|
Yahoo! November
22, 2002.
Cuban musician Polo Montanes in stable condition after car accident
HAVANA, 21 (AP) - Cuban singer Polo Montanes was in stable condition
Thursday after a car accident that killed his stepson, a Havana radio station
confirmed.
Montanes, his wife and several relatives were returning from a family party
when their car crashed into a truck at about 8 p.m. Wednesday on a highway
outside Havana, Radio Progreso reported.
Mirel Gonzalez Garcia, the stepson, was killed. Montanes and his wife, Adis
Garcia, were in stable condition at the Carlos J. Finlay military hospital in
Havana.
Montanes, whose real name is Fernando Borrego, came from a humble,
provincial background to become a musical hit three years ago. His music is
known for its maturity.
He has described his song "Guarijo Natural," which topped the
charts in Latin America, as a "self-portrait:" a simple country boy
who falls in love and enjoys life.
The singer's success began in Colombia in the late 1990's. Later, he toured
Latin America and Cuba, where hundreds and thousands admire him.
Havana Film Fest Has 41 Entries
HAVANA, 22 (AP) - Forty-one feature-length films from across the Americas
will compete next month at the Festival of New Latin American Film.
More than 400 films will be shown during the 10-day event sponsored by the
Cuban Institute of Cinema, lead organizer Alfredo Guevara said Tuesday. The
festival opens Dec. 3.
More than 20 theaters in Havana and outlying provinces will be dedicated to
marathon screenings. Last year, long lines snaked around the theaters as about
670,000 people attended screenings and other festival events.
"El Crimen del Padre Amaro (The Crime of Father Amaro)," directed
by Carlos Carreras, is among the feature-length films entered in the
competition.
Seven other films from Mexico, 11 from Brazil, six from Argentina and five
from Cuba also are in the competition.
Among those invited to the event are directors Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
(news) of Mexico, Julie Taymor of the United States, Marco Bellocchio of Italy
and Adolfo Aristarain of Argentina.
Organizers said this week that U.S. presence will be stronger than ever.
"American culture is not only Anglo-Saxon — it is Latino,"
Guevara said.
"We feel that we still have not achieved an appreciation of the
interesting phenomenon that will transform American intellectual life over the
short term," he said, referring to a growing Hispanic influence on U.S.
culture.
Excerpts from the writings of Pedro Juan Gutierrez and Leonardo Padura
Thu Nov 21, 8:36 Pm Et . By The Associated Press
Some excerpts from the writings of Cuban authors Pedro Juan Gutierrez and
Leonardo Padura:
Pedro Juan Gutierrez, from "Dirty Trilogy of Havana," "One
Day I Was Exhausted" (1998):
"In the morning, a stabbed woman appeared in the street. She was a
beautiful, tall mulatto, with a very short black skirt and white blouse and
close-fitting jacket soaked in blood. She was stretched out on the sidewalk and
there was a lot of blood around her. People said she had cheated on her husband
with other men. So often that the guy couldn't stand it any more and cut her up.
One could see from the track of blood that he had attacked her with a lot of
hatred. Her face had a terrible expression of pain, and the lips and nose were
broken from the blows, deformed, with coagulated blood.
"This is a simple crime of passion. Like anywhere. But here it doesn't
get into the press because for 35 years it hasn't been suitable to speak of
anything disagreeable or worrisome in the papers. Everything has to be good. A
model society can't have crimes or ugly things.
"But it has to be known, that's sure. If you don't have all the
information, you can't think, decide, or state an opinion. You turn into a fool
capable of believing anything."
__
Leonardo Padura, from "Autumn Landscape" (l998):
"'... You know we are a generation of orders and that is our sin and
our crime. First our parents gave us orders, so we would be good students and
good people. Then we were given orders in school, so we would be very good, and
after we were ordered to work, because we all were already good and they could
order us to work where they wanted to order us to work. But it never occurred to
any of them to ask us what we wanted to do: they ordered us to study in the
school it was our lot to study in, to pursue the career we had to pursue, to do
the job we had to do, and they kept on ordering us without asking us even once
in our fool lives if that was what we wanted to do. Everything was already
mapped out, right? From childhood to the grave in the cemetery it will fall to
our lot to be buried in, they chose everything, without ever asking us what ill
we would like to die of. That's why we're the waste we are, why we no longer
have dreams and doubts if we are good for what they order us to do.'
"'Look here, Andres, that's not the case,' said skinny Carlos,
attempting to save something while he served himself more rum.
"'Not the case, Carlos? You didn't go to war in Angola because they
ordered you to? Your life isn't screwed up, seated in that crappy wheelchair
because you were good and obedient? Did it ever occur to you you could have said
you wouldn't go? They told us that, historically, it was our destiny to obey and
it didn't even cross your mind to say no, Carlos, because they taught us always
to say yes, yes, yes. ... Everything you said you wanted to be and never have
been in your life, where did it get lost? Don't kid me, Carlos, at least let me
be convinced my life is a disaster.'"
