By Randy Alonso Falcón on October 30, 2023
It is becoming commonplace that every late October, shortly after commemorating the National Culture Day, Cuba is shaken by the controversy of the Halloween celebration. Not only because of the debate on the relevance or not of its celebration in these lands, but also because of events that occur on that date and call for social reflection.
This is a holiday that has little to do with our traditions, but has spread like purslane or marabou, in the absence of cultural and recreational celebrations that are attractive to younger audiences and has become the scene for aberrant expressions to flourish, although certainly still isolated, as apologies to racism or fascism.
Last year there was the incident of young Holguineros dressed in the style of the Ku Klux Klan; now, an ignorant or provocateur dressed in Nazi garb. The former strolled around a park in the middle of a provincial capital; the latter this year entered a cultural institution in Havana and was even awarded a prize for his attire.
How far can we go in allowing these degrading, offensive expressions that are totally contrary to our principles and expressions? Where are our values as a society when hundreds allow and applaud such aberration?
I am even more embarrassed to learn that in Argentina, that same night, people expelled from a private Halloween party a young man who appeared dressed as Adolf Hitler. He received the repudiation of those present and was removed from the place by the security of the place. And there are even neo-fascist politicians there.
What is a state institution, even more a cultural one, doing organizing, promoting and developing a celebration that has nothing to do with our traditions, nor with a patriotic date, nor with our legitimate cultural exchanges with other countries, not even with the most genuine of the rich and diverse American culture, but with its most consumerist and sterile sense?
The uncritical absorption by our society of a foreign celebration, fruit of the globalizing cultural penetration that arrives and imposes patterns everywhere, does not imply in any degree that it can be assumed unconsciously by the institutions of a State whose cultural policy and whose defense of human values has always been emancipating, liberating and rooted.
It is the same question I asked myself a couple of months ago, when a national tourist company organized, promoted and marketed a Music Festival whose feature was a drug addict, gang member, misogynist and promoter of violence against women like Tekashi 69. Will the search for income, cheap commercialism impose on us behavior patterns, symbols, and a sense of success totally contrary to the values we defend?
It is unacceptable that racist, xenophobic, sexist and other anti-values practices try to become naturalized among us. The State cannot allow it; we, the citizens, cannot allow it.
There are necessary and profound readings, beyond the disguises and the announced analysis of the most recent event. I remember the assessment made a year ago by Iroel Sanchez, unfortunately deceased, who catalogued as “urgent and essential to investigate the causes of why such a comprehensive educational, cultural and media apparatus as ours has not made possible a critical reception of this fact and allows the conditions for its reproduction to nestle in our social fabric”.
Cultural and ideological battles are not won by decree. But let us not add to the overwhelming and dominant power of imperial culture, its related practices and its fabulous channels of diffusion, the delivery of spaces for it to gain a foothold in our lands, colonize our minds, degrade our culture and pervert our values.
Source: Cubadebate, translation Resumen Latinoamericano-English