BY VANESSA KNAPTON
LOS ANGELES - Norberto Codina Boeras, a Cuban poet
and editor of the magazine La Gaceta de Cuba, will be
on a month-long speaking tour in four cities in late
September and October to lecture on art and culture in
Cuba today. A member of the national council of Union
of Artists and Writers of Cuba (UNEAC), Codina will
speak in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Houston, and
New York.
La Gaceta de Cuba, the publication of UNEAC, is the foremost journal of arts and letters in that Caribbean nation. Its has featured articles and exchanges of opinions on topics from the place of art in the Cuban revolution to the debate on gays in Cuba sparked by the film Fresa y Chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate).
Codina's tour is sponsored by a broad array of academic figures. He has been invited to attend the September 28-30 congress of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) in Washington, D.C., by the president of that organization, Cynthia McClintock. Some 2,000 scholars are expected to attend that national gathering. Another prominent host who will attend the LASA congress is Wayne Smith, professor of Latin American Studies at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
The Cuban writer has received more than 20 invitations to speak at a number of universities and cultural forums. He has been asked to talk about Cuban arts today, as well as the discussions in Cuba on the role of art in politics. Codina, an award-winning poet, has offered to recite some of his poems as well.
Among those academics who have invited Codina are Catherine Allen, director of the Latin American Studies Program at George Washington University in the U.S. capital; professor Tom Kleven of the Texas Southern University in Houston; professor Daniel Fireside, co- chair of the Cuba-U.S. Academic Consortium at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York; and professors at the Latin American Center of the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA), to name a few. Also involved in the tour is John Shapley, president of the Graduate Students Association at UCLA.
Codina will speak at several universities in the Washington, D.C., area, including George Washington University and George Mason University. In Los Angeles he will address cultural events at two bookstores, Midnight Special and Arroyo Books. His sponsors are planning a reception for him that will be attended by well-known local Cuban-American artists. Other engagements are set for UCLA, California State University, and Glendale Community College.
In Houston, the mayor's office will declare Codina an "honorary citizen of Houston." The Cultural Arts Council of Houston in Harris County, a municipal arts council that provides funding for cultural activities, has expressed interest in the tour. Another local arts group, Inprint, said it would like to host a citywide event including a lecture and poetry reading. Yet another active sponsor in Houston is the Hispanic Cultures for the Arts, a student organization.
Codina, 43, has been the editor of La Gaceta de Cuba, which is distributed in the United States by Pathfinder Press, since 1988. In the past 20 years several collections of his poetry have been published. A este tiempo llamarán antiguo (They Will Call This Time Old- Fashioned) won the David Poetry Award in Cuba. This year the publisher Unión will print a poetry anthology edited by Codina, Los ríos de la mañana (The Rivers of the Morning). He has previously served on the national council of the Saíz Brothers Brigade, an organization of young Cuban artists and writers.
Those interested in the tour of the Cuban writer and editor can contact the Norberto Codina Lectures Committee, c/o John Shapley, Graduate Students Association, 301 Kerchkoff, University of California, 310 Westwood Plaza, Los Angeles, CA 90024; tel: (310) 206-8512; fax: (310) 206-7612.