Nicolás Ríos: At a certain moment, the expression by Fidel Castro, "Within the revolution, everything; outside the revolution, nothing," was used as a guideline to orient intellectual activity in Cuba. Does it remain in effect today, or have there been changes in its interpretation? How is it interpreted?

Abel Prieto: In the first part of your question, Nicolás, there is a small detail that should be corrected, and it's an interesting one. You quote: "Within the revolution, everything; outside the revolution, nothing." The actual phrase was: "Within the revolution, everything; against the revolution, nothing." There is a difference of prepositions. The phrase includes things that might be outside the revolution, but not against the revolution. This is a key distinction. What happens is that it gets repeated that way, and it has gone down in many texts that way. But you can go back to the early editions of Words to the Intellectuals, and you will find this prepositional detail.(1)

I believe this phrase holds good today. Owing to the prevailing conditions in which we chart Cuban cultural policy, we cannot at present permit art to be utilized as a pretext to attack the revolution. Telling you anything different would be demagogy; it would be painting a picture that is not real.

Nevertheless, this framework has no precedent in the history of socialism or in the history of revolutions. It is a framework of extreme broadness, which puts forth no formal restrictions, no official style, no straitjacket on creative activity.

In terms of cultural policy, it is meant for a country that has undertaken a life-and-death historical process and it does, in fact, entail limitations on counterrevolutionary expression.

Dismal half decade of Cuban culture
But what has happened is that at certain moments there was a dogmatic interpretation of it. Since no manual exists, nowhere is it set down what the limits are, and these limits have sometimes been linked to specific conjunctures. We had the famous stage during the 1970s of the "dismal half decade," as Ambrosio Fornet termed it. During that period there was clearly a dogmatic interpretation of that phrase, and people invoking it resorted to restricting the expression of things that were absolutely within the revolution, or perhaps at the margins of the revolution, but were never against the revolution. That is the key thing.

During that period it even reached the point where there were homosexuals who had to leave the cultural sector simply for being homosexuals. How does that have anything to do with being "within," "outside," "beside," or "at the margins of"?

Is there freedom in Cuba?
Q: What were the years of the "dismal half decade"?

A: They are given as from 1971 to when the Ministry of Culture was created, in 1976. There were other difficult conjunctures, but undoubtedly the creation of the Ministry of Culture marked a stage opening up a climate of trust. I believe this must be recognized. It was the beginning of the end, at least, of a very turbulent climate of distrust, which involved errors of policy in the theater, in the visual arts, and so on.

Q: Keeping those events in mind, can one speak of freedom of intellectual, artistic, and cultural creation in Cuba?

A: I believe there is enormous freedom of creation. To convince oneself of this, Nicolás, one must see the works themselves. I can speak to you, for example, of the critical role of art in Cuban revolutionary culture: from Presiones y diamantes by Virgilio Piñera to the latest in children's narratives; these works have a thoughtful, critical, nonconformist, unorthodox role. There is an element of heresy in Cuban revolutionary art.

Q: Heresy? Is that true?

A: Yes it is. Moral heresy; a heresy toward customs, a disputing of dogmas.

With regard to heresy, capitalism has a very intelligent way of assimilating and mutilating it. This is done in very subtle ways. Capitalism has ways to protect itself from all heresy. These are indeed sacred. It has specific channels of dissemination, circuits of dissemination, which are protected from all heresy. And it handles your heresy with the mechanism of the marketplace, with mechanisms of blackmail, and sometimes with mechanisms of repression.

In other words, it uses every type of mechanism. The famous protest songs of the early 1960s - which helped spawn the Cuban New Song Movement and the things Silvio Rodríguez did later on - were mutilated through the marketplace, through pressure. In order to make their way into certain circuits, they had to leave behind the most aggressive part of their poetic message.

What tends to happen now is that people stop with this one phrase and don't read the body of the speech in which Fidel Castro issued a call, including to people who were not even revolutionaries. To those who were not revolutionaries yet wanted to work for an educational revolution and for culture; a call to all generations. It is a beautiful appeal for unity of all levels, all generations, all tendencies. He speaks of Catholics, of people holding philosophical and even political views that did not directly connect with those of the revolution. It was a great appeal. But sometimes this phrase gets torn out of context, and becomes transformed into a symbol for an entire speech.

Time of Playa Giron
It seems to me that it would be interesting to reread it now, because it has great relevancy today. One has to consider the context in which it was given. It was given not long after Girón,(2) at a meeting of intellectuals in the National Library. Out of it arose the idea of the First National Congress of Writers and Artists, and of creating the Union of Writers and Artists.

