The socialist Cuba viewed by the romanian writers

Abstract

The Cuban Revolution was enthusiastically received in The Romanian People’s Republic and the two nations’ similar policies contributed to several bilateral agreements, one of which focused on cultural exchanges. As a result of these agreements, Romanian writers started travelling to Cuba and their Cuban counterparts travelled to Romania, allowing several Romanian writers to visit and write about the Caribbean country. This article presents the Romanian writers’ travels to Cuba and analyses the texts they wrote about their Cuban experience, concluding that these texts compose a very heterogeneous corpus, both from a generic and from an ideologic point of view, in what regards their degree of support of the socialist leaders’ ideology. Another outstanding feature of these texts is that the writers’ travel diaries about Cuba do not always show the changes in the official ideological discourse, or the changes in cultural policy that affected socialist Romania. Without exhausting all the questions raised by the theme, this insight into the relations between the Romanian and Cuban cultural institutions highlights the similarities between cultural policies in the old Socialist Block and in 1960-1980’s Cuba.