CULTURE-CUBA: Back To The Days When Culture Was Fun In Old Havana

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Aug 5 1997 (IPS) - Concerts, exhibitions, fairs, a film festival and street shows last week briefly returned the Cuban capital to the days before the current seven year old economic crisis, when Havana was a global byword for rich cultural ambience.

Havana residents had the chance to forget the last seven years of economic crisis, when cinemas were shut down, theatre and museum schedules shrank, new publications nearly disappeared, and TV was left as one of the few remaining recreational options.

For eight days they harked back to the culturally rich 1980s, when there seemed hardly the time to take in all the film releases and theatre debuts, concerts, art gallery openings and presentations of new books and magazines.

Cinemas joined forces to run a festival of Cuban film; books, cassettes and posters were sold in street markets, galleries celebrated national art and salsa music filled the night and the city squares with revellers.

The 14th World Festival of Youth and Students, which ran Jul. 28 to Aug. 5, drew 11,200 representatives from 135 countries. And among the pre-festival arrivals, a ‘guest’ of a different, but no less welcome kind: the legendary Argentinian-Cuban guerrilla Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, whose image was evident everywhere.

“I was sure you would return, that you would return from anywhere,” runs the song by Gerarfo Alfonso, the most widely-sung verse today in Cuba. Guevara’s remains were found in Bolivia and returned to Cuba last July, 30 years after his death. His contribution to modern history was the focus of many concerts, personal testimony and new books at the festival.

‘The Beauty of the Alhambra’, one of Cuba’s biggest cinema hits, the classic ‘Memories of Underdevelopment’, and ‘Strawberry and Chocolate’, a film by the late director Tomas Gutierrez Alea, one of Cuba’s most highly regarded prize-winning films, drew some of the biggest crowds at an extensive film festival.

The Cuban theatre company Hubert de Blanck staged Spanish playwright Manuel Duaso’s work ‘Sara and Simon’. Six characters, including a morphine addict, a transvestite and a pimp, played out a story revolving around AIDS and human beings who “dream, love and try — within their possibilities — to communicate and exist”.

Respect for diversity seemed to be the key to the success of the festival, an attempt to revive the festivals that began in 1947 under the slogan ‘For Peace and Friendship’.

The first Youth Festival was held in Czechoslovakia in 1947, intended as a call for peace after the Second World War. The last one was held in the capital of North Korea in 1989. One of the main aims of the festival was to try and breathe new life into this kind of global youth movement, apparently doomed to extinction with the break-up of the socialist bloc.

Young communists from the German Free Youth, out of what was once East Germany, protested the ‘annexation’ of their state. Chileans recalled Salvador Allende, their socialist president overthrown in 1973; Mexican Zapatista rebels sold images of guerrillas in ski masks; Libyans sported t-shirts with president Moammar Gadhafi’s image; and a group of homosexuals from the United States arrived under the group banner ‘Queers for Cuba’.

For some, the festival was little more than a means to channel their nostalgia. Others found it a useful space to claim the right to think differently in an increasingly globalised world. A few U.S. citizens took the chance to defy their government’s ban on their travel and take advantage of discounted flight and accomodation to get to know Cuba at first hand.

The festival included ‘Songs of the Rose and the Thorn’, a series of concerts organised by the House of the Americas to mark the 25th anniversary of the birth of Cuba’s Nueva Trova (New Song Movement) and the 30th anniversary of the First Encounter of the Political Song in Havana.

Havana citizens who eagerly participated in the programme looked to the future as well. “Havana will never be the same again. When the crisis is over it will recover, but by that time it will be another city,” Michael Garcia, 31, told IPS at one of the concerts, attended by more than 5,000 people, who filled the stalls, aisles and foyer of the National Theatre, Cuba’s second largest, for a packed programme of Cuban and foreign singers.

The series, celebrating the intimate, guitar-picking charm of typical Nueva Trova concerts, was inaugurated by Chile’s Angel Parra but not without at least one disappointment. “We were expecting Mercedes Sosa, but it seems she couldn’t come,” said Maria de los Angeles de Dios, a Mexican who had vowed to take in every one of the programmed concerts of political song.

Argentina’s ‘La Negra’ Sosa pleaded other obligations. “La Negra wasn’t here, but we had Silvio,” said a Chilean, after hearing Cuban New Song singer-songwriter Silvio Rodriguez, one of Cuba’s best known musicians, perform live for the first time.

There was music for all tastes, with instrumental bands, singers, chamber music, rock and jazz, and music with African roots, but salsa was the unifying bond at night as dozens of young people flocked to the concerts playing modern versions of traditional rhythms like the son and guaracha. Arabs danced as if they were born in the Caribbean, and a wheel of Caribbean islanders and Brazilians tried out a unique fusion of reggae and samba.

“I danced alone or with whoever was in front of me,” said a Colombian who danced until 3.00 AM and slept out on the wall of Havana’s Malecon boardwalk with a group of Cuban friends.

There was space for a diversity of revellers as well. Despite the disruption of a Monday morning hotel bombing that caused no injuries, many preferred quieter ways to spend the festival.

They simply enjoyed a walk through Old Havana — declared a global heritage site by the United Nations — swam in the sea or took their time picking out at least one poster or t-shirt bearing the image of Che.