Identidades in English No 4, December 2014 | Page 65

only their own successes and failures. Even so,
the official system also feeds off of new dreams
in its never-ending system of human recycling.
A Little Bit of History
The idea of independent art held by the Revolution, with its flourishing arts schools, perhaps did
not exist in any definite form during the first ten
years of the Revolution’s triumph, a time when it
was confidently believed that social changes were
well on their way to renovating everything that
was dead. The Revolution permitted anything that
was necessary for that to happen (these schools
were plagued by the same rigid structures that
have already, traditionally, shown that one cannot
contain a phenomenon as alive and expansive as
art). Not even the speech Fidel’s Words to the Intellectuals (1961), nor the nighttime hunting of
young people with long hair or miniskirts, managed to uproot the aspirations of self-expression
and thought.
The Padilla case (1971) should have made perfectly clear what was “permissible,” at least for
that moment’s intelligentsia. In case there were
any doubts, the subsequent process of “parametration” [severe restriction of movements and
activities]* took care of meticulously “purifying”
the art that flowed through official channels and
while simultaneously jogging the memory of
those who were rebellious via performative, punitive measures. Yet, the events that took place in
the Peruvian Embassy and the Mariel Boatlift
(1980) were catalyzing in two ways: they helped
the State get rid of a large number of non-conformists (Reinaldo Arenas was one of the artists
who left during that bleeding of population) and
painted the horizon for those who didn’t know,
hadn’t lived, were not aware of the limits, and
were energetically raising up the new banner of
freedom. These were the intellectuals and artists
during a cellophane-wrapped, shiny decade. They
had come to believe that it was possible to achieve
one of the important ideals of the ancient
Greeks—Paideia—“an educational platform centered on elements of one’s upbringing that gave
people a truly human character, making everyone

capable of exercising his or her civic responsibilities.”
The scene in which the Hip Hop Movement
evolved was much more convulsive: the Special
Period (1990-?), the moral and economic crisis
that took place after the collapse of the socialist
camp; the sinking of the 13 de Marzo ferry, and
the Maleconazo uprising (1994) produced another mass exodus. This may be why rappers enjoyed relative freedom. Yet, once F