the concept of local identity often takes on material form in the display of material culture of the ethnicized Afro-Cubans, usually in the form of religious objects from santería practices. Identity is seen as analogous to ‘tradition’ and to something the different ‘others’ possess that has to be exhibited as proof of open-mindedness. Ultimately, museums shifted from ‘demonstrating’ revolutionary commitment to ‘demonstrating’ local identity. And these signifiers – revolutionary commitment, local identity cultural history – stand for the same master that is signified, hegemonic state power and its revolutionary nationalist discourse (Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

Room devoted to the display of ‘local identities’ in the Provincial Museum of Ciego de Ávila. It exhibits Afro-Cuban musical instruments and religious objects.

The detachment between nation and Marxism-Leninism

If the symbolic detachment of the tropes of nation and Marxism-Leninism analysed in the previous section was structural and gradual, the inauguration of the Memorial to José Martí had a stronger symbolic impact and could be understood as an ideological statement of the regime. Conceived and designed for a national and international audience, it was inaugurated in 1996 at the base of the Monument to Martí in Havana’s Square of the Revolution, in a space that had remained empty since 1967 when the Museum of the Revolution moved to the presidential palace. We must take into account that the regime did not stress so pervasively the figure of Martí during three decades of revolutionary process. Although he was always a key ideological reference, Martí had actually become more or less symbolically equal to the other characters in the polytheist pantheon of the Marxist-Leninist narrative during the Sovietizing period. During the 1990s, however, the regime turned again to Martí’s ‘monotheism’. Accordingly, the state’s symbolic legitimacy was drawn from the national wars of independence against Spain led by Martí rather than from a Marxist-Leninist teleological narrative. The dramatization of Martí was another effort ‘to simulate that there is an origin, a founding substance’ (García Canclini, 1995: 110) in relation to which Cubans should shape their public identities and behaviours. Martí was conceived by the post-1990 revolutionary intelligentsia as the ‘most comprehensive and main instrument to promote national and cultural resistance, and to reformulate a more liberating project of nation and society than the previous ones’ (Martínez Heredia, 2005: 182).

Many wonder about the capacity of the Cuban revolutionary regime to adapt to new contexts. This can be partially explained by the great flexibility of revolutionary ideology, capable of detaching nation from revolution and of rejecting its immediate past. For instance, the architect and designer of the memorial to Martí, José Linares, embodies this flexibility. He studied in communist Czechoslovakia, designed hundreds of Soviet-style museums throughout Cuba and wrote papers on Soviet museology. Now, he embraces the new museology, designing the memorial in a minimalist fashion as a reaction to Soviet models. ¹³ The memorial comprises a performance hall, a room for temporary displays and a permanent exhibition presenting an in-depth account of Martí’s life that stresses his symbolic connection with Fidel Castro. This is achieved by aesthetic strategies of didactic affect that resort to a metalogic of heritage symbolism (Baker, 2010). This strategy establishes a symbolic connection between Martí and Castro through a visual grammar that emphasizes their shared concerns: the education of the youth, internationalism and anti-imperialism. The exhibition focuses on the transformation and resignification of the old Republican Civic Square into the Square of the Revolution, which symbolically sanctions the connection between Martí and Castro (Figure 3).

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Figure 3.

Castro used the Square of the Revolution as a space of political ritual to establish a new symbolic atmosphere that highlights his connection with José Martí.

A room devoted to the history of the Civic Square and the monument to Martí denounces the corruption of the ‘bourgeois’ republic with belligerent language and presents Castro as the redeemer of Cuba, highlighting the events of popular support for Castro performed in the square, already resignified as the Square of the Revolution. This Manichean narrative about the myth of origins of the revolution resembles that developed in the 1960s during the early revolutionary years. However, in what way does the narrative of the memorial differ from the narrative of that period? Fundamentally, it differs in its emphasis on memory and heritage. In the 1960s, the images of nation and revolution coalesced. The iconic relation between Martí and Castro was achieved through massive public performances and rituals in the square. In the 1990s, the symbolic link between Martí and Castro was mediated by the manufacturing of heritage through the memorial, that is, by a metarepresentation – a representation operating within a cultural process – based on heritage. The exhibition of the monument’s history and the reification of Castro’s rituals into museum displays, was aimed at providing legitimacy and real and historic (rather than symbolic) grounds for the Martí–Castro connection. The gradual abandonment of mobilization and passion as sources of legitimacy in late socialist Cuba was apparent at the inaugural ceremony of the memorial. It was no longer a public performance of the elite in front of the masses but instead a private event for the restricted elite circle. The masses were only allowed to celebrate and occupy the streets a day after (see Gonçalves, 2001).

