Ideologema de la modernidad en el discurso de las vanguardias cubanas

Abstract

Under the common denomination of Cuban avant-garde, the present article gathers texts of versatile subject matters and poetics: Regino Pedroso’s “Salutación fraterna del taller mecánico” (1927), Manuel Navarro Luna’s Surco (1928), Mariano Brull’s Poemas en menguante (1928) and Ramón Guirao’s Bailadora de rumba (1928). Nevertheless, all of them are characterised by the same avant-garde attitude consisting in searching for novelty and, above all, they reveal a similar “structure of feeling” (Williams 1977). The euphoria, proper for the first decades of independence (always controlled by the “the giant with seven-league boots”) was replaced by confusion and disorientation experienced after the economic depression of 1920, disagreement with corruption, clientelism and other blights on the Republic’s political life, and with the idea of modernity reduced to material progress. The article studies the ways in which modern avant-garde Cuban literature gains insights into objective factors of modernity. It also aims at explaining why Cuban avantgarde writers, instead of internalizing modern fantasies and dreams (Berman 1988), try to generate compensatory constructions which pretend to abolish them (Cros 1997).