Published in Letras Libres (http://www.letraslibres.com) Interview with Alfredo Guevara By Abel Sierra Madero [1] and Nora Gámez Torres [2] May 2014 | Photo: Clement Zablocki Alfredo Guevara (1925-2013), one of the most influential figures in the cultural policies of the Cuban Revolution, and a personal friend of Fidel and Raul Castro, died last year in Havana. The Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematograficos [Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry] (ICAIC) --which he founded and headed for several decades-- exported epic images worldwide at the height of the Cold War. ICAIC contributed to depicting the Revolution as a play, a great movie; the end of which is still unknown to us. A few months before his death, thanks to filmmaker Arturo Sotto, we held a couple of interviews with Alfredo Guevara. The result of these conversations --or rather confessions-- is an unprecedented first-hand account, by someone who was at the very center of power. Convinced that he was running out of time, Guevara spoke openly about the leaders of the Revolution, the intrigues and infighting that marked the early decades, his role as a censor, socialism in Cuba, and the recent reforms proposed by Raul Castro. The first meeting was at his home in Havana’s Vedado neighborhood, in February 2012. The conversation took place in a luxurious setting, decorated with paintings by famous Cuban artists; visible were at least a Servando Cabrera and an Amelia Peláez. Guevara’s possessions --considered "cultural heritage of the nation"-- are now in the spotlight of the Cuban authorities, when an inventory conducted in his house after his death revealed the absence of three important works. The second and final meeting was in his office at the Festival of New Latin American Cinema, in Havana, a month later. His health had already deteriorated. "I think I have little time left to live," he said at the outset, "so in recent weeks I’ve felt an immense desire to speed up whatever time I still have. I am giving you this interview because I do not want to keep things inside me." Guevara's obsession for transcendence is implicit in the title of his latest book ¿Y si fuera una huella? [Perhaps an Imprint?] (Ediciones Autor, 2010- [Autor Publishers]), which, together with Tiempo de fundación [Foundation Time] (2003) and Revolución es lucidez  [Revolution is Lucidity] (1998), attempts not only to establish his legacy and biography but also to re-write the memory and history of the Cuban Revolution. "I do not know how we will be judged; I should know because it has already started and I can feel that they are going to be very sharp and sometimes very cruel, unfair," he said a few minutes into the first meeting and explained:" I read the last book about Fidel (Fidel Castro Ruz: Guerrillero del tiempo [Guerrilla of Time], by Katiuska Blanco Castiñeira) and I'm not going to send a letter telling him that things were not the way he's telling them. I think he has his version and I have mine; but I do not want any contradiction. I want to be very careful, I am afraid ... Not that he's changing history but he goes on and on ... as old men do, and they forget things. " Guevara liked to think of himself as a romantic: "I wanted my life to be seen as a novel, I wanted many things to happen to me, to live a lot; that was my imagination and I thought that to achieve this I would have to be either a millionaire or a revolutionary. I decided to choose the path of revolution. Of course, it was much more difficult to take the path of being a millionaire. It would really be good to be a millionaire and a revolutionary at the same time "[he laughed]. His life was indeed hectic and marked by internal power struggles. When questioned on the subject, he quoted from Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian. Emperor Hadrian "was a god because with his will alone he could dispose of the lives of others. That is the key to power, and the key to anti-power education is to exert power as a moral obligation. I've had that experience and it's heartbreaking to think that the lives and destinies of others depend on you. Indeed, whoever has power is a censor, because if I had money to produce seven films but had twelve scripts, I had to apply censorship when deciding which ones were going to get the money and which were not. That's censorship too, that's governing. When Raul Castro is investing in the port of Mariel and not in the wholesale market that is needed to develop the private sector so the self-employed do not have to steal,--because all of them steal--, he is censoring and making a political decision, he is exercising  power. The things they've made me say! I do not care anymore.” Swiftly, his memory goes back several decades to bring out his disagreements with the Partido Socialista Popular (PSP), the former Communist Party of Cuba, which he blames for imposing Stalinism within the Revolution: "Many of the mistakes