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Diana and Beverley: What does the end of the cold war, the breakdown of the socialist bloc, and the political-intellectual "crisis of Marxism" mean for you personally, and for the project that the project that Casa de las Americas in particular and the Cuban Revolution in general represent?
Retamar: Speaking of one of his ancestors, Borges once said that he happened to live in hard times, like everyone else. For the countries of the South, for the Cuban Revolution, for the project of Casa de las Americas, which I direct, and of course for myself also, since for ethical reasons I have no other desire than to share the destiny of my people, these are undoubtedly hard times. Not so long ago, we managed to experience wonderful moments of struggle and hope on a worldwide scale; you would have had to be an adult Cuban before and after 1959, inside or outside Cuba, to have felt the full extent of it. But now these are the times we have to live in. That we deserve with our present conduct the privilege of those prior moments and of all those similar ones that will return one day: this must be our motto.
Given that a probable outcome of the so-called cold war might have been a nuclear hot war, who in their right mind regrets its end? But what has followed has been something less than a pax perpetua. The invasion of Panama, the equally unwarranted invasion of Iraq, and the Gulf War, all of which developed in the absence of the containment facto represented by the Soviet Union, are proof enough of that. The negative side of the end of the cold war is that it has given a free hand to U.S. imperialism- I know the term is outdated, but I'm not so much concerned with the term but with what it represents, which has clearly gotten worse. I don't think the dead in Panama, Iraq, Somalia, or Sarajevo are comforted by knowing that they were killed after the cold war, or that they survived the danger of nuclear annihilation. One thinks of the verses of the Mexican song: "The day she was killed/ Rosa was lucky;/ of the three shots / only one was deadly" [El dia que la mataron / Rosita estaba de suerte; / de tres tiros que le dieron / no mas una era muerte"] Nor can the end of the cold war be much comfort either to the millions of human beings starving to death or dying of incurable diseases in those countries where misery continues to rule.
As for the Great Powers, the cold war has been supplanted by a cold peace..."