There were insurgents in the Escambray at the time.(3) Do you realize that? It was a moment of enormous hostility, in which the country was in an unstable position; it was a moment of danger, of pressures. And it was at such a moment that the speech was given. I see enormous historical value and relevancy in this. Because the moment of danger has not passed. We have been going from one such moment to another, and it has always been latent, in one way or another.

Q: In the capitalist world there is a very sophisticated and effective way of dealing with heresy. How does Cuba handle it?

A: I believe we still do not have a policy with regard to heresy. Clearly one would have to begin by defining what we mean by heresy in culture. In the political or moral sense, heresy can be viewed as anything that departs from points of view presented more or less widely by a country's leaders.

What occurred under socialism elsewhere? Under the socialism that disappeared? An absolute lack of flexibility in dealing with heresy, in incorporating it, in addressing it. In other words, with regard to all the mechanisms of dissemination for stimulating a tendency, for bringing out its nuances, socialism demonstrated it was not prepared for heresy.

And then unimportant things become transformed into important ones. They become exaggerated. You see the damage done by the well-known dissidents in the former Soviet Union, the Solzhenitsyn case. Clearly they were writers of importance. In Cuba we had our Padilla, and so on. One cannot compare the two contexts, but I do believe that one of the lessons we could draw - in terms of propaganda, of image, and mechanisms of stimulation, compulsion, and assimilation - is that sometimes capitalism uses unorthodoxy to limit its scope or to nullify it, sometimes totally unethically. We on the other hand cannot create a method of assimilation that lacks ethics.

I believe there is a problem in Cuba, Nicolás: we frequently lose a sense of proportion. That is, we have been living in such a polarized situation for so many years that, in general, a cultural incident rapidly evolves into a crisis, into a debate that goes beyond the incident itself.

The Padilla case
Q: Would the Padilla case be treated differently today?(4)

A: I am sure it would be. I am convinced that the Padilla case was an error. Of course, it's easy today, in 1993, to stop and criticize errors. I even believe that his book Fuera de juego [Out of play] might have simply faded away. But we made it into something with the famous imprisonment of Heberto Padilla for several hours-I don't know how long, but it was very short.

Later Padilla's famous self-criticism became a ridiculous trap that the comrades involved fell into. Very valuable people, revolutionaries, intellectuals, believed that piece of theater, that self-criticism.

A short while ago I saw the film made by Santiago Alvarez, and it would be very good for the young people to see it. We saw it together. But it is very sad, because it is a type of caricature of the Moscow trials.

There are moments of genuine humor in it. In one of these Padilla states he is impressed by those very brilliant leading cadres in State Security, and he asks them: "Where do you dig up such cadres?" Then he relates how the official told him, "Stay here with me." And Padilla looks out a window and sees some Pioneers leaving. And he exclaims, "Now I see how much I was mistaken, how worthless I have been!"

At the time Casa de las Américas published a very complete transcript of the famous self-criticism. Really, to believe the thing was truthful, that such a piece of buffoonery could have been sincere, makes one realize the extent of the prevailing climate of collective myopia, or collective delirium. Because as the film ends you see people hugging Padilla. Revolutionary people, good people, hugging Padilla. "You have come back to us!" It was pathetic, truly sad. You leave the film extremely depressed. Didn't that happen to you? You leave depressed because there you have good people, valuable people, caught in the trap of this charlatan. Because while Padilla is a good poet, he is an absolute charlatan. His political game was only too obvious.

What about when U.S. hostility stops?
Q: In the United States they raise the following argument: Today Cuba permits, or talks about certain possibilities when U.S. pressure ends; but if that pressure were to stop someday, the regime would feel strong enough to reduce freedom of expression even more in all areas, including in the field of culture. If tomorrow the United States were to end the blockade and stop its hostility, Cuba would then begin to enjoy a security it has never had before in almost 35 years of revolution. What would happen then? Would that strengthen a tendency against democratization of the process, or would it favor it?

A: With regard to culture in specific, Nicolás, there has always been great freedom throughout all these years. With the exception of that period called the "dismal half decade" and one or two other conjunctures, people here have written, directed, and painted whatever they pleased. To deny this would be to deny the truth. We have gone through specific periods, but the Cuban cultural climate has never been repressive, with the exception of that stage when very mediocre people with very dogmatic ideas held positions of leadership in the cultural field.

