Abstract
Drawing its inspiration from the writings that Sartre dedicated to the Cuban revolution after his 1960 visit to the island, this article discusses his understanding of the relationship between socialism and freedom. The importance of these texts, which were never published in book form in France, goes beyond their specific analysis of the Cuban revolutionary process. They offer a good opportunity to deepen the study of themes central to Sartre’s thought and help us understand the complex connection that Sartre made between his criticism of colonialism and imperialism, and his vision of a socialist society that, by being centered on man and freedom, would not make the critical errors of so-called “real socialism.”
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Notes
The most important texts are the following: (a) “Ideologìa y Revolución,” published in Spanish on March 21, 1960 in a special issue of Lunes de Revolución entitled “Sartre visita a Cuba,” which also contained the following text: “Sartre conversa con los intellectuales cubanos en la casa de Lunes.” The latter text and “Ideologìa y Revolución” were translated into English and published in Studies on the Left (vol. I, n. 3, 1960, p. 7–16), but never appeared in French. Both were also published in the volume Sartre visita a Cuba, printed in 1960 by Ediciones R., Havana. This volume also contains the reportage “Huracàn sobre el azùcar,” the Spanish translation of the series of articles published in France-Soir from June 28 to July 15, 1960 (Ouragan sur le sucre: un grand reportage a Cuba de Jean-Paul Sartre sur Fidel Castro). Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka illustrate its genesis: “Eager to publicize what he had seen in Cuba, Sartre suggested that France-Soir publish “Ouragan sur le sucre.” France-Soir accepted and gave the reportage a good deal of publicity, maintaining in each issue that it did not endorse some of Sartre’s opinions. De Beauvoir (1963), in La force des choses, gave the following explanation: ‘He had undertaken an enormous work on Cuba, which surpassed by far the limits of the report proposed by France-Soir. Lanzmann helped it to cut the articles.’ This manner of proceeding explains certain weaknesses that appear in the second reading of a report that was, at the time, particularly effective in the degree to which it presented to the larger public historical and economic information not usually found in the general press. The titles are by Claude Lanzmann.” (Contat and Rybalka 1970, 60/342). Sartre refused to publish these texts in book form in France. There are various editions of the reportage in Spanish (Huracan sobre el azùcar, Buenos Aires: Editorial Uno, 1960; Lima, Editorial Prometeo, 1961; La Habana: Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, Departamento de Asuntos Culturales); English (Sartre on Cuba, New York: Ballantine Books 1961); and also, recently, Italian (Visita a Cuba, Bolsena: Massari, with an introduction by Gabriella Paolucci, 2005). There are also a number of other Sartrean texts regarding the Cuban revolution and the island in general that are, however, of minor importance. They are: (1) “Cuba es una democracia directa,” televised press conference of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir at the Hotel Nacional in Havana, in Revolución, March 11, 1960. (2) “Sartre y Beauvoir por la Provincia de Oriente” interview article by Lisandro Otero, in Revolución, February 27, 1960. (3) Interview with Sartre on Cuba from March 11, 1960, circulated by the agency Prensa Latina, of which nothing is available except a typewritten text in Spanish, conserved in the archives of L’Express (Contat and Rybalka 1970, 60/336). (4) Discussion with the students of the University of Havana, March 14, 1960, in Revolución, March 15, 1960. Responding to some of the students’ questions, Sartre critiqued bourgeois individualism and pointed out certain traits of the Cuban personality (joy, sense of responsibility, the dynamism of the blacks). He also asserted that the Cuban revolution was original compared to both the French and the Russian revolutions because its theory came from practice. At the end, Sartre posed his own questions to the students. (5) Press conference held in New York by Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir upon their return from Cuba, in France-Observateur, March 24, 1960, in which Sartre asserted that “The regime born of the Cuban revolution is a direct democracy.... The Cuban revolution is a real revolution.” (cit. in Contat and Rybalka 1970, 60/341); (6) “Cuba, la révolution exemplaire,” interview with Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir by Jean Zielger, in Dire, Genève, n. 4, August 1960, p. 13. The themes already developed in the other texts on Cuba are taken up again here. (7) “L’assaut contre Castro,” in L’Express, April 20, 1961; an extensive interview carried out after the attempt to land at Playa de Giron (Contat and Rybalka 1970, 61/361). (8) Interview on the occasion of the Cultural Congress of Havana, January 1968, in Granma, January 1968; some extracts in French in La Voix Ouvrière, January 12, 1968. Sartre had accepted the Cuban government’s invitation to participate in the congress, but illness prevented him from attending. (9) Message to the Cultural Congress of Havana, in Granma, January 21, 1968. There are other less important texts and interviews published by the Cuban press during Sartre’s visit to the island revealing the warm welcome the French philosopher received in Cuba. A thorough analysis of such a large and interesting documentation would require another article.
Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from French into English are my own.
“At the end of the year, passing through Cuba again after a trip to Brazil, Sartre would notice that the regime had stiffened under foreign threat: Cuba’s party was over” (Contat and Rybalka 1970: 344).
