appeared on the surface to be simply cultural, spoke to a national value that had a political valence: that is, the freedom of personal expression. It seems the editors hoped that if citizens and politicians valued honesty and sincerity, the Cuban government would then operate in the best interests of the nation rather than serve the interests of the officeholders and their North American cronies.
Just how cultural practices of sincerity could come to have a political impact was left undefined. The articles suggest that the editors hoped that if the general populace strongly valued honesty and freedom of expression, then they would tolerate nothing less from their politicians and that this strength of feeling would translate somehow into political pressure. Whether or not this could be an effective strategy for political change is another question entirely. Nor is it clear how a discrete national identity could emerge from the widespread pursuit of personal expression by various authors and artists. Although a widespread practice of individually focused, free expression could ultimately have a political impact if enough of the work produced happened to have politically resonant content, this is clearly an uncertain political strategy. But this was not really the vanguard's aim. Close scrutiny of the journal's editorials and contemporary art criticism suggests that rather than produce a particular national identity, the vanguard's aim was to promote freedom of expression as a national value.
This editorial connection between personal expression and the desire for a free and just life could be seen as a veiled critique of the censorship and repression of the Machado regime. The Machado administration regularly jailed, tortured, and exiled its intellectual and militant opponents, as well as shut down periodicals and the university when threatened by the opinions they expressed. Machado's pressure on the editorial board of Avance became so insistent that the journal folded in September 1930. The arrest of Marinello, together with a dramatic rise in violence against the opposition, seems to have brought the journal to this point (Directrices: La agresión al trabajo 1930d). In the final issue, the editors stated that they would rather suspend publication than submit to government censorship. These ideals for government and for art were integral to the vanguard's project to moralize and regenerate national art and politics; the journal had urged for the adoption of these principles for a deeply personal artistic expression, implying that art could model the ethical performance lacking in national politics. In this way, Cuban modernism could be avant‐garde in the sense of being at the forefront – ahead of society – in leading Cuba to a new set of social norms.
During this time, the Lyceum remained open and continued to present vanguard art, poetry readings, and lectures. Former Avance editor and poet Eugenio Florit (1904–1999) remarked in 1936:
In respect to the period when tyranny violently shut the doors of our principal educational centers, we remember that the Lyceum was a truly free university, where the most distinguished professors broke the silence imposed on them, giving lectures and courses of great value. At the same time, the artists, writers, poets gave exhibitions, concerts, and recitals in our salons, attended by unsettled and enthusiastic youth, who also took part in the debates prompted by contemporary subjects and of transcendence in distinct orders of life. (pp. 156–160)
Particularly during the Machado dictatorship, the Lyceum is remembered for its contribution to Cuba's democracy, providing a rare venue for civil debate and disagreement. Lyceum director Elena Mederos de González (1954) also noted that although members were “homogeneous” in their views of the club's mission, beyond that there was great “heterogeneity” of opinion. The homogeneity of the Lyceum extended to race and class as well, for the majority of the members were middle‐to upper‐class, criollo, and presumably Catholic (Stoner 1991, p. 74). Nevertheless, the emphasis on the heterogeneity of thought welcomed and promoted at the Lyceum, the club's association with vanguard buzzwords like las inquietudes (restlessness) and “youth,” and its pursuit of democracy all align the Lyceum's activities with the vanguard's agenda (Mederos de González 1954). Florit (1936) remarked that this protection of the vanguard may not have been possible without a woman's touch. But when intellectuals – including those who regularly spoke at the Lyceum – were routinely persecuted by the Machado dictatorship, why would their host institution be exempt? The answer may have something to do with the traditional respect accorded Cuban women, which Cuban feminists had recently embraced as a part of their political strategy. The Cuban women's movement capitalized on women's traditional roles in their arguments advocating for women's potential to make a unique contribution to the nation.
Machado's respect for women's traditional roles, and also Cuba's elites, is illustrated by his response to women protesters in the tense political standoff resulting from the 1930 death of student leader Rafael Trejo González, for which the government was largely held responsible. Feminist leaders turned the funeral eulogy into a platform to decry Machado's repression and to call for united action against the regime. Just as Machado permitted the women mourner‐protesters to make these statements and participate in the funeral proceedings, he may have permitted the Lyceum's activities out of fear for how an attack on a women's cultural organization might be perceived by the general public. Even while responding to his opponents with extreme violence, Machado was not indifferent to public opinion. For example, in 1932 the dictator‐president released political prisoners in an attempt to rectify his image. Just as the mourner‐protesters at the Trejo González funeral were acting as caretakers, so too were the Lyceistas in their protection of national culture.
The Lyceistas themselves cited women's traditional life‐giving and child‐rearing roles as a model for their work as caretakers of Cuba's intellectual and cultural patrimony (Mederos de González 1936). Journalists, from the inauguration of the Lyceum's first clubhouse in 1929 throughout the history of the organization, repeatedly heralded the warm home and the hospitality the Lyceistas offered to the vanguard, and national culture more generally. The February 1929 coverage of the inauguration of the clubhouse and the celebratory New Art Exhibition in Avance heralded the Lyceum's domestic ambiance and the presence of many young women and young intellectuals, signaling the Lyceum's partnership with the vanguard:
Sunset, Street 81. A large house in old Vedado before the arrival of chalets. A Vedado still somewhat underdeveloped. A portal with fat columns. Wide wooden doors. A noble interior with old Creole furniture … The coming and going of conceited, smiling, and jubilant young women preparing for the opening. Lots of guests, who for the most part are young intellectuals.1
The Lyceum was housed in a neoclassical home in the prestigious Vedado neighborhood, which the writer pointedly noted predated “chalets” – a US building style. Photographs of the interior reveal traditional Cuban living room furniture; from the inauguration through at least the 1930s, the domestic nature of the Lyceum's headquarters was frequently mentioned in journalistic accounts of the group's activities, and the club was often referred to as a “home” to Cuban culture (Almanaque 1929; Florit 1936; Mederos de González 1936; Borrero 1939; Arocena 1949a, b). In 1936, vanguard artist and children's art instructor Alfredo Lozano remarked that at “the Lyceum, intense focal point of national culture, there is also the warmth of home.”
As they had done at the funeral of Trejo González, the members of the Cuban women's movement were adept at using women's traditional roles to create a voice for themselves in national politics; the Lyceum was as much a partner to the women's movement as it was to the vanguard. In her history of the Cuban women's movement, Lynn Stoner (1991) argues that rather than targeting the patriarchy or the traditional Hispanic family, Cuban women embraced their self‐proclaimed femininity, lauded motherhood, and extended their caretaking roles to the public sphere, where they positioned themselves as authorities on social welfare issues, such as education, maternity hospitals and childhood disease research, charity and welfare, cultural events, and the morality of politics. Delegates of the National Women's Congress in 1923 and 1925 capitalized on their assumed moral superiority to argue that women could be the moral saviors of a new, more democratic, and more socially just Cuba. This position was in fact predicated on women's traditional roles, and as such, the majority at these congresses advocated
