Saturday, October 8, 2011

Cultural exchanges with Cuba are mostly one-way affairs

Posted on Friday, 10.07.11
In My Opinion

Cultural exchanges with Cuba are mostly one-way affairs
By Fabiola Santiago
fsantiago@MiamiHerald.com

There's little novelty in Cubans from the island traveling to Miami to
play their music, show their films, exhibit their art and read their
literary works.

Culture from the island is imported as routinely as it is from New York,
and this week alone I've been invited to the art opening in Coral Gables
of an artist from Pinar del Río and a dinner with a visiting Cuban art
dealer.

The policy under which the cultural elite of Cuba readily get U.S. visas
is called "a cultural exchange program," but that's a bit of a misnomer,
as it implies a two-way deal.

Cuba doesn't issue visas as freely to the Cuban cultural elite on this
side of the Florida Straits, so it's quite unusual to see a
Cuban-American performing or showcasing his or her craft in Havana. It
happens in some circles and with some carefully chosen intellectuals,
but from here-to-there is rare.

Freedom rings on this side, thankfully, and for the most part the
presence of Cubans from the island among us is illuminating and
informative, if not always in the ways those involved intended.

When you live in a free society, it's easier to distinguish the real
thing from the opportunist (he just wants to sell his paintings and run;
he claims to not know anything about social issues, particularly Las
Damas de Blanco, the brave Ladies in White who peacefully march every
Sunday in Havana and are attacked by pro-government mobs).

And it's priceless to witness an artist using euphemisms and jargon
acceptable to the Cuban government in her artist statement and in
conversations with left-leaning Americans — then in private with Miami
Cubans, after a couple of drinks on South Beach, blurting out: "We can't
wait for that degenerate old man to die." And from there, letting it all
hang out, the sweet taste of freedom flowing with the mojitos.

Interesting exchanges all, but now here comes an opportunity for the
Cuban government to shamelessly export its best propaganda tool
camouflaged as culture.

Later this month arrives La Colmenita Children's Theater to stage the
play Abracadabra. According to a promotional press release , the play
advocates against the "injustice" of the jailing of Cuban spies in the
United States, known as "The Cuban Five" — one of them released Friday —
and calls for the end of the U.S. embargo against Cuba.

The children's tour has been scheduled to coincide with a United Nations
vote on the embargo Oct. 25.

News of the play — the tale of a teacher and students whose flight of
fancy is inspired by the "freedom-loving" spies — arrives in my mailbox
in a press release from clueless public relations specialist Karen Lowe.

She pitches coverage of La Colmenita, The Little Beehive, and its U.S.
tour – shows in Washington D.C. and San Francisco, none so far scheduled
for Miami – by pointing out the newsy Miami connections to the spies.

She cites the downing of a Cuban airliner in 1976 in which 73 people
were killed, attributed to a Cuban exile who has long denied
involvement, and notes that the founders of La Colmenita are the mother
and brother of a man on that flight. She doesn't say that another
brother, a filmmaker, showed his movie recently at the Miami Film
Festival, or that another brother was working at Miami's America TV.

Nor does she offer that these are the same children trotted out in
Havana to celebrate Fidel Castro's birthday, to uplift the comandante's
spirits when he's sick, and, whenever there's any sign of true change,
to peddle the view that the regime is one great big timba party with
lots of love for children and culture.

Any tactic is valid to sustain the nearly 53-year-old dictatorship. No
qualms about using children to pull at the heart strings of
international public opinion, although if you're an optimist, you might
be inclined to say that this is another sign of a mortally wounded fiefdom.

Just watch the little children, their bodies trained to sing and dance
to the rhythm of Cuba's fraudulent revolution, advocating for the
release of cretins and the lifting of an embargo that doesn't really
exist when several planes fly to Cuba daily loaded with American goods,
when shipping companies send parcels and dollars to the tune of millions
a year, and when artists return to Cuba with their pockets full of
American cash.

Under the "cultural exchange" rules, there's not supposed to be any
payment, but all artists are paid, only the money is called a living
stipend. Sure.

The only thing embargoed in Cuba is truth.

As for the cultural exchange program, it will be a treasure the day
writer Yoani Sanchez is allowed by the Cuban government to travel here
and claim her journalism prize at Columbia University, or to read from
her new book about life in Cuba. And it will be even truer the day
Cubans on the island get to hear singer Willy Chirino's voice ring in
Havana's Karl Marx Theater: " Oxígeno!"

Oxygen.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/10/07/v-fullstory/2443791/cultural-exchanges-with-cuba-are.html

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