Island of the future
By
Enrique Ubieta Gómez Read Spanish Version
The
following article originally appeared on the Cuban daily Juventud
Rebelde on April 6, 2008.
On
Friday, on my way through the streets of Centro Habana to the Palace
of Conventions, where I would attend the closing session of the Cuban
Writers’ and Artists’ Congress, as usual I saw several tourists
posing for pictures in front of some "almendrones". (**)
What once was undoubtedly a symbol of revolutionary resistance —
maintaining those cars running in spite of the blockade — was
converted now in its opposite: the past resisting to disappear.
Some
promoters of tourism followed the logic of the market and created a
taxi company (in foreign currency) so that visitors could fulfill
their most unusual dream: evading the onerous present in a time
machine that would take them through a city frozen in its
architectonic evolution, riding cars that four, five, or six decades
ago were the most.
If
in that city, hundreds of thousands of people with university degrees
and a similar number of university students move around, if among the
observed or filmed passer-byes — as in Spielberg’s movies, the time
tourists take samples of that mysterious island where dinosaurs still
roam, in order to document the discovery — there are no illiterate
people and the majority have finished high school, or only five
children die per thousand born alive, or life expectancy is 78 years
of age, those are figures that the taped images do not show.
The
same happens with music: a sharp businessman gathered a group of
wonderfully talented senior performers — in a country of wonderfully
talented performers of all ages — and made them famous. The music,
the cars, the buildings and even the stubborn socialism — a "20th
century ideology" allegedly fallen into disuse — complemented
each other so that tourists can live in the past in a "real"
way. Paradoxically the symbols of socialism — Fatherland or Death,
or Che’s face on a wall, the neck kerchief in the school uniform —
even if they did not belong to the cult decades, are photographed as
part of a "gone" era. A superposition of time past in a
postmodern pastiche.
What’s
the use of telling them that in the streets of Havana or Santiago de
Cuba, for example, they could find thousands of excellent young
musicians that graduated from the National School of Art? The scenery
encompassed the first half of the 20th
century, up to the 60s: Cubans flaunted the educational and health
levels that Latin American society yearned for the 21st
century. But so what? As with the Spanish Conquistadors of the 16th
century in the Americas, they saw without seeing. In their wake, some
artisans found a gold mine mimicking in their mass produced paintings
— oil, on wood or papier
maché
— the antique car models and some topics from the long gone
vernacular theater, now staged on the street for the (not so) naïve
"Galician", and in a more up to date version for Italians.
In
these days at the Congress we have discussed these and many other
things. I have felt proud of being a Cuban intellectual. Proud that
writers and artists have met, not so much to talk about the latest
trends in literature, the stage or the arts, but to share concerns
and critical opinions on the spiritual life of the society to which
we all belong.
Proud
that many ministers, party officials, two Vice Presidents of the
Council of State, and Raúl (Castro) himself attended —
respectful of our opinions. That Fidel followed, in his
convalescence, the course of the debates and shared with us his
thoughts in an open letter. Proud of the cultural and revolutionary
tradition to which I belong, of being a spiritual son (that’s how I
feel) of Cintio (Vitier) and Fina (García Marruz), beautiful
and dignified, of Fidel, of Che; of being able to appropriate myself
of the heartfelt and wise words of great intellectuals such as
Graziella Pogolotti and Eusebio Leal, to mention just two names, and
of a well-known group of my lucid and committed contemporaries.
As
(Vice President Carlos) Lage said in a brief but intense
intervention, "we came from — and in some measure we still are
in — a historical period of almost two decades in which we set
ourselves to maintain an ideal of justice that was no longer possible
to defend. And we made it, to the astonishment of all and of
ourselves. Why? Because we believe in what we fight for. Because we
do not fear. Because we have had Fidel."
And
he added regarding the enormous problems we still face: "those
are the wounds of war, but of a war we have won." Pity that
those intoxicated visitors, victims themselves of media manipulation,
do not know how to see the inside of the country, I mean, beneath its
skin. It is sad to live without hope, without reasons to fight for a
better world. The Revolution is not in their photos and videos, but
in these days of Congress I have seen it, not as past, but as the
future. Cuba is the island of the future.
**
Old American cars from the 1940s and 50s.
