http://www.themilitant.com/2008/7213/721350.htmlBroad discussions on culture, politics mark Havana book fair BY MARTÍN KOPPEL
AND BEN O’SHAUGHNESSY
HAVANA—The 2008 Havana International Book Fair was marked by a wide range of discussions on literature, politics, history, and other topics over the course of the 12-day event. Organizers estimated that half a million people attended the fair, held February 13-24. Over the following three weeks, hundreds of thousands more flocked to the cultural festival as it traveled to 41 other cities across the island. Book sales and cultural events took place in schools, military bases, children’s hospitals, prisons, and farming areas. By the time the fair concluded March 9, 5 million books had been bought nationwide, organizers reported.
During the rest of March, “minifairs” will be held in smaller towns. In April the “Mountain Book Fairs” will bring literature to working people in more remote mountainous areas of central and eastern Cuba.
In Havana, steps were taken to ease the overflow crowds of book lovers that have in recent years made the narrow cobblestone lanes of the sprawling fairgrounds at San Carlos de la Cabaña—the historic fortress overlooking Havana Bay—virtually impassable on some days. A week before the fair opened, 350 new titles were put on sale at 44 bookstores across the city as well as in parks, recreational centers, and computer clubs.
Poetry recitals, plays, film showings, seminars, dance and musical performances, art exhibits, book presentations, and several literary awards were among the varied events that were organized as part of the book fair. This year’s festival was dedicated to the Cuban writers Graziella Pogolotti and Antón Arrufat, and to Galicia, a region in northwestern Spain. A substantial delegation of Galician publishers and writers brought a large display of literature from that part of the Iberian peninsula, where the predominant language is similar to Portuguese.
A broad range of new books was available, registering the continuing expansion of publishing in Cuba since the sharp decline during the 1990s economic crisis. This included contemporary Cuban and Latin American literature, classic works such as those by the German playwright and poet Friedrich Schiller, new children’s books, and American literature from The Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters to Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
There were exhibitors from 31 countries, with the largest representations coming from Spain, Mexico, and Peru. Popular contemporary titles covered everything from climate change to AIDS treatment in Cuba.
A significant number of events featured books on political questions. These included titles on Cuba’s place in the world class struggle, such as Editora Política’s new edition of Octubre de 1962: A un paso del holocausto (October 1962: One step from the holocaust) by Tomás Diez Acosta, published in English by Pathfinder Press under the title October 1962: The ‘Missile’ Crisis as Seen from Cuba.
Another such title was Ediciones Verde Olivo’s Operación Carlota, by Milton Díaz Cánter, which is based on a popular Cuban TV documentary series that interviewed Cubans who in 1975 volunteered to fight in Angola to help defend the newly independent country from an invasion by the South African apartheid regime.
Revolutionary continuity Several new books drew renewed attention to the 1930-35 revolutionary upsurge in Cuba. During that period, the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Gerardo Machado was toppled and a revolutionary “Hundred Days Government” came to power, only to be overthrown in a U.S.-backed military coup led by Fulgencio Batista.
One such title was La revolución cubana del 30 (The Cuban Revolution of 1930) by Fernando Martínez Heredia, published by Ciencias Sociales. It highlights the political role of several outstanding revolutionaries during that period. These include Julio Antonio Mella, one of the two leaders who in 1925, drawn to the example of October 1917 Russian revolution, founded the first Communist Party of Cuba; CP leader Rubén Martínez Villena; and Antonio Guiteras. The latter served in the Hundred Days Government and then led a revolutionary organization, Young Cuba, in guerrilla actions to try to overthrow the Batista regime.
The course these revolutionaries fought for, Martínez noted, clashed with the political line of the Cuban Communist Party in the late 1920s and early ’30s. The CP, following the ultraleft “Third Period” course dictated by the Stalin-led Communist International at the time, attacked Guiteras and his followers as “social fascists.”
As a result of the Comintern’s “abandonment of the United Front advocated by Lenin and the imposition of sectarianism,” Martínez writes, the Cuban CP remained on the sidelines and acted as an obstacle in the mass revolutionary struggle of the early 1930s.
Speaking at the book fair presentation, Martínez explained that Guiteras played “a decisive role in the development of communism and the fight for socialism in Cuba” to which the Cuban Revolution of 1959 can trace its continuity.
Debate on revolution’s cultural policy Two major panels at the fair, each drawing up to 200 people, focused on the debate and discussion on the Cuban Revolution’s cultural policy that has unfolded here over the past year.
