After the Tall Timber

by Renata Adler

  A solid production with just a fillip of political commitment has become characteristic of much of Cuban art in the last ten years, and has developed certain stylistic values of its own. But some ideologues are beginning to demand a more thorough political orientation. A series of four pseudonymous articles last fall in the military magazine Verde Olivo attacked the “depoliticalization” of much of Cuban art, particularly two works, a book of poems, Outside the Game by Heberto Padilla, and a play, Seven Against Thebes by Anton Arrufat, which won the prizes of the Cuban Artists and Writers Guild, UNEAC, last year. The articles suggested worthy future subjects—heroism during Hurricane Flora, for example—for revolutionary art and deplored less committed work as counterrevolutionary. The attack went unanswered for three months. Mr. Padilla, whose poetry was denounced for its “pessimism” (his poems imply that individuals are inevitably crushed by historical forces), had already lost his job at Granma, a government newspaper, and has not been granted the trip abroad that is part of the guild prize. The contested book of poems also includes these lines: “I live in Cuba. Always / I have lived in Cuba. These years of wandering / through the world, of which they have spoken so much / are my lies my falsifications. / Because I have always been in Cuba.”

  Mr. Arrufat’s play, denounced for its “pacifist” elements (all war is depicted in horrible terms), has not been produced, but both Seven Against Thebes and Mr. Padilla’s Outside the Game have been published in a UNEAC edition—with two conflicting introductions. The first, by writers who belong to UNEAC, disclaims the poems and play but defends the freedom to publish them. The other, by members of UNEAC’s international jury, defends Padilla’s poems in the strongest terms. Earlier this month, Haydée Santamaria, a heroine of the revolutionary battle of the Moncada who is now head of the Casa de las Américas (an institute for Cuban cultural exchange with the rest of Latin America), suggested that the UNEAC jury consist only of Cuban writers in 1969.

  Cuban filmmakers are now preparing to publish a position paper of their own—which will be the first public answer to the Verde Olivo line of attack. The six-page “Declaration of the Cuban Cineastes” will deplore equally the “clean hands” and “pure vocation” of liberal writers, who, in trying to prove their independence of ideology, produce “reactionary” art, and the “timid and bureaucratic” dogmatists, who, in trying to control development of the arts, occupy a “masked” counterrevolutionary position as well. The young filmmakers will advocate free artistic expression, not too “lazy” to take the aims of the revolution into account; their guardedly liberal statement is expected, in the intellectual community, to bring the controversy to a public crisis of some kind.

  The last time the issue of artistic freedom arose in Cuba on a major scale was in 1961 when a documentary film, P.M., which showed drunkenness and decadence in Havana nightclubs, was suppressed. Cuban artists and intellectuals protested vigorously, until Premier Fidel Castro, in a famous speech to the intellectuals, stated his position on freedom in the arts: “What are the rights of revolutionary writers and artists? Within the revolution, everything; against the revolution, no rights whatsoever.”

  Among the writers opposing the suppression of P.M. was Guillermo Cabrera Infante, then editor of Lunes de Revolución, a Cuban cultural journal. The journal was discontinued, and Mr. Cabrera Infante, who has since left Cuba, is now conducting an important correspondence in an Argentine periodical, Primera Plana, protesting Cuban censorship. It was after praising Tres Tristes Tigres, a book by the emigrant Cabrera Infante, as the best Cuban novel since the revolution, and after dismissing as unimportant a book by Lisandro Otero, vice president of the Cultural Council, that Mr. Padilla lost his job at Granma.