Of course, in an atmosphere of less hostility, I believe the limits would be much broader; it would be easier to integrate heresy. It would be easier to apply all these mechanisms in a society without pressure, without an enemy that wants to decapitate it, without a group of fascists howling at you from over there. It would be very easy. I will go further: in terms of freedom, I believe it would be easier to chart a more consistent cultural policy without the presence of that enemy pressure, of that hostility.

In any case, to say that the Yankee presence or the blockade has limited freedom of expression of Cuban artists is, I believe, taking things too far. Because in reality the works of art speak for themselves. I have just returned from Holguín, where I attended a concert by a young worker who follows the line of Carlos Varela.(5) He made a series of statements and reflections that were very profound and very serious. What those young people are doing is as far removed from conformism in art as can be, and in general that is what is being done in Cuba, including at this moment. In other words, the most beautiful thing about this period, from the point of view of cultural creation, is that despite the shortages there has been no change of policy....

Economic emigration
Q: Many of those arriving in Miami say that they left because here they were repressed often for ridiculous reasons. For example, Maggie Carlés says they didn't let her sing "Ave María."

A: "Ave María" is heard here almost to the point of tedium, on television. Then there is the case of Arturo Cuenca, who says that after his disagreement with Carlos Aldana(6) he was persecuted. All that has been proven to be a total lie.

We are preparing to publish in La Gaceta de Cuba an anthology called "The Price," a play on words of the famous theatrical work. In it we are going to present what is being said in the press in Miami by people like that, followed by what can be read by anyone, exposing the lie. We are going to present it without commentary. We will not do anything that might seem manipulated. It is an anthology, a mini- anthology. There are even some truly humorous things, since they sometimes lack even imagination.

For example, Jesús González de Armas, a very good painter of Indo-Cuban themes who asked for asylum in Paris, had his works shown here extensively. Even the other day there was a wall with a painting of his on the corner of 60th and 31st. Yet what it occurred to him to say, taking advantage of the 500th anniversary of the discovery of the Americas, was that his paintings are repressed because they ran counter to the government's line on the 500th anniversary. There is another painter who said the Communist Youth sent someone to be his girlfriend, to spy on him. All these things, worthy of George Orwell, are truly ridiculous, because in reality these people are part of an economic emigration.

Q: And the person who left and says, "I left because I really could not stand the conditions, the sacrifice-"

A: He seems to me a much more authentic type. I respect him more. I gave you the example of the guy with the bicycle. He deserted, and said that what sickened him most was the idea of getting on a bicycle. He is more legitimate than the others.

We are going to publish in La Gaceta de Cuba a piece about Jesús Díaz, who was a repressor here, a repressor of Ediciones El Puente. He hunted down homosexuals. For Jesús Díaz there was no "dismal half decade," because during those years he was in the Cuban Film Institute, traveling halfway around the world and making films. Now it turns out he was a victim of "political persecution," that he was ostracized and silenced. He doesn't even have imagination.

The anthology has its dose of humor. There is a musician, a bongo drummer, who states that the union would not sell him a color TV. He seems an honest type. What they did to him was a dirty trick, not selling him a color TV. At least he says what he feels....

The Bible should be in school libraries
At an advanced secondary school in San Antonio, I was approached by a young woman who asked me about the Bible: "Why isn't the Bible in school libraries?" I told her I thought it should be. I explained to her that I thought the Bible could be read as a believer, as a poet, or simply to get to know a book that has a richness that is not only religious, but also historical, literary, and poetic.

I realized there was a group of young people who were very interested in my response to that question. I told them of the book containing Fidel's conversation with Frei Betto, of Cantar de los Cantares, and of the fable of Job. We talked about this for awhile, because I realized that these young people felt a concern about this, that they were evidently believers, or at least they were interested in the Bible in this sense, and they simply wanted to know what the person who was running for deputy in that district thought about that book.

I even told them that the Bible had been the best- selling title at the last book fair, where it broke all sales records.

Of course, we should keep in mind that there are people attracted to religion, because in moments of crisis, religious beliefs grow. That is true. But there is also an element of its being taboo, that is, people who are attracted to religion out of curiosity. If the father of those recalcitrants was an atheist, for example, this might be a prohibited topic.

It was an extremely interesting process, with the people very freely questioning things, and with interchanges that really left a mark. Because an important percentage voted for me; they placed trust in me and in all those who were elected.(7)

Not the slightest political crisis
The interesting thing about all this, what the elections demonstrated, is that in this country there is not a political problem, because there is not the slightest political crisis. Our problem is economic.

The revolution has a level of support, including by those living under extremely difficult conditions, those being hit by the problems of daily life, those lacking soap, those having nothing to wash dishes with, new mothers with nothing to clean diapers with.