One centered on the presentation of the new printing of Las polémicas culturales de los 60 (Cultural polemics of the 1960s). This is a collection of debates, published in various Cuban periodicals in the early 1960s, by prominent Cuban filmmakers, writers, and political figures. It was first presented at last year’s book fair and quickly sold out. Published by Letras Cubanas, it was edited by the well-known theater critic, essayist, and national literature prize winner Graziella Pogolotti, who also wrote the introduction.
The second panel featured a new title, La política cultural del período revolucionario: memoria y reflexión (Cultural policies of the revolutionary period: Memory and reflection). It is a compilation of talks given last year by six prominent writers: Desiderio Navarro, Ambrosio Fornet, Mario Coyula, Eduardo Heras León, Arturo Arango, and Fernando Martínez Heredia. The talks were given at seminars sponsored by the magazine Criterios, edited by Navarro, as part of a debate that began early last year.
That controversy was sparked in January 2007 by a TV interview with Luis Pavón, director of the government’s National Council of Culture from 1971 to 1976. Pavón was responsible for implementing policies similar to those imposed by the Soviet bureaucracy, preventing many writers, musicians, and artists the Council deemed politically “unreliable” from being published or having the resources and conditions necessary to work. Following the disintegration of the Soviet Union, this period came to be broadly known in Cuban cultural circles as the Quinquenio Gris (Gray Half-Decade) or pavonato (Pavón reign).
In 1976 the Council was dissolved and the Ministry of Culture established under the leadership of Armando Hart, one of the historic leaders of the clandestine revolutionary struggle against the Batista dictatorship in the 1950s.
‘Within the revolution, everything’
The Stalinist policies that made inroads in Cuba during the 1970s—and not only in the cultural arena—were a reversal of the proletarian political line championed by Fidel Castro, Ernesto Che Guevara, and other historic leaders of the revolution like Hart of guaranteeing full freedom of artistic expression to all but the open enemies of the revolution. In a famous 1961 speech known as “Words to the Intellectuals,” Fidel Castro summarized that policy with the statement, “Within the revolution, everything. Against the revolution, nothing.”
The TV program, presenting Pavón as a prominent cultural figure of the 1970s while remaining silent about this history, outraged many Cubans. Scores of prominent writers and artists, many of whom had themselves been victims of the “pavonato,” spoke out at meetings organized with government officials, as well as in e-mail debates and numerous conferences.
Speakers at the panel on Cultural Polemics of the 1960s noted that this title became a contribution to the discussion. Essayist and screenwriter Ambrosio Fornet, author of one of the polemical articles in that collection, said the book documents the rich debates on culture and politics that marked revolutionary Cuba in the 1960s. This included, he said, sharp polemics between figures associated with the Popular Socialist Party (PSP), the old pro-Moscow Communist Party, and non-PSP writers and filmmakers who in the course of the revolutionary struggle had found their own way to Marxism and led the fight against the Stalinist pretensions to represent a communist approach to culture.
Those associated with the PSP argued in favor of what was known worldwide as “socialist realism,” the bureaucratic proclamation that such a thing as “proletarian culture” existed and should be promoted by all “revolutionaries.” Under that policy, Fornet said, James Joyce’s classic novel Ulysses “had been labeled a ‘bourgeois excrescence.’” In contrast, he said, writers like himself who “were followers of Martí and Fidel—we had not read the Soviet manuals”—believed in embracing “all of humanity’s cultural patrimony.”
Pogolotti, also a panelist, said the cultural debate was and remains part of a more fundamental question, “How is socialism to be built?” The revolution’s policy of encouraging debate and artistic expression was part of a broader approach, she said. “It is not enough to change the economic structures,” she noted. “As Che said, to build socialism you also have to develop the subject of that new history—the men and women, and also culture.”
This discussion continued in the panel on the book published by Criterios, and included five of the six authors whose essays are in that collection. Navarro described how the debate sparked by the Pavón interview had unfolded last year. An overflow crowd of 400 people attended a Jan. 30, 2007, conference sponsored by the National Union of Writers and Artists (UNEAC).
Many young people could not participate, however, because attendance was by invitation, largely to leaders of cultural institutions. To rectify that, he said, Criterios and the Saíz Brothers Association, an organization of young artists and writers, sponsored a workshop on February 23 that drew 400 youth. The discussions broadened with the series of forums organized by Criterios, which continued through July.
Speaking on the panel, Fernando Martínez said this process of discussion was positive, and helped pose an important political challenge. “It called attention to the need for public discussions on the principal questions facing the country,” he said. Martínez pointed to Raúl Castro’s July 26, 2007, speech calling for broad discussion of pressing social problems.