The attempt to articulate a sense of historic depth and stability in the memorial amidst a catastrophic economic crisis was reinforced by the transformation of the symbolic landscape of the Square of the Revolution, where the memorial is situated. Here, the seasonally changing image of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara was transformed into a fixed monumental image in 1992, soon followed by a similar monument to Camilo Cienfuegos (Figure 4). This carefully arranged display of order aimed at reinforcing the legitimacy of the regime was paralleled by a gradual decrease in the frequency, size and intensity of public rituals and mass demonstrations in the Square of the Revolution, which have almost entirely disappeared since the coming to power of Raúl Castro in 2008. These transformations suggest that the revolution is not using the past and cultural heritage any longer as resources to set out new prospects and ‘routes’ for the future, but rather as a way of naturalizing its own roots and gaining a sense of legitimacy from the past. However reified, the past is now considered meaningful in itself, instead of being seen as ‘raw material’ (Baller, 1984) to build new revolutionary ideas, as it was during the Sovietizing era. In its attempt to establish a historical connection between past and present using heritage to create representations of nation and identity, the revolution is actually turning itself into heritage as the social dynamism and mobilizations of the 1960s are now the focus of an exhibition. If what is dead is often removed from social life and transferred to a museum as meta-cultural discourse (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1998), the revolution might be sanctioning its coming of age and a definitive end to the years of passion.

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Figure 4.

The changing image of Che in the Square of the Revolution was transformed into a fixed monument in 1992. A similar monument to Camilo Cienfuegos was built soon afterwards.

The transformation of ideology into heritage

The third use of heritage in the materialization of the new ideological atmosphere employs belligerent language and stresses anti-imperialist behaviour geared to countering real, perceived and imagined threats represented by US policies. Its aim is to realign certain areas of the public symbolic order with the new ideological bent of the regime. This has involved the reworking of key symbolic spaces of Havana, especially those closely related to the US, such as the Avenue of the Presidents and the Square of Maine, where the US Interests Section is located. However, as Martínez Heredia puts it, the regime is as if ‘suspended in the air in the theoretical field and in the ideology that it expresses’ (2005: 175). Because of this lack of self-confidence, the regime has resorted to a strategy that continues and expands a process initiated with the memorial to José Martí, the transformation of ideology into heritage. This paradoxical meta-cultural process reverses the prevailing heritage logic of the previous period. Heritage no longer functions as a means to convey ideological content; rather, new ideological contents are rapidly materialized to achieve heritage status. There is no longer an attempt to establish an iconic or symbolic relation between heritage representations and an ideological narrative. Instead, a belligerent discourse of antagonism regarding the US takes material form in monuments and museums stripped of all aesthetic and formal complexities. Raw ideology becomes bare heritage. The underlying logic of this process is to provide legitimacy to the regime by compressing time and history into heritage with the aim of conveying a sense of historic depth.

The revitalization of anti-imperialism and animosity against the US was channelled through the so-called Battle of Ideas, a nationwide cultural programme for the ideological and moral reinvigoration of the revolution that started after the controversy between Cuba and the US surrounding the case of Elián González. When Elián was six, his mother took him illegally to Miami, dying in the attempt. Elián survived and stayed in the US, but the claim of his father to have him back in Cuba triggered an escalation of diplomatic tension between Cuba and the US (see Bardach, 2004). In Cuba, Elián became the iconic figure of the Battle of Ideas, which focused on the ‘ideological strengthening of Cuba’s youth to resist the effects of the market and individualism’ (Kapcia, 2009: 12). In terms of heritage, the Battle of Ideas drew on a combination of the resignification of places and the creation of new museums and monuments charged with a melodramatic ethos. Although melodrama provided a metaphor for the core meaning of Castro’s speeches and public rituals since 1960, this is now emphasized in the Battle of Ideas. Melodrama portrays a severe conflict:

bringing tremendous difficulties, such as physical impairment, economic and material exploitation, dangers, and moral sufferings. Key to melodrama is the life-and-death struggle between good and evil. There is a villain and a morally pure, vulnerable victim. Then there is the hero, weak in material resources but a giant in virtue. (Aguirre, 2002: 75)

