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culture

celia

The exclusion of Celia Cruz in Cuba

por Giordan Rodríguez Milanés 6 septiembre 2020
escrito por Giordan Rodríguez Milanés

On October 4, 2009, the day Mercedes Sosa died, the producers at Radio Granma faced an odd dilemma. The printed press published the news, but in the record libraries or music departments of every local radio station in the country, there was a list of artists whose broadcasting was forbidden or limited, and the Argentinean singer was on it.

We didn’t know the reason. Actually, the reason was never important. Sometimes the director of the radio station got a phone call: ‘Pablo Milanés started criticizing the Revolution and it’s been decided to limit his broadcasting’, as it happened during the public controversy between him and Silvio Rodríguez. Fortunately, good sense prevailed on that occasion, and a few hours later Juan Salvador Guevara – then vice-president of the Cuban National Union of Writers and Artists (UNEAC) in Granma – called to explain that the supposed limitation of the Bayamo-born singer had been an ideological overreaction by someone and that Abel Prieto himself had clarified the issue.

When Buena Fe’s album Catalejo came out, the then director of Radio Granma and I participated in an event in Caibarién gathering radio stations from coastal municipalities. A different wind of renovation was apparently blowing. Several broadcasters believed it was ‘a very harsh album’, and that started an informal and engaging debate in which some of us spoke about the cultural inconsistency of the prohibitions and limitations, to which Guillermo Pavón – who had recently been appointed vice-president of radio broadcasting at the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television (ICRT) – replied: ‘It’s being studied, it’s being studied.’

The poet, researcher, and editor Julio Sánchez Chang, whose executive secretary I was at the Municipal Committee of UNEAC in Manzanillo, told me a few months before passing away that at a meeting of that organization in Camagüey, a producer asked about the list of forbidden and limited artists in Cuban radio, and the ICRT representative responded: ‘I don’t know what list you’re talking about here. The Revolution’s policy has never been to exclude anybody.’ Then the producer, saying nothing and apparently satisfied with the answer, went back to Radio Agramonte, tore the list, and brought it to the meeting.

A few months after that meeting in Camagüey, the ICRT sent an email explaining that all the previous lists were invalid. Some producers, a small minority, like Orestes Ernesto Remón at Radio Granma, started to include Celia Cruz in their musical productions, as well as music by Annia Linares, Mirtha Medina, Oscar d’ León, Rubén Blades, Maggie Carlés, and others.

In spite of that, in late 2012, another general director of Radio Granma took me to be analyzed at the Supervisory Board because I had broadcasted the songs ‘Miedos’ by Buena Fe and Los Aldeanos, and ‘Lucha tu yuca, Taíno’ by Ray Fernández. Two years ago, at the Manzanillo local channel, Golfovisión, there was an attempt to apply sanctions, and a media coordinator lost her bonus pay because, in a visual support clip for a program, she let slip a shot from the ICAIC co-production Yo soy del son a la salsa, by Rigoberto López, which showed Celia Cruz.

The question is, why does Celia Cruz appear now in the TV program La Pupila Asombrada?

Apparently, for the same reason that the list of censored artists was eliminated: so that those who accuse us of being totalitarian and authoritarian aren’t right. It’s in Miami and not in Cuba where people publicly smash artists’ records for performing in Havana, cyberbully Laura Pausini for singing with President Díaz-Canel in the audience, start a campaign to boycott Buena Fe performances in the United States, and demonize Israel Rojas.

It’s not the Cuban government either the one who applies a law preventing the best Cuban artists who have decided to live in the island from being promoted in international circuits or from signing with American labels, or that Juan Formell y Los Van Van travel to receive a Grammy award. That’s all true. But there’s one detail: we’re not the US government; our government is not the imperialist one. Our politicians speak of building a better world and of attaining all possible justice. Here we say that ‘Revolution is never to lie or violate ethical principles.’

Therefore, so as not to violate ethical principles, if you’re going to include Celia Cruz in a TV program with a marked ideological and political outlook, like La Pupila Asombrada, the honorable thing would be to tell the whole story, not only that the singer hated the Cuban Revolution – as she did –, but also that we were in the wrong for 50 years in the treatment our media gave to any artist who decided to migrate to the US or who didn’t agree with the policies of the Revolution, or to those who, without being Cuban, expressed any sort of public criticism of the Revolution or any of its leaders.

