Abstract/Summary

For commentators on cultural life, the decade of the 1970s is almost unanimously viewed as unremittingly grey: the decade opened with the highly controversial 1971 Congreso de Educación y Cultura, and continued with the infamous quinquenio gris. However, as Jorge Fornet’s recent study El 71. Anatomía de una crisis (2013) makes clear, the 1970s was not only the decade of the sovietisation of culture; it was also the decade in which clashing endogenous and exogenous models of literature included many perspectives that advocated cultural decolonisation as the most urgent project. This chapter examines the complexity of cultural production, regulation and reception during the first half of this decade through a close reading of discourses of decolonisation in the most infamous policy document produced in the 1970s, the closing resolution of the 1971 Congreso de Educación y Cultura, and relates those debates to contemporary cultural policy in Cuba.