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.Once the image of the communist parties was questioned and thegravitational force exerted by them began to diminish, the entire debateabout the role of the intellectual in society resurfaced.It was a mixture ofinsecurity and arrogance on the part of the intellectuals themselves: inse-curity, as  safe roles inside the Party structure began to vanish rapidly andwere not replaced by other, similar political organizations; arrogance, asthe intellectual aimed to take on a revolutionary role that neither theParty nor its natural constituency, the working class, appeared to live upto.Ultimately, the defining moment of the New Left was also a criticaltest of independence of thought and action as the endemic dogmatism ofthe Party drove many away either voluntarily or by force.Thus, the 1960s bore witness to a phenomenon never matched since:the rise of the figure of the politically committed, yet independent,intellectual.In France, this process was explained by the lack of spacefor intellectuals, already mobilized against the Algerian war, to partici-pate meaningfully in the working-class institutions (Ross, 1991).Thereal separation of intellectuals from the communist parties was paral-leled by the equally increasing reflection of this separation in debates,self-definitions, and intellectuals search for a new identity and role.Sartre typified the characteristics of this new version of the committedintellectual.Clearly positioned on the Left, but outside the organizationthat until the late 1950s had been the point of reference for left146 Cuba and Western Intellectuals since 1959intellectuals, Sartre appealed to a historically specific understanding ofcommitment advocating a role in terms of engagement with the politicsand conflicts of the time.The new form of intellectual engagement typical of the New Leftintellectual came in the form of interest in and commitment to the ThirdWorld.Two alternative forms of commitment dominated.The first wasto defend the liberation of the ex-colonial world according to universalprinciples of justice and the right to self-determination.The second was acommitment to the Third World that was born out of rewritten Marxistorthodoxies.These two general ideological strands, though on the Left,included an enormous variety of intellectual motivations for showingsupport for the anti-colonial and, later in the decade, third-worldist strug-gles.It included support for the Third World, on purely ethical grounds,against what was seen as the abuse of power of the West.These positionswere very close to some Christians concern for the fate of the oppressedthat would later feed into the discourse of Liberation Theology, mostly inthe Third World and with particular strength in Latin America.Mostimportant, however, was the Marxist contribution to this form of com-mitment that discovered in the Third World a new and more deservingsubject for carrying out a global revolution (Crouzet, 1963).As previous chapters demonstrated, the Cuban Revolution typified theNew Left s interest in the Third World, making this particular example avalid case study that fits in with the general trend of exchange betweenintellectuals in the First and Third Worlds.This trend went from mutualattraction, followed by varying degrees of cooperation and exchange, toeventual separation.The reciprocal attraction between the European NewLeft and the Cuban Revolution may be explained by a number of factors.First, the Cuban revolutionary experiment openly appealed for the partic-ipation of radical intellectuals out of favor with the state in their respec-tive countries.Second, they shared disdain for Communist dogmatism.Thus, since the Cuban example fed the European New Left s sense ofidentity as distant from Communist doctrine and political practice andthe New Left stimulated revolutionary Cuba s intellectual need to  thinkitself in ways that went beyond established orthodoxies, both partners inthis exchange justified each other s existence.It was no coincidence thenthat the issue of the role of the intellectual became a point of confluence.The type of commitment to the Third World expressed by Europeanintellectuals did not last any longer than the practical attempts to carryout worldwide revolutions themselves.By the early 1970s, Cuba nolonger was considered fashionable in New Left circles.Although explana-tions vary, most commentators today agree that the failed commitment tothe Third World of the early 1970s was a turning point in the long-termCuba and the Third World 147decline of the political influence and commitment of intellectuals(Hourmant, 1997; Lacoste, 1985; Liauzu, 1986; Schalk, 1991; Sorum,1977).Hourmant and Schalk offer specific case studies of the connectionbetween the Third World and intellectuals in France and the UnitedStates, respectively.Hourmant explores the fascination with Chinaamong French intellectuals in the 1960s as an example of Third Worldcommitment and argues that the decline of the Chinese revolutionarymyth came in the 1970s, accompanied by the disappearance of theintellectual star and his prophetic political forecasting (Hourmant,1997).Alternatively, Schalk studies in depth the parallels between Algeriaand Vietnam from the point of view of the responses of committedintellectuals to ascertain  how [these responses] related to the status andpossibly the survival of the intellectual class (Schalk, 1991: 273) [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]