The central theme of this issue is the cultural impact of the “Cuban diaspora” on Cuban society. This is a reference to the Cuban community abroad, primarily in the United States.

One artist who is part of this “diaspora” is writer Edmundo Desnoes, who left Cuba in 1979 and currently lives in New York, where, among other things, he is a university professor. Desnoes is the author of Memories of Underdevelopment, a novel written in the mid-1960s that was later made into an award-winning film directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea.

In January, Desnoes returned to Cuba for the first time in 23 years to sit on the jury that issued the annual Casa de las Américas literary awards. He had been invited to participate as Cuba’s representative on the jury.

In an interview, La Gaceta asked Desnoes: “You left Cuba in 1979, when the so-called Gray Half-Decade was already behind us, and things were beginning to get better for many writers and artists.” The “Gray Half Decade” or “gray period” is a term commonly used in Cuba to describe a period at the beginning of the 1970s when an anti-working-class trajectory on questions of culture and the arts, influenced by the Stalinist bureaucratic policies of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, had its strongest influence in Cuba.

A number of those who are today among Cuba’s most prominent writers and artists, such as musician Silvio Rodríguez and essayist Antón Arrufat, who was awarded the national prize for literature in 2001, found that they were unable to publish or perform. Music like the Beatles was labeled decadent and banned from Cuban airwaves.

“After the Padilla case,” Desnoes replies, “Cuban writers were left very isolated.” Herberto Padilla was a Cuban novelist and poet who had been awarded the national poetry prize in Cuba in 1968. In 1971 he was arrested for “engaging in possibly counterrevolutionary activities” because of the content of his work. While in prison, he wrote a letter of “self-criticism” directed at the government. Today in Cuba, Padilla’s imprisonment is often held up as one of the most notorious examples of the policies implemented during the “Gray Half Decade.”

“For me, the writer is society’s critical conscience. I’m convinced of that. And I was stupefied to see that at a given moment the party began directing culture and charting the path to be followed…

“When, as you say, things began to get better, they told me I had to begin again, little by little, from below, humbly, so that I would be recognized again. Out of pride and arrogance I didn’t agree, and decided to leave Cuba.”

Once in the United States, Desnoes refused to join Washington’s counterrevolutionary propaganda campaign against Cuba. This earned him the enmity of forces in the U.S. determined to try to overthrow the Cuban Revolution.

“In the United States I could have devoted myself to the lucrative profession of being Cuban, but I could not turn my back on what I had been,” Desnoes states.

Another Cuban exile writer, Reinaldo Arenas, did become a vociferous voice in the counterrevolutionary campaign. Arenas “attended one of my lectures and got into a fight with my students, to the point of attacking them,” Desnoes says. “He then turned to the Pentagon and accused me of being a Castroist agent, saying that my mission was to win U.S. intellectuals over to Cuba’s cause. This was an accusation that did not fall into a vacuum, since I got a visit from FBI agents, who pestered me about it.”

Speaking about the reception he received in Cuba after almost two and a half decades, Desnoes states, “I was moved by the applause I received—why deny it? I didn’t expect that. Neither did I expect the generosity with which I was received by friends, young people, and even some political leaders.”  
 
Combating legacy of racism
Another interview in this issue of La Gaceta is with painter Roberto Diago, a Cuban who is Black, much of whose work centers on Afro-Cuban themes.

What Diago seeks to do with his work is “to emphasize allegorically the precarious world that Blacks have been compelled to live in, the legacy of slavery we’ve inherited, how we live, what our aspirations are,” the article says. This is a “part of Cuban life that some people at times don’t want to show.”

The interviewer points out that Diago is “part of a group of Cuban intellectuals who for a number of years have been alluding to the problems of racism that still persist in Cuban society.” He asks about Diago’s specific aims in this regard.

“If I’d been a slave,” Diago answers, “I would have become a cimarrón [runaway slave]. In truth, what many of us do through art is cultural cimarronism….

“What I have been creating is painting à la rap,” he says. In doing so, “I try to express through my work what still rankles, what still hurts, everyday racism, scornful looks, humiliations, and statements made about culture in relation to this topic.”

The interviewer asks whether it’s a contradiction for Diago to wage a battle against racial discrimination while he himself, as a successful artist, enjoys certain privileges that many Cubans do not have.

“The question you’ve asked me now indirectly, and which almost everyone also says to me, implicitly contains a certain racist posture,” Diago replies. “Is it that a Black person cannot have a car or have the right to travel.…

“Unfortunately there are very few Blacks in Cuba who enjoy these so-called privileges. You just have to go to the parking lot of any enterprise, store, restaurant, bank, and you’ll see many people with automobiles, cell phones, and among them, the percentage of Black persons is insignificant.”

Diago explains that notwithstanding his success as an artist, he continues living in the La Lisa neighborhood of Havana, one of the city’s poorest, to keep his ties to his roots. One of the projects he initiated and leads is a creativity workshop for children in the neighborhood.

“Working with children brings me closer and closer to reality and purity,” he says. “This link also brings me back to my own past, when as a child I participated in courses at the Museum of Fine Arts. By coincidence, when my old teacher Morriña saw me at the UNEAC office with children from my workshop, participating in the campaign for peace and against the war in Iraq, he told me how moved and satisfied he felt to think of how those classes with the child Diago had borne fruit. For me, hearing that statement was as if they’d given me a prize.”

Publication of the interview with Diago is characteristic of a broader and more open discussion in Cuba over the last half-decade on the questions of racism and racist prejudices, on which the UNEAC leadership has often taken the lead. In its Dec. 7, 1998, issue, for example, the Militant published an interview with Graziella Pogolotti, a member of UNEAC’s national secretariat, conducted by Martín Koppel and Mary-Alice Waters.

“The Cuban Revolution eradicated the economic basis of racism, and perhaps it was naively believed that this problem would be solved much more rapidly,” Pogolotti said. “Of course, there has been significant change between the situation before the revolution and today. Even so, prejudices continue among certain parts of Cuban society…. This problem cannot be left to be gradually, automatically eliminated by society. Instead, we must influence society to make it aware of this problem and begin to overcome it.”

The latest issue of La Gaceta includes additional articles on the theme of the Cuban diaspora, as well as poetry, short stories, reviews, and interviews with singer and songwriter Liuba María Hevia and poet Domingo Alfonso. Subscriptions to La Gaceta de Cuba can be purchased from Pathfinder (see ad below). To subscribe, contact pathfinderpress@compuserve.com. Subscriptions will also soon be available for sale on www.pathfinderpress.com.  
 
 
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