BY JONATHAN SILBERMAN
LONDON - Norberto Codina, editor of the Cuban publication La Gaceta de Cuba, will be speaking in the United Kingdom and Sweden in November. La Gaceta de Cuba is the magazine of the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba. It is a lively forum for discussion on culture and everyday life in Cuba.

Codina will arrive in London early November and participate in a poetry symposium organized by the Association of Cultural Attache's of Latin America, Spain and Portugal. His two-week tour will then take him to Sheffield and Manchester in the north, and Bristol in the west.

The Norberto Codina Tour Committee held its first meeting September 13. The meeting was initiated by Pathfinder Distribution, which distributes La Gaceta de Cuba in the UK. Opening the meeting, Tony Hunt said that the recent bombing of Cuban hotels gave added importance to the tour. "Getting out the truth about Cuba - among working people and youth, and all those interested in culture - is especially important at this time. As Codina has himself said, the most important cultural event in Cuba was the revolution that brought literacy and culture to millions previously denied it," Hunt added.

John Waller a member of the national executive of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign (CSC), attended the meeting for his local CSC group in Sheffield. They have decided to host a day school November 29 at which Codina will be the featured speaker.

Two lecturers from Hackney Community College in London, Behige Smith and Jayne Bullock, spoke enthusiastically of the prospect of Codina speaking at their campus. "Hackney is the poorest area in London, one of the poorest in the country," Smith commented. "It will be great for the students and teaching staff alike to have Norberto Codina visit."

Hilda Kaune, a Chilean exile and long-time Cuba solidarity activist, presented a report to the meeting on the openings for the tour among Latin Americans in London. She and Terry Bennett, a student at Middlesex University and an activist in the Friends of the MST of Brazil, formed the nucleus of a committee that will flesh out these openings. "There are also opportunities among Latin Americans in Bristol" said Gareth Evans, co-editor of Entropy, an experimental arts magazine.

Jane King, dance critic of the Morning Star, the newspaper associated with the Communist Party of Britain, and Emma Sangster, an artist and secretary of North-East London CSC, spoke of the opportunity to win further support for the tour. "This tour can reach people who haven't been involved in activity in defense of Cuba before," Sangster said. Celia Pugh, from the Communist League and a member of the Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union at Lucas in west London, said that a number of fellow trade unionists at the plant had donated material aid to Cuba and read literature about the revolution. "From Norberto Codina they'll be able to hear firsthand of the Cuban reality and the challenges facing the revolution."

Further information about the tour can be obtained from the Norberto Codina Tour Committee, BCM Box 7621, London WC1N 3 XX.  
 
 
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