Blas Roca Calederio, born on July 22 in 1908, was a Cuban communist revolutionary and radical journalist. Roca helped lead the 1933 general strike that ousted Gerardo Machado, and served in Fidel Castro’s revolutionary government.
Born into a poor family, Roca began working at age eleven, shining shoes. According to Castro, Roca was already a prominent communist organizer in the province of Oriente at 21 years old.
At age 25, Roca helped lead a two week general strike that ousted dictator Gerardo Machado. By 1936, he was head of the Cuban Communist Party and began serving as a politican, helping author the 1940 Cuban Constitution.
Under Roca’s leadership, Cuban communists were instrumental in providing an organizational and ideological structure for Castro’s revolution, as well as playing a pivotal role using the party’s long-standing ties with the Soviet Union to promote increasingly closer ties during the early days of the revolution.
In 1961, Blas Roca, leading a party delegation, presented a Cuban flag to Nikita Khrushchev during a meeting of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Roca served on the first central committee and politburo of the new Communist Party of Cuba, founded in 1965.
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There’s a new essay of literary criticism making the rounds. I’m upset about it because I think it’s very bad and I don’t know what to do about that
how so?
This is maybe a bit inside baseball, but Christian Lorentzen’s review essay about some recent sociological books about literature production is upsetting me. This is because he’s aiming at the right issue, which is that these books follow a reductive, cynical and capitalist theory of literature under the guise of empiricism, but what he puts up against that is just nostalgia for mediocre post-war “intellectuals” and second-rate romanticism. Like, he states that publishers consume literature instead of producing it (because novels apparently just spring fully-formed from the secret source of writers) – how naive is that! And his whole pose of defending intellectualism from the cynical rationality of career academics rings hollow to me when he’s putting CIA-funded antisemites on a pedestal while writing a Substack on the side. You can’t act like you’re defending literature from the vagaries of our times when your political analysis is that blind. Basically, he’s a smug git and I never want to hear from him again.
ah this one, i’ve read it. Seemed meandering both-sides nonsense to me.
probably similar comrades twitter opinion to your liking (?)
Yeah, Malcolm Harris is correct that both of these “sides” are terribly unconvincing and unhelpful, while Marxism provides resources for thinking about art as a commodity and as something that resists commodification (dialectics!). I just think that one could press Lorentzen harder on the disparity between the ideals he espouses and his lack of literary and theoretical sophistication.
Violence?