Enrique Fernandez . Sun-Sentinel. March 20, 2000
Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Cuba's most prestigious writer, has sent a fax from London, where he has lived in exile for decades, to Florida International University. In it, he renounced the honorary doctorate FIU had granted him.
He has done so to protest the presence of a large delegation of Cuban academics who are participating in a meeting of the Latin American Studies Association at the university.
The writer's reaction was predictable. An outspoken and convincing critic of the Castro regime, he recently dropped his long association with the Miami Film Festival because of last year's screening of Wim Wenders' documentary Buena Vista Social Club. This year's screening of an actual Cuban
film only strained the relationship further.
According to Cabrera Infante, anything that comes from Cuba is tainted by the government's evil intentions, even traditional music played by living antiques. Certainly, academic discourse. In his view, there is no cultural life in Cuba as long as Fidel Castro is in power, a view shared by
many Cuban exiles.
In the field of music, where Cuba has been and remains a powerful presence, there is a long-standing notion among exiles: El son se fue de Cuba. The son (an old music form that is the basis of most popular Cuban music) left Cuba.
It went into exile, a point made by noting that Cuba's most-popular musical artist, Celia Cruz, has lived in the United States for years as an outspoken enemy of the Castro government.
If all Cuban culture is merely the party line, there is no point in cultural exchange with the island. No point in softening the embargo to include the people-to-people contact the Clinton administration encourages. And, most of all, no point in dropping the embargo, a move many observers, of
all political persuasions, think the current administration contemplates and a future Democratic administration is likely to enact.
Not all Cuban-Americans share Cabrera Infante's position. And though there is a small minority that is actually pro-Castro (yes, and some of them live in Miami!), a larger group thinks change in Cuba is overdue and the best way to bring it about is to drop the embargo.
I have no illusions about intellectual freedom in Cuba. However, no system is monolithic, and Cubans are masters of slipping and sliding around structural limitations at all levels of life. That means that many Cubans, some with official connections to the system, have more in common with
their compatriots in exile than with the government.
As for Cuban culture, I radically disagree with Cabrera Infante, a writer who knows of my almost religious admiration of his artistry. I think that Cuban culture is greater than the island's tyrants and political hustlers -- and, we've had more than our share.
And I think that no one, not even someone with the ambition and political talent of Fidel Castro, can control it.
Oh, he can use it. I have no illusions about that either. Clever political leaders, good or bad, always use culture -- I still remember Richard Nixon quoting Woody Guthrie's This Land Is Your Land at the GOP convention; it just about blew my mind. But culture has a life of its own, and Cuban
culture, that magnificent edifice built by anonymous troubadours as well as by superstars in all the arts, is owned by no one.
As for the embargo, it hasn't worked. After four decades, Castro may not own the culture but he owns the real estate. Doing business with him will generate some injustices, no doubt, but no more than are in place now. And, in the end, it will erode the structures of power.
Cabrera Infante is totally wrong on one point. He said the comparison with the transition from dictatorship to democracy in Spain is fallacious because that transition only happened after the dictator died. Not so. Franco's power had eroded way before his death, and that erosion came in part
from something Spanish exiles, like Cuban exiles today, detested: American involvement in their country. American influence.
I remember a letter I got from an enthusiastic Cuban rocker long ago who somehow got a hold of a publication I used to write for. ROCK AND ROLL RULES!, he wrote me. Indeed it does. It can even overrule.
Enrique Fernandez can be reached at efernandez@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4797.
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