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Washington Post.
Top Cuban Official Says End of U.S. Embargo 'Is Closer'
By Karen DeYoung. Washington Post Staff Writer. Saturday,
November 11, 2000; Page A02
NEW YORK –– Cuba remains optimistic that the end of U.S. economic
sanctions against the Communist-ruled island "is closer than ever before,"
despite what Havana considered a major setback in the U.S. Congress last month,
Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque said Thursday.
Most Americans "recognize that it is wrong to deny food and medicine to
a country that poses no threat to the United States," Perez Roque said in
an interview at Havana's United Nations mission here. Not only will U.S.
agricultural and business interests continue to lobby for change, he said, "the
eyes of others in Congress have been opened to the fact that [the embargo] is
neither rational nor ethical."
But "we don't underestimate the power of the Republican congressional
leadership" to again overrule majority votes in favor of easing sanctions,
he said. Although both the House and Senate agreed this year to eliminate
prohibitions against food and medicine sales to Cuba, a leadership-directed
conference committee effectively nullified the likelihood of such sales by
including a ban on U.S. governmental or commercial credit for Cuba in the final
legislation.
A House-approved measure that would have dropped enforcement of U.S.
restrictions on American travel to Cuba was also eliminated in the conference,
replaced by a provision that wrote into law a ban on American tourism to the
island.
Although some spokesmen for U.S. agricultural interests have suggested that
Cuba could circumvent the credit ban by seeking third-country financing to
purchase American goods, Perez Roque repeated Cuba's refusal to do so.
"No. Definitively no, for two reasons," he said. "The first
is a question of national self-esteem. . . . I'm sure the United States would
never accept trade with another country under these conditions. Second, it's
simply not possible to buy food in the United States under these conditions,"
he added, citing continuing transportation restrictions and U.S. prohibitions
against Cuba's use of American dollars.
Perez Roque denied assertions by backers of the credit restrictions,
including Cuban American representatives in the House, that the lack of
financing alone would prevent cash-strapped Cuba from buying American goods.
Citing what he said was $1 billion worth of food imports this year, he insisted
that "we are buying [from other countries], and we have money to pay."
Havana's determination seemed to be borne out yesterday, when the first
group of U.S. farmers to visit Cuba since the new legislation was passed held a
news conference to say they had been unable to persuade the government there to
purchase anything, even if third-party credit could be arranged.
Jack Laurie, president of the Michigan Farm Bureau, told reporters in Havana
that the Cuban government had expressed interest in buying dry beans and other
products from Michigan farmers, but said it would not do so under the current
law, the Associated Press reported.
Laurie said his group, and others, would continue to press for the sanctions
to be lifted. "The buyer is willing, but the conditions of the market make
it difficult," he said. "We feel that it is important that the Cubans
know . . . that our industry and the majority of the American people intend to
change these laws at the start of the next Congress."
The interview with Perez Roque took place after the U.N. General Assembly
voted 167 to 3 Thursday in support of a Havana-sponsored resolution calling for
the end of the U.S. embargo. It was the ninth year in a row the resolution has
passed by an overwhelming majority. Only the United States, Israel and the
Marshall Islands voted against it; El Salvador, Nicaragua, Morocco and Latvia
abstained.
The sanctions, first imposed by executive directive and later made law by
Congress, have been in place in varying degrees for nearly four decades;
successive U.S. governments have said relations will never be normalized as long
as Cuba maintains communist political and economic systems. Havana, and an
increasing number of members of Congress, have called the policy irrational and
pointed to ever-warmer U.S. relations with communist China, Vietnam and even
North Korea.
As to Havana's relations with other countries, U.S. officials took note last
month when Cuban President Fidel Castro traveled to Caracas for a virtual love
fest with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. U.S. officials expressed concern
that Chavez, who signed a concessionary oil deal with Castro, is becoming
increasingly authoritarian and may be trying to emulate the Cuban Communist
leader.
Perez Roque, who was also on the trip, said his impression was that
Venezuela considered the United States "an important market for its
petroleum exports" and valued its relationship with Washington. As for
Castro and Chavez, he said, "it would be inexact to say they have the same
ideology. Fidel Castro is a man of Marxist-Leninist convictions, a communist.
Chavez is not a Marxist-Leninist. Fidel is a believer in the defense of
socialism. Chavez isn't interested in a socialist system for Venezuela. But they
are great friends."
For D.C. Theaters, an Exchange of Heart in Cuba
By Megan Rosenfeld. Washington Post Staff Writer. Sunday,
November 12, 2000; Page G01
In Cuba, Molly Smith was told, everything is difficult, and then it becomes
easy. And she gave an example.
One night last month in Havana, Smith, the Arena Stage artistic director,
joined Studio Theatre's artistic director, Joy Zinoman, in an attempt to see a
production at a local company. When they arrived at the appointed place, they
found no play. Neither woman speaks Spanish, so Zinoman acted out a word she
remembered from the play's title--parakeet.
Ah! They were sent vaguely in another direction to find the play with a
parakeet in the title, down a long, dark street. Finally they flagged an ancient
cab and climbed in. Another passenger from Washington was already inside: Hugo
Medrano, artistic director of GALA Hispanic Theatre.
"I saved them," said Medrano, whose theater is smaller and poorer
than Smith's or Zinoman's. "We had a good laugh."
Everything was difficult and then it became easy.
In recent months an extraordinary number of Washington arts leaders have
trekked south to the fascinating, depressing island 90 miles from Florida, for
reasons both obvious and opaque. In the coming months and years, Cuba could have
as large an impact on Washington arts as any single country has--including this
season's Canadian onslaught.
It was Medrano who set the Cuban connection in motion. He went four years
ago--using his Argentine passport--to cast a stage version of the Cuban film "Strawberry
and Chocolate" for GALA. His cultural outreach was controversial at the
time, but he also learned the bureaucratic ropes of arranging visas and licenses
and negotiating with Cuban arts officials. Last year, Washington Ballet Artistic
Director Septime Webre visited Cuba under GALA's license, and acquired his own
for the ballet's recent visit to Havana's International Ballet Festival. In
turn, Smith, Zinoman and other theater people from Washington traveled under the
Washington Ballet's license.
"We've had no trouble getting visas because we have been very proper
with all the paperwork," said Medrano from Havana, where he has been
auditioning actors for two productions this year. "But it is really a pain
in the neck."
Aside from GALA's now-annual Cuban offering, the results of all this
cross-cultural fertilization are just starting to show. Smith will be reading a
number of Cuban plays once translations are complete, and has been asked to
return to Cuba to teach. She and Zinoman were moved--stunned, really--by a
production they saw in a former church, a performance done in daylight because
the electricity had gone off. (Based on a Tolstoy short story, the play, "History
of the Horse," encompassed film of a horse being slaughtered,
gender-bending dance, nudity, and animal bones used as musical instruments,
among other elements.)
But the artistic results of travel are not always easy to measure. Minds are
not so much changed as stimulated, and the mingling emotions of awe, fear,
delight and shock may not lead in a straight line to inspiration. The extreme
contrasts of poverty and loveliness the Americans witnessed in Cuba were
confounding. They were as astonished by the crushing mob of more than 500
fighting to get into the ballet as they were repelled by the police toting
machine guns on every corner.
"The people are desperate and they are buoyant," Smith said. "I
could have stayed for a month."
The production of "Two Sisters and a Piano" that just opened at
Studio provides a sample of cross-cultural enrichment. By coincidence--somehow
influenced by the Elian Gonzalez saga, which was unfolding during play-choosing
season last spring--the play by Nilo Cruz, a Cuban American, had already been
scheduled before this fall's visits. Piggybacking on the Washington Ballet's
license (you go as a "representative" of the licensed company) and
largely paying their own way, director Serge Seiden, designers Daniel Conway and
Helen Q. Huang, and actresses Greta Sanchez-Ramirez and Nancy Rodriguez visited
Havana for four days in September, just before the ballet group.
"Cuba totally shredded our ideas of the play," Seiden said.
