The Cuban filmmaker Tomás Piard now faces ideological pressure in his work for having interviewed me in his most recent documentary “TROCADERO 162, LOWER,” filmed last November for UNEAC, its producer. The debut of the film planned for 19 December 2010 (the 100th birthday of the Cuban writer José Lezama Lima, the subject of the film) is postponed.
This coming week Tomás Piard will face a meeting to “analyze” the “situation” created by my interview and also the sequestering of the original film and censorship of it in the name of the Abel Prieto, Minister of Culture.
All those in charge are cowards! Petty mercenaries (assassins who kill beauty and truth for wages). Look what they do with this honest and lonely man…!
SOLIDARITY WITH TOMAS PIARD, CUBANS! A CREATOR WHOSE SOLE PURPOSE WAS TO OPEN THE LUNGS TO BREATH IN THE CLAUSTROPHOBIC REPRESSIVE ATMOSPHERE INTO WHICH OUR BUREAUCRATS OF THE 21ST CENTURY HAVE CONVERTED THE CULTURE IN THE TIME OF THE REVOLUTION!
Translator’s note: This article about Cuban “Twitterers” mentions OLPL saying: With a degree in biochemistry, Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo is a writer, photographer, editor and member of the Voces Cubanas website, as are many of these twitterers. In one of his acidic tweets OLPL writes: “What joy, what desire to cry: To live in Cuba trembling on the yellow line ignored by students and buses, what do you learn? Live!” His blog, Post-Revolution Mondays, has texts woven on a Cuban flag.
Anyone can teach, only a few can educate. The phrase, not to be repeated, is no longer important. Times change and with them the customs and even the ways of speaking and acting, but there are unwritten rules that are handed down from generation to generation, and each person much respect and meet them.
These begin to be instilled in the family and are consolidated in school and in society. By making sense, and tending to facilitate human relations and coexistence, they are not an imposition, much less repressive. They depend on individual conviction for their importance and we feel good when they are applied. Because of this, their exercise comes naturally.
They consist of respectful treatment; deference to older people, women and children; care for the environment and social and individual property; decent behavior; the correct use of language; the rejection of vulgarity and marginalization, and many other attitudes.
Sadly, this is not our reality, to go out into the street has become a real challenge: whether to let the wrong pass, or confront it.
The majority opt to let it pass so as not to go looking for problems. This comfortable attitude, widely practiced, has worsened the situation and brought no solutions. To face wrongs would bring risks, but at least it would be a good start to reestablishing the lost education, so necessary to a healthy citizenry.
To try to defuse the tension that comes over me by surprise and makes me clench my teeth, I decided to take these last days, nothing special, to enjoy doing nothing. Noting, indeed, the Cuban governments’ announcements for 2011. I try to be objective, I try to be dispassionate, I try to be optimistic, until the moment when the President speaks to Parliament, I thought in a fit of civility he would present his resignation in the name of the whole government; and stepping aside would give the younger ones a chance to do better; so many years of experiments and failed policies should seem like too much. But no.
II
The block where I live was adorned with many lights for the end of the year. Some neighbors created decorations like you see in the movies, but mine created an exceptional block. From the next block, on the last night of the year, I walked through a dark city, with pockets of music and rarely the unmistakable odor of roasting pork. Places like La Pelota, Cinecittá, el Pekín and Loipa, along central 23rd street, were closed and had no customers. It was the same at 10th and 17th and at 12th and 17th. On the way the home of a cousin of mine where we are accustomed to seeing in the New Year, I sat next to Lennon, again without his collectible eyeglasses, and to take this photo I had to use the double flash because the darkness in the park was absolute.
It was the wall clock that confirmed for us it was midnight, and not how it is announced elsewhere, with horns, firecrackers and cheering. 2011 arrived in Havana like a cop. The day before yesterday I learned that in City Historian Eusebio Leal’s precincts there would be fireworks, the areas of Old Havana that have been restored confirm to the barely curious tourists their “very typical” image which confirms what they see in the leaflets.
Returning home, around one in the morning, the fire of the party had been extinguished. Just some drunkard, a lot of water on the sidewalks, and two or three houses with music coming from them. The rest of the city in retreat or sleeping. On my block, the most lit up of all I walked along, just a few of the Christmas lights were still lit. The spirit of these days are not reconciled with the new electricity fees.
Pinar del Río is a city without movie theaters, an urban place where cars barely pass and at night the streets are dark and empty. However, some personal projects shine in the midst of such paralysis. One of these is Pedro Pablo Oliva’s workshop, with its room halfway between a family home and an art gallery. There they invite you in, give you coffee, show you the canvas hung on the wall or the sculpture tucked into a corner, without asking who you are, where you came from. The first time I visited, Oliva was adding brushstrokes to a Fidel Castro in oils, seen through an X-ray machine. He was floating with his scraggly beard and between his hands in held a nearly asphyxiated maiden, who resembled — irrefutably — Cuba. At the bottom of the painting, tiny people with empty eye sockets watched the force with which the Maximum Leader strangled the country.
