When the military government junta took power in a coup on July 11, 1963, it was already notorious that our intellectual and popular sectors had surrendered to the influence of the Cuban revolution in many areas, including culture and art. Just in the last days of October, a missile crisis broke out in the Caribbean, and Cuba was the target of a possible nuclear attack. This political-military conflict will lead to another one, in which the Cubans and the Soviets disagreed and distanced themselves because the former believed that the island was still a pawn of the Soviet Union.

Already in 1962, the Tzántzicos cultural and artistic group consolidated in Ecuador, calling themselves so because they take as a symbol of their proposals the ancient ritual of the Shuar people of cutting and reducing the heads of enemies, in this case those artists and writers they considered bourgeois. The language used by the Tzántzicos is consistent with insurgent preaching that combines letters and weapons, at least in discourse, to reinforce an ideal that had already traveled in other latitudes: literature was another instrument to achieve, through insurrection. popular, Latin American Revolution.

Art is defined as a moment of war. The Tzántzicos practice new art forms – for lyrical, prosaic, sharp, harsh, even rough, street, vulgar styles – and new content – ​​articulated around the defeat of capitalism and the bourgeoisie. In addition, it insists on the effort to bring poetry closer to the workers and the people. A kind of literary guerrilla was inaugurated in what they called the cultural debate, and since they were considered bourgeois, many writers and artists who did not openly commit themselves to the revolutionary struggle would be the object of ridicule.

The Tzántzicos, therefore, inculcated an ideology that combined something of the red fantasy of Jean-Paul Sartre with the postulates of the Cuban revolution. Genius in the conformation of verses was the poetic method of almost all Tzántzicos, who in their recitals asked listeners and spectators to take on the ideas and actions of the rebellion. Relentless frontality – as in battle – is a characteristic of the Tzántzicos, who, inspired by Guevarism, demand that cultural and artistic manifestations reflect revolutionary, anti-imperialist, proletarian and mass action.

From 1962 to 1968, the Tzántzicos attacked democracy and dictatorship, since they did not know how to distinguish between these types of political regimes, since both were for them – as Guevarismo dictated – manifestations of the servants of North American imperialism and its Creole allies. What have we learned from the works of Tzántzic sixty years ago? Is democracy still only understood as an expression of the hegemonic State that dominates all spheres of social life? How much does the delirium of the twenty-somethings of that time determine the task of writers and artists today? (OR)