made at the beginning of the Revolution were the responsibility of the party members, who had no more merit than to be reliable; but they were incompetent and they were everywhere. Some were workers with no political training, without the slightest creativity. They were clean and selfless people but they were deformed by Stalinism, with an interpretation of Marxism that produced something called Marxism-Leninism, which was nothing else than Stalinist doctrine. You cannot run a country like that," he concluded. For Guevara, this party had lost legitimacy after having built an alliance with the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista: "The People's Socialist Party followed Stalin's instructions to create a united anti-fascist front, and to establish it in Cuba they even entered an alliance with the dictator Fulgencio Batista. The book Los fundamentos del socialismo en Cuba [The Foundations of Socialism in Cuba], by Blas Roca, which tears down the history of Cuba, had been published before the edition you probably know, which was in 1961. The edition I refer to --which was the first-- was dedicated to Fulgencio Batista. That was not objectionable, because it followed the line set by the Communist International; but that alliance politically defeated them forever; the Party got stained." Referring to the disastrous impact of the Stalinist formulas in the design and management of culture in those early years, and the attempts to impose so-called "socialist realism", Guevara recounts the controversy that he established with party secretary, Blas Roca Calderío, who, in 1963, made fierce criticisms of ICAIC for having shown movies like La Dolce Vita, by Federico Fellini, Accattone, by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Luis Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel and Alias Gardelito, by Lautaro Murua in Havana's theaters. In a letter that was only published many years later in his book ¿Y si fuera una huella?, Alfredo Guevara compared Blas Roca to Stalin and Beria: "I think I was too hard on him then. He was not a bad person, but he really clung to the Soviet model and the experience they considered triumphant, and which proved a failure in the end.  The Communist International was the International Communist Party, so it was above and beyond the nations themselves. It was an ideal just like anarchism or Christianity. The International was a Vatican. I do not believe in partisan globalization and slogans that fit everyone equally." But the ambitions of the leaders of the PSP went beyond imposing their own aesthetic criteria. In the early sixties, at least three distinct groups coexisted in the highest echelons of power: the 26th of July Movement, led by Fidel Castro; the Revolutionary Directorate, with a strong student and middle-class base, and the PSP. Members of that party, led by Aníbal Escalante, sought to expand their control over institutions --including ICAIC-- and to displace the leaders of the July 26th from power, including Fidel Castro, whom they considered "petty-bourgeois". * "To tell you about the conspiracy in ICAIC I have to talk about Edith Garcia Buchaca, who still lives; she's over ninety now but keeps on bitching. She used to head the Cultural Commission in the PSP and was also secretary of the Consejo Nacional de Cultura [National Council for Culture which had the functions of a Ministry for Culture]. She had decided to take over ICAIC with the consent of a few of its founders. You would be amazed if I told you who they were. She came over to ICAIC as head of the Cultural Committee of the party and said something like: ‘As you know, Fidel is transferring power over to the party', which was a lie because I was really close to Fidel and Celia Sánchez and they knew nothing of this. She kept talking and told me I had to accept the presence of a political commissar. I cannot pass judgment on myself now; I must have been very disconcerted. I asked her for some time to think about what decision to make, whether I would resign or accept the political commissar. From ICAIC I went straight to 11th Street in Vedado, Fidel lived there with Celia Sanchez, but when I got there Fidel wasn't in, so I told Celia the story. She started yelling and cursing, because Celia was strong, and told me that the same was happening all over the country. She told me to ‘kick their asses out of there'. ‘They have tapped our phones, even this one here in the house!' she told me. At that moment I realized that what was to be later known as the “microfraction” was already on its way. "I didn't do as Celia said. When, a few days later, I came back to ICAIC to a meeting with Edith Garcia Buchaca, I told her that I had decided to resign, but not to her, but to Fidel, to whom I would explain what she had said about the transfer of power to the party. Right then she began to take back her words, this way and that way ... She left and I went back to my office and I got