I have just received your message about Pavon’s unbelievable appearance on national television a few days ago; I saw the commercial for it, but I couldn’t bring myself to get unnecessarily irritated by watching him in view of the revulsion I feel for this man. He is in the habit of coming out from time to time like a phantom from the dead, in important places, and then disappearing afterwards. A few years ago he turned up in the corridors at UNEAC [Writers and Artists Union of Cuba] and I let Aurora Bosch know, who was the then president of the Dance Section, that she could not count on my presence there as long as that person was walking around the floors of UNEAC.
Some time passed, which I have forgotten about now, and she let me know that he had disappeared and I could return to the institution. I didn’t bother looking for the programme in which the person would appear, unconsciously rejecting the possibility which you now point out, that “a revival” may occur with the additional appearance of the deservedly-forgotten Serguera, partner-in-crime of the cultural disaster of the 70’s. All that had to happen was for him, whose name I have forgotten, to appear, take the reins of the performing arts at that sad opportunity, and he swept the theatre into the shadow of the Revolution. The dance also suffered the setback of making me disappear, although, strangely, I believe that I was one of the few who kept a salary which should have gone to pay into a ghostly bag which was created and was kept going for various years in equally phantasmal parts of the area of the National Opera Council.
Important names from the theatrical movement were “peremptorily” sent to the Ministry of Work, where the only options for work they had was filling holes in the road or digging graves in the cemetery. The puppet theatre was mercilessly destroyed and its beautiful puppets were sent to Cayo Cruz to the rubbish dump which then existed in the bay. And the Camejos were especially harassed and erased from the national culture.
Meanwhile, my work, el Decálogo del Apocalipsis, which was supposed to have opened, according to the invitation printed in beautiful bright red with the date 15th April 1971, after a year’s hard work and enormous expense in costumes and scenery and should have been an important milestone in the development of contemporary dance in Cuba, and whose absence has been regretted by following generations of art school graduates in this area, who lost the model dances I promoted over 12 years and which marked the successful development of a dance movement rooted in a national identity but also informed by the vanguard movements of the era.
A lot has been written about this phenomenon by the choreographers who followed me, especially Marianela Boan, inheritor of my creative work with her group Danzabierta.
What you have told me in the message I received has opened my eyes to the danger, which seems fundamental in these days of possible changes in the direction of the country’s cultural policy, of the appearance of those phantoms from the past who want to return in an opportunistic search for new laurels.
The fact that the national tv dragged them out of the grave of oblivion gives us notice of a new storm.
Ramiro Guerra
Translated by GH
