Content area
The Dissertation studies the discursive foundation and the first eleven years (1960-1971) of the Cuban cultural journal Casa de las Americas. The research discusses the modes of spatialization and the moral significations of the literary and cultural debates which permeate the discourse and the form of the journal during these years. The institutional discourse of the journal is governed by a series of metaphors which emphasize the house-like quality of the journal's cultural operations. These spatial series frame the constitution of the journal as a literary genre, signaling it out in the Cuban public sphere as the suitable place for the diffusion of Latin American cultural texts. The Dissertation contextualizes the cultural task of Casa de las Americas within the Cuban cultural institution. It also traces the discursive homologies and the figures of speech shared by the journal's editorial declarations and some of its representative texts and those of the Cuban revolutionary public sphere of the sixties. Casa de las Americas is read in this study as a public logbook which recorded those debates concerned with the place of Latin American literature and the Latin American intellectual in the public sphere. The journal is read together with key texts of the cultural politics of the Cuban Revolution.
Casa de las Americas assembles in its internal organization, its declarations and its distribution of literary genres and topics through the sections, a spatial and moral version both of Latin American culture and the Latin Americanist discourse privileged by the institution. During the period under study, the diversity of collaborators and proposals which comprises the journal draws up an image of Latin America as a movable territory, pierced with tensions, temporalities and poetic struggles which seemed to "prefigure" the advent of the Continent's definitive political utopia. But by the late sixties and early seventies, and in spite of the initial dialogical emphases of the publication, the cultural discourse and the intellectual models articulated by Casa de las Americas produced a moralist and highly belligerent conception of Latin American culture and its literary specificities.