Writers' Blockade: The Artist in Cuba

A report by James Plath

In Strawberry and Chocolate, the 1994 Cuban film about a gay artist and a naive Castro supporter in 1979 Havana, the artist spouts all sorts of things one wouldn't expect to be exported from the Cuban Institute of Cinematographers these days: "Art makes you feel and think. Art does not transmit. A government radio does that," he sputters. "When will they understand that art is one thing, and propaganda another?" Later, voice cracking, he asks, "So, communism will make us fags happy? So, someday I'll be able to show any exhibit I want?" And while his young ideologue friend lowers his eyes and offers no response, 17 years later the answer seems to be, "Yes." At least, it was before the downing of two civilian planes piloted by exiles. When my wife and I went to Cuba just weeks before Brothers to the Rescue dropped anti-Castro leaflets over Havana in January of 1996, all of the writers and artists that we met told us they did not need rescuing.

"In the seventies we had a problem with censorship, but we fought it," Cuban Writers Association president Francisco López Sacha told us. "Now, no standards. We write. Our narratives have plots that weren't possible to publish in Cuba 10-15 years ago. Problems of sex--homosexuals too--taboo 10 years ago are now being written." And as he spoke, we recalled lesbian and gay couples we saw walking the cobblestone streets of Old Havana, unabashedly holding hands.

The association is part of the Union of Cuban Writers and Artists, which sponsors one publishing house (the National Ediciones) and two literary magazines (Union Review and La Gazetta de Cuba); they publish eight books per year, with an average press run of 300 copies. But the problem is money. As Sacha explained, his voice shifting from enthused to impassioned, "There are many fine Cuban poets and short story writers (though for some strange reason we don't have any good novelists, and I wish we did, because novelists write in a genre that pays). But we are in the midst of a great literary movement," he said. "Our tradition in poetry and the short story is in renaissance, and yet we don't have paper. It's a contradiction. It's very frustrating." He said the U.S. embargo has forced them to export paper from farther away and pay three times as much.

Sacha's frustration was echoed by others we met, all of whom thought it painfully ironic that the artistic freedom they said they had fought for and won was now being stifled by U.S. policies administered in the name of freedom, and influenced by exiles that many in Cuba resent for leaving and not staying to continue to fight for improved conditions. But then, they added, most of those who initially left were members of the wealthy planter class and had nothing to gain by staying, but everything to lose. Our talk with with López Sacha and Marilín Bobes, vice president of the writers' organization, coincided with their annual conference at the former Havana mansion which now houses the Union, an organization which began in 1964 and has grown to 1700 members. At first we were skeptical of what we saw, suspecting we had been shuttled onto a communist version of a theme-park ride which would take us past only the most flattering attractions. For a moment, we even wondered if the conference in progress--which looked to us like any in America--was somehow staged for our benefit. Writers and artists carried manuscripts and portfolios of their work, stood in hallways laughing and hugging each other, broke into small groups for discussion sessions, and wore the badges of happy conventioneers, not bedraggled revolutionaries. Was this the Cuba we had heard so much about? Clearly, there was another side to what we had heard in the U.S.

As we stood on the steps of the 17th-century building shaking various hands, we turned our heads to occasionally glimpse the flow of World War II motorcycles with sidecars and American vintage cars that still motor up and down Havana streets, coughing up fumes from the heavily leaded gasoline. It's common to see many of those cars parked on main streetsÑtheir hoods up, owners on creepers rolling under the chassis, trying to keep them running. With every conversation we braced to hear the virtues of Castro communism--after all, most historians concede that Cuba under Castro, though not terribly adept at generating wealth, has managed to efficiently distribute the wealth, with dramatic improvements in public housing, education, health care, and culture--but instead we heard about the current hardships Cubans face. In public and in private, the Cubans we met complained with the same unflinching passion as people we know in the Midwest--except that, unlike Americans, who are quick to point fingers whether the subject is government or sports, no names were ever mentioned. Only issues. And these were discussed as unfortunate by-products of the revolution that had yet to be resolved.