We were in the wrong to the point that, at the Manzanillo Theater, there are paintings of great personalities who stepped onto its stage, from Carlos Manuel de Céspedes to Rosita Fornés, but Ernesto Lecuona is missing. He’s not there because they had him removed and they replaced him with Capablanca, who was in Manzanillo, but never at the theater. According to what they told us, the pianist and composer from Guanabacoa had said that while Fidel was in power, he didn’t want his remains to rest in Cuba. How could there be a painting of him at a place which, as was thought back in 2002, Fidel himself might reinaugurate?

That’s the type of mentality we should set out to change for our own good as a nation. As I’ve said before: you can’t overcome it with more exclusion and isolation, when exclusion and isolation are what they want to impose on us. You can’t beat hatred with hatred. You can’t defeat the intention of dividing us Cubans with more divisions. And you can’t overpower the slanting views and the crude manipulation applied to the cultural history of this country with more slanting views and more crude manipulation. You win by uniting forces and by wielding the truth in hand.

Translated from the original 

6 septiembre 2020 3 comentarios 672 vistas
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tribute

José Martí: the tribute

por Alina Bárbara López Hernández 1 febrero 2020
escrito por Alina Bárbara López Hernández

Every January 28, the environment was festive at the small school ‘José Cadenas’, in the Jovellanos of my childhood. Teachers —all of them women—, students and parents came together to celebrate the Night of Martí. The central courtyard of the old large house-cum-school was filled with classroom desks where the comfortably seated attendees enjoyed the activity. Simple paper chains and a huge picture of the Apostle were the only decoration for the tribute.

We would get ready for the evening since the beginning of the year. The teachers wrote the short scripts and the children would passionately decide who got to play each role. My role was a cinch. I almost always played Leonor Pérez; the advantages of having a height that made me look older.

The summary of crucial moments in Martí’s life was managed with creativity, putting together bits and pieces of his poetry and prose. Some of his characters paraded in front of the audience, like the Spanish dancer, Pilar, Piedad and her Doll, Bebé and her cousin Raúl, Masicas and Lopi, Meñique and the Princess… and many others from La Edad de Oro (The Golden Age). We would sing the song ‘Clave a Martí’ and reenact his death, face turned to the sun, with his verses as an epitaph. It was an ending that moved children and adults alike.

Those were the years of the Grey Five-Year Period, something I’d learn about later, but those Nights of Martí had nothing to do with dogmatic attitudes. They were a tradition that dated back to small public schools during the republican era, where self-sacrificing schoolteachers turned their adoration for Martí into a living and collective act. These were the teachers who remained active in the 60s and 70s.

When my daughters were of school age, I couldn’t help comparing these remembrances with the way of commemorating the Teacher today. Now, in morning meetings at school, standing under the harsh sun, I felt distant from the emotion, the creativity and the enthusiasm of the 70s. The century had changed, but other things had changed too.

Paying tribute to Martí is at the heart of the Cuban Republic. From the very early stages of independence, practically all municipalities and towns in the island named a street after him. In 1900, a public contest was organized in order to choose the person who would be honored with the first commemorative monument of the Republic, replacing the statue of Isabella II. The popular survey decided it would be dedicated to Martí. And that’s how, in 1905, his effigy was erected in the Parque Central of Havana, at a cost that was also defrayed by public subscription.

From 1900 on, he became an object of popular devotion. People applauded at school parades in remembrance of Martí. There were parties to honor Martí, feasts to honor Martí, layettes to honor Martí…

In 1926, his birthday was instituted as a nationwide celebration for the first time. January 28 was declared a public holiday. Researcher Ricardo Hernández Otero tells us that his image was even used for commercial advertising. The big stores of Havana, for example, showed Martí-themed shop windows on that date.[i]

Going over the documents and press of republican times allows us to verify the affected and corny language that political discourse used to present Martí. Juan Marinello stated in his article ‘El homenaje’ (‘The Tribute’), published in the Diario de la Marina on the very 28th of January, 1926: ‘We must move past the stirred discourse, this plebeianly stirred discourse (…) and into sharp, penetrating speech, which carries its force in its natural simplicity. More than anything, we must spread the virtue of that brilliant Cuban, and with it, the guidelines of his political ideas.’

It would be in the second half of the 1920s —a period of economic crisis and great social effervescence— that a new assumption of Martí’s work and legacy would break through. His figure would be much better known, his biographies would be written. In the wise words of Pedro Pablo Rodríguez, one of his most relevant scholars, ‘a distance was required that would permit the collection of documents and processed information with a certain frequency and systematicness.’

