Cuba: the specter of censorship

Intellectuals worried about the public resurfacing of political commissars of yesteryear

By Correspondent GERARDO ARREOLA

A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann.

http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2007/01/19/index.php?section=mundo&article=056n1mun

Havana, January 18.- The apparent recognition of cultural purges which prevailed in Cuba three decades ago caused alarm among dozens of intellectuals who voiced their anger soon after a number of then-political commissars reappeared on public television and sparked off a debate for many years unseen in the country.

In an official declaration made on Thursday, the Board of Directors of the Cuban Union of Writers and Artists (UNEAC) claimed to “share the just indignation" of its members and stressed the irreversible nature of “the anti-dogmatic cultural, creative and participatory policy inspired by Martí and followed by Fidel and Raúl [Castro], inaugurated with the Words to the Intellectuals speech".

Thus the text referred to Fidel Castro’s address to an audience of creators on June 30, 1961, widely publicized again in the last few years and conventionally remembered for this passage: "...within the revolution everything; against the revolution nothing. Against the revolution nothing because the revolution also has its rights, and the foremost right of the revolution is the right to exist, and no one can oppose the right of the revolution to be and exist. Because the revolution covers the people’s interests, because the revolution stands for a whole nation’s interests and no one can rightfully argue anything against it".

The reason that some raw nerves were touched by this debate is that even though that speech is held to have led Cuban cultural policies in the last forty years, it is also known to have given rise to opposing interpretations.

As UNEAC pointed out, to the intellectuals “it was of the utmost importance to count from the outset on the full support of the [Communist] Party leaders".

The artists and intellectuals protest came in the wake of a January 5 interview on national TV with Luis Pavón Tamayo, who as head of the late National Culture Council (CNC) from 1971 to 1976 –the so-called gray quinquennium– led a policy of crackdown and civil death sentences on artists and writers not toeing the party line, its provisions aimed at discriminating against homosexuals, rejecting any sign of decadent capitalist culture, disclaiming the works of émigrés or censoring critical views of the country’s realities.   

Pavón, former director of military journal Verde Olivo (Olive Green), was featured presented as a valuable contributor to national culture. Not one word was mentioned about his repressive role.

However, another former censor had resurfaced on December 13: Jorge Serguera, at the time the head of ICRT (Cuban Radio and Television Broadcasting Institute) and before that the general auditor of the armed forces, chief of the revolutionary tribunals, leader of military detachments and ambassador to Algeria and Congo.

In putting both appearances together, the outraged artists recalled another one early in 2006: that of CNC Deputy for the theater movement, whose TV interview followed the same lines as Pavón’s and Serguera’s.

Protests and meetings

An avalanche of irate e-mails began to circulate, and a dossier was put together which some of the dissenters presented to Political Bureau member and Minister of Culture Abel Prieto in the first of at least three meetings between the official and intellectuals connected to the case.

Playwright, poet and storyteller Antón Arrufat, winner of the National Literacy Award in the year 2000 and previously a victim of repression, told La Jornada that the appointment had been ‘purely informative’ and "rather preliminary" to the second meeting, attended by current ICRT president Ernesto López, also a former member of the armed forces, and some of the people responsible for the programs at issue.

In Arrufat’s view, “no one seems to be responsible for anything”, judging by the things these TV officials said about how the programs were made. “It was a sham, nothing but talk about bureaucratic mechanisms only to conclude that they have to continue the inquiry".

According to some of those present in the third meeting last Tuesday, the matter is in the hands of Esteban Lazo, the Political Bureau member in charge of the media, who allegedly asked the ICRT to offer an apology to the intellectual community.

As remarked in the declaration submitted by UNEAC’s Secretariat, the broadcasting authorities said that the programs in question "respond to none of our policies” and that “serious mistakes were made in their design and making".

In addition to the meetings and UNEAC’s communiqué, the wave of protests had other effects: cultural policies came to the fore, plans were made to publish a book with the facts of this case, and the debate made it to provincial level.

The kickoff of a discussion process this month will be a conference called "The gray quinquennium: revisiting the term" by Ambrosio Fornet, the writer who so baptized that period of Stalinist-type purges in Cuban culture.

This week the debate was taken to other provinces in the hands of Reynaldo González and César López, two writers who were banned in the 1970s and have now joined the fray, and two of UNEAC board members: president Carlos Martí and the Writers Association chairman Francisco López Sacha.

In its declaration, UNEAC remarks that the meetings with the artists “provided evidence of the need" for creators to work “together” with the TV broadcasting authorities to promote programs that “express Cuban culture’s true intellectual and artistic hierarchies".

Exiled writers such as Eliseo Alberto and Abilio Estévez joined the cause of their outraged colleagues in the island, while others like Amir Valle believe the debate must be pursued to even further levels in order to define who’s accountable.

Without going into details, UNEAC observed that “some people from overseas gave their honest opinions on this issue; others, obviously at the service of the enemy (in clear reference to the U.S. government), have tried to manipulate the situation for their own benefit", but it ruled out the idea that any “doubtful attitudes, divisions or opportunities for [the enemy’s] annexationist purposes” may be seen in this “debate among revolutionaries".

More than just a quinquennium...

The implications of what came to be a dark period for Cuban culture went beyond a quinquennium. Its most well-known precedent is the case of Heberto Padilla (1932-2000), whose collection of poems Fuera de juego (1968) won an award even after it was officially tagged as ‘counterrevolutionary’.

Padilla was jailed for 38 days, after which he delivered a self-critical speech to UNEAC members, and then lived in isolation until he went into exile in 1980.

His situation prompted a flood of criticism worldwide and stood out as the first breakup of the intelligentsia with Fidel Castro’s government.

In 1971, the First Congress of Education and Culture laid down a set of parameters to be met by those who held public office or jobs, its effects spreading well into the 1980s. Homosexual authors like José Lezama Lima (1910-1976) and Virgilio Piñera (1912-1979) were ostracized and died with no official recognition. Arrufat was sent to work in a library basement for nine years tying parcels of books and was not allowed to publish for 14 years.

Under the said policy, rock music, the Beatles, wearing blue jeans, and men with long-hair fell victim to harassment as symptoms of ‘ideological deviation’.

Never, at least in the last 20 years, had such a far-reaching debate taken place in Cuba, Arrufat said, pointing out that the only antecedent he remembered dated back to the early 1980s when there had been a “violent” argument initially centered on poetry but soon extended to cover, like in this occasion, the country’s cultural policy.

Other authors believe the debate can only compare to the protest that brought about the closing of the Military Units to Support Production (UMAP), camps of imprisonment and forced labor for those labeled as ‘social misfits’, namely homosexuals and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

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