  It might be assumed that artists who have not left Cuba after ten revolutionary years are demonstrably “within the revolution,” but the present crisis seems a kind of testing of the still ambiguous and contradictory grounds, to determine whether Cuba is about to undergo what seems to many a historically inevitable tightening of control. The situation this year is different from 1961: Problems in the arts are ironically complicated by the fact that, except for the economic blockade—which many Cubans credit with having strengthened the country and unified the people—pressures from the United States have become less apparent. They appear, more subtly, as a Cuban internalization of the values of American culture itself. At every cultural level, for a newly literate people, past and present are learned together, and the weight of cultural history as well as the weight of contemporary art naturally falls on the side of peoples who have been literate for some time. A generation too young to remember Batista, the early struggles, illiteracy or real underdevelopment is growing up. And there exists a contingent of youth that Cuban intellectuals refer to as “snob”—bored with revolutionary discipline and fascinated by American life styles, American films, American rock (a Beatle-like group called Los Meme is greeted with screams; a Havana youth newspaper reports solemnly that the Mamas and Papas are breaking up), and what an official for Cuban television calls the American “Queen for a Day Psychology.” Minor leanings in this line are tolerated, but students who drop out too firmly or too conspicuously are likely to be expelled from the schools and sent to the provinces for “agricultural re-education.”

  “In the early days of the revolution,” a Havana University student said, “the important words were ‘blockade’ and ‘imperialism.’ People used to explain personal troubles, even nightmares, in terms of imperalismo.” The crucial words now, he said, are “Third World” and “underdevelopment,” with Cubans trying desperately to identify themselves with underdeveloped countries, to divorce themselves from the culture ninety miles away. It is out of lack of confidence that Cuban artists are developing in definably Cuban ways, he said, that a dogmatist approach takes form.

  There are certainly fields in which Cubans are developing art and cultural dilemmas of their own. In the early days of the revolution the Cuban Institute of Film Art and Industry, ICAIC, fought a battle over posters against bureaucrats who argued that representational, essentially socialist realist art was the only means of communicating to the people. ICAIC held out for art, and now professional and amateur artists in Cuba design posters with such style that even the political agencies are producing graphics of distinction and originality.

  On the lawns of what was formerly the Havana Country Club, a Cuban architect, Ricardo Porro, has designed the Havana Art Institute (a school for children between twelve and seventeen), consisting of rounded structures, like Gaudí in brick, with bulbed dome windows on top and long columned walks along the windowed sides. It is one of the most pleasant, least institutional schools imaginable. The prefabricated houses replacing peasant huts all over the country, on the other hand, are flat, infinitely reduplicated rectangles. Cuban theater, since the Arrufat issue arose, has been largely limited to imaginative productions of Bertolt Brecht, or inventively staged choral readings from the Cuban poet and patriot José Martí. Vicente Revulta, one of the best-known theater actors and directors in Havana, has temporarily moved to the more liberal film institute.

  Out of a concern about underdevelopment, a Youth Congress of Artists and Writers, which met recently in Havana, will meet again later this month, with delegates from all the provinces, in Camaguey. The young people want to discuss how, as active revolutionary workers, they can find time and access to materials, instruction, and outlets for the artwork they would like to do. A genuine cultural problem, acknowledged by the government, lies in bringing books, film, art, and information to a generation of new intellectuals emerging from the schools, and being sent, for the most part, to settle in the provinces. The old propaganda vehicles, newspapers and television, are not suited to new sensibilities. Hard news of the outside world, even in Havana, scarcely exists.

  The writer who introduced the word “underdevelopment” on the intellectual plane is Edmundo Desnoes, whose novel Memories of Underdevelopment (now a highly popular film in Cuba, and for
some reason published in the United States as Inconsolable Memories) uses the word ironically to apply to a writer who is not entirely convinced by the revolution, who is not in fact entirely convinced by anything. Mr. Desnoes, a tall, blond man of thirty-eight, who worked until recently as an editor of books, now works for the Cuban propaganda agency COR in charge of coining slogans—rather like the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky in the Russian Revolution. Before the revolution in Cuba, Mr. Desnoes, who describes himself as having been for years completely alienated from society, lived on a boat in the Bahamas. In 1961 he returned to Cuba, expecting an invasion and expecting, he says, to die. Asked whether as an intellectual, highly skeptical writer, he found that the revolution gave or cost him energy, he said, “For me, it is always an effort to remain alive.” Asked whether he believed in progress at all, he said that formerly he did not, but that looking at Cuba fifty years ago, “a country of pimps and prostitutes,” and looking at Cuba now, it is difficult to maintain his skepticism about it.