Though everywhere in Havana we saw a generally happy people dressed well and enjoying life--by no means the misery and squalor we had envisioned--we were told how many of them had to work long hours just to make ends meet, to purchase a modicum of basics. Gasoline and food are rationed, and a black market flourishes where tourists with American dollars can buy just about anything, while Cubans with their pesos struggle. It's ironic, we were told, that since the fall of the Berlin Wall such capitalistic features as salaries and incentives have gradually worked their way into the Cuban social system, and doubly ironic that the embargo has forced the government to turn to tourism as an attempt to bolster an economy crippled by trade sanctions. In the process, the island has come nearly full circle, returned to a two-tiered class system that the revolution sought to eliminate. But for all the economic constraints faced by Cubans today, aside from those who worked for the state newspaper or radio stations--one reporter from Granma, the state newspaper, said with a wry smile that "of course" they faced restrictions, "even Disney requires its employees to behave a certain way"--the writers of literature we spoke to said they felt no censorship. And they presented us with some of their books, to prove it. As Sacha explained, "Our members also write about the problems of workers and students, problems of women in society, problems of young people. Somebody's Licking Himself All Over is the first book about the problem of rockers in Havana. We have exile literature, not just from America, but from all countries," he said. "We have a metaphysical literature, with God and the heathen, and the poet and divination. Ten years ago? No. For our generation, art is art, not ideology."

As he spoke we couldn't help but wonder, was this the same organization that in 1968 protested when an international jury awarded Cuban dissident poet Heberto Padilla the Casa de las Américas prize, complaining that Padilla's poems were "ideologically in opposition to the revolution?" It didn't take long for us to realize that the Cuba dissidents left after the revolution, or even the Cuba which Padilla finally fled in 1980, is not the same Cuba as it is today. As we drove from José Martí International Airport to the Hotel Inglaterra in Old Havana, we expected a virtual skyline of Mao-sized billboards featuring Che Guevera and Fidel Castro, but saw only a handful of small-scale pro-patria slogans on fences and on the sides of buildings. No graven images of the President, and just a few of Guevera. We went expecting to be escorted and scrutinized by police ready to wrench our cameras away from us the instant we tried to photograph block-long lines of Cubans waiting to purchase food or clothing or to board huge diesel buses called "camels." But no one seemed to care what we photographed in Havana. We could point our cameras at some of the homeless, at squealling pigs strapped to the backs of bicycles or dead chickens dangling by their feet from handlebars, at the heaps of uncleared rubble and debris, at the roosters and dogs plentiful as pigeons on the sidewalks, at the men in their sleeveless t-shirts and the women in tight flashy clothing with rhumba ruffles. We could shoot the Capitolio, a virtual replica of the U.S. Capitol Building, or the stately Moro Castle that guards Havana Harbor--even while uniformed police strolled the boulevard as if it were Chicago's Lake Shore Drive. No one said a word. We could photograph the shirtless boys playing baseball on the grass between freeway on and off ramps, or the horsecarts in the suburb of San Francisco de Paula, common because gas is so scarce and prohibitive. And we did.

Having read about black market moneychangers in guidebooks written for Canadian and European travelers, we expected police to rush us when an old man, ostensibly peddling the morning edition of Granma, really tried to get us to exchange one American dollar bill for each freshly minted three-peso likeness of Guevera. But even police standing in front of the Hotel Inglaterra looked vaguely into the Parque Central, as if seeing nothing. We expected armed soldiers at the airport and at every intersection, but saw only traffic police armed with walkie-talkies, presumably to report speeders or erratic drivers--though in Havana everyone drives as if they're looking into the screen of a video game, honking as they weave in and out of bicyclists and pedestrians, and swerving, amid grand but crumbling structures, to avoid potholes that can run a foot deep. Yes, the boys were quick at our sides to beg for chiclets and coins, but there were also young Cubans who approached us just to practice their English. Chicago. Michael Jordan.

All of these things we found surprising, given what we had read and heard. Almost as surprising as being able to walk around Havana and talk with Cubans who felt just as free to talk with us. But as we made the rounds among artists and writers, it was the apparent lack of censorship that surprised us most--last in a long line of surprises which began when, teaching at the University of the West Indies, I was invited to speak at the Museo Ernest Hemingway outside of Havana. The place itself reminds one of the rope-thick cigar that the Cuban Ambassador to Barbados held between two fingers as he leaned back in his swivel chair and assured us, godfatherly, that Americans travelling to Cuba these days need not worry about having their passports stamped. Separate visas are issued. "We do it all the time," he said. When I told him I was both a journalist and a Hemingway scholar, and according to State Department literature qualified as one who was not required to apply for a general license from the U.S. Treasury Department, he smiled broadly, as if I had made a good joke. It seemed clear that to him every American these days was somehow exempt--at least before the February airplane incident. And we certainly found that to be the case.