Cruz left Cuba with his parents when he was 9 years old. His play is both a
caustic indictment of the repression in Cuba and an exploration of a doomed
romance, based loosely on the experiences of exiled poet Maria Elena Cruz
Varela. The sisters, writer Maria Celia (Sanchez-Ramirez) and musician Sofia
(Rodriguez), are under house arrest after two years in jail for demanding
perestroika-inspired changes in the Cuban system. One of their guards (Paul
Morella) falls in love with Maria Celia.
Taking their cues from the script, Seiden and the designers had seen the
production as primarily a romance, set on a lush and beautiful tropical island,
with an aura of magical fantasy. The palette would be pale--light clothes and
white furniture--and the backdrop an expansive horizon.
After the first day in Havana, they knew these ideas were wrong.
"The intense crushing grittiness and lack of freedom of speech was
unbearable for us in many ways," said Seiden, who grew up the child of
hippies and had a rosy, left-leaning view of Castro's regime before his visit. "It's
the most beautiful city, but it's crumbling. And the colors--the juxtaposition
of colors, of one layer of paint peeling off another layer, which is peeling off
brick and a layer of plaster which is coming off a layer of steel."
These layers became a kind of metaphor that shaped the look and concept of
the play. The focus shifted from romance to the struggle of an artist trying to
be free. The palette darkened; some costumes were jettisoned and replaced with
new ones in mottled tones. The look of the set's floor was changed from tile to
painted, faded cement similar to what they had seen in Cuba. Louvered shutters
were added, and the wrought-iron trim was treated with a "dirty water wash"
of sawdust and paint to make it look rusty.
"We added an entire layer of grit and grime," Conway said.
Castro now permits people to sell crafts in open-air markets, which has
produced a thriving crochet industry. The Studio Theatre crew discovered
unemployed PhDs, nurses and X-ray technicians selling fabulous crochet work, and
they bought the dress and jacket that Sanchez-Ramirez wears in the play. Cruz's
stage directions indicating that the sisters knit were changed to have them
crocheting (the two actresses got a lesson at a factory the team stumbled upon).
In a small Havana bookstore, Seiden found the Spanish translation of Mikhail
Gorbachev's book about perestroika, which is used as a prop in the play. Even
more than the meager number of books for sale, they remember the three children
who lived in the back of the shop, one a small girl in her underwear clutching a
battered doll with missing limbs.
The contradictions embedded in Cuban life were inescapable. The child of a
union employee knew what the Internet was, but his father's office computer
keyboard did not include the @ sign, so no e-mail was possible. When told what "Two
Sisters" was about, Seiden recalled, people would say they should bring the
production to Cuba, but "change the ideas" in it first.
The atmosphere weighed most heavily on one member of the group, costume
designer Huang. Born in Beijing and raised in post-Cultural Revolution China,
the 40-year-old Huang has lived in the United States for 15 years. Before
setting out for Havana, she thought--wryly--of Cubans as the "communist
brothers" portrayed during her youth.
Every day she went out for hours with her camera to take pictures of
architecture. Fearlessly, she went into houses, abandoned buildings and
crumbling structures, snapping roll after roll of film. And then, suddenly, she
would be ambushed by childhood memories and dissolve in tears.
One day the group visited two sisters who had a piano. The instrument
reminded Huang that her family in China had had a piano, which they had had to
sell very cheaply to pay for her brother's transportation to the city. The Cuban
sisters took the group into a back room, where all their childhood toys from the
1950s were stored, including a doll exactly like one Huang had as a child. Her
doll had been taken away, because she was thought to have more toys than other
children on her street.
"I believed in the communist concepts when I lived in China,"
Huang says. "When I saw the empty stores, the poverty, I think, 'What
happened to those dreams?' People believe for so many years, and what does it
bring? . . . Crushing poverty kills idealism."
It is Studio Theatre practice to hold the first rehearsal before an invited
audience of about 100 staff and board members and donors. Each person on the
creative team makes a presentation.
When it was Huang's turn, she started to talk about her costumes, and then
began to cry. She kept talking, and crying. She's still not sure why. The play
had become a reflection of her own life:
"It was like old scars being peeled again."
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