On Censorship And Its Demons

On Censorship And Its Demons / 14ymedio, Enrique Colina
Posted on November 14, 2015

14ymedio, Enrique Colina, 30 October 2015 – The artistic censorship
practiced in Cuba during these 56 years, against works and creators,
from a culture in favor of a supposed defense of the Revolution, has
paradoxically resulted in a backlash against the political prestige of
the Revolutionary Process, the same one that encouraged and developed
from its beginnings the diverse artistic expressions that today sustain
and reinforce our national identity and guarantee the continuity of the
positive legacy of this stage of our history.

If we consider the rectifications and rescues of cultural works and
personalities that were once stigmatized with the counterrevolutionary
sanbenito by officials and leaders of a rigid and dogmatic orthodoxy –
on occasion fractured by a corrupt and opportunistic, or simply
inconvenient, act within a centralized and vertical structure of power,
which led them to be separated and condemned to political ostracism –
the list would be long. Today the injustices committed during the
so-called Five Gray Years are officially recognized, and the
reparations, repairs and appropriation of our cultural legacy is often
realized when its authors have already disappeared, moreover of those
who had to emigrate, but for those who left because of criticism,
warnings and the denunciation in their works the authoritarian and
intolerant drift of the systemic bureaucracy, for those "rescued" they
have to be dead already.

Intolerance to criticism as a rule to know the truth – which is inherent
in the artistic phenomenon that explores, investigates and scrutinizes
human conflicts, socially, politically and economically framed in its
reality and its history – has been and continues to be a projection of a
fear to face the responsibilities emanating from a bureaucratic power
that has made mistakes, and suffered losses and deviations from its
original revolutionary and libertarian impulse.

Mistakes and absurdities motivated on occasion by a chimerical
immobility incapable of adapting and overhauling the utopia to meet the
urgent requirements of a reality in need of an objective, sensible and
balanced assessment of the causes of its defects in order to correct and
amend them. Rather, and despite, the cyclical openings of rectification
and the calls to public criticism against what has been done badly in
these 56 years, attention was always focused on the phenomena and not
the causes.

Thus the absence of a systematic critical confrontation through the
media, subjected to a castrating censorship, has ended up forging the
sacredness and untouchability of the vertical decisions of power,
although it tries to mask them with participative consultations to touch
up the make-up.

There is already a stagnation in public awareness and an ideological
exhaustion from the worn out propagandistic character of the media that
support an opaque future reality and provoke this apathy and escapism
that so concerns those who are worried about the ideological
diversionism, superficiality and banality of the entertainment people
seek in the "weekly packet," the computer games, and reggaeton music…

This loss of values, bad education, vulgarity, social indiscipline… are
also the result of not having promoted and nurtured in public practice
that rebellion and autonomy of opinion that Che encouraged against all
the liars and opportunists who preach the dictates of discretion,
caution and restraint in the expression of our non-conformist
citizens. Disagreement as a lawful civil right to express an opinion
without being reprimanded through this inoculation of fear in the face
of the consequences of expressing a critical point of view in "an
inappropriate place, at an inopportune moment, and in a politically
incorrect manner."

Movies, plays and art works have contributed with many of their
creations to confronting us with this wall of silence protected by the
ideological gatekeepers who censor and condemn in the name of the
defense of the Revolution when in reality what they do is undermine the
humanist pillars of its continuity. Movies, plays and artworks – without
forgetting the period of prohibition suffered by the best exponents of
the Nueva Trova who ultimately became the most authentic singers of the
Revolutionary work – suffered the brunt of this reactionary hangover
that rejects the debate of ideas and crouches in the stone trenches to
launch their poisonous inquisitional darts.

Recently — and in contradiction to the appeal made by the government's
highest authorities to face reality with a critical eye, honesty and
ethical commitment, recognizing that unanimity of opinions is a fallacy
of simulation — they have launched attacks against a writer whose
literary work and journalism is an example of seriousness and sincerity
recognizing our current material and spiritual scarcities, in addition
to being a genuine exponent of a committed and authentic Cubanness.

I'm talking about Leonardo Padura and also referring to the stupid ban
on the movie based on his novel, Return to Ithaca, which months later
was shown during French Cinema week, more to keep up appearances than as
recognition of the error of arrogance committed. Stupid because it
shamelessly exposed the fangs of the crouching dogmatic beast just to
create a problem that discredits not only its own maker but the power it
represents.

Because it is understood that more than strength, such intolerant
behavior expresses the weakness and the intellectual and political
intolerance for open and responsible debate with reasons and arguments
that nourish a shared confidence to seek solutions to the problems
denounced in the work, so that this sad history is not repeated, a
history of encouraging this "revolutionary" combativeness with a
propensity to gag thinking and make a paranoid sickness of the logical
precaution that assumes a change like that which is being produced in
our country. Healthy change, not only of the intentions to keep
everything the same, but to expunge this inability to see ourselves in
an uncomfortable mirror, to recognize our imperfections and to question
the historic deficiencies in the systemic structure of the model that
encourages them.