In the check-in lines at Cubana Airlines we saw as many American passports as Cuban. One week later at the famed Tropicana cabaret, we sat across from a psychologist from Boulder, Colorado who said he was to meet a friend in Cancún but arrived early and found no room at the inns. What the hell, he thought. Why not go to Cuba? Canadians were doing it. Europeans were doing it. "I told them to go ahead and stamp my passport. I want my passport stamped," he said. "If enough people do that, sooner or later people won't have to mess with it." Given the warm welcome that Americans--especially tourists travelling illegally--received there, admonitions published by our State Department seemed as comical to us as lines from the now-classic government production of Reefer Madness: "Visitors who attempt to enter Cuba without the proper documentation are subject to detention and arrest by the Cuban government. . . . Entry and exit into Cuba is strictly controlled by Cuban authorities. Attempts to enter or exit Cuba illegally, or to aid the illegal exit of Cuban nationals are punishable by jail terms of up to 5 years." Are they kidding? we wondered. Until tensions exacerbated, it was clear to us that Cubans viewed every illegal American as a counterweight that might eventually tip the scale against a U.S. trade embargo that has been in force since mid-October of 1960. And there were plenty of Americans in Havana who thought the embargo was nonsense. Now, the noose seems sure to tighten, with the Cuban Liberty Act intending to completely isolate Cuba from the world trade community and a congresswoman from Florida urging a boycott of other Caribbean nations if they admit Cuba into their association.

While we only met with members of the artistic community--not the political or economic--none of the Cubans we encountered could understand the embargo which has prevented U.S. corporations and overseas subsidiaries from trading with and investing in the island. While we were free to roam the backstreets of Havana during the afternoons and evenings, our host, the director of the Museo Ernest Hemingway, took us at our request to meet some of the most influential people in the artistic and scholarly community.

One of our first stops was the two-bedroom apartment of writer Enrique Cirules. It was a modest flat with few decorations and furnishings, though the man who accompanied us and who was to translate my public presentations said the accomodations were luxurious by Cuban standards. He, for example, lived with his pregnant wife and eleven other extended-family members in a three-bedroom house--which he said was still better than most Cubans, who lived in barracks-style housing. Later, rereading what historians have written, we learned that the barracks themselves were an improvement over the makeshift shacks and hovels that existed before the revolution. Cirules, one of Cuba's most respected writers, welcomed us with smiles and hugs while his wife, Maria, fixed the obligatory sugared coffee we were offered at every stop. At this one, as at every other--including our visit with Gregorio Fuentes, one of the models for Santiago in Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea--the first topic of conversation was the U.S. embargo. "Cuba is communist, China is communist," Cirules began, leaning forward in earnest. "But China has Most Favored Nation status, and Cuba? We have the longest trade embargo in history. Why?" he asked, with the same kind of moist and confused look one sees in parents on television news clips--the ones who want instant answers for the random violence that struck down their children on America's streets. Though he neglects to mention another parallel--both China and Cuba have been accused of human rights violations--the question is still puzzling. But the answer, if one rules out such obvious differences as sheer size and power, is clearly distilled into one tiny shot: the political clout of Cuban exiles in America. Pre-revolutionary Cuba was driven by foreign interests in sugar, oil, and tourism. Remnants of the planter class and Cuban entrepreneurs left with the expelled Norteamericanos, and exiles like the Brothers seek a return to a Cuba where one is free to amass wealth. Those still living on the island are quick to remind that while conditions for the business and land-owning class obviously worsened under Castro, life has dramatically improved for the other 85 percent of the population, those who weren't as fortunate.

It also explains why Ernest Hemingway is still the most popular writer in Cuba. If José Martí and Che Guevera are the patron saints of politics, Ernest Hemingway is the hovering literary presence--a national hero. Schoolchildren still read The Old Man and the Sea, and in Cojímar, the fishing village backdrop for the novel, a poignant monument stands near the 16th-century Spanish fortress at the harbor's entrance: a bust of the novelist made from scrap metal gathered by fishermen the day after Hemingway killed himself. Earlier, he had demonstrated his own affection by presenting his Nobel medal to the people of Cuba, giving it to the Virgen de Cobre, patron saint of Cuba, to be kept in the shrine of Our Lady at Santiago de Cuba, where he knew it would be safe. Twenty-two years before the revolution, when he published To Have and Have Not, Hemingway was eerily prescient, for he must have known that the Haves would be driven from Cuba and that the medal may have been in as much danger of being sold as the crown jewels were after the Russian revolution. Yet, Hemingway's heart belonged to the Have Nots, and his public approval of the Castro government was enough to make our own government uncomfortable. Despite Hemingway's own privileged station, he preferred the company of common fishermen, boxers, everyday workers. And his presence is preserved in Cuba.