The predictable outcome of action in melodrama is the victory of the weak and good over the strong and bad, following a pre-ordained pattern. In the claim for the repatriation of Elián, the regime saw a symbol that could reassemble Cubans under a common cause (Boudreault-Fournier, 2003: 73). The heritagization of Elián’s campaign illustrates the underlying ethos of the Battle of Ideas and of post-1990 late socialist Cuba broadly. Soon after the beginning of Elián’s campaign in 2000, the government decided to build the Anti-Imperialist Platform in front of the US Interests Section and next to the Monument of Maine in Havana, historically a central symbolic area for the negotiation of US-Cuban relations. The monumental complex consists of a large long platform presided over by a huge realist statue of Martí crafted by the party-loyal artist Adrián González. Martí is holding Elián and pointing towards the US Interests Section with an accusatory finger (Figure 5). The concrete pillars are covered with plaques commemorating Cubans killed by US forces. In addition, the site can be adapted to changing degrees of antagonism towards the US. Thus, when the Interests Section building started displaying political messages on its façade in 2006, the Cuban government countered with the Monument of the Black Flags, intended to symbolize the 3400 Cuban victims of the US forces since 1959 and to hide the messages from public view. The monument exemplifies how, rather than emphasizing or accompanying loss, blaming the other can provide an ‘effective mechanism for generating heritage’ (Andrews, 2010: 130). For the developers of the Anti-Imperialist Platform:

the architectural design had to seize the privileged location of the US Interests Section, while at the same time providing easy access to the media and good aerial shots to report everything that happened there … it should also become a cultural platform (‘Tribuna anti-imperialista’, 2000: 26)

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Figure 5.

Sculpture of José Martí in the Anti-Imperialist Platform. He is holding the child Elián González and pointing to the US Interest Section.

The monument accomplished the twofold task of resignifying the space surrounding the US Interests Section and of providing an adequate setting for media coverage. In fact, the monument and the mass demonstrations in support of Elián’s repatriation held in the Platform received the expected international media coverage. The monument soon became popularly known by Cubans as the protestódromo (protestodrome). This is so because it became the preferred setting for mass mobilizations, replacing the Square of the Revolution, which was thereafter devoted to specific performances of collective belonging such as May Day, 1 January or 26 July. Few know, however, that the Anti-Imperialist Platform is a remake of a 1991 project called the Monumental Complex for Dignity, planned well before Elián was born. The project, compiled from the CNPC Archive, set out the theoretical grounds of the project in accordance with the post-1990 situation, justifying its location in the Square of Maine:

The building of the embassy of the United States, built nearby the Monument to the Victims of Maine, had become the symbol of US hegemony in Havana. The Cuban Revolution put an end to this situation. The people tore down the eagle from the monument … and the area has served on countless occasions for Cubans to manifest their opposition to aggressive and arrogant US policies. ¹⁴

The stated objectives of the 1991 project were clear: to underscore the dignity of the Cuban people, to highlight Cubanness and to symbolically ‘mark’ the presence of the revolution in the Square of Maine. Furthermore, the complex was seen as a way of reinterpreting contentious past events in relations with the US, such as the blowing up of the navy ship the USS Maine that triggered US intervention in Cuba’s war with Spain. Accordingly, the construction of the monument should become a symbol ‘to help us explain from our perspective the blowing up of the Maine’. ¹⁵ The project of the Monumental Complex for Dignity, never publicly mentioned by the authorities, is significant because it shows that the regime intelligentsia had carefully planned an official ideology for the years to come since the very beginnings of the special period in 1990. Elián’s campaign provided the necessary pretext for the reworking and implementation of the project. Now it would not only serve to mark space via heritage but also become a way to trigger new socio-political mobilizations in an effort to reinvigorate revolutionary passion. Overall, this process reflects the flexibility of the regime and its capacity to adapt the substance of history-in-the-making to the unchanging form of revolutionary melodrama. Moreover, it illustrates the regime’s attempt to disguise ideology under cultural idioms that foster a fictitious sense of political openness and participatory democracy. Accordingly, the mass assemblies, which Cubans are largely compelled to attend, were not called demonstrations but ‘open forums’ and ‘political-cultural acts’ (De la Hoz, 2000: 6). The official version holds that the agency of the campaign rests in civic social actors. Accordingly, it was ‘the role of the cultural field and Cuban artists who, together with the people, created a mass movement that entailed a shift in US public opinion towards Cuba’ (Rivas Rodríguez, 2000: 9).

