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• Arts and Culture
• 11 / 07 / 2007

Several Latin American governments break up their relations with Cuba and the OAS promotes meetings one after another in its attempt to condemn Cubans. The class struggle is everywhere and hardly a day goes by without a terrorist plan or attack being discovered or a counter-revolutionary group being dismantled. A survey reveals that 40% of Cuban households read no newspaper and that 23% read no books, while adolescents prefer to read comics or cartoons.

But the year 1961 is also the year when the socialist character of the Revolution was proclaimed and it was the year of the victory in Bay of Pigs against the mercenary invasion. It was the year Nationalization Law for Education and of the Literacy Campaign, thanks to which after a year, precisely that same 1961, around 700 000 Cubans learned to read and write. "For our people, there is nothing impossible anymore," declared on that date Commander in Chief Fidel Castro.

That is, in general, the environment surrounding the birth, on August 22, 1961 of the Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba (Union of Writers and Artists from Cuba) (UNEAC in Spanish), a non-governmental organization called its VII Congress for next years starting months, and which during its 46 years has played an important role in Cuban life. The UNEAC increases the participation of culture in society, promotes the dialogue with the best part of universal culture, evaluates the specific cultural contributions coming from Cuban community in foreign countries and promotes rich reflections on such important topics a the relationship culture-tourism, artistic teaching and culture in community.

The Union of Writers and Artists as well as all the other Cuban cultural institutions, place culture at the centre point of a debate that currently implies the reaffirmation of our identity, the recognition of our authentic cultural sources and the spreading of art and literature with an unusual authority and with proposals that are to be reached massively.

PRECEDENTS

The UNEAC, of course wasnt born out of the blue. At the time of its birth there were already the Instituto Cubano del Arte y la Industria Cinematográficos (Cuban Institute for the Arts and Cinematographic Industry) (ICAIC in Spanish), the Casa de las Américas and the Consejo Nacional de Cultura (National Culture Council). Its creation was preceded by three days of intense meetings, where the most representative personalities from national art and literature held a one to one dialogue with the highest leaders of the Revolution. Three days of fruitful discussions that Fidel Castro would sum up with a discourse which would be left to posterity under the name of Palabras a los intelectuales (Words for intellectuals). This discourse is now 46 years old.

Would socialist realism predominate in Cuban culture? Would the slogans drawn creative freedom? Could imagination be allowed to fly freely in the new society? These and many other questions were asked by the creators to Fidel. Virgilio Piñera, who was among them all, the first one to talk, because as he confessed: "I was the one who was most afraid," said that people were saying that the Revolution would proclaim a directed culture. And Fidel asked him, smiling, who was saying such a thing. "There are people saying it, I have heard it," answered Virgilio and he went on bravely: "It is in the air, people are speculating that. I am not a counter-revolutionary, I am not in Miami, I am here, and there are doubts and reservations..." The poet Eliseo Diego asked whether he would be allow to sep writing according to his idealist vision, which was not the same as the ideology of Revolution.

Fidel, during his dialogue and his discourse, placed everything in the right spot. The Revolution, he assured, can not go against the sense of freedom it favoured, it would never asphyxiate the creative spirit and it would always respect formal freedom. He added: "The thing turns out to be more subtle and it becomes the true central point of the discussion when we talk about freedom of content." To this respect, he pointed out:

". . . within the Revolution, everything, against the Revolution, nothing. There is nothing allowed against the Revolution, because the Revolution has its rights too and the first right of the Revolution is the right to exist, and in the face of the right of the Revolution of being and existing, nobody, since the Revolution comprises the rights of the people, because the Revolution means the interests of the entire nation, nobody can rightly hold a right against it."

"I think this is clear enough. What are the rights of the revolutionary and non-revolutionary writers and artists? Within the Revolution, there is very right; against the Revolution, there is no right."

The environment was thus cleared for the celebration of the I Congress of Writers and Artists, which among other agreements established the creation of the UNEAC. The poet Nicolás Guillén would be its president. The final Resolution of that event states: "Cuban writers and artists, united in their I National Congress, after the triumph of our patriotic, democratic and socialist Revolution, adopt together with the people the Havana Declaration, that constitutes the Program for the Nation during this historic stage and we accept as a duty and right of the artists and writers the one to "fight with its work for a better world."

