ABSTRACT
This chapter examines various genres, such as the bildungsroman, the detective story, and a postmodern allegory, and will trace four ethical aspects elaborated in the friendship plot: the incompatibility between excellence in art and revolutionary commitment; the triangular structure required by the tests of loyalty; honor as the all irreducible category of manliness; and stoicism as a revolutionary value that confines the political to the rules of heroic societies. This chapter discusses these values so as to prepare the ground for two complementary hypotheses regarding the Cuban intellectual class and the survival of the socialist social contract. The first relates to the political and ethical aspects of friendship and art production as they appear in the post-Soviet Cuban novel. The second suggests a philosophical misunderstanding within the revolution as ethical project. Legitimacy in both friendship and socialism is determined by high ideals such as loyalty and fraternity, values that, define them as social formations.