At the Floridita, one of Hemingway's favorite watering holes, his seat is roped off and surrounded by photographs and a tributary bust. The now-gutted hotel where Hemingway wrote parts of For Whom the Bell Tolls is being restored and Hemingway's room turned into a museum--part of an attempt to preserve the hundreds of architectural wonders crumbling in the oldest part of the city. We ate at La Mina, one of many historic restaurants in Old Havana to have already been restored by Habaguanex S.A., a historian-led company in charge of restorations. As the general manager of the Ambos Mundos Hotel explained, "There are three things that we need to preserve in our culture: Cuban, urban, and Hemingway." At the Finca Vigía, the place Hemingway lived for 21 years--longer than anywhere else--some 35 to 40,000 tourists visit every year. In the dining room, a 1954 silver cup is displayed, presented to Hemingway on behalf of the Cuban people by the Cuban Institute of Tourism (who first invited Hemingway to Cuba). His beloved Pilar, the boat Hemingway once used to prowl Caribbean waters looking for Nazi submarines (though the C.I.A. only asked that he keep his eyes and ears open around town and in bars) is displayed on the grounds. The house, preserved as it was when Hemingway permanently left the island, was confiscated by the state and turned into a museum after the author's suicide at Castro's suggestion. It was part of a cultural revolution that accompanied the political.

According to Museo Ernest Hemingway director Gladys Rodriguez Ferrero, there were only six or seven museums before Castro came to power. "Now there are some 300 museums. Each municipality has its own museum." As she spoke, one got the impression that we were to be impressed by the numbers. Instead, what impressed us, was her openness in telephoning to beg gasoline from the mayor of San Francisco de Paula to "transport a professor," and her criticism of the way the government was commercializing another tourist site, Marina Hemingway. Other sites had more legitimate (and tasteful) claims on the Hemingway legacy, she argued, and Gisela Herrera, director of culture for the City of Havana, did not look startled to have the government criticized in front of a foreigner. She only nodded in somewhat sheepish agreement. Rodriguez Ferrero, a Hemingway scholar, objected mostly to the government's creating a shrine where Hemingway only appeared once, to pose for a photograph with Castro after the fishing tournament in 1960. At El Viejo y El Mar (The Old Man and the Sea Hotel), the restaurant is named "Cojímar," though the Marina is nowhere near the fishing village, the restaurant bar is dubbed "Gregorio's," though the Old Man still prefers the bar at La Terraza where he and Hemingway drank, and the lobby bar, "Mina's," is named for a Hemingway granddaughter who visited once during the fishing tournament. "It's too commercial," she complained. "And innacurate."

We also heard complaints when, at the home of Hemingway scholar Mary Cruz and her husband, poet Angel Augier, I mentioned that I was among those in America who waged a campaign to free writer Norberto Fuentes, whom we had heard had been imprisoned for trying to leave the country illegally. Cruz laughed and said how galling it was to hear that Americans were trying to rescue Doctor Fuentes. He hasn't even taught at the university, she complained, and his scholarship is shoddy. That may be, I said, but what about his imprisonment? "Ahhh," she waved, "he could have left the country legally if he pursued the proper channels. But he didn't. He broke the law, so he's punished. It doesn't happen so in other countries?" Their apartment, unlike the Cirules', was more comfortably furnished with shelves of books, a television set, and various artworks on the walls and on tables. But the apartment was on the eighth floor of a building which, in the U.S., would be described as a "crumbling tenement" with elevators perpetually out-of-order and broken windows never replaced. As we climbed the dark stairwells--bare wires dangled from old light fixtures--we imagined trying to carry full bags of groceries to the eighth floor. "That's not a problem we face," Cruz smiled.

