The first teeth of El caimán barbudo (1966-1967)

Abstract

The present article approaches the cultural controversies developed in Cuba at the beginning of El caimán barbudo -the cultural magazine of the Union of Young Communists- especially during its first editing team, with evident influence of the intellectuality arisen from the work of the Philosophy Department of La Habana University.

For such purpose, this text analyses the debates of its director Jesús Díaz, published in the magazines Bohemia (1966) and La Gaceta de Cuba (1966), with Ana María Simó (co director of El Puente publishing house) and with Jesús Orta Ruiz, well known as El Indio Naborí. Besides, this work recovers the controversy between the editing team of El caimán barbudo and the poet Heberto Padilla surrounding the Lisandro Otero´s novel Pasión de Urbino (1966) and Tres tristes Tigres (1967), a novel belonging to the already emigrated, in those times, Guillermo Cabrera Infante.

Therefore, this article inquires about heterogeneity that distinguished the cultural practice of the island in the period mentioned before, as well as highlights the confrotational eargerness that caracterized debates between art and politics established by the different aesthetic ideas integrated to the revolutionary process.