BY MIKE TABER
A new issue of La Gaceta de Cuba has recently come off the press. A literary journal published six times a year by the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC), La Gaceta is a leading forum for discussion and debate on culture, politics, and challenges facing the Cuban revolution today. The first issue in 1995 of the Spanish-language publication includes a wide assortment of essays, interviews, short stories, poetry, and book reviews.

An article by Cuban minister of culture Armando Hart, written on the 100th anniversary of Cuba's war for independence, discusses Cuba's legacy.

"In the midst of its great difficulties," Hart writes, "Cuba is currently undergoing a gigantic cultural explosion. And cultural explosions, like political ones, present challenges and unforeseen events." Cuba can confront this challenge "because we are aware of the universal nature of these questions, and because, in their great majority, our people identify with the conquests of the revolution.

"In terms of political ideas," Hart says, "the Cuban revolution was the most important development in the Western world in the last 50 years."

Also in this issue is an interview conducted in 1967 by Desiderio Navarro, director of the magazine Criterios, with the renowned French author Marguerite Duras. In the course of the interview, Duras contrasted Cuba's cultural openness with the policy of "socialist realism" in the Soviet Union. Navarro notes in his introductory comments that, for political reasons, the interview was not published in Cuba at the time, and appears now in La Gaceta, 27 years later, for the first time.

Miguel Barnet, winner of Cuba's 1994 award for literature, writes about a recent visit to Nigeria and Benin. Barnet, best known for Biografía de un Cimarrón, his 1966 novel recounting the life of an escaped slave, visited Africa as part of a UNESCO delegation retracing the slave route.Over the course of the slave trade, Barnet notes, more than 2 million men, women, and children were uprooted from Africa to toil on the plantations of Cuba's conquerors. His essay on this forced migration traces its impact on Cuban culture down to today.

Rounding out the issue, Humberto Arenal writes on American movies, Emilio Garci'as Montiel reviews the works of Japanese Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburo Oe, Jorge Luis Arcos discusses the common cultural heritage shared with Cubans abroad, and Miguel Mejides presents his short story "Rumba Palace."

Subscriptions to La Gaceta de Cuba can be purchased from Pathfinder. Single copies of the 64-page, large-format journal will also be available for $10 from some of the Pathfinder bookstores listed on page 12.  
 
 
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