The discursive promotion of the monument as a cultural endeavour cannot conceal its ideological purposes within the regime’s attempt to compress temporal and spatial coordinates to gain legitimacy. Martí is brought back to life and portrayed, not as an intellectual, an apostle or the father of the nation, but as an aggressive anti-imperialist warrior protecting Elián, who symbolizes the oppressed Cuban nation. As Quiroga and Enenbach point out in a different context, the process of the heritagization of ideology stripped of any symbolism has ‘the scent of late taste, of the end of the game’ (2011: 278). This feeling was reinforced by the attempt to further the historic depth of the new ideological discourse through the creation of a museum. Because of the new revolutionary commitment to respect local identities, the Museum of the Battle of Ideas was created in Elián’s birthplace, the city of Cárdenas. As with the Anti-Imperialist Platform, the Museum of the Battle of Ideas results from the reworking of a previous project called the Museum of the Ideological Struggle of the Cuban People, which was then renamed the Museum of the Anti-Imperialist Struggle. The project conceived the museum as a ‘school to cultivate in the spirit of the younger generations love for the fatherland, the revolution, Castro, the party and the ideals of socialism’. ¹⁶ The museum was inaugurated in 2001, and comprises four exhibition areas. The first is devoted to seven Cuban independence and revolutionary heroes, while the second provides an exhaustive account of all US aggressions towards Cuba. The third presents a detailed history of Elián’s campaign in a clear example of how the ‘bureaucratic logic of heritage appropriates individual identities and social lives and reframes them as national heritage’ (Flikke, 2006: 11). In doing so, the museum transforms ongoing social dynamics into history, a rhetorical strategy aimed at the reification of change and the fixing of the ‘correct’ reading of history (Figure 6).

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Figure 6.

Replica of José Martí’s statue in the Museum of the Battle of Ideas in Cárdenas.

The transformation of ideology into heritage becomes apparent in the central room of the museum, devoted to the display of a replica of the statue of José Martí and Elián that had been recently erected on the Anti-Imperialist Platform in Havana. According to the museum script, the statue ‘shall have the maximum hierarchy, and must, consequently, become the point of greatest attraction for the museum’. ¹⁷ In addition, large banners portray mass mobilizations in the monumental Square of the Revolution of Havana, images of the Monument to Martí with anti-imperialist quotations and a scale model of the Anti-Imperialist Platform (Figure 7).

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Figure 7.

Scale model of the Anti-Imperialist Platform on display at the Museum of the Battle of Ideas, in a room devoted to the campaign for the repatriation of Elián González.

The process that establishes a series of meta-cultural relations between heterogeneous heritage-producing devices and heritage products themselves is what I have called the transformation of ideology into heritage. For Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (2004), meta-cultural production implies the selection and conversion of selected aspects of culture and social life into heritage. This picture is complicated here by the fact that the heritagized elements are part of an ongoing heritage endeavour that exists outside the museum walls – the Anti-Imperialist Platform. The elements are not stratified features of actual cultural and social life. That is, the heritage elements on the platform and in the museum do not lead two different ‘modes of existence’ outside and inside the museum (Latour, 2007) but rather establish a series of symbolic references between them. Moreover, if the symbolic power of monuments derives from their uniqueness, having a replica of them in a museum probably undermines their significance rather than increasing it. This transforms the roles of museums, which were traditionally used in Cuba and other countries as repositories or final destinations for those elements that had lost their connection with life in the community (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1998). However, for Groys (1994), the highly ideological nature of public symbolism in communist countries would make the idea of bringing statues of revolutionary leaders after the end of communism into a museum similar to returning Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup back to the supermarket. Even if the regime has not collapsed, this is precisely what the late socialist Cuba has done.

After the thrust of the Elián campaign faded away and the case was settled, the regime has resorted to new anti-US campaigns. What matters is not the content but the belligerent attitude. The current scapegoat campaign concerns the Cuban Five, a group of Cubans accused of terrorism and imprisoned in Miami since 1998, turned by the regime into anti-imperialist heroes. The ideological message is not only constantly present in the media and public life but has also taken on heritage form in the Museum 28 of September of the Committees for the Defence of the Revolution. Since its inauguration in 2007, the museum has become a hard-line promoter of the campaign for the repatriation of the Cuban Five, which is the main focus of the exhibition. In addition, the exhibition includes objects and pictures regarding international relations with other Latin American allied countries such as Venezuela or Bolivia. Similar symbolic interventions materializing the ideology promoted in the Battle of Ideas have been carried out throughout the country, most notably in other key symbolic sites such as San Juan Hill and the Museum of the Spanish-Cuban-American War in Santiago de Cuba. This suggests that the transformation of ideology into heritage is not a transient process but rather a form of relating to the past and generating representations of identity and nation to be fostered by the regime in the years to come.