TODAY

The constitution of the UNEAC was not the end of the road, but a starting point in the search for a true union, as its current members recognize today. It was not a copy of the organizations that existed in the socialist block, where creators would be grouped together according to their spheres: writers, painters, musicians... Composer Harold Gramatges: status: "We have had a privilege: the existence of this Union itself.... Here we all have this space to discuss, to understand each other, to fulfil each other, not with an individual interest, but in relation with everything else done by the other creators."

In the UNEAC come together writers, musicians, visual artists, theatre people, dancers, set designers, people from the cinema, the radio and television... According to the work of each one, the members of the UNEAC belong to the corresponding Association. The Associations for Literature, Visual Arts and Music surged as sections at the very same time when the UNEAC was created. The Associations for Cinema, Radio and TV, together with the one for Staging Arts are more recent. It also has a publishing house, Ediciones Unión, and three magazines: La Gaceta de Cuba, Unión and Música Cubana. It sponsors several competitions and has a TV news program under the title of Hurón Azul.

During these more than four decades, everything was not a clear and simple path. There were some years in which some dangers that seemed to be solved with that Palabras a los intelectuales, threatened to impoverish cultural life. But according to the former Minister for Culture Armando Hart, referring to those defeats, "none of them was strategic, nor had the necessary weight to cloud the work of Revolution in culture."

In 1992, during one of the most tense and difficult moments of the Revolution, the National Council of the UNEAC made public the document La cultura cubana de hoy: temas para un debate (Cuban culture of today: topics for a debate). Then, when a way out for the crisis was barely imaginable and our cultural institutions suffered a brutal recession, the document defended the critical and reflexive function of culture and the need to consolidate spaces for discussion. It also ratified that the Cuban socialist project was the "only realist and possible alternative to preserve the revolutionary work and the existence of our nation itself." It added "we trust then, in the inevitable reorganization of the left wing thoughts that have to take place in the nineties, a process in which Cuban intellectuals may make essential contributions."

"The first thing we have to save is culture," said Fidel, a year later during the V UNEAC Congress, and this decision became real a short while later in the support to the basic cultural institutions and in important investments.

The discussions in the VI Congress, in 1998 were concentrated around the repercussion in Cuba of the imperialist cultural hegemony, the insatiable expansion of a consumption culture supported by the media, the attempt to impose a standardized taste and a unique, neo-colonial thinking, and the danger ran by national identity in front of such processes. In that encounter, phenomena such as marginality, racial discrimination, management position, non-critical assimilation of the market patterns, the ignorance of our hierarchies, the degradation and the Miamization in architecture and in the city and the banality in the media were analyzed.

Today, right before the start of the VII Congress, expected to take place during the first four months of 2008, the UNEAC may state with no sense of triumphalism that thanks to the work of writers, artists and promoters and the political will of the country, the cultural network of the nation has been restored. But as President Fidel Castro himself expressed, the humanist values of the Revolution are long from being irreversible.

That is why in its call to the immediate Congress the Union of Artists and Writers expresses: "This ethical battle to which we are called upon, has to animate our reflections. It is more urgent than ever to fight against the expressions of cultural colonialism that are present among us and against the persistence of social phenomena foreign to our values and contrary to the socialist project. We should turn the true culture into an essential part of the everyday life of the people and keep prioritizing community work. At the same time, it is indispensable that we participate actively in the worldwide call to stop the destruction of the environment and in every important topic of current international debate."

These intentions that necessarily through the defence of diversity, the debate of ideas, frankness and the rigor of discussions and which according to the Call, "our greatest expectation is that we should all participate in the analysis of these topics. There is a new stage opening up of reflection and stimulus for intellectual and artistic work at this "time of recount and united march." A congress that is called when that reorganization of left wing thinking, which was alluded in 1992, went much beyond and we are supposed to assist to a new and hopeful revolutionary peak in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Source: By Ciro Binchi, CubaNow