Herberto Padilla, one of Cuba’s leading poets, was arrested and imprisoned in Havana on March 20 1971. Some prominent European and Latin American writers, “supporters of the principles and objectives of the Cuban Revolution,” wrote a letter to Fidel Castro where they expressed their “disquiet as a result of the imprisonment of the poet and writer Herberto Padilla” and asked him “to re-examine the situation which this arrest has created.” They also underline that “the use of repressive measures against intellectuals and writers who have exercised the right of criticism within the revolution can only have deeply negative repercussions among the anti-imperialists forces of the entire world, and most especially of Latin America, for which the Cuban Revolution is a symbol and a banner.” The letter was published in Le Monde on April 9 1971.
As far as I know, neither the critical nor the bibliographical literature in French has ever carefully considered these texts, with the exception of the work of Contat and Rybalka (1970); nor does the Anglo-Saxon literature, which even includes the previously cited English edition of the majority of the Cuban writings (Sartre 1961c), appear to have ever dedicated much attention to the texts. One exception is Aronson (1980), who dedicates several pages to the matter in his book on Jean-Paul Sartre.
“On his way to Paris, Franqui, the editor of the greatest newspaper in Cuba, ‘Revolución,’ came to me with some of his friends, one of whom spoke French. He had black hair and a moustache and looked typically Spanish; he told me with authority that it was our duty to go and see a revolution on the march with our own eyes. We had sympathy for them, but Franqui’s offer left us indifferent [...]. In reality, our apathy had another cause: the Algerian War blocked our view. But the rest of the world existed, and we should have taken notice. What Franqui had said was true: the Cuban experience concerned us all” (De Beauvoir 1963: 464).
The atmosphere surrounding Sartre’s trip to Cuba appears in some of the papers given at the international conference held at La Habana in November 2005 to celebrate Sartre’s centennial. The conference, entitled “Sartre a Cuba,” was organized by the Casa de Altos Estudios “Don Fernando Ortiz,” Universidad de La Habana (Torres-Cuevas 2005). The book, introduced by Graziella Pogolotti and Eduardo Torres Cuevas, includes “Huracán sobre el azúcar,” the text “Ideología y Revolucíon,” and some pictures taken by Korda during the Sartre’s stay in Cuba. The book also includes a collection of texts on Sartre written by Cuban intellectuals.
During his visit, Sartre also attended a performance of La putain respectueuse (Sartre 1946a) at the National Theatre with Castro. His comments on the production, which he judged to be excellent, and the performances, about which he harbored some reservations, in particular that of the actor who played the senator, are cited in an article by Humberto Arsenal published in “Revolución” on March 19, 1960, in which the short declaration written by Sartre in the golden book of the National Theatre is reproduced (Contat and Rybalka 1970: 344).
After Évian, Sartre (1962), with his usual polemical strength, would write in Les somnambules: “It is right to say that this is not the moment to rejoice: for 7 years France has been a crazed dog dragging a saucepan tied to its tail, more frightened every day by its own noise. None today is ignorant of the fact that we have ruined, starved, and massacred a country of poor people, trying to force it to its knees. It has remained standing. But at what price!”
In Le colonialisme est un système (Sartre 1956), the philosopher warned against mystification néo-colonialiste and analyzed the economic mechanisms of colonial exploitation from the nineteenth century to the present. The article concluded with these words: “The only thing we can and must attempt – and today it is essential – is to fight beside [the Algerian people] to liberate both the Algerians and the French from colonial tyranny.”
Contat and Rybalka (1970: ivi, 361) observe that in this celebrated text, “one of the most violent that he wrote,” Sartre “found the most radical and literary effective formulation” for the positions he had assumed in the preceding years regarding the colonial question: “that of political and practical solidarity with the Algerian combatants. This position is generalized here together with the struggles of underdeveloped countries and it can be said that [...] it made an important contribution to the creation of the “third worldism” of the intellectual revolutionary youth in France.”
The Appel of the Comité pour le Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire, the organism created by Sartre and others in 1948, clarified the context in which the following statement was born: “Between democratic and capitalist corruption, the weaknesses and flaws of a certain social democracy, and the limitations of communism in its Stalinist form, we think that a grouping of free men for revolutionary democracy is capable of making the principles of freedom and human dignity take a different path, joining them to the fight for social revolution” (Sartre 1948a).
The first staging of Les mains sales occurred in Paris on April 2, 1948. It is a political drama about the murder of a leading politician set in a fictional Country, Illiria, between 1943 and 1945. The major point is not about finding the killer, which is known from the beginning, but his real motivations. The play’s main theme is the problem of individual responsibility in political praxis.
The only exception would be the relationship between Sartre and the Partito Comunista Italiano (the Italian Communist Party), which he cultivated in the following years, above all through habitual visits with the intellectuals of that party, such as Alicata and Rossanda. He would also maintain close relations with Togliatti, after whose death he would write an obituary in the pages of the party’s newspaper, L’Unità, significantly entitled “My Friend Togliatti” (cit. in Pompeo Faracovi and Teroni 1987).