Cuba's best known novelists hold critical mirror up to their country
By Michael Norton, Associated Press Writer. Thu Nov 21,
8:36 PM ET
HAVANA - Neither political dissidents nor government mouthpieces, Cuba's two
most widely acclaimed writers hold a critical mirror up to their country's
society, reflecting the differences between the frustrations and failings of
real life on the island and the illusory world of government propaganda.
In his "Dirty Trilogy of Havana," Pedro Juan Gutierrez writes
about victims and victimizers — thieves, hustlers, drunks, pimps and
prostitutes living marginal lives in an urban jungle. Knowing neither friendship
nor loyalty, alcohol and sex are their only satisfactions.
In Leonardo Padura's detective novels, the mysteries solved by disabused
Cuban police investigator Manuel Conde reveal the difference between
declarations of socialist virtue and the vices of a society where almost
everyone engages is some kind of illegal activity to survive.
But while Gutierrez and Padura explore Cuban reality in ways few others
dare, neither systematically criticizes the island's communist system or its
leaders. Though they say they suffer no true persecution for what they write,
there are limits they accept.
Gutierrez's internationally acclaimed trilogy, for example, is virtually
impossible to find on the island. Published in 1998 and since translated into
English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and French, "Dirty Trilogy"
is registered in Cuba's National Library but is unavailable to readers.
Once an award-winning journalist, Gutierrez, now 52, says he was "booted
out" of the profession after "Dirty Trilogy" came out.
"I write literature, not political pamphlets," he said in an
interview in his rooftop apartment in a dilapidated quarter of Havana.
His powerful, energetic body clad in tank top and Bermuda shorts, his
balding head shaved and a serpent entwining a sword tattooed on his right upper
arm, Gutierrez acknowledged that his work is "provocative."
For a year, the "Dirty Trilogy" manuscript slept in the drawers of
a Cuban publishing house. Gutierrez finally got it published in Spain. He now
survives on royalties from foreign publishing houses.
"Literature exists to reveal the secret being of human beings," he
said. "What I have written will last, and future generations will read it."
In 1994, he began writing the 60 semi-autobiographical short stories that
compose "Dirty Trilogy" and four novels. Together, they form
Gutierrez's "Centro Habana Cycle" — a 1,200-page look at Cuba
that belies the images projected by tourist brochures and government propaganda.
The self-proclaimed success of more than 40 years of socialist revolution is
sometimes ridiculed in the crude language of his stripped, anti-rhetorical
style.
"In the tradition of other ribald, earthy, urban authors like Blaise
Cendrars, Charles Bukowski and Henry Miller, Gutierrez is an exuberant writer,"
Karl Taro Greenfeld wrote last year in The New York Times Review of Books.
"What Gutierrez ... shares with that gritty crowd is the ability to
evoke sensory experience in his prose, and to use the immediacy of that
description to make sense of a world that simply doesn't make sense."
Unlike Gutierrez, Padura has been able to get his books published in Cuba.
The Cuban edition of his latest novel about Cuban poet Jose Maria Heredia, "La
Historia de Mi Vida" ("The Story of My Life"), costs about 80
cents, making it affordable to readers.
But publishing houses are small and there is a shortage of paper, which
means a limited number of his books are passed among readers.
An award-winning journalist like Gutierrez, Padura quit the profession in
1996, when he won a $16,000 prize in Spain for "Mascaras" ("Masks"),
the third in his quartet of detective novels, "The Four Seasons."
But Padura, who cut sugar cane in the fields and fought in Angola, says he
is never invited to lecture at the university. "There are practically no
critiques of my books in reviews and newspapers, which are censored by narrow
minds," he said.
"The general tendency of modern Cuban literature is openness of mind, a
critical questioning of reality," Padura, 47, said in the book-lined office
of his southwest Havana home. "This does not necessarily mean a rupture
with the Revolution. The simple fact I live in Cuba is a political statement.
"Many things have to be changed in this country, and literature is
another form of political engagement. It is not antagonistic to politics. But
its mission is parallel. It enables us to see the problems, even if we cannot
see the solutions," he said.
"Padura looks at daily life without preconceptions ... and his cold eye
reveals the reality of Cuba," says Haitian poet Jean-Claude Bajeux, a
literary critic and human rights advocate who once taught Caribbean literature
at the University of Puerto Rico. "From novel to novel, he has become a
master of his craft."
For Padura, political isolation and economic hardship are at the root of the
Cuban predicament. While the state assures free health care and education, and
housing and utility costs are minimal, the average monthly salary of Cuban
workers is about $9.60.
The government does ensure a minimum of basic foodstuffs to all citizens
each month, but wages often don't stretch to cover other basic necessities, such
as clothing. And the U.S. trade embargo also has affected the country's economy,
Padura said.
Despite Cuba's problems, both men cannot imagine themselves ever leaving the
island.
"I won't leave this place. It connects me to the earth," said
Padura.
"I won't write a book containing my personal opinion of the political
situation," said Gutierrez. "I don't want to be forced into exile.
"Elsewhere, I'm an alien. I'm too Cuban." | 
