BY MICHEL PRAIRIE AND CHRISTIAN COURNOYER

MONTREAL - "You will meet many Cubans who complain and who criticize Fidel Castro. But if our coast is attacked, they will take up arms to defend it," said Juan Padrón. "It's because the revolution is the only national project in Cuba - unlike the projects of the opposition."

Padrón is an editor at Casa de las Americas, a well-known publishing house in Cuba and Latin America. He was responding to a question on how the Cuban people have been able to resist imperialist aggression for so long. Padrón was one of the featured speakers at a conference on "Culture in Cuba," here September 27-28. It was organized by Carrefour culturel de l'amitié Québec-Cuba, a group in favor of cultural exchange with Cuba. About 75 students, workers, and solidarity activists attended.

Norberto Codina, director of La Gaceta de Cuba, and Claude Morin, history professor at the University of Montreal, also spoke. La Gaceta is a bi-monthly magazine on culture and politics published by the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC).

The event began on the evening of September 27. It was sponsored by the Teaching Assistant Union at the University of Quebec in Montreal (SCCUQ) and by Optimonde, an academic exchange program with the Third World at the Vieux Montréal College. Codina and Padrón arrived the next morning due to a hitch in transportation arrangements. The plane tickets of the Cuban guests were paid for by the ministry of international relations of the Quebec government. A population with a high cultural level
The conference began with presentations by the three invited speakers. Padrón underlined the key role played by the various institutions and initiatives of the revolutionary government for more than 35 years in developing a high cultural level among the Cuban people.

Codina spoke at length on this point as well. "The literacy campaign of 1961 is one of the biggest initiatives undertaken by the revolution with regard to culture," Codina said. "Only three percent of the population is illiterate in Cuba today. In 1958, less than a million books were published. By 1989, this had grown to 45 million."

Codina also described the impact on publishing of the economic crisis Cubans call the "special period." This crisis came about at the beginning of the 1990s by the abrupt end of favorable trade relations between Cuba and the former Soviet bloc countries.

In the past six years, Codina said, there are less funds available to publish new titles and new authors. As a result, Cubans have been forced to find alternatives. Many books are now published on recycled paper. And a second-hand market has developed.

Claude Morin focused his presentation on the sense of history in Cuban culture. The previous evening, during the opening of the conference, Morin stated that contrary to predictions by many after the collapse of the break up of the USSR, "Cuba survived its `protector' because Cuba was never a protectorate." A three-hour exchange between the speakers and the audience followed the presentations.

In answer to a question on freedom of artistic expression in Cuba, Padrón replied, "I have always said what I think, including in heated and sometimes difficult polemics."

Codina added, "The latest denunciation of Cuban artists has taken place in Miami, not in Havana." He was referring to firebombings and violent threats by opponents of the revolution against the Cuban singer Rosita Forne's, who was twice forced to cancel a concert in Miami in September.

Codina described debates taking place among Cuban artists on two subjects that were previously taboo.

"The question of homosexuality," he said," is being tackled with more audacity than in many Latin American countries, and even more so than in the United States and Spain." There is open discussion on combating prejudices and discrimination against gays and lesbians.

"Aberrations were made regarding artists who emigrated" after the revolution, Codina added. He drew a parallel between such aberrations in Cuba and pictures retouched by functionaries of the regime of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union to erase the figure of Russian Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky.

Trotsky, who fought to advance the revolutionary political course defended by V.I. Lenin against the counterrevolution eventually headed by Stalin, was assassinated at Stalin's orders in Mexico in 1940.

"In the 1970s, some Cuban artists disappeared from the books," Codina stated. "But in the last ten years there has been an important process of reappropriating the works of artists who left Cuba." Cultural policy of the revolution
In response to another question, Codina explained that for a number of years the policy of the revolution regarding matters of artistic freedom had been summarized in a sentence of a 1961 speech by Cuban president Fidel Castro: "Within the revolution, everything is possible. Against the revolution, nothing."

Castro gave that speech, titled "Words to the intellectuals," at a conference of artists in Cuba in June 1961. "The revolution should give up only those who are incorrigible reactionaries," Castro said in that speech. "The revolution has to understand the real situation and should therefore act in such a manner that the whole group of artists and intellectuals who are not genuinely revolutionaries can find within the revolution a place to work and create, a place where their creative spirit, even though they are not revolutionary writers and artists, has the opportunity and freedom to be expressed."

"Culturally," Codina said, "all the avant-garde are allowed in Cuba." He described how works of Czech writer Franz Kafka, French painter Marc Chagall, and avant-garde Japanese filmmakers were accessible throughout Cuban society in the first years of the revolution.

"But Fidel Castro's sentence contains a margin of exclusion, which led to a great many problems later on," Codina said. "Who decides who is in favor of the revolution? A bureaucrat? We could have saved ten wasted years."

Codina said he was referring to what many revolutionary artists in Cuba term "gray period" in Cuban culture, from the end of the 1960s to the mid 1970s when concepts borrowed either from the USSR or directly from capitalism gained increased acceptance in Cuba, undermining political consciousness.

Someone in the audience asked what the impact had been of the report given by second secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba Raúl Castro to the fifth plenary session of the Central Committee of that party earlier this year. Castro's report, given on behalf of the Communist Party's Political Bureau on March 23, was adopted by the Central Committee. That report "on the political and social situation in the country and the corresponding tasks of the party," was published in its entirety in the April 10, 1996, issue of the Cuban weekly Granma International.

In that report, Raúl Castro discussed the need for communists in Cuba to lead a political and ideological battle against those who espouse pro-capitalist ideas and methods. The report also raised that certain cultural publications in Cuba were promoting values that play into the hand of those who oppose the revolution.

"A group of cultural publications contributes to spreading the ideas of the best of the revolutionary intellectuals. But we let our guard drop... and publications appeared which openly auction off many of their pages," receiving donations from abroad, Castro said in the March speech. "In those publications, along with interesting and politically correct articles, others frequently appear that scarcely differ from those written by U.S. academics who are enemies of the revolution, using supposedly revolutionary language apparently aimed at creating a smoke screen for their true intentions."

"When Raúl spoke," Codina said, laughing, "some friends phoned me to ask if I had lost my job. This report is important because U.S. imperialism is working hard at ideological penetration. But the section on the cultural publications is the most arguable -which is what I said in Cuba. It's also been the most exploited outside the country."

"The artists have not been touched by that," Codina said. "They have continued to function as before. For example, the magazine that comes closest to those artistic tendencies criticized by Raúl is Temas [Themes]. It is still being published and will be introduced next week in Madrid along with La Gaceta de Cuba. Twenty years ago a declaration [like Raúl's] would have partially paralyzed the cultural milieu in Cuba. Not today. The revolution is stronger."

The tour of Codina and Padrón in Quebec continued through October 12. The two Cubans visited Quebec City and Hull, giving presentations in classes and meeting artists, teachers, and others.

Christian Cournoyer is a member of the Young Socialists in Montreal. Michel Prairie is a member of the Carrefour culturel de l'amitié Québec-Cuba.  
 
 
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