to thinking, and decided that all those who had sneaked into ICAIC would have to leave. I would leave only the ones I thought were filmmakers or had the potential to be one. For example, it was a miracle that I kept Santiago Álvarez because at that time he didn't seem to be the filmmaker he turned out to be; he looked more like a heavy handed militant,  but later on he was extraordinary. " On March 26, 1962, Fidel Castro announced on TV the existence of a sectarian current –that's the name he chose for the conspiracy - within the Integrated Revolutionary Organizations (ORI), which grouped together members of the 26 July Movement, the People’s Socialist Party and the Revolutionary Directorate. Years later, in 1968, the same Aníbal Escalante would be involved in what became known in Cuba as the "second microfraction". Apparently, between Anibal Escalante and Alfredo Guevara, who was from the July 26th, there were serious contradictions. "I'm sure,” Guevara said, “that if Anibal Escalante had succeded, who tried twice to take power, I wouldn't be alive. What the dictatorship [of Fulgencio Batista] couldn't do, the Party –of which I had been a militant in my youth– would have accomplished. Anibal intended to accuse me of being an agent of French intelligence, and opened a dossier on me. The reason for this was that, on one occasion when I was in Paris, I was approached by French intelligence to send information to Fidel through me. So I did; I brought the documents to Fidel and he asked me to give them to Che, who was handling the case of a conspiracy to thwart a Cuban sugar negotiation that was underway and this affected France, which depended on Cuban sugar at the time. That conspiracy was being carried by persons who were even members of the Council of Ministers with whom Fidel met frequently; but Fidel being a good strategist, knew who was going to resign and leave the country. Anibal kept a record of all that information to discredit me." But while Guevara insists on distancing himself from the PSP, he did not hesitate to use it to put an end to the "Lunes de Revolución" project, led by Carlos Franqui –also a member of the July 26th– which grouped together several renowned intellectuals, including Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Virgilio Piñera. In April 1961, Guevara joined forces with Edith Garcia Buchaca to censor the documentary P.M., made by Saba Cabrera Infante, brother of Guillermo, and Orlando Jiménez Leal. The film documented a playful and extravagant part of Havana's nightlife which remained disconnected from the context of siege mentality and the revolutionary discourse of the moment. Censorship of this film triggered events that would have a very negative impact in Cuban culture. Guevara admits in the interview that the matter went way beyond what he would have wanted or imagined. "With the experience I have today,  I say I shouldn't have acted that way, although I did not agree with the distribution of P.M. because we were in the prelude to the Bay of Pigs and machine guns were already placed on rooftops and in the streets. We were expecting an invasion of Cuba. The problem is that the old party went head-on into the issue and took things farther than I had wanted to. I did not have the experience I had later; I could have played it better, I wasn't intelligent enough. But I later learned to be diabolical. I take responsibility in the matter because I refused to distribute the film in theaters; however, I gave them the copy." A month after our last meeting with Guevara, we interviewed a ninety-year-old but still lucid Edith Garcia Buchaca at her home, where she has been under house arrest since 1964. According to Garcia Buchaca, it was Alfredo Guevara who approached her to express his concern over the exhibition of P.M. and asked her for help because he didn't want to ban it himself. Although both stories are inconsistent regarding each other's responsibility, the truth is that García Buchaca with other party members, convened a meeting at Casa de las Americas to discuss the material and from that meeting a document came out that officially prohibited, with the consent of ICAIC, the exhibition and distribution of the documentary. However, the censoring of the documentary P.M. was only the most visible event of a struggle over control of the media that was going on behind the scenes. Guevara himself offers clues and also tells how they raided one of the country's main television stations even before the nationalization process had been raised on the island.  "My problem with Franqui began because I saw he was interested in taking over the TV stations; Che also noticed that. Carlos Franqui knew that whoever controlled the media would wield a lot of power and that's what he tried to do; but key people in the Revolution began to conspire with me to outsmart him and so it was. We literally raided the TV station of Gaspar Pumarejo, who was the owner of Channel 12 on Prado Street and had a back exit. You are seeing me as I look today but I was then a physically fit young hot-head. I was accompanied by a few wild guys with sledgehammers. We raided the station one night and in the morning, when the secretaries and the staff came in, they found that I was the new Pumarejo. We already had two television stations. That night I was joined by Che, Ramiro Valdés and Raul himself. This is the first time I've told this.” Ultimately, Alfredo Guevara went directly to Fidel Castro: "Then I talked to him and I raised my concern over 'Lunes de Revolucion'. My position was that they could not continue to speak on behalf of all the intellectual youth of the July 26th [Movement]. Fidel did what he felt like and convened the meetings at the National Library where he gave the famous speech known as ‘Words to intellectuals. "This speech, whose best-known phrase is" within the Revolution everything, outside the Revolution nothing", publicly established the framework that, to date, has not only governed the field of culture but also of policy in general. Guevara, however, insists that Fidel sought only to settle the internal differences between members of the July 26 who wanted to dominate the cultural field and, incidentally, he mentions that Fidel's socialist ideas dated back to well before 1959: "For me 'Words to the Intellectuals' is an action by Fidel trying to keep the unity of the revolution at a higher level; but of course that's my opinion. It was complicated; don't ever believe it was easy. Fidel did not accept –nor does he now– that there were divisions within the July 26th Movement. And there were, because not everyone in the July 26 accepted socialist ideas. Fidel had socialist ideas even before embarking on the Granma yacht, but he did not show them. Fidel was the cement of all of us, and had a clear vision of what unity had to be like. That is why the divisions in the July 26th never surfaced, they were never known." During the first decades of the Revolution, Alfredo Guevara successfully learned to navigate the turbulent waters of power. Apparently, his closeness to Fidel Castro kept him afloat against the onslaught of some members of the Communist Party over the years. However, in 1981, an altercation with Antonio Perez Herrero, who supervised the field of culture from the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the party, made him leave ICAIC. Guevara says that the pretext for the altercation was a controversy over Cecilia, a Cuban-Spanish film co-production that demanded large sums of money. "They said I had squandered ICAIC's budget to produce that film and it was a lie, because that movie returned the investment even before it was completed. Everything had been staged and Antonio Perez Herrero was instrumental; we had had tremendous quarrels that Fidel himself knew about. At a given moment I met with Pérez Herrero and told him that I did not accept the methods he was using in the area of culture and said that if he kept at it he would cause a problem for the Revolution. ‘I’m going to have to kill you,' I snapped at him once and I pulled out my gun. Antonio Perez Herrero slandered me with Raúl; Raúl scolded me and told me that Pérez Herrero had some tape recordings that incriminated me. I then told Raul to demand the complete recording of the material he had received. That was one of the causes that took me to Paris ... Fidel asked me to leave ICAIC without making any comments, and it was immediately made known that I was going to UNESCO." After a decade in Paris, Fidel Castro asked Alfredo Guevara to come back as ICAIC's director, but Guevara found a new scenario in Cuba. The Berlin Wall had fallen and with it, the Cuban government had lost its main economic, trade and political partners. In the new landscape of the nineties, that old binary framework which had reduced the condition of “cubanidad” [being Cuban] to being either within or without the Revolution began to crumble. Once back, Fidel Castro asked him to work with him in a new policy aimed at trying to encourage Cuban émigrés in Miami to consume in the island. Near the end of the second interview, Guevara looked somewhat fatigued. He agreed to address one more topic: Raul Castro's reforms. Then he would take a pause until a new contact, but this never came to pass. He showed optimism regarding the reforms, although he extensively criticized the role of the State in Cuba. "I thought -even long before these changes that are taking place and the call to the Party Congress- that if the dismantling of a State that usurped the place of society began -because the State that has been created in Cuba is the usurper of society- and reducing bureaucracy is a way to dismantle it realistically; then an already existing but lethargic civil society would resurface. Thus you can create a civil society that would pressure the State. " From his position of being very close to Fidel and Raul Castro, Guevara