BY MIKE TABER
"The 1996 theater year ended with a polemic that has transcended the limits of the drama community to involve the Cuban cultural field in its totality, as well as other sectors of the country."

So reads the introduction to a debate appearing in the January-February issue of La Gaceta de Cuba, the bimonthly magazine of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC). La Gaceta is Cuba's leading literary and cultural journal. Its pages reflect a wide range of views on questions of culture and politics facing the Cuban revolution today.

The centerpiece of the January-February issue is an exchange that took place in the Cuban media at the end of 1996. Eleven contributions to this debate are included.

What is controversy about?
The controversy began following an article by Jorge Rivas Rodríguez in Trabajadores, a weekly newspaper of the Central Organization of Cuban Workers (CTC). Rivas reviewed a theater festival that took place last October in Camaguey, a city in the central region of the island. The Trabajadores journalist focused on two plays: Los equívocos morales (Ambiguous morals), by the theater group Escambray; and El arca (The ark), by the experimental group Teatro del Obstáculo (Theater of the Obstacle).

Omar Valiño, La Gaceta's theater critic, who also compiled the items related to this debate for the magazine, was present at the Camaguey festival. In a conversation with Militant reporters in Havana in late April, he described what transpired. According to Valiño, Los equívocos morales depicts the U.S. conquest of Cuba at the end of the 19th century. In one scene, an actress symbolizing Cuba drapes herself in the Cuban flag and, under attack by Spanish colonialism as represented by another actor, rolls around on the stage. Some viewers interpreted this scene as the actress "wiping the floor" with the Cuban flag, Valiño said.

El arca depicts Noah's Ark, in a symbolic comparison with Cuba today, surrounded by the rising waters of a hostile world. In the course of the play, a young Cuban woman who is a member of the Pioneers asks herself questions about her future. She asks what it means to "be like Che" - a slogan of the Pioneers and other Cuban youth organizations, which often point to the life of Ernesto Che Guevara, one of the central leaders of the Cuban revolution, as an example to emulate. Among the questions she poses is whether a prostitute too can strive to "be like Che."

`Counterrevolutionary' plays?
Rivas's review of the Camaguey festival opens the exchange in La Gaceta. In his article, Rivas attacks Los equívocos morales for its "despotic, denigrating, and unjustified treatment of the Cuban flag." He also criticizes El arca for "gross manipulation of the figure of Che."

Rivas's review was followed up by a nationally broadcast radio program entitled "Hablando claro" (Speaking clearly). The program featured Renato Recio, another journalist for Trabajadores, together with moderator Osvaldo Rodríguez. The program was transcribed and published in La Gaceta.

Both Recio and Rodríguez state that while they had not seen either of the plays in question, they nevertheless share Rivas's views. "There is no violation of freedom when a society prevents the development of a false art that tends toward pornography," Recio remarks.

The moderator, Rodríguez, asserts that "you and I, in the context of the family, in the context of a group of friends, can make certain criticisms, but these should not be depicted in a play."

Recio states that these two plays may be appropriate for "the petty bourgeoisie," but never for "the workers."

Rodríguez ends the program by suggesting the plays may be "counterrevolutionary."

The radio program elicited a number of public responses, some of which were published in La Gaceta.

Rafael González, director of the Escambray Theater Group, wrote a letter to the editor of Trabajadores, which was published there in part, and is printed in full in La Gaceta. González replies to the article by Rivas and the radio program, which he says are based on "considerations of an ideological or political nature that are truly unacceptable."

After replying to the affirmations made, he states, "The Escambray Theater Group, its directors, its [Communist] party nucleus, its UJC [Union of Young Communists] unit, its two trade union sections refuse to be put in the camp of the opposition because of the irresponsibility of those who shamelessly defame a collective that has a clean record of not being manipulated by any interest."

Also commenting on the two attacks, theater critic Amado del Pino devoted his regular radio program to the debate. In it he stated that he "disagree[s] with some of the statements" by Rivas, Recio, and Rodríguez, but is in agreement that some plays are manipulated for "extra- artistic" purposes.

Another radio program is transcribed and published, featuring Pedro de la Hoz, a critic for the daily newspaper Granma, and Omar Valiño.

Theater in Cuba, capitalist world
Valiño answers the Trabajadores journalists by describing the Cuban theater compared to that of capitalist countries. "Throughout the world, the majority not just of the theater but of the whole cultural field is governed by the laws of the marketplace, and is not interested in participating in any type of social process. The Cuban theater, on the other hand, continues its commitment to an aspiration, to a specific national undertaking, and it reflects the rough edges of this transition, of this process."

The other panelist, Pedro de la Hoz, states: "One cannot seek to find in a work of art a treatment of all facets of reality and all the answers... One cannot make an exact translation of art into politics."

De la Hoz followed this up with an article that appeared in Granma. The cultural policy of the revolution, he writes, guarantees "maximum freedom of expression based on civic responsibility." It has opposed "every attempt to make things fit within established norms," he says. "It's strange to hear the formula of `balanced' works. This corresponds to the false and pernicious attempt to find an equilibrium between the exposition of problems and the obligatory dictates of finding happy solutions."