It was one of the many structures built after the revolution whose deterioration, like the existing buildings that were confiscated by the state, mirrored the economy's. Food is as scarce as building materials. At the Institute of Higher Art, Cuba's training ground for musicians, actors and dramatists, visual artists, and broadcast journalists, the post-revolution evolution was most evident. The Institute occupies buildings which were formerly a Havana country club built in the 1920s, with the director's office located in the suite where Richard Nixon used to stay between 1958-59, when he was Vice President. The golf course ranked second in the world when Nixon Slept Here is now reclaimed pasture, complete with cows--though part of it is worn smooth where faculty and students play softball to relieve stress. The Institute itself is more pastoral than country clubbish, with dogs sprawled in the lobby, a bassoonist sitting on an outdoor bench practicing scales, and two conga players rehearsing on their practice-room balconies in what used to be guest rooms. Tiles are cracked, walls are bare, and it looks like a building complex in temporary use. The pool, as at the Finca Vigía, remains empty by government edict, since water is in short supply. What was once a drawing room is now used for formal receptions, while the dining room is used for etiquette training, the candelabras more for tell than show. Mario Masvidal, chairperson of the research department at the Institute, joked that now "the students are richer than professors. Sometimes they invite me for a beer or a meal." He told us that several buildings were added to the reclaimed country club in order to accomodate 800 students. Aside from a dormatory that he described as "ugly, typical of the worst that post-revolutionary architecture had to offer," he pointed with pride to the visual arts building designed by a professor-architect to resemble "the vagina that leads to the uterus of creation inside." Outside the building is a phallic obelisk. Inside, there's a sloping bricked courtyard in the shape of a uterus and a uterine-sculpted fountain trickling quietly into a pool. There's also a drama building, styled in the manner of a 17th-century Spanish fortress and playfully dubbed "Elsinor Castle" after the one in Hamlet, which was built by students who took classes in the mornings and worked construction in the afternoon.

It was our good fortune to arrive when a student show was in progress, and everything we were told about artistic freedom was again evidenced by what we saw and were allowed to photograph. Some of the artworks were decidedly pro-Castro, but what caught our attention were the ones that were not. One such painting depicted an artist suspended by chains over a sugar factory where workers labored. The artist held a paintbrush in his teeth, and endured a shaft shoved up his anus by various demons. Painted by "one of the best students," Douglas D. Perez, "It depicts a slave punishment," Masvidal said. "It's one of the most political paintings in the show, and one interpretation is that artists are forced to be a slave to the economy." Masvidal said that the best students are funded by the government so that they can exhibit their work abroad, but the rest must make their own contacts, as artists and art students do elsewhere. When they have a show, what they make is theirs to keep, after gallery commission, he said. By far the most striking artwork was an installation where a headless jointed figure of a human, legs spread, faced a volley of giant penis-shaped arrows aimed at the crotch and crafted out of wood. In this feminist work, the penis-arrows were painted to reflect different aspects of the culture. Shockingly and significantly, the first arrow aimed at the vaginal area was painted in the design of the Cuban flag; the second was a decoupaged boat made from the communist newspaper, Granma--named for the boat that carried Castro and Guevera and 79 other revolutionaries to Cuba. Other penis-arrows in Lisette Castillo Valdés' sculpture bore Rembrandt's name and palette, a corn cob, a volcano, palm trees, and other images and concepts that have led to the sexploitation of women. Like the writers we met, painters lamented the embargo-raised prices of paints and canvases at a time when they had fought years of censorship, and finally won.

When I was interviewed live on Masvidal's Radio Metropolitana program, we talked about Hemingway, and we talked, without coaching or warnings, about conditions for artists in Cuba. Such was the case wherever we went, concentrating on only this one facet of Cuban life. We talked with painters whose works were displayed in shops along the narrow streets of Old Havana, we talked with writers singly and in groups, and we went to the 18th century building on the oldest square in Havana which houses the Cuban Institute of Book Publishing, to witness the awarding of the National Prize for Literature. There we watched a hip-looking young man in black leather jacket and long hair squirm during a tediously long and rambling speech by the Minister of Culture, and were surprised to learn that he was both a poet and Vice Minister of Culture . . . and a member of the communist party. Only once did his James Dean anti-establishment body language vary, and that was when the Minister said, "Americans read Cuban poetry and think its socialist. Bullshit," and the entire audience joined him in laughter. Our time and our focus was limited. We did seek out members of the Concilio Cubana--members of consolidated dissident organizations who were planning to hold a convention on the day of the Brothers' incident, but decided to cancel. Nor did we seek out families who have had loved ones taken by the secret police and detained, interrogated, or imprisoned, as reported in Miami newspapers. We only sought out writers and artists. And we were so surprised that the Cuba we saw bore no resemblance to descriptions we've heard and read in American media, that we asked those we spoke to what we could do to help. "Write your government officials and ask them to come to Cuba to see for themselves that things are changing," some of them advised. In an election year ? we thought . . . but promised, nonetheless.

Postscript: No U.S. magazine would print this story, perhaps because America's rigid anti-Cuban policies and the influence of Miami-based exiles has made publishers fearful.