For essayist and researcher Carmen Suárez, the perception of Martí was gradually built ‘through a plurality of discourses, in a very choral way, with all the ambiguities, contradictions and distortions that entailed.’ She identifies a discourse which fuels the popular image of Martí; which encouraged, and still encourages, hypothetical anecdotes transmitted in oral tradition: the womanizer or seducer, the drinker, or even the one used to justify the stealing of a book.

In the antipodes of that popular appropriation, Suárez places the official discourse ‘of a frivolous and irritating cynicism, which sought (…) a sort of cordial cosmetic for power, a resource to tune into the highest patriotic feelings, without the rhetoric of invoking Martí having anything to do with actual political practice.’

In the plurality of voices about Martí, a cultured layer of the population must be singled out: the intellectuals —teachers, creators, professionals—, who promoted the systematic study of his life and work as the century progressed.

In an interview granted to Julio César Guanche, and published in La Revolución Cubana del 30 (The Cuban Revolution of the 30s), Fernando Martínez Heredia maintains: ‘Every generation which has entered Cuban civic life during the 20th century has had to deal with Martí. Each one, naturally, has done it from different situations and conditions, but also facing a previous cultural accumulation which includes Martí and the images and readings of him, and reacting to them.’

When the generation of 1926 approached Martí, it sought to polish its anti-imperialist facet, nearly dented by the constant praise of the pro-independent figure he was. In order to do that, they had to break with the political generation of those who fought in the independence wars and with their guiding principles: personal leadership and dependency.

When the generation of the centenary became a light in the dark shadows of a tyrannized country, exactly one century after Martí’s birth, it wanted to pay tribute to the man who told Gómez —in spite of the respect he felt for him— ‘You cannot set up a people, general, in the same way you set up a camp!’ A group of those young people stormed a military fortress and the struggle against Batista began in the name of the Apostle, a struggle that would be joined by Cubans from different classes and social sectors, in the plains and in the mountains, until the dictator was overthrown.

The lesson that both generations left us is quite obvious. Martí should not only be embraced. In the same way that they did, he must be deconstructed. It is a civic imperative to react to the symbolic images of the Apostle that are presented to us from power. It’s the only way a generation will find its own course.

Every time brings with it particular ways of questioning, of interpreting sources and decoding symbols. But that way of reacting must have political coherence, an underlying ideal and a civic purpose. The bloodstained busts of Martí aroused diverse reactions; reactions that cannot be classified as from inside or outside, by socialists or capitalists, by liberals or conservatives.

That action was obviously a provocation to the Cuban government, where the figure of Martí was the least important thing. Some saw simple acts of peaceful and civil disobedience in the vandalism, when it was really something else. Martí was merely an idle pretext.

I do not reject the perpetrators because I believe Martí is sacred, or worship him as a saint, a holy man, a being full of nearly mystical purity. Not even because their actions showed ignorance of Martí’s own appreciation for leaders of the independence movement, to the point that, without shaking off the dust of the road, he went to pay his respects at the statue of Bolívar when he got to Venezuela.

I condemn them —before I knew they had been paid to carry out the act of rebelliousness— because they are not worthy of a man who, since his adolescence, had the courage of facing the consequences of his actions and confessed to writing a letter that took him to prison. They are not worthy of a man who acted, in his desire for independence, against outdated forms of organization and apparently established political judgments.

Because the subliminal reading some people tried to give it, that the meaning of the stains was a reference to how the ideas of Martí have been let down in Cuba, is a cowardly justification to continue to postpone what we now can say outright, due to its real possibility of socialization: with respect, with forcefulness, with good reason.

José Martí was a profoundly subversive man. He was so in his writing, in his political ideas and even in his privacy. He not only conceived a Cuba independent from Spain and the United States, he conceived a future Republic that Cuba is yet to construct. That sets him apart from other leaders, and grants constant relevance to his ideas. The tribute he needs today is that we revisit his republican doctrine. And for that one needs many readings, much civility and much personal worth, not busts stained by clandestine hands.

(Translated from the original)

[i] All unspecified quotes are taken from ‘Martí en la República’ (‘Martí in the Republic’), in the Controversia section, Temas, no. 26: 81-106, Havana, July-September 2001.

1 febrero 2020 1 comentario 581 vistas
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facundo

The downfall of Facundo

por Giordan Rodríguez Milanés 12 enero 2020
escrito por Giordan Rodríguez Milanés

The downfall of Facundo happened slowly. It all began when the character Claro, from the ‘Dale Taller’ segment in the show Deja que yo te cuente, disappeared even before it was created.