The La Gaceta debate features replies by Osvaldo Rodríguez, Jorge Rivas, and Renato Recio. All of them argue they have been misinterpreted, but restate the views expressed in their original articles.

A polemical article by Abel Prieto, former president of UNEAC and now Cuba's minister of culture, concludes the exchange.

Cultural policy of Cuban revolution
Prieto starts by summarizing the cultural policy of the revolution as expressed by Cuban president Fidel Castro in a well-known 1961 speech, which is referred to as "Words to the Intellectuals." In that talk, given at a conference of Cuban writers, Castro defended a policy of artistic and cultural openness, recognizing all contributions that were not overtly counterrevolutionary. One of the statements made by Castro in that speech has since become a guideline for Cuba's cultural policy: "Within the revolution, everything is possible. Against the revolution, nothing."

"The revolution should give up only those who are incorrigible reactionaries," Castro said in the 1961 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, can be expressed."

The perspective presented in that speech, Prieto writes, was subsequently elaborated on by Che Guevara in Socialism and Man in Cuba. In this famous article, one of his last major political writings, Guevara criticized "socialist realism." Following the death of Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin, "socialist realism" became the banner under which artistic expression deemed threatening to the interests of the bureaucratic caste headed by Joseph Stalin was not only censored but brutally repressed. Similar policies were later implemented by the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe.

In those countries, Guevara wrote in his 1965 essay, cultural policy was transformed "into a mechanical representation of the social reality they wanted to show: the ideal society, almost without conflicts or contradictions, that they sought to create."

Under that view, Guevara said, "what is sought then is simplification, something everyone can understand, something functionaries can understand...

"But why try to find the only valid prescription in the frozen forms of socialist realism?" he asked. "We must not, from the pontifical throne of realism-at-all-costs, condemn all art forms since the first half of the nineteenth century, for we would then fall into the Proudhonian mistake of going back to the past, of putting a straitjacket on the artistic expression of the man who is being born and is in the process of making himself."

`An open, plural, antidogmatic policy'
In his article in La Gaceta, Prieto says that the policy of the Cuban revolution on art is "a policy that is open, plural, antidogmatic, enemy of all kinds of sectarianism."

In the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, on the other hand, Prieto says, "they succeeded in liquidating that brilliant fusion between the political vanguard and the artistic vanguard that characterized the time of Lenin and the October Revolution. Repression, censorship, and other methods of mutilation were systematically employed against creative freedom and this created the ideal conditions for opportunism to flourish."

Prieto continues, "In Cuba, as we know, there were errors and `gray' and `dark' moments, but timely and successive rectifications prevented a break of the mutually productive ties between the intellectuals who create and operate in the field of politics, and those who do so in the arts and letters."

The term "gray period" is often used by pro-revolution artists in Cuba in reference to the five years between 1971 and 1976, when cultural as well as economic practices copied from the Soviet bureaucracy had the greatest weight.

Prieto opposes the attempt to draw a dividing line between artists and workers. "The enemies of Cuba and its agents (Yankees or other nationalities) have failed in their attempts to create an intellectual fifth column in the country," he says.

"Our cultural program .. must exclude the schematism of the censor from above, behind his enormous desk, and the creator below, awaiting absolution or condemnation. We're not talking about whether the censor is `harsh and arrogant' on the one hand or `persuasive' on the other. We simply do not want censors, who have done so much damage to `actually existing socialism.'

"We also do not want those in Miami with their Molotov cocktails and hired mobs, nor the less `visible' censors who function at the service of the powers that be in the capitalist world, and who buy, sell, corrupt, and repress with sophistication, using the marketplace as the dreaded guillotine. It is these people who convert a subnormal type like Sylvester Stallone into a cultural fetish."

Dogmatism, Prieto concludes, "not only stands in the way of the arrival of a humanistic and socialist culture, based on solidarity. But dogmatism can shut the door to a renovated socialism that follows the lines of Marx, Lenin, and [José] Martí, to which we have not, nor will we ever renounce." What Cubans aspire to, Prieto writes, is "a socialism of `free and cultured' citizens who enjoy a `prosperity' overflowing with poetry."

Debate continues
The reverberations of this debate spilled over into subsequent issues of La Gaceta. The latest issue (number three) includes a reply to Prieto by Renato Recio. In it Recio claims to have been unjustly criticized and states that the plays were inappropriate. "Some things are more sacred than art," Recio says, pointing to what he believes is the unacceptable use of Che's name in El arca.

In addition to this exchange on cultural policy, there are many other articles of interest in the first three issues of 1997. The March-April issue contains a lengthy interview with Cuban writer and poet Pablo Armando Fernández. The May-June issue has an interview with noted photographer Raúl Corrales, and a feature on the continuing popularity of the Beatles in Cuba.  
 
 
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