this potential to be realized in Cuba and not in Sweden? I asked Carlos and Donna, Was there something fundamentally different about Cuba’s socialist ideology? Or had evil people simply taken control of socialism in Cuba? “Neither,” said Carlos. “It’s because of power. They have total power. Think what you yourself would do if you had total power over everyone.” Not a pretty picture, I admit. And I’m not even a socialist. Socialists think of society as a giant, sticky wad. And no part of that gum ball—no intimate detail of your private life, for instance—can be pulled free from the purview of socialism. Witness Sweden’s Minister for Consumer, Religious, Youth and Sport Affairs. Socialism is inherently totalitarian in philosophy. The Swedish socialists have exercised some degree of self-restraint. The Cuban socialists haven’t bothered to. In Cuba, the authorities have a Ken Starr grand-jury-like right to poke into every aspect of existence, no matter how trivial. Imagine applying marxist theory to rock and roll, this being what the Union de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba, or UNEAC, the official labor organization for creative types, is supposed to do. Karl Marx said in Das Kapital, “Nothing can have value without being an object of utility. If it be useless, the labor contained in it is useless, cannot be reckoned as labor, and cannot therefore create value.” Roll over Beethoven, and how. Professor Dr. Jose Loyola, who was, according to his business card, “ Compositor y Musicologo ” and “ Vice Presidente Primero ” of UNEAC, talked to me about utility. Specifically, he talked about trying to get Cuban elements into rock and roll to offset imperialist U.S. influences. Sex, drugs, and cha-cha- cha? Professor Dr. Loyola’s office was in a splendid nineteenth-century town house, the kind of digs that should belong to a rock star. Although I had visited an actual Cuban rock star, Santiago Feliú¶¶ (who I assume is a major genius because I couldn’t find any of his cassettes or CDs, and the good things are always missing from the shops in Cuba). Anyway, Feliú lived in what looked like a graduate student’s off-campus apartment. The UNEAC town house had been spoiled by the cheap partitions and wobbly chrome-leg chairs loved by bureaucracies everywhere, and by photographs of Fidel where art used to hang. While we sat in the part of the former dining room that was now the professor-doctor’s stuffy office, the power went out repeatedly.
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