The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.60/No.42           November 25, 1996 
 
 
La Gaceta Writers Discuss Cultural Policy In Cuba  

Among the features of the September-October issue of La Gaceta de Cuba are several articles replying to a new publication in Madrid entitled Encuentro de la cultura cubana [Cuban Cultural Encounter], edited by Jesús Díaz. We reprint below major excerpts of such an article by Pedro de la Hoz.

Díaz is a writer and filmmaker who defected from Cuba several years ago. De la Hoz, a frequent contributor to La Gaceta, is editor of the magazine Arte Cubano [Cuban art].

La Gaceta de Cuba, published six times a year in Spanish by the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC), is a leading forum for discussion on culture, politics, and the challenges facing the Cuban revolution today.

The translation, footnotes, and subheads are by the Militant.

The title suggests good will: Encuentro de la cultura cubana. A few words on the masthead describe the magazine as "an independent quarterly publication that does not represent and is not connected to any political party or organization inside or outside Cuba." The lead editorial insists that "we seek to help present our culture in its diversity, in its contemporary and international scope, and as one of the principal hopes of the nation."

Certainly there can never be an excess of space for points of encounter and dialogue on Cuban culture. But in this case looks are deceiving. The launching over the summer of this magazine, published in Madrid and edited by the writer and filmmaker Jesús Díaz, pursues clear political aims.

Beginning with its lead editorial, Encuentro makes an error of presumption. In Cuba important space has opened up in recent years, space for demonstrating the diversity and the contemporary and universal reach of Cuban culture; and for discussing the country's past, present, and future. Space for debate in Cuba
This space, which has continued to grow, bears no resemblance to the caricature that Encuentro terms "one of the sorriest aspects of the current situation in the country," consisting of "an attempt to divide up the Cuban population into two poles that are usually presented as irreconcilable: those living on the island and those in exile." The director of 55 Brothers should know that the process he filmed effectively in its initial moments has today matured and become irreversible. But I will return to this later.

Nevertheless, even the magazine's pretensions of constituting the sole space for discussion would be worthy of consideration if it respected the objective and pluralistic spirit proclaimed in its lead editorial. To call things by their name-a name that Encuentro avoids and covers up shamefacedly - this is a right- wing political publication that seeks to present our country from this perspective.

The magazine's views are smuggled in under a supposed liberalness and a left-wing appearance. It promotes the idea of the irreversible frustration and agony of the Cuban revolutionary process. It incites intellectuals living inside and outside the island - including those who sympathize or show respect and comprehension for the country's situation - to wash their hands of Cuba and adopt instead the perspective of a dependent Cuba, a Cuba that used to exist.

A quick glance at the magazine's contents reveals its viewpoint without too much difficulty. The materials range from an academic examination by Jorge Domínguez, a Harvard University professor and active member of the Inter-American Dialogue committee, to a haranguing diatribe against Cuba today by Marifeli Pérez-Stable.

Domínguez presents his interpretation of Cuba's situation in the 1990s, starting from the hallowed neoliberal stereotypes of U.S. political science. But the academic cover doesn't work. His presentation dissolves into speculation and prophecy, and responds more to desire than to reality.

Accusations such as arbitrariness, repression, censorship, and control are repeated in a Goebbels-like manner throughout the pages of the magazine, in an attempt to discredit Cuba. Domínguez's political fiction utilizes these terms, and Marifeli Pérez-Stable picks them up in her article, "Mission Fulfilled: How the Cuban Government Eliminated the Threat of Dialogue." Her analysis, written with a tone of obsession, touches on the nature of the revolutionary power, which for her rests on "an intensive exploitation of the reserves of good will, and the people's fear of the unknown." Profound contempt for Cuban people
These appreciations demonstrate an ignorance of the true dynamic of Cuban society. They show a profound contempt for the Cuban people who, by their own decision, have faced the most difficult years of our contemporary history. And they display an absolute and total attempt to reduce things to the exclusive model that the United States tries to impose on a world scale, in which everything that does not resemble this model in body and soul is of no value at all.

To attribute to the Cuban government "the decisive vote in the approval of the Helms-Burton Law" because it shot down the planes sent by the counterrevolutionary Brothers to the Rescue that violated the nation's sovereignty, is a perfidious claim.(1) By this view, the Cuban revolution should be permissive, complacent, obedient, fearful; ready to avoid everything that might bother or provoke the rage of the neighbor to the north.