Race and social relations in Cuba Another of the noteworthy titles presented at this year’s fair was Desafíos de la problemática racial en Cuba (Challenges of the race question in Cuba) by Esteban Morales, published by the Fernando Ortiz Foundation. The author is now director emeritus of the University of Havana’s Center for the Study of the United States.
First presented January 17 to an overflow crowd at the foundation’s headquarters, the book is seen by many here as an important step toward openly addressing racial questions that Morales says have long been taboo. These include the role of Blacks in important chapters of Cuba’s history that are largely unknown here, and how to combat the legacy inherited from capitalism of discrimination against Blacks.
In his book Morales notes that Fidel and Raúl Castro have been the most outspoken in the Cuban leadership in publicly promoting the need for conscious measures to combat discrimination against Blacks. He points out that Fidel Castro “first dealt with it extensively in March 1959,” barely two months after the victory over Batista, in a series of speeches. At that time the revolutionary government took measures that included barring discrimination against Blacks in employment and opening Cuba’s previously whites-only beaches to all. As a result of the socialist revolution, Cuba has made unprecedented advances in reducing social inequalities and uprooting racist discrimination, Morales emphasizes.
“Unfortunately, since [the question of race] became a taboo in the early 1960s”—often with the argument that discussing it would foster “divisions”—“today we face a lag in addressing racism, both on the level of ideas as well as in the scientific and political arenas,” Morales writes.
He cites ongoing “disadvantages for blacks and mestizos in terms of access to the best jobs, little representation in positions in the state structure at all levels, overrepresentation in marginal [poor] neighborhoods, worse housing and living conditions in general, among other things, which tell us we still have much to accomplish.”
In the presentation of the new title at the book fair, Morales said it was a positive sign that more public forums are being held and articles printed on this question in Cuban publications including, for the first time, an article scheduled for publication in Cuba Socialista, the magazine of the Communist Party of Cuba.
Cuba’s internationalism in Africa Among the highlights of the book fair was the presentation of a new Cuban edition of Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa: 1959-1976, by Piero Gleijeses. The book, first published in English in 2002 and in a Spanish-language Cuban edition that same year, documents the Cuban Revolution’s record of internationalist solidarity with liberation struggles in Africa from 1959 to 1976.
On the panel with Gleijeses, who teaches at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C., were Jorge Risquet, a member of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party who led Cuba’s internationalist mission to Congo-Brazzaville from 1965 to 1967; and Fernando Remírez, head of international relations for the party’s Central Committee.
Juan Rodríguez, director of the Ciencias Sociales publishing house, which printed the book, noted that Gleijeses is now working on a complementary volume covering 1976-1991, the years during which more than 300,000 Cuban volunteers joined forces with the Angolan government to defeat invading troops from apartheid South Africa, culminating in the battle of Cuito Cuanavale.
Remírez, who served as a volunteer combatant in Angola in 1986-87, praised Gleijeses’s book for its “total commitment to the historic truth.” He said, “It is important for youth to read this book,” to learn about the decisive role of Cuba’s internationalist actions in the world. Risquet said Gleijeses’s book “has inspired many more Cuban combatants to write of their own experiences,” adding that “more needs to be written about this history.”
Gleijeses said the strength of his book is that it is thoroughly backed up by documentation, including from government archives in Cuba, the United States, Russia, and South Africa.
With humor, he described how some academics in the United States and Europe have advised him to be more “objective” in his writings by speaking less favorably of Cuba and presenting more of “the other side.” He said that in response, he added even more documentation from U.S. and other sources. All of it confirmed his favorable conclusions about the revolutionary foreign policy of Cuba and its role in Africa.
“It’s necessary to explain that South Africa was defeated in Angola,” Gleijeses said, to refute the lie that apartheid forces withdrew from Angola and Namibia because of U.S. “mediation.” He said this fact is documented in his new book, for which he gained access to South African archives and conducted extensive interviews with key government officials.
In one document, he said, a South African general admitted that Cuban troops were better trained and led than his own army’s. He wrote that Pretoria would have to pull out of Namibia and accept an independent government there or face “thousands and thousands of white casualties” at the hands of Cuban and Angolan forces.
These presentations are a sample of the rich debate and discussion that not only stamped the 2008 Havana International Book Fair, but have been a feature of this island-wide cultural event year after year. They are a reflection of the strength and working-class character of the Cuban Revolution, captured in a famous statement by Fidel Castro in the early 1960s that has become the slogan of the book fair: “The revolution doesn’t tell you, ‘believe.’ It tells you—read!”