  Mr. Desnoes, like nearly every other able-bodied Cuban, spends about a month each year cutting sugar cane. He acknowledges that he hates it. “As an intellectual, you have a certain idea of nature,” he said. “Landscapes, something impressionistic. But the cane is alienating, overwhelming. Conversation becomes absolutely crude and elementary. Bending down to the coffee plants, I suppose, is physically more difficult. But the cane never seems to end.” Mr. Desnoes, who has lived in the United States and who has traveled a great deal abroad, said he would not leave the country now until the sugar harvest of ten million tons, projected by Premier Castro for 1971, was in.

  Before the revolution, books by Cuban writers were not published in Cuba except at the writer’s own expense, and Mr. Desnoes published his own first novel, in an edition of five hundred copies, himself. The Cuban bourgeoisie under Batista, he said, read mainly Life and Reader’s Digest. “Now, for the first time, a Cuban writer has an authentic audience,” he continued. “He does not have to look abroad for international acclaim. It entails certain responsibilities.” Asked about the characteristics of that new audience, he said it was perhaps still too accepting, too uncritical. “The problem is to understand them, not to project,” he explained. “In all the new education, we cannot be sure what the people know. It may be that with all the ideology about Latin America people have no idea what Latin America is. Or any country. Or a continent.”

  He said that the revolution had so far proceeded pragmatically, reactively, without any rigid ideological system, and attributed this to the instincts of Premier Castro. Asked how the revolution would go without Mr. Castro, he said, “Perhaps Stalinism, no? But it is not right to protect your ideas against the future. It might become a nightmare or a dream.” In a late-night discussion between Mr. Desnoes and some friends in Havana’s Hotel Nacional it was mentioned that the United States had not, after all, invaded Cuba, where it might once have succeeded, and had, instead, gone to Vietnam, where it had fewer interests and could not win. It was suggested that this might be construed as a colossal blunder of idealism. Mr. Desnoes said that in coming to grips with America, a colonial writer must also come to grips with the fact that it has also helped to form his own idealism. “If the country is so powerful that with a flick of its finger it could extinguish Che in Bolivia,” he said, “one must also understand the things it has not done.” On the subject of how the United States might react to a full recognition of its loss in Vietnam, Mr. Desnoes said, “I hope it will not be like Moby Dick. A bewildered monster who flicks his tail and wipes us off the island.”

  Humberto Solas, twenty-seven-year-old director of Lucía, the most popular film in Cuban history, works six months a year on films and six in the agriculture or at other jobs, which he does not mind. “The year has twelve months,” he said, and when it was remarked that the content of the experience of American intellectuals is often only other intellectuals, he said he was certain his contact with the people in his months away from film helped in his work.

  Mr. Solas, who is reading a Soviet polemical history of Stalinism distributed by the Cuban government to intellectuals (a few special books, called Polemical Editions, are occasionally circulated only among intellectuals, for discussion purposes), is very much concerned with the dogmatist position on Cuban art. “They do not understand the revolution,” he said. “Now, after ten years, everybody is thinking. This is a popular revolution. We have a strong secret service to deal with real counterrevolutionaries. We don’t need a populist-dogmatist bureaucracy.”

