BY CLIFF WILLIAMS
MANCHESTER, England - "This journey has had various points of interest to me, not only as a poet participating in an important literary event, but also getting to know England, getting to know excellent people, and getting to know their cultural interests," said Noberto Codina, in his opening address to a fund-raising dinner for the Cuba Solidarity Campaign in Preston.

Codina, poet and editor of La Gaceta de Cuba, the magazine of the National Union of Writers and Artist of Cuba, was referring to his participation in the Ibero-American poetry festival and a speaking tour of England which had already taken him to London, Oxford, and Bristol. The dinner was the first engagement on the northern leg of the tour. Codina also spoke to 50 students at the University of Manchester and in the same city 80 people heard him speak at the Copacabana Latino Bar. In addition he addressed a mass meeting of the locked-out Liverpool dockers, was the main speaker at a dayschool in Sheffield entitled "Inside Cuba Today," and spoke to an open Spanish class at the University of Sheffield.

Codina also took time to visit places of cultural interest, including the Beatles museum and Cavern club, where they performed. The Beatles, popular in Cuba, were often referred to in Codina's talks.

The cultural advance of the revolution was not a linear process, he explained. "There was a first period in the sixties when Cuban culture was expanded. After this there was a time, called the gray period or `black decade,' where dogmatism and bureaucracy were conspiring against the cultural gains the revolution had made." He gave the example of having to "hear the Beatles sung by Spanish groups, which had nothing to do with the original version. As is normal, young people objected to this, and whoever had a Beatles record was invited to every party."

The poet explained that things began to change in the mid- 1970s, and this process developed through the '80s, confronting conservatism and prejudice. Despite the economic crisis triggered by the collapse in trade with the Soviet Union at the start of the 1990s, the recent years have seen some of the greatest advances in cultural freedom, Codina said. He pointed to the Second International Conference on the Beatles, currently taking place in Cuba, as one example of this change. Another is the broader readership of La Gaceta de Cuba, despite its smaller print run and much greater price. "One should understand that our fight for the culture was our fight for the country and the gains of the revolution," he stated.

Codina was able to meet with the strike committee of the Liverpool dockers, before addressing their mass meeting of hundreds of workers. The dockers were locked out by their employers for refusing to cross a picket line over two years ago. Since then they have waged a fight for full reinstatement and trade union conditions for all those wishing to return to work. This struggle has received widespread international solidarity, particularly from other dock workers.

"The chance to speak to a group of workers who are in industrial struggle to claim their rights is very important for me. I was very happy to see that there have been such things as comedy shows to raise funds and promote the struggle," Codina said. "There has been a traditional effort to separate workers from artists but we can see that cultural workers and artists can come together, in solidarity with the struggle of workers.

"More than 20 years ago, I wrote a poem that said that strikes have no limits but I never thought that I would come to experience the kind of struggle of workers in Liverpool. I owe a great deal to the people of this port, for my generation the Beatles were very important and they had a very popular origin. When I return to Cuba I will be taking with me the experience of meeting with yourselves," he told the mass meeting. "Your struggle is not sufficiently well known in Latin America and Cuba and similarly the struggles of Latin America and Cuba are not known here .. we need to remember that solidarity doesn't only relate to Cuba, but, as José Martí said, every true man must feel on his own cheek every blow dealt against the cheek of another." Martí was a leader of the Cuban fight for independence from Spain in the late 1800s.

Noberto Codina and participants from the World Festival of Youth and Students held in Cuba last summer in Havana were the inspirations of the dayschool in Sheffield, explained Jenny Fortune of Sheffield Cuba Solidarity Campaign.

The discussion there took up a wide range of issues. One person asked if the circulation of the dollar, legal now for three years, was leading to culture taking on commodity forms and becoming commercialized. In reply Codina said, "The problem created with the legalization of the dollar has contaminated some sectors of culture, but this is something that writers and artists are very clear about and we are fighting against the dollarization of culture. For example, although my own journal needs dollars to buy the raw materials, the journal is being sold in Cuban pesos for Cuban people. The Cuban reader pays only 10 percent of the price people outside the country have to pay, and we have made clear that the journal is mainly for the Cuban reader."

One question that came up in many forms was about how relations with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe had effected Cuban culture. Codina explained that these relations helped make possible the publishing projects of institutions like Casa de las Américas.

This made some of the best literature of the world and especially the Third World, available, at cheap prices, to Cubans and Latin Americans. "As happens with any exchange we had good things and bad things. The cinema of Eisenstein could be seen in Cuba and we saw also these Soviet films where couples couldn't kiss on the lips. Nonetheless, this exchange made it possible for Cubans and Latin America to discover a very rich culture," Codina explained.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home