14ymedio, Regina Coyula, Havana, 15 November 2017 — A more inclusive air can be breathed in the corridors of Performing Arts of the Ministry of Culture. Or at least I thought that was the case when they told me that an article written by me about Departures, a work by the company El Ciervo Encantado (The Enchanted Deer), was in the catalog of the Theater Festival of Havana this year. But after the initial optimism, the logic of how events occur in authoritarian regimes caused me to doubt.
Was it an accident or a consequence of ignorance, mistake or intention on the part of three officials involved in the catalog? In any case, there was an institutional response: all of them have been removed from their positions.
My text, as has been described in the article about the punishment, is not conflictive. So that is not what the problem is. Nor should my signature be a problem because, to put it in the manner of my dear Manuel Díaz Martínez, I am an unimportant person. What is important is Departures, which twists the broken fibers of a country that for many years converted those physical partings into emotional ruptures that were intended to be final.
The work was exhibited before and during the Theater Festival, so nor is it because of the work itself. The lack, crime, transgression or whatever it is called by those imposing the punishment, has been to use a text from 14ymedio, a digital newspaper that for the authorities does not exist, inaccessible from the servers of the state telecommunications monopoly. The fact may seem ridiculous and even false to anyone who does not know the mechanisms of censorship in Cuba.
With regards to this, just a week ago I was at a presentation in Miami of the anthology The Compañero Who Watches Me, a compilation prepared by Enrique del Risco, literary and always political, of almost sixty writers about their experience with censorship, Big Brother, State Security. Sixty writers is not a small number for this little island, but at the same time their contributions fall short by the number of testimonies that do not appear because the protagonists opted for the healthy silence of voluntary oblivion, or because they were unaware of the existence of this project.
The current events surrounding Performing Arts do nothing more than provide an update to the stories in the book, not at all in the key of the past. I could not avoid the analogy.
Sincerely, I regret that the exclusionary bias maintained in cultural affairs has impacted the professional careers and lives of the three officials involved. It is an unequivocal signal for many of those who declare that politics does not interest them, whom I invite to look at the facts that have led to this “administrative” measure.
After the initial stupor, the three officials can look with new eyes at information and events all around them that previously they did not see (or did not want to see, it must be said). It is said that it is a capacity that many deploy only after being dethroned.
Without becoming Socratic, knowledge is a good path to individual freedom.
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