confirms the versions of those who believe that the reforms have not gone faster due to the caution shown by the General President, not only to avoid making strategic mistakes, but also to avoid annoying his brother Fidel. About this he says: "I am very optimistic, I still think sometimes that we are really going to change. And Raul is a personal friend of mine and also knows my family; he came here for dinner and to be with us. My son keeps telling me that I've repeatedly told him these things and nothing changes, and he is right; but I'm still optimistic because I know Fidel and Raúl very well. I think that with Raul the time has come for this society to be transformed. But Fidel is so afraid of capitalism, of seeing his entire work crumbling, that Raul does not wish to contradict him. Raul has to go wrenching away the changes. “I think he has already wrenched so much, so much of what seemed most difficult, that maybe, if he can take a few more steps, the changes that are needed can come faster. I've told the government leadership many times that we do not mobilize anyone anymore because people do not feel that they participate” He also referred to the immobility of the structures of the Communist Party, which he compared to the Church: "I do not see any difference between a Christian and a Socialist here on Earth; in heaven, we will see [...]. What is the difference between the structural organization of the Church and that of the Party? The question makes me think of the Crusades and the Revolution too, because the Revolution is the project to impose or spread an idea in the awareness of an individual or a collective. That is the key to why the socialist project did not work, because one thing is to propose an idea to someone and another thing is to impose it." But while Guevara tries to present himself as a critical and lucid member of the ruling elite, his detachment from the reality of the island is evident and leads him to deny and to minimize the impoverishment that large sectors of the population have suffered as a result of the crisis in the past two decades: "Sometimes, people close to me claim that we do not see the misery, but they do not realize that before the Revolution real misery existed. It comes to my mind now that there was a restaurant just beside the Capitol, on the block between the Gran Teatro de La Habana and the ruins of the Campoamor movie house, where leftovers were sold in paper bags to abandoned children for five cents.  That was misery. Now they say that people who live in microbrigade buildings with their laundry in the balconies and people without shirts in the street is misery.  No one can tell me that there is real misery.” Much more surprising, for its stark candor, is his vision of "the people" in whose name he managed institutions, wrote drafts of the first revolutionary laws and won a seat in parliament. Guevara, like Raul Castro in his speech on July 8 at the National Assembly, felt very disappointed at the Cuban people and its qualities: "Anyway - and I truly believe it- I am the bearer of an almost mystical vision of my country, a people in which I do not believe, I do not think that they are worthwhile. I believe in their potential but not their quality. They've always wanted to squeeze us into the mold of the Soviet Union. Talking once to a French intellectual on the peculiarities of Cuba, I wanted to convince him that we were very different and I convinced him that day, because I said, 'Go out in the street. Do you think that with those asses and those Lycra slacks someone can understand Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy? Do you think that is possible? 'He immediately laughed and understood what I meant. We must take into account the tropics, dear me. In the tropics you cannot implement even the purest formulas of Karl Marx.” However, despite his criticism and doubts, the elder Guevara refuses to talk about the failure of socialism in Cuba. Bent on ultimately judging his own life, Alfredo Guevara prefers to believe that the Revolution - and with it some of his own legacy-   will have a place in the future Cuba: "Socialism has never existed, neither in Cuba. What we have in Cuba is a society with more solidarity, more concerned with the social aspects. Our original project became deformed and our only hope is having the strength to change, not the image but the structural essence of the project. If I'm wrong, then I will have lost my entire life; it will be a novel as I have dreamed, but a tragic one. Because the only thing my life would deserve would be suicide." * See Raul Castro, "Report to the Central Committee of the Party" in Verde Olivo. Official Publication of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, Year 9, no. v, February 4, 1968, pp. sup. III-XV. EDITOR'S NOTE: In the following player you can hear excerpts from the interview, kindly provided by the authors.
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