14ymedio, Reinaldo Escobar, Mexico City, 9 September 2015 – If I were Juan Carlos Cremata’s attorney, in a an eventual appeal to be held in the Chamber of Labor, I would argue the following:
According to one of the whereases in the National Council for Performing Arts’ Resolution No. 10, the reason for canceling the theater production El Ingenio (The Genius) and terminating Juan Carlos Cremata’s contract as a theater director, is that the artist made “intemperate attacks” in the foreign press and social networks against the management of the Theater Center and the National Council of Performing Arts, “who legally represent and sponsor him,” and that those attacks are “incompatible with the social purpose for which the project was created.”
As a lawyer, one could have to argue that the artist’s statements were made in a personal capacity, exercising his legitimate rights and not as a gratuitous attack, but to defend himself against what constituted an attack on his freedom of expression, namely, the suspension of the work, “The King is Dying*.”
Cremata Expresses an Artist’s Bellyful Against Cultural Repression / 14ymedio, Miriam Celaya
It should be noted that every day Cuban artists undertake actions on their own accounts corresponding to their needs, their preferences, or from a broad spectrum of their artistic projections and political, religious or philosophical inclinations, which are not contemplated within the social purpose of the institutions that pay for or sponsor their projects.
To accept the obligation that every action undertaken by an artist has to obey the letter of the “social purpose” of one of his or her projects, would be to accept a kind of intellectual slavery in which the painter is prohibited from writing verses or the filmmaker is not permitted to rent rooms in his house, only because such actions are not contemplated in the joyous “social purpose” of a project that has been approved by the institutions that sponsor and represent him.
This action of a legal nature executed against Cremata by the Council for the Performing Arts, itself conflicts with “social purpose” for which this organization was established, because in the text where this purpose is defined it states nowhere that the confidence it has in the artists depends on the degree of coincidence that exists between their propositions and the institution’s interests. (I note that I have never read this text, but I say this here to see if they dare to contradict me and make public such an atrocity.)
Finally, I would like to know if the closing of the theater project El Ingenio leaves the rest of the artistic staff unemployed and what support will be provided to them.
As a lawyer, I quote here as witnesses all those artists who now feel threatened with being ostracized the day it occurs to them to defend themselves for having been censored.
*Translator’s note: This play has also been staged in English in the United States under the title “Exit the King.”