The trial began when that controversy between Alfredo Guevara and Blas Roca was left unfinished in the pages of Hoy newspaper. The argumentation for the sentence is surgically picked out from Fidel Castro’s ‘Words to the Intellectuals’, turned into anathema by the usual extremists and reductionists: ‘Within the Revolution, everything; against the Revolution, no rights’.

Was Andy Vázquez setting Facundo against the Revolution when he made the video about the events at Cuatro Caminos? Or were those who poorly organized that whole business of the inauguration of the famous market the ones who put the Revolution at risk, or those whose purpose was it to keep the enemy –they mentioned the enemy– from ruining the much anticipated inauguration?

Those are the questions we Cubans of 2020 have to ask ourselves in order to understand not only what happened to Andy Vázquez, but also to Yasel Porto a few months ago, and to the character Claro a few years ago, and to Enrique Arredondo with that ad lib in Alegrías de Sobremesa that punished a child to watching only Russian cartoons for a week.

Georgina Mendoza Cedeño was a radio broadcaster from Manzanillo with more than forty years of experience. In that time she had trained generations of producers with her radio host workshop for children; she received multiple awards in national radio festivals; she was a founder of the Hermanos Saíz Brigade and of the Cuban National Union of Writers and Artists (UNEAC); she directed and hosted first-rate radio programs; she had been head of programming and director of Radio Granma, with excellent results.

Right when her program Para ti, mujer had the highest radio ratings in the province of Granma, Georgina received in her home the visit of her daughter’s husband, who lived in Chicago, and another Cuban residing in the US, who she fell in love with. It was more than the municipal Party office could take, and they pressured Pedro Espronceda Figueredo –Georgina’s lifelong comrade and colleague– so he would not only take away from her the direction of that popular program, but also ‘force’ her to retire.

Georgina spent several months at home with no salary; they wouldn’t even let her set foot in the studios of the station to which she had practically dedicated her life, until she got her pension checkbook.

The Cuban Institute of Radio and Television (ICRT) never gave UNEAC an answer. All they did was honor her, two years later, at the gala for the 80th anniversary of the radio in Manzanillo, which yours truly had the privilege of writing and directing.

What legal basis was there for Georgina Mendoza’s forced retirement?

None.

What legal basis is there for the ‘break’ given to the character of Facundo Correcto, in the very own words of the director of Cubavisión?

None.

However, for the guys at the Ideological Department of Central Committee of the PCC, who are the ones running the radio and television in Cuba after all, both cases, and all the other ones before, have a political and ideological basis they cannot allow themselves to question beyond certain limits: i. e., the myth of the infallible cadre educated by the Revolution. With time and the determinant weight of the course of history, they’ve had to accept that a cadre or leader can be wrong, be corrupted even, or be treasonous, but only as an individual.

Facundo’s problem is that, more than a generalizing relation with reality, he made it specific about the events in Cuatro Caminos. Andy Vázquez’s problem is the same as Georgina Mendoza’s: understanding that we’re all Cuban no matter where we live, and that he can perform for –or, like Georgina, fall in love with– the ‘Cubans in Miami (…) and also go to old people’s homes in Cuba (…) to Canada, and also to elementary schools in Cuba where children go wild with joy. (…)

To Punta Cana, and to hospitals on Doctors’ Day’, as Luis Silva has said on Facebook, which is extensive to Andy Vázquez and Facundo. That inherent free will of the human condition and the arts is something the guys at the Ideological Department and the administrators of ICRT cannot understand and much less accept.

That’s why Enrique Ubieta, for example, replied to Luis Toledo Sande in a Facebook comment, according to Arturo Chang: ‘actually, his contract was rescinded, he wasn’t given a sanction (it’s not the same), nor was he expelled from TV and not for his most recent Miami video, which for some time he has produced using a character and even the show name of Vivir del Cuento, all of it without the authorization of the Cuban TV’.

Beyond the fact that Ubieta’s comment contradicts that of the director of Cubavisión, who says the character of Facundo ‘has only been given a break’, that is, he doesn’t mention the contract being rescinded, it is a fact that Cuban Television has no exclusive rights on Vivir del Cuento, and there doesn’t seem to be an exclusive rights clause for any of its characters in favor of the Cuban Television.

Therefore, there’s no legal basis for rescinding or ‘giving a break’. It’s not the case either that, as we’ve seen, legal basis is something of any interest for those who punished Enrique Arredondo, disappeared Claro or forced Georgina Mendoza to retire. You know who said it: ‘Within the Revolution, everything; against the Revolution, no rights’. And for the censors, an artist’s will is obviously against the Revolution.

(Translated from the original)

12 enero 2020 0 comentario 521 vistas
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