I went home treasuring the affection the painter, his wife Yamilia, and his daughters, one with the beautiful name “Azul,” had all shared with me. I felt that with people like that it was possible to embrace, the understanding, the debate; it was even possible to revitalize, to rejuvenate, the streets of Pinar del Río. A few months later I learned that repudiation meetings had also marked this place, when Yamilia began to stage a series of public performances under the title, “Without Permission.” She chose December 10, Human Rights Day, a day when the demons of intolerance on this Island, run riot. The result, a mob of people screaming in front of her door, blocking her from taking her easels outside so that passersby could fill them with color in the plazas and parks. A year later, also on Human Rights Day, the scene was repeated, this time with the threat of sticks and stones forcing her to stay inside.
From her mobile, Yamilia sent her message asking for help, and I remember uploading to Twitter that S.O.S. coming from the west. At one point I even recommended publicly that Pedro Pablo Oliva, an emblematic figure in our culture, express himself about what was happening so close to him. A few days ago I received his response, along with his permission to make it public. His words are so free and filled with reconciliation that I think it’s worthwhile to share them with you. When I read them, I knew that the movie theater in Pinar del Río would reopen some day, and that this urban and civic immobility would give way to a more lively, less sectarian city. The great blackout that he painted in the most difficult years of the Special Period, has given rise to a candle here… a firefly there.
Video of works by Yamilia Pérez
Letter from Pedro Pablo Oliva:
Yoani:
First I want to say hello and ask after your and your husband’s health, the last time we met was in Obispo Street as a result of the meeting you requested with the official who abducted you (to put it in a poetic way) in those ugly and awkward days. He taught me the marks of violence.
I will get to the point so as not to run on and on.
I imagine you are aware of the declaration that the Home-Workshop (a project I’ve had for 10 years) issued relating to the art performance of Yamilia Pérez Estrella, at that time my wife, in the province of Pinar del Río, it’s still on the Internet.
In some of the paragraphs of that declaration I expressed my position, but if you like I can state other things much more clearly.
I am, I was and I will be against the use of violence, manipulated or not, to silence any thought or idea, it is truly shameful to use aggression to impose a way of thinking or to try to use it to intimidate. Every act of this kind generates rejection and repulsion and is no help at all in the so necessary unifying of this country marked by political and family conflicts.
On the other hand, I have always thought and believed that the artist needs more open spaces for communication, and fights for this.
My generation, on the other hand, believed in the social function of art, and I, at least, assumed it proudly, hence my desire for a work that tried to reflect its context and that brought a critical analysis of society. For this I’ve been censored more than once.
Yamilia joins me in the desire to change the world, to try to make it better, always from different positions, she from direct confrontation as Tania Bruguera did, or does, I from the place where social projects are born, questioning or not, criticizing or not. Something that we totally agree on is: this is not a perfect society, nor are others I’ve experienced.
I dream of a different society, Utopia is that man I am and have lived year after year, successes and failures, but I do not stop fighting for that dream.
I am, Yoani, one of those who believe that opposites need to express themselves like day and night, wet and dry, I think fearlessly of the need for more than one party because people have the right to group together based on affinity of thought and philosophy and the precious agreement of dreams.
If you were to ask me one day (which I doubt) what party I would like to belong to I would answer one that does not imprison its children for thinking differently, one that permits the flow of ideas like a river that runs between two shores, one where I know its children are where they receive the sweet embrace of the motherland, where they respect that a woman can love another woman and a man another man. One that grows, step by step in the enchanted spell of love. Where the horizon is seen not as an end but as a beginning, the party that does not say, “this is,” but that opens like the wings of a butterfly, where children are protected from the hateful ghost of hunger and the terrible scourge of dogmas. A party that understands that the new generations need to lead the country and express themselves as the wind and the rain express themselves, and much more, Yoani, that would take forever to name and that form a part of the dream that this man aspires to.
If I have learned in all these years that one person can’t remain for so much time leading a country, I can understand the presence of a party of 20 or 30 years, even 50; but not always led by the same image, the faces, the manner and the way of thinking; changes are needed every so often, each man may have a different method.
Forgive my disintegration and incoherence. You know that Yamilia has a work that is too short, but it has spirit and guts to overcome any obstacle in the process of creation.
This is my position, there is no other, I am sorry to see so much official apparatus circling around a thin girl to stop her from an artistic act one day someone wrongly determined was dissent, if ten Yamilias arose I imagine they would deploy a whole army.
I assure you, Yoani, that this man lives without fear.
My love to you,
Yours,
Pedro Pablo Oliva
Translator’s note: Alumbrón is a “made up” Cuban word which comes from “alumbrar” or illuminate. Rather than note when the lights go off, and call it a “black-out”, no electricity is assumed to be the normal state and electricity the exception, so when the lights come on the illumination, or alumbrón becomes the exceptional event that is named and remarked on.