“For years the Marxian intellectual believed he served his own party by violating the experience, leaving out the embarrassing particulars, grossly simplifying the dates and most of all conceptualizing the event before having studied it [...]. The problem is no longer studying the facts from the general perspective of Marxism to enrich knowledge and illuminate action: the analysis consists only in disposing of the particular, in forcing the meaning of events, in distorting certain facts or even inventing them, in order to find, underneath, immutable and fetishized ‘synthetic notions’ as their essence” (Sartre 1957c: 29, 31).
The political and theoretical limits of Les Communistes et la Paix were discussed in an important text by Merleau-Ponty (1955), who accused Sartre of “ultra-Bolshevism” and observed that the Sartrean theory of the political “leader” aroused “painful memories.”
As Sartre himself wrote, looking back on that period, in his essay on Merleau-Ponty (Sartre 1961b), it’s not easy “to be the fellow traveler of someone who has not invited you on the trip.”
Aronson credits the Cuban Writings as characterizing the fourth phase of Sartre’s political development. The first phase was “the pre-Cold war socialist-neutralist period of Les Main Sales.” The second one was “the phase of alignment with the Communist heralded by le Diable et le bon Dieu,” while the third was “the hopeful period after Stalin’s death, when Sartre became a Marxist and an independent and critical fellow traveller, attacking Soviet intervention in Hungary.” Finally, “his turn towards the Third World at the time of the Algerian War.” Each stage, as Aronson notes, “yielded a book: Entretiens sur la politique, Les Communistes et la paix, Le Fontôme de Staline, and Sartre on Cuba” (Aronson 1980: 216).
The question also has precise methodological consequences that go beyond the analytical intents of this article. The underlying theoretical premise of Questions de Méthode, in fact, is that the study of man and society cannot occur in the form, or from the perspective, of an explanation that causatively reduces every event to its antecedent and every whole to its own simple components. Such a study must take place instead as comprehension, according to the lesson of phenomenology and Gestalt psychology (Sartre 1957c, and later in 1960a).
In doing so, we see that Sartre seems to be more interested in exalting the freshness and spontaneity of the Cuban experience rather than trying to understand it fully, thus perhaps losing himself in the phenomenological description of the reality. As Aronson argues, he seems to reinvent the historical situation and not actually to confront it (Aronson 1980). Maybe it is not a problem that involves only the Cuban writings, but all the political ones, as we saw in the case of Les Communistes et la paix.
His portraits of the young revolutionary leaders, including most importantly Castro and Guevara, are especially strong – “No one in power is old: the average minister is 29 years of age,” ran the title of his article of July 9, 1960. The encounter between the philosopher of freedom and Marxian humanism and the unusual president of the state bank, who signed banknotes with a simple Che and was constantly preoccupied with placing the creation of the “new man” at the center of the revolutionary stage, remains immortalized in a famous photograph by Korda. The photographer shot Guevara just as he was lighting a cigar for Sartre in the sober office of the Banco Nacional. The philosopher was immediately impressed by Che Guevara’s personality, whereas the young doctor, on his part, found himself face–to–face for the first time with one his favorite authors, whose books he had read from the time he was young. Sartre painted Che Guevara as an educated and tireless revolutionary, devoted day and night to finding solutions to make the revolution successful. “Guevara,” he wrote in the article that appeared in France–Soir on July 10, 1960, “passes for a man of great culture. And you can see it. One understands immediately that he has, behind every sentence, a golden reserve. But an abyss separates this broad knowledge, the general knowledge of a young doctor devoted to the study of the social sciences out of inclination, out of passion, and the precise and technical knowledge that is indispensable to a state banker. He never talks of this, if not to joke about his change of profession. But you can feel the intensity of the effort. You can see it everywhere on this calm and restful face. Even the hour of this encounter is unusual: midnight.” They would never have another occasion to meet after Sartre’s stay in Cuba, but the writer would never forget the strength that emanated from this young revolutionary who remained for him a symbol of an experience that shunned dogmatism and relied on an autonomous search for an original path towards socialism and freedom. After Che Guevara’s assassination, in an interview with Prensa Latina, Sartre would refer to him as the “most complete man of his times” (Sartre 1967).
Castro himself seems to have explicitly asked Sartre not to make any reference to the ideological implications of what was happening in Cuba (De Beauvoir 1963); moreover, a public declaration of Cuba’s socialist character would not take place until the following year.
“But Sartre went much further than tactics alone dictated. Besides trying to protect and support Cuba, he also reconsidered the relationship between theory and practice. In Cuba, he claimed to have found revolutionaries whose actions stemmed from the concrete situation that they confronted, not from abstract and general theories. ‘It’s not principles or opinions which count,’ he affirmed. What counted were necessities of the situation” (Aronson 1980: 238).
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I am very grateful to Sandra Teroni for her valuable suggestions and the information she has shared with me.
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Paolucci, G. Sartre’s humanism and the Cuban revolution. Theor Soc 36, 245–263 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-007-9031-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-007-9031-3