Nothing is accidental in the conception and order of the magazine's contents. As part of this whole dramatic act, articles are inserted that are less prejudiced or genuinely literary, as part of a homogeneous whole: against the revolution, everything; within the revolution, nothing.(2)

As proof, the magazine contains a documents section that at first glance might seem fair and objective. It includes the declaration by the Conference of Cuban Catholic Bishops; the "Conclusions and Recommendations from the Report on the Human Rights Situation in Cuba" by the special reporter of the Geneva Commission; and disjointed fragments of the report of the Political Bureau to the Fifth Plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.(3)

It does not take too much effort to see how things are manipulated here. The editors mutilate the party document, intentionally ignoring its examination of the social conditions in the country, while stressing only those fragments that could be construed as an attack on intellectuals, relying of course on a partial and out-of-context reading of it.

Publishing the document by the special reporter is an even greater act of bias, since it is widely known that it merely echoes the most hostile sectors of the Cuban-Miami enclave, and is an instrument of the anti-Cuban policy of U.S. administrations.

Added to this is the clear manipulation of various titles and informational materials ("We are losing all our values" is the title given to an interview with Tomás Gutiérrez Alea,(4) to make the reader believe he was a dissident, something that cannot be found anywhere in the interview) and a sick insistence on trying to show that cultural activity on the island is suffering incurable paralysis.

To verify this last point, it's sufficient to observe the sham type of dialogue the magazine proposes to us. The literature section contains reviews of ten titles, all of them published in the United States and Spain. The editors list another 31 books, only two of them published in Cuba.

More than a few lines in this section contain tendentious political assessments. The language can sometimes be crude and gross, as with the case of Zoe Valdés's review of the photographic essay La vida: La Habana 1994, by Alberto Schommer. (In passing, Valdés commits the blunder of attributing the text of the well-known song by Pablo Milane's, La vida no vale nada [Life doesn't matter] to the Rosenbergs. She's got the song mixed up.)

One truly painful case for those who know him is that of Eliseo Alberto, whose article "The Gray Years" seems much closer to the prose of Cabrera Infante's Mea Cuba than one might suppose. At times it would even appear to echo Pérez Roura, García Fusté, Celedonio González, and other persons who vociferate from the airwaves of Hialeah. The writer treats as taboo the entire experience of the Cuban revolution, stating that its errors arise from monstrous deformations. Embodied in his apocalyptic outburst is a type of rhetoric alien to Cuba's cultural experiences - that of the horror of the Gulag and the purges.

He forgets that with all the difficulties, wrongs, and errors in the institutional life of Cuban culture in these years; and despite certain aberrations like those of the 1970s, in Cuba there was never a general stifling of thought, nor of the nation's spiritual richness. A fair and broad cultural policy
In fact the opposite was the case. The credit for this rests with the Cuban intellectual movement, with its numerous and pluralistic proponents, and with a fair and broad cultural policy. These factors were decisive in overcoming the errors and defeating symptoms of mediocrity, sectarianism of various types, and the ambitions of opportunists and demagogues.

It's painful to read sentences such as the following, which can be classified as among the clumsiest examples of political kitsch: "Paid henchmen consisting of incompetents and hired lieutenants, drunk on the liquor of envy...transformed our theaters, galleries, and publishing houses into latrines where they, and they alone, swam at will like tadpoles in a sea of rafts." Or this adage: "The weed of lies invaded the meadow of intelligence." Where does one get such hatred, such built-up resentment?

If anyone wants to see an example of a conscious political sellout and a blatant intellectual mercenary act, a few pages later there appears an article by the French writer of Venezuelan origin, Elizabeth Burgos, in which she accuses the Cuban revolution of the death of the poet Roque Dalton.(5) It would not be worth paying the slightest attention to this article were it not for the fact that beyond attacking Roqués memory, it exemplifies a political type - the repentant individual who wants to brew up a new political invention today.

With the exception of the assistant editor, Pío E. Serrano, a correspondent for Radio Martí - that is, an agency of the U.S. government - the intellectual nucleus sponsoring this anti- encounter consists of something we could call a Cuban and Latin American "New Right." It is composed, in its majority, of persons like Jesús Díaz himself, who had long records as militants - including people not free of extremist displays.(6) Perhaps this background is what deters them today from using, as they should, the term "right-wing" to describe themselves, and to publish a magazine like Encuentro with a certain left-wing veneer. In its pages capitalism and its institutions are presented as an inevitable and necessary evil that perhaps, after all, is not as bad as they previously believed. Nor are imperialism and its servants as bad as they once thought....

Is it viable for those who reject the motives for which the majority of the nation lives and fights should hold a privileged position as a meeting ground of Cuban culture? If the real aim of those who publish this magazine is, as they proclaim, to create space that is "open," why not prioritize other areas of intellectual activity, like artistic creation itself, where agreement can be greater than in the field of one-sided political discourse?

