By Tatiana Coll on September 1, 2022
What characterizes us as underdeveloped countries are the queues, popular queues, queues for tortillas, transportation. But only in Cuba are there queues for books. This surprised me since the first time I went there in 1970. When I worked at Juventud Rebelde newspaper and a large bookstore was very close by, the newsroom would often hear the announcement, “the book has just arrived…” Immediately there was a whirlwind of people running to get in line and there was no shortage of people asking: “Can you save me a place? In Mexico, the average number of books per capita/year has been around one or two, while in Cuba it is around 20. Books don’t just sit in bookstores collecting dust. Recently Paco Ignacio Taibo II said that Cuba has created a republic of readers. Another impressive experience was to meet the Escambray Theater, made up of excellent actors, such as Sergio Corrieri, who decided to move to the Escambray region where the counter-guerrilla and bandits supported by the US had concentrated in 1963, an area of cultural-educational abandonment and where the peasants would have to develop the challenges of radical transformations. Through the theater they wrote and starred in with the peasants, the contradictions were diluted. Part of this great cultural revolution was also the fact of founding the ICAIC, the Casa de las Americas and the National Theater and Ballet just three months after the revolutionary triumph: whose objectives, according to García Márquez, “are easy to say, but are unsuspectedly far-reaching, to link Cuba and Latin America in cultural spaces that allow the development of the capacities, thoughts and actions of all our America and the Caribbean, for a process of decolonization”. Especially because at that time the continent was plagued by fierce dictatorships.
A great culture of resistance has spread on the island. Its Afro-Caribbean roots, its Latin Americanist Antilleanism, its nationalism and anti-imperialism have created a vital cultural space of resistance, an expression of the diverse and rhythmic essence of the Cuban people. A space of survival and consciousness, creative and multiple. If we understand culture as Freire proposed: the possibility of constituting oneself as a being-in-the-world and breaking with the condition of only being in the world; appropriating one’s life, one’s decisions, one’s own change; culture as the sustenance of the “I in the world”, its existential dimensions, as Goran Therborn pointed out. We understand that culture unfolds in hundreds of processes: reading, cinema, music, but also sports, health, science; solidarity, social and, above all, political culture, which cement a no to racism, discrimination, machismo, cultural and mercantile elitist contempt; a resounding no to the culture of exploitation and humiliation. Education as one of the central and sustained axes in Cuba from the beginning, has been the factor that has allowed such profound cultural results to be harvested. The extensive educational system, equitable, integral, humanistic, rigorous and innovative, so wisely put together that it has managed to produce an immense pool of creative, scientific and professional popular talent, which covers with great virtue the range of cultural possibilities that set in motion and sustain the peoples in resistance.
On August 23, at the same time as the ALAS congress, Abel Prieto, former Minister of Culture, gave a master lecture and reviewed the most bloody moments of the cultural war (the name of his lecture) that the US has been waging against the revolution for 63 years. From Operation Peter Pan, which convinced the parents of 2,000 children that, in order to save their children from brutal communism, they had to send them to the US, to the recent SOS-Cuba that nurtured the hundreds of thousands of tweets arising from the CIA’s strategic digital restructuring and the use of the trained Yutuel and Yunior. The countless occasions and means employed have responded to a single and old conception: the one clearly expressed by Mallory, Eisenhower’s secretary, when he determined that the revolution would be defeated by hunger. The current president of Casa de las Americas also went through the different “trenches of ideas” that as a central task they inherited from Martí, he cited Armando Hart, the founder of the Ministry of Culture and the first to systematize the cultural challenges; Haydée Santamaría, founder of Casa de las Americas, symbol of the Latin American cultural fusion, discoverer of so many creators. Her follower Fernández Retamar and Cintio Vitier, writers, poets, solid and simple men, and so many others who established the enormous strength of the Cuban popular culture. Cultural battle, battle of ideas, that the people have sustained in the midst of a noble and audacious resistance. Seeing what they have produced, it is almost unimaginable to think of what Cubans could have done if they were not subjected to the constant and brutal, excessive and relentless siege.
My wine is banana wine and if it were to come out bitter, it would still be my wine. -José Martí
Source: Red In Defense of Humanity, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – US