BY MIKE TABER
The September-October 1997 issue of La Gaceta de Cuba is
now available. La Gaceta is the bimonthly Spanish-language
literary journal published by the Union of Writers and Artists
of Cuba (UNEAC).
An interview with veteran Cuban filmmaker Manuel Pérez is
one of the issue's highlights. Pérez first became interested
in film in the late 1950s, and got involved in politics during
the revolutionary struggle against the U.S.-backed dictatorship
of Fulgencio Batista. In March 1959, two months after the
revolution came to power, Pérez became a member of the film
section of the Department of Culture of the Rebel Army.
"My job," he says, "was to oversee the movies that were being shown to the armed forces and give the showings a political character. A drive to teach the Rebel Army's soldiers to read and write was under way, and there needed to be a relationship between what was being taught and what they were seeing in the movies... We turned film showings into movie/debates, into a type of classroom."
That year he joined the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC). The Film Institute's founder and most prominent leader for many years has been Alfredo Guevara, a longtime figure in the revolution who was a fellow-student of Fidel Castro at the University of Havana in the late 1940s.
The 1960s was "the best period for the ICAIC, I believe, the most fruitful. In that entire stage, the creative work atmosphere for filmmakers was vital and stimulating." During those years, Pérez became a maker of documentaries. Pérez was asked about the 1971 congress on education and culture, which he participated in. That gathering is associated by many people with the beginning of the "gray half-decade." That term is often used by pro-revolution artists in Cuba in reference to the period from 1971-76, when cultural as well as economic practices copied from the Soviet bureaucracy had the greatest weight.
The Cuban Film Institute came under sharp attack at the congress, Pérez replied, due to its record in promoting an open airing of issues - sometimes controversial ones - facing the Cuban revolution, and its policy of making available important films produced in capitalist countries.
He recounted one workshop that was the scene of a particularly heated exchange. Pérez was taking the minutes. Suddenly, he said, Fidel Castro entered the room.
"There was suspense. No one knew who Fidel was going to support. He took his time, asked questions. Then he took the floor in defense of film programming, and in particular the work and capacity of Alfredo Guevara and ICAIC as a whole. Fidel stated that ICAIC had done a serious revolutionary job, and explained the material difficulties we had in sustaining programming throughout the country's theaters. He said that we could not live in a vacuum, that the solution was to educate the viewer, to prepare him to be critical. He confessed that some movies from the socialist countries concerned him more than many from capitalist ones." When it was all over, Pérez states, "ICAIC came out of the congress unscathed." Throughout the 1970s the Cuban film industry was probably the least affected branch of Cuban art and culture by the "gray half-decade." Pérez said that "apart from what was happening with ICAIC, there were forces interested in freezing the development of Cuban culture, and in the name of defense of the revolution, they were harming its basic components."
In the late 1980s, the Film Institute formed "creative groups." These were groupings of directors and artists formed on a voluntary basis, as a source of discussion and criticism from one's peers, a forum for bouncing off ideas.
"I believe that the creative groups, which were constituted in 1988, were the most interesting experience of that period," he explained, "above all because they were able to restore a climate of aesthetic and ideological discussion that had begun to be lost, to have its arteries hardened, at the end of the 1970s." At the end of the interview, Pérez was asked what he was working on at present. "I am now working on two projects. One has a contemporary theme: the situation facing people of my generation today: those of us who were youths in 1959, who lived through the entire revolutionary process with great intensity, and now confront the crisis of values at the end of the century in different ways.
"The other project is about what happened after the death of Che [in Bolivia], with the six survivors of the guerrilla movement... This story is a way of keeping Che present without having him present. I'm one of those who could not put Che on the screen, to have some actor play a person who for me remains very close."
The current issue of La Gaceta also features an article and interview on the 25th anniversary of the New Song Movement (Movimiento de la Nueva Trova). Noel Nicola and Carlos E. León, two of the Movement's founders, each tell the story of this popular trend in Cuban music. They explain how the Movement grew up under the rise of the protest song in Latin America, the United States, and other countries in the 1960s, and continuity with the Cuban tradition of balladeering. Among the other founders of the New Song Movement are well-known singers Silvio Rodríguez and Pablo Milane's. The movement lasted as an organization until 1987.
The September-October issue of La Gaceta de Cuba also includes an interview with Alberto Korda. For a number of years Korda was the personal photographer to Fidel Castro, and also took some of the most well-known photos of Che Guevara. One in particular - portraying Guevara wearing a beret - can be seen on many posters and T-shirts of Che around the world. The photo was taken in March 1960 at a mass rally to protest the death of more than 80 people in the explosion of the Belgian ship La Coubre in Havana harbor, a crime generally linked to the U.S. government.