  Mr. Solas is also very much worried by a rumor that a book called The Hard Years, by Jesús Díaz, will become a reflection of a cultural line. “It is a study of the years before the revolution,” he said. “But it is important to realize that ‘the hard years’ are now.” He much admires a recent Colombian novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Marquez—“very revolutionary, very deep,” he said. “The populist position is, ‘I did not want to put the bomb, but I was told to, and I did.’ The deep position is, ‘I was told to, and then I thought, and perhaps I didn’t put the bomb.’ ” Solas was convinced that young people “of talent and sensibility would not accept a populist approach. But if, as he thinks unlikely, the hard line should win out, he would stay in Cuba and wait for a better time. “If I could not make my kind of films, I would rest,” he said. “In the end, the question is who is more revolutionary, which side of the controversy produces better art.”

  The New York Times

  February 10, 1969

  HAVANA

  At the time of the revolution, Cuba’s contribution to world cinema consisted mainly of cheap tropical locations, facilities for dubbing, and, in Havana’s Chinatown, the three most famous pornographic theaters in the world. Starting virtually from nothing, Cuban filmmakers—most of whom are in their late twenties or early thirties—have now developed the most widely discussed, persuasive, and controversial medium in the country. Films now reach far more extensively than television (which broadcasts mainly propaganda and old films monitored from stations in Miami) every place where Cubans meet.

  In early 1959, three months after the revolution, the Cuban government founded ICAIC (Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos), a film institute instructed to form and document the revolutionary experience of the people, while creating films as art. Under the direction of Alfredo Guevara, a former guerrilla, who, in exile in Mexico City, had served as an assistant to the Spanish director Luis Buñuel, the film institute took over all film production, distribution and collection in the country and began to move, rather like the new roads and schools, into the countryside. Since modern equipment was unavailable, the institute created a kind of spare-parts cinema, refurbishing the one hundred commercial theaters in Havana and the four hundred in the rest of the country, founding a 3000–film cinémathèque, and sending all films, Cuban and foreign, to villages all over the country in mobile units, which show films in fields, community centers, and schoolhouses. According to an official of ICAIC, every Cuban now has access to about two films a week. The pornographic film houses have been closed.

  The budget varies considerably from year to year, but the government supplies the institute with what filmmakers call “means”—that is, props, locations, theaters, access to places, transportation, technicians, and actors temporarily released from national theaters. Since Mr. Guevara has long been a personal friend of Premier Fidel Castro, filmmakers are relatively independent of the national Cuban Culture Council, which nominally administers all the arts in Cuba. As a result, the film institute is regarded by Cuban intellectuals as one of the major sources of information and relative liberalism.

  American films made since 1960 are not exported to Cuba and, since the blockade, Cuban films have not been admitted to the United States. But among the most widely and seriously discussed foreign films in Cuba now is the Czechoslovak Closely Watched Trains, Jiří Menzel’s story of a young boy who thinks himself impotent, sleeps with an old
er woman and, the next day, blows up a Nazi train. The crucial point for young Cubans is that the woman who brings the boy the bomb, and who sleeps with him, is an artist. “In any Russian film of the forties,” Humberto Solas, a twenty-seven-year-old Cuban director, said over lunch in the Hotel Habana Libre (formerly the Hilton), “the woman would have brought the boy the bomb and sung him the Internationale. In Menzel’s film, it is just as important for her to go to bed with him. It is something new. It is human.

  Mr. Solas himself has just directed Lucía, the most popular and enthusiastically discussed film in Cuban history. Already seen by more than a million people, Lucía tells the story of a woman’s problems in Cuba in three historical periods, 1895, 1932, and now. In the first episode, Lucía, played by Raquel Revuelta, falls in love with a Spaniard, who turns out to be married. She is persuaded to run away with him and reveals to him the location of the cafetan, the revolutionary headquarters. He turns out to be a Spanish spy as well, and brings the Spanish soldiers in. She murders him. In the next chapter, Lucía, played by Eslinda Núñez, is drawn by a boyfriend out of her rather F. Scott Fitzgerald set into guerrilla sabotage in which the boyfriend is killed. Both episodes are done with a remarkable sense of style and period, but it is the third, the contemporary, chapter that causes the greatest excitement in Cuba now.