Thus, I finally get to the starting point that motivated me to write
these lines: the prohibition of the play by Juan Carlos Cremata and the
suspension of his employment as a theater director. This brought me to
remember those years when the Cuban theater, that had reached its
splendor with the Revolutionary triumph, suffered that purifying
"parameterization" with its aberrant and repressive prejudices that
resulted in frustration, ostracism and exile for creators and artists
who were only enriching with their art the cultural patrimony that we
know constitutes the support and sustenance of our national identity.

I am not telling the story nor mentioning names overwhelmed by that
outrage which I consider truly shameful and counterrevolutionary, which
only brought discredit to a Revolution that some extremists with the
power of decision interpreted the aspiration to create a New Man with
that of creating an obedient robot, dogmatic and filled with reactionary
prejudices, today under attack but not exterminated. Nor will I stop to
argue about the work in question which one can agree with or not, like
its staging or not… no, I only want to point out that I consider it
inappropriate for some – who are not artists nor have they contributed
anything to the national culture – to again set themselves up as
inquisition judges and who, yoked to an ephemeral authority, decide to
frustrate the fate of an artist, of a creator whose work in the cinema
and the theater is already the patrimony of our culture.

There may be contradictions and wherever a theater director can decide
whether or not to present a work, whether to suspend or continue its
representation, the anomalous case is that if there was prior
supervision with respect to its content or staging, the responsibility
the censors have in the situation created after the premiere.

The theater in Cuba is under by the Ministry of Culture and responds to
a political culture whose tuning fork should be as broad as the
recognition of the national audience's capacity of discernment, an
audience officially recognized for its educational, political and
cultural level. So why, then, the censorship of the adaptation and
staging of a play that itself contains great provocation, perfectly
compatible with the shock factor of an art that tries to break taboos,
move us and make us think, to take sides in favor or against their proposal?

Do we or do we not have an educated and committed audience with
revolutionary ideas and principles capable of drawing their own
conclusions to approve or reject it? What is the real constructive sense
of an exclusive censorship without mediating a debate among those who
undertake this artistic activity who are potentially subject to this
same arbitrariness?

When, 25 years ago, censorship was dictated against Daniel Diaz Torres's
Alice in Wonderland, and direction was given to the militants of the
Provincial Party, headquartered at M and 23rd, to go to the Yara Cinema
during its showing to "cut off at the pass any manifestation of
counterrevolutionary approval." On the front page of the newspaper
Granma an official note appeared where it was announced that the Council
of State decided that the Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry
(ICAIC) would be under the supervision the Cuban Institute of Radio and
Television (ICRT). This meant that the National Film Institute lost the
relative autonomy of political decision-making for the approval of film
production, which until then had allowed them to do documentary film
production and today could be considered as a diagnosis of the evils of
the Special Period which worsened to point of sounding the alarm on the
urgent need to make the changes and openings that today are so long delayed.

At that time we filmmakers gathered to protest against that decision
that discredited the film, its director and dissolved the ICAIC. The
film was not counterrevolutionary, nor was its director nor any of those
who went down on their knees to defend the artistic space with critical
proposals, all lined up against the bureaucratic authoritarian and
reductive abusive interventionism, exactly like that which caused the
so-called desmerengamiento* (total collapse) of the Socialist Camp.
(Because it was the same hammer and sickle that brought down the Berlin
Wall, and it is worth saying that it was because of disbelief and the
political dysfunctionality of the Socialist model, in whose womb, worn
out and corroded, lay the revolutionary essence of its origin.)

There were directors like Santiago Alvarez, Tomas Gutierrez Alea and
others who, with their artistic careers, supported the continuity of
this critical slope that always confronted the harassment and
repudiation of those keepers of the chalice, pristine and pure, of that
ideology without supreme saviors, without Caesar or bourgeoisie or God…
today we say a controversy in the practical application of the laws of
dialectics. And, thanks to this resistance they would keep making movies
that never turned their backs on reality and that today maintain intact
their rebellion against bureaucratic ukases and diktats.

So our protest is also confirmed by the pretension of excluding us from
decision-making in the supposed restructuring of the ICAIC and the
insistence, for more than two years, in the belief in a Film Law that
guarantees the recognition of an independent production and a movie
institute that promotes and protects national filmmaking and not one
that monopolizes and controls it, because there is no… (There is an
official claim of legitimate institutions eroded by a future that has
exceeded its capacity for functional readjustment to meet new demands
imposed by a very distinct present very different from that which
motivated its origin. See the documentary, "Put me on the list…")

The Cremata case falls within the ideological debate which has marked
the destiny of a process that needs to keep alive the historic memory of
its cultural work so as not to continue committing and supporting errors
that put this valuable cultural treasure in danger, a critical
thermometer that no censorship will be able to disconnect while we are
able to act in consequence and committed to our civic duty.

*Translator's note: Desmerengamiento was coined by Fidel Castro to
embody, in a single word, the debacle of the Soviet Union. It comes from
the word "meringue" and, like a failed meringue, refers to the idea of a
complete collapse.

Source: On Censorship And Its Demons / 14ymedio, Enrique Colina |
Translating Cuba -
http://translatingcuba.com/on-censorship-and-its-demons-14ymedio-enrique-colina/