"Culture itself is a meeting point," says the poet Gastón Baquero in the article that launches this magazine, and that is what virtually all Cuban intellectuals aspire to, whether living on the island or residing abroad. But in the present case, those responsible for this publication have chosen to base their discourse on a narrow and anachronistic right-wing political fringe, marked by intolerance. Cultural climate of 1990s
The Cuban cultural climate of the 1990s has opened up, as never before, to dialogue, points of contact, and inclusion. La Gaceta de Cuba has featured Cuban poets, narrative writers, and essayists who live in the United States, or other parts of the world.

Temas, Casa de las Américas, Unión, Lo Que Venga, Arte Cubano, La Revista del Vigia, among other publications, have included articles by émigré authors and assessments of their artistic and literary contributions, without generational exclusions, and without distinguishing the motives that led to their decision to live in other countries. Articles by and about Gastón Baquero, Severo Sarduy, Lydia Cabrera, Jorge Mañach, Agustín Acosta, José Kozer, Roberto González Echevarría, Mayra Montero, Cristina García, among many others, have been published.

Exhibits have been held in Havana featuring works by Ernesto Pujol and dramatic works by Dolores Prida. The paintings of old and new émigre's occupy prominent places in public collections. And academic figures born in the United States and who teach at U.S. universities, frequently participate in events held in Cuba. In 1995 UNEAC and the University of Havana's Center for Political Alternatives organized an encounter on "nation and identity" that turned out very fruitful owing to the frankness and constructive spirit of the discussion among Cubans from all over.

This does not mean that all pending matters related to the relationship between intellectuals living inside and those living outside the island have been resolved to everyone's satisfaction. But to achieve this, openness, clarity, responsibility, and good will are needed. It would progress much faster were there not so much opportunism, so much base interest, so many unscrupulous attempts at manipulation.

Some Cuban writers living both inside and outside the island collaborated in this first issue of the Madrid magazine. Clearly they were motivated by what they believed would be new space for cultural dialogue. As they come to appreciate the magazine's unmistakable political affiliation, its anti-Cuban activism, Encuentro will surely disappoint them and others.

The financing of the magazine, although not stated explicitly, obviously responds to the interests of those who, instead of encounter and dialogue, dream of destroying revolutionary Cuba.

Encuentro shows one face that will never characterize the "diversity" of Cuban culture: the face of distance and rejection.

1. On February 24, 1996, two small aircraft piloted by members of the Miami-based Cuban American counterrevolutionary group Brothers to the Rescue were shot down over Cuban airspace after defying repeated warnings by Cuban air traffic controllers and air force pilots. U.S. President William Clinton used as a pretext this action by the Cuban government in defense of the country's sovereignty to justify signing the misnamed Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act. The legislation, also referred to as the Helms-Burton law, registered a significant escalation of Washington's economic war against the Cuban people.

2. The author here uses a reversal of a phrase by Cuban president Fidel Castro, which summarized the cultural policy of the Cuban revolution in its early years. "Within the revolution, everything; against the revolution, nothing," said Castro. This statement was part of a June 30, 1961,speech Castro gave to a conference of writers and artists in Havana, which has come to be known as "Words to the Intellectuals."

3. Raúl Castro's report to the plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba in March 1996 was published in the April 10 issue of the English-language Cuban weekly Granma International.

4. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, who died earlier this year, was one of Cuba's leading film directors.

5. Roque Dalton was a Salvadoran poet and revolutionary. He was killed by factional opponents in 1975.

6. Note by Pedro de la Hoz: Jesús Díaz has always acted in an opportunist manner and with a clear double morality. "I am not a politician, and my space for action is very limited; this space exists between the front and back covers of my books," he told a correspondent for the Miami Herald in April 1992. However, he had no qualms about acting like [Brothers to the Rescue leader] José Basultós copilot. "I do not believe that the existence of a multiparty system would resolve anything in Cuba," he declared in November 1991 to Quehacer (Peru), but shortly thereafter he bet on "social democratic" and "Green" solutions (Cuba Libre, Germany, no. 4/92).

But perhaps his political evolution is best captured by what he declared to the German journalist Horst Eckert-Gross in October 1992: "Cuba's greatest problem is the future. How can one conceive a future in a world where the USSR no longer exists, a world totally dominated by capital?...

"Is it possible to imagine Cuba, poor and isolated, capable of solving a task that not even the rest of humanity has been able to solve? I don't think so." As can be seen, Jesús Díaz not only stopped believing in the revolutionary effort, shaken by political changes on a world scale in the 1990s, but he very rapidly lined up behind the dominant ideology in a world "totally dominated by capital."  
 
 
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