Ernesto Morales Licea, Translator: Unstated
I recently heard Carlos Alberto Montaner in a presentation on art and
literature in exile which I had the good fortune to attend. According
to Montaner, one of the points on which the Cuban regime undoubtedly has
been shrewd, is the negative connotation they have managed to associate
with the terms "anti-Castro" in global eyes, through a sustained and
effective propaganda machine.
For example, to publicly say one has been, for many years, an
intellectual anti-fascist, or anti-Pinochet, leads to immediate
applause, but the same does not happen when you call a man of thought
and action "anti-Castro."
With luck, your declaration would be taken with a dismissive silence. In
other cases, some of your audience's chairs would quickly empty and your
public could be notably reduced.
This is a complex puzzle, the structure of which can be inexplicable for
those who, like me, use logic as a fundamental tool in shaping
judgments: many of those who have suffered and fought against tyrannies
of different colors and different ideologies take an incomprehensible
position with regards to Cuba, halfway between cowardice and
hypocritical silence.
Thus, for example, we see respectable intellectuals, artists,
influential men, using acidic terms to refer to General Franco who
decided the destiny of the Spanish nation for forty years, while with
respect to the satrap who steered the Island according to his will for
fifty years, they are silent or, much worse, they smile with pleasure.
I will say just a pair of names: Miguel Bosé, Luis Eduardo Aute.
Spaniards of good background who don't skimp on scalding adjectives
whenever they dig up the bones of their own dictator; but when they take
into their mouths their name of ours, they chant it in flowery poetry.
I would ask them, for example, what they think of the recent declaration
of the elder Castro supporting, in writing, his brother's declaration
with respect to the limit of two terms of five years.
In the future I don't thing I'll take any notice of more possibilities
for their possible responses: either one has an extra dose of imbecility
to ignore the cynicism behind this phrase, the support of a
leader-for-life for a measure to restrict the terms of those who come
after; or the intellectual dishonesty is too great to even consider.
Quite recently I asked the journalist Max Lesnik what he would think if
suddenly the American government prevented him, after leaving Miami,
from returning to which had been his city his entire life. The answer
can be read by those who consult my interview, published in this blog.
Well, I would be delighted to ask this same question of Benicio del
Toro, let's say. As admirable in his profession as he is questionable in
the causes he embraces. To say to him, for example: "You go out and film
your Guevara film. You offer your sovereign statements, in Cuba, with
respect to the embargo and the interference of the American government,
and suddenly, when you go to buy your ticket home, this government has
closed the doors of your country forever."
So what gives?
Let's adapt a Creole aphorism, and say there are causes that deserves
sticks. And there are silences that also deserve sticks. And every time
I hear intellectuals like Eduardo Galeano and Noam Chomsky criticize the
historical excesses of tyrannical governments in Latin America, and
ignore the fact that before their eyes the country continues to be
administered like the private plot of a small family, I'm convinced that
a creative reputation doesn't have to go hand in hand with ideological
honesty.
Every time I read the teary-eyed petitions to free the Five Members of
the Wasp Network, from artists like Danny Glover and Danny Rivera, and
don't hear their pronouncements about the thousands of children
separated from their parents because
Apparently it's quite pleasing to denounce to the four winds the
shameful conduct of American soldiers in Guantanamo, but when it comes
to saying a word, just one, with respect to the thirty elderly demented
Mazorra patients massacred, it is good to keep the purest silence.
The forcibly exiled Cuban writer Norberto Fuentes–rescued from the
country's cells by the intercession of the patron Garcia Marquez in the
wake of the "Cause Number 1″ of 1989 which led to the execution of
General Ochoa–was about to speak. He had done so for the newspaper El
Pais. And from respect for his literary work, not stunning but still
valuable, I believe he had to shut up.
Because to say of a Politburo with an average age of 67, that the Island
does not continue to be dominated by a military gerontocracy, and to
assert the contrary, that Cuba is being ruled by young generations, is
to make a monumental fool of someone who's written books as good as,
"Hemingway in Cuba" and "Sweet Cuban Warriors."
Or Norberto Fuentes, a writer beloved by the Fidelist nomenklatura in
the past, has secret information that the rest of us don't know, or to
say something so outrageous is worthy of applause: suddenly an
improvised harlequin is erected.
Worse yet, he has said, and I quote: "In 1989 the Revolution was
castrated, because they eliminated the bold, the untamed. In that moment
the Revolution was fucked. Then came a period of gray functionaries."
Those who know of his deep friendship with Tony de la Guardia and
Arnaldo Ochoa, the most famous in our national history to face a firing
squad, know what Fuentes is talking about. But the question that then
absorbs the entire cerebral function is: Where was the writer Norberto
Fuentes during the worst of the Five Grey Years?
Where was the author of the "Autobiography of Fidel Castro", when
homosexuals were beaten, or slept in police cells for listening to the
lads from Liverpool?
The answer is clear: walking with whores on nights of excess, enjoying
the honey of the same power that would later throw him off the cliff.
For this reason an honorable author like Carlos Albert Montaner can't
approve of the gray connotation which the term anti-Castro calls forth
in much of the world. For this reason eternal intellectuals such as
Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Jesus Diaz, who in a moment of their lives
stopped halfway and knew that faced with the verticality of the same
cause they had previously defended, they would never win approval in the
eyes of the leftist academics for whom it is all very well to have been
at odds with Leonidas Trujillo, but not with his colleague Fidel Castro.
It's not about a supernatural effectiveness of official Cuban
propaganda. It is about–the doubt is less every day–an ideological
hypocrisy too widespread, in times when the words artist or
intellectual, and honest thinking, are no longer necessarily synonymous.
27 April 2011
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