Cruel Modernity by Franco Jean

Author:Franco, Jean
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Duke University Press

Like many things that have happened to me in my life to which I've never found a common thread and which I decided to forget, because, on the one hand, their solution doesn't put food on the table and, on the other, why go looking for a tiger without stripes. Being a communist and having an understanding of the problems of society is enough for me. When the people make their revolution, there will be time to delve into the mysteries of nature and death. (395)

This self-censorship, the determination to ignore all that escaped Marxist analysis, may well have been what kept him mentally stable, but it also prevented him from understanding that it was often not science but human weakness that motivated his comrades' actions. After being recaptured in 1934, he was released and then forced to report every two weeks to the police, which made him suspect in the eyes of his comrades. This he describes as one of the worst blows. “The bullet and machete blows are marks that fill me with pride but these ones I'm talking about are scars deep in my soul and maybe even in my ideology, and that's why I prefer to hide them, to bury them off someplace where no one will see them. Someplace where they can't hurt” (401).

Whereas Mármol stresses the confusion, the indecisions and dubious tactics, and describes the heroism of individuals, the editor and critic Roque Dalton, speaking from the viewpoint of the Leninist intellectual of the 1960s, judges Mármol's account to be simplistic, revealing only a crude knowledge of Marxism and inadequate analysis. Thus, Miguel Mármol is not only about the events of 1932 but also a judgment on those events viewed in the light of the Cuban Revolution as seen by Dalton and laced with his own view of communist causality and his prejudices. For instance, in his introduction, Dalton comments critically on Mármol's language, which mixes “that everyday-colloquial, almost folkloric expression, the gamut of popular speech with a style of language charged with the catchwords and clichés of traditional Marxist-Leninists of Latin America; and even with a new kind of political-literary language of undeniable formal quality” (31). In a revealing comment he admits that he had refrained from imposing stylistic uniformity on the text, although he himself had to make an effort

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