Conclusions

Do we not encounter in Cuba … a kind of negative Messianic time: the social standstill in which ‘the end of time is near’ and everybody is waiting for the Miracle of what will happen when Castro dies, and socialism collapses? (Žižek, 2001: 7)

In late socialist Cuba, ‘revolutionary mobilization conceals social stasis’ (Žižek, 2001: 7). The urgent requirement to put the heritage and museum apparatuses at the service of the new ideology reveals an effort to provide a root for personal identity in local places while the reification of ideology into material form further reflects the standstill of the Cuban regime. The post-1990 period of economic crisis and socio-political stagnation is marked by the separation of Marxism-Leninism and nation, and the revival of the figure of Martí, now portrayed as a revolutionary anti-imperialist warrior symbolically analogous to Castro. For nearly three decades, ‘nation and socialism blended to such an extent that they became exclusionary: without both, one could not be Cuban’ (Martínez Heredia, 2005: 100). Now, the shift towards local identity and the acknowledgement of real historic time represent the incipient emergence of a narrative of national reconciliation. As the different campaigns of political mobilization show, however, ‘the principal actors of Cuban culture are still in a state of memory-war, a struggle for historic legitimacy that derives from exclusive and irreconcilable narratives of a common past’ (Rojas, 2007a: 237). The symbolic civil war between Cuba and the US, and, specifically, the Cuban exile community in Miami, leads to abuses of memory on both sides and creates a scenery of permanent conflict monopolized by discourses of resentment, victimization and blame (Améry, 2001).

Late socialist Cuba plays with the ‘ethics of memory’ (Margalit, 2002) to revive past conflicts and to generate a state of uninterrupted war against a timeless and transhistoric enemy that ‘takes place within an Homeric battlefield, on which a host of interpretive options are either openly or implicitly in conflict’ (Jameson, 1983: xiii). In this sense, the Cuban regime has not come to terms with real historic time and is still trapped in a messianic interpretation of time. According to Agamben (1999), messianic temporality is distinctive of sovereign powers that place themselves outside the law and historic time to establish that there is nothing outside the rules of power. In fact, late socialist Cuba exploits a simplification of forces and fears of homogenization ‘by positing global commoditization (or capitalism, or some other such external enemy) as more real than the threat of its own hegemonic strategies’ (Appadurai, 1996: 32).

If ‘where heritage is deemed fit for re-heritagization, a specific aesthetic discourse develops’ (Bernbeck, 2013: 535), the transformation of ideology into heritage involves the creation of an aesthetic canon that endows materiality with meaning in the museum by evicting history. Because ‘heritage reduces materiality to an ahistoric inalterability’ (Bernbeck, 2013: 537), placing a monument symbolizing the nation as a whole in a museum has probably been seen by the regime as a form of reifying stasis and immutability. Late socialist Cuban revolutionary nationalism sees the nation as an unchanging essence. And if essentialism is just ‘another word for reification, and reification is all about making something material’ (Byrne and Herzfeld, 2011: 156), understanding Cuban heritage politics and policies is fundamental to making sense of the current developments and future prospects of the regime. In fact, as with any other monument, the Anti-Imperialist Platform is a cultural form involving a founding event that structures future-oriented activities (Haber, 2011). On it, the representation of a belligerent Martí holding Elián represents the timeless Cuban spirit of rebelliousness and materializes the mythical image of a weak David (Cuba) fighting a powerful Goliath (the US). But then, why place a replica of this new monument in a museum? Is this an effect of a sense of a loss of time depth and a concomitant demise of utopia? Alternatively, is it, maybe, nostalgia for the lost sense of timelessness provided by the Marxist-Leninist philosophy of history?

The oxymoron of a new monument being musealized produces a tension between the different temporalities described by Trouillot (2012): the contemporary request of ever more usable pasts and the actual production of pasts through social dynamics and history-in-the-making. Because the distance between both diminishes exponentially, Cuba might be running out of pasts to be consumed (see Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 2004). As the need for legitimacy in increasingly changing conditions speeds up, ideology in Cuba ‘becomes heritage almost before it has a chance to be lived and heritage fills the life space’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 2004: 59). This asynchrony of temporalities evinces the challenge of reuniting the messianic time of ideology and the historic time of social dynamics. The regime’s intention was to gain legitimacy with Elián’s campaign and to reify it in different forms via heritage to provide a sense of historic depth. However, the sense conveyed by the whole process is one of decadence, where the regime has reached its ‘end of history’, bringing its own ideology into the museum for contemplation. In attempting to manufacture an unchanging and timeless Martí as a national symbol, the outcome has been precisely the opposite, a sense that heritage and the ideas it represents are vulnerable, changing and transient. The attempt to ground ideology in a monumental time implying permanence, eternity and the disappearance of temporality (Herzfeld, 2006: 129) has failed because of the short time-span between the processes of monumentalization and the musealization of the monument. Seemingly, late socialist Cuba is not only running out of pasts but also out of prospective futures to be drawn from the ever-changing symbolic and ideological repository of the revolution.