But people stop-I don't know whether consciously or unconsciously-at a type of sacred line, a sacred zone, to use a title by Carlos Fuentes, between being irritated and placing oneself in opposition to the revolution. There is a sacred, magic space that the overwhelming majority of Cubans do not wish to cross under any circumstance.

That explains everything. That explains May Day, the enormous vote, the enormous consensus behind the revolutionary leadership, behind Fidel.

First of all, people know what the revolution did. Secondly, even the youngest ones sense that the country's structural and economic problems will not be solved by capitalism.

I am asked how the young people know this. First, because of the extremely high level of political education; second, through an elementary reading of what has occurred. I know many people who at first, when perestroika began, were enamored with that idea. Here, in intellectual circles, Gorbachev had a lot of sympathy.

But now, in the face of what has happened, you will find no one who thinks this is the way. You can find people who have lost faith in our road, who believe it is a beautiful effort yet impossible, unrealizable. You can find such people who have distanced themselves and are thinking of their personal fate, of saving themselves, and who have forgotten the nation. But people who have a capitalist program for this country? No.

All they have to do is look at what happened in Nicaragua, what happened in Panama, and in those countries that are reconstructing capitalism. And they are reconstructing it not like we would if at some point we thought of doing so. They are reconstructing it with many more resources, with an industrial base. Where have those processes led to? Things are seen much more clearly now.

From the economic point of view, the elections [in Cuba] were conducted at the worst moment; but from the political and ideological point of view, they were conducted when things were already clear.

Importance of internationalism
There is another element, however. The young people in this country, on an unprecedented scale, know about the Third World. More than half a million Cubans have gone to Africa, Angola, Ethiopia, to Nicaragua, as soldiers. To places where children die like flies, where the level of malnutrition is frightful. They know what capitalism is in its special period, in its most crude phase, its most ferocious and cruel phase. There have been soldiers, teachers, doctors who experienced it in real life. This is a country where the ideas of internationalism have thoroughly pervaded society. This must be kept in mind.

Of course, we had precedents. Cuba was the country that sent the most people per capita to fight for republican Spain. Martí went to war not only for Cuba, but for Puerto Rico, for the continent, and for the equilibrium of the world. Martí's ideas were not provincial or insular.

We held a formal ceremony for the burial of the internationalists. If the Soviets had done that for those killed in Afghanistan, it would have turned into a mass demonstration against the government. Here it became a mass demonstration in support of the revolution.

They died over there, far away, in Angola, yet it was as if they had died at Girón. Because internationalism is pervasive. It has been a contribution of the Cuban revolution to the collective ideas, to the collective psychology.

You even see how people greet the solidarity groups. It is extremely important for people in Cuba to feel that their resistance here is important, that it has meaning for others. In another country, people think about how to solve their own problems; the individual is a fragment. Here the people have pride in the nation. It is true that there are areas that have deteriorated morally. Scarcity creates moral deterioration in some areas. You see it around the hotels, the people who rob, the growing problem of the black market.

Our challenge is to reach the point where the spirit of February 24 is achieved at work every day. That joy of being Cuban, of resisting. A type of deep pride, deeply imbedded by the revolution that so many generations have built.

1. These were Fidel Castro's closing remarks on June 30, 1961, to a series of meetings attended by leading Cuban writers and artists. It is viewed as the revolution's main statement on cultural policy.

2. On April 17, 1961, 1,500 Cuban-born mercenaries invaded Cuba at the Bay of Pigs on the southern coast. The action, organized by Washington, was defeated within 72 hours. On April 19 the last invaders surrendered at Playa Girón, which is the name used in Cuba to designate the battle.

3. During the early 1960s the U.S. government helped organize armed counterrevolutionary bands in the Escambray mountains of central Cuba

4. Heberto Padilla was a writer whose arrest in 1971 on unspecified charges sparked protests by many supporters of the revolution around the world. The author issued a public "self-criticism," written in the style of the Moscow trial "confessions" of the 1930s.

5. Carlos Varela is a young Cuban musician and composer.

6. Carlos Aldana was a central leader of the Communist Party of Cuba, dismissed from his post in September 1992.

7. Abel Prieto was a candidate for Cuba's National Assembly in the first popular election for National Assembly held Feb. 24, 1993. This vote was widely viewed as a referendum on the revolution, as opponents called for submitting blank or spoiled ballots. Nationwide, 88 percent of the ballots cast were valid and included votes for the full slate of candidates.  
 
 
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