After the Cuban state formally dropped its promotion of atheism in favor of official secularity in 1991, the Papacy successfully negotiated the right of the Catholic Church to edit and publish theological newsletters like this one, Vida Cristiana [Christian Life]. One goal was to recover the discursive public space that had long defined personal values as extensions of Marxism. Another was to delink individual happiness from the “triumphs of the Revolution” that Fidel Castro’s speeches, schools, media, and laws had so long fused together. Yet, to anyone accustomed to reading the traditional ideological discourse of the Communist state, it was surely hard to tell the difference in Vida Cristiana. Ironic, even bizarre examples abound of the editors’ outright imitation of classic state terms once used to inspire voluntary, unpaid labor for the state, such as “jornada” [work week]. Here, jornada had a spiritual purpose: it was a week-long call to prayer for the expansion of clerical ranks. The same editorial also justifies “one-man” paths to salvation, invoking Jesus Christ as the “one man” who could bring that about, as opposed to the apparent one-man, nearly forty-year rule of Fidel Castro himself. Similarly, page two of the newsletter examines whether “freedom” and “happiness” are possible or just another unreachable utopía. Discursive parallels between the Church and the state thus presented Vida Cristiana’s calls for “change” as only half-baked. Here, editors even went as far as to endorse “humanism”, the very ideological code on which Fidel Castro had relied in 1959 to convince millions of Cubans he would never adopt a communist state—only to do so a year later. Collection of Lillian Guerra.
