ARTS-ENTERTAINMENT – 6

By Patricia Grogg Reprint | | Print |

Patricia Grogg

HAVANA, Mar 2 1999 (IPS) - Next month, Cuban writers will welcome another sign of the gradual re-emergence of the publishing industry next month after suffering a lack of outlets for their talents because of the nine-rear-old economic crisis.

April will see the debut of the literature magazine “The Infinite Island” to be published with the sole commitment of “encouraging creativity as such, whether it is in the form of narrative, theater, poetry or music.”

The magazine’s director, poet, essayist and narrator Cintio Vitier, says the magazine will showcase “what is being produced in Cuba in terms of literature, and provide a venue for Cuba writers who are talented, but not widely known.”

Vitier, who is 77 years old, won the National Literature Prize in 1988, and is considered by critics to be the most important living Cuban writer living in the country.

The magazine will have about 50 pages and will come out every three months. It will be published by the Cuban Book Institute – which does not mean that it will subordinated to that organization, Vitier says.

Vitier said in an interview that “almost all the magazines that exist in Cuba have an institution on which they must depend – one way or another – but that will not be the case for The Infinite Island”.

Independence and freedom from differences of opinion between generations will be two important characteristics of the magazine, says Vitier, who was commissioned to carry out the project by Minister of Culture, Abel Prieto.

“It is a privilege to work with younger writers and produce a magazine without having to be accountable to anyone”, he says adding that he believes that the country is going through “bad times in economic terms, but in cultural terms we are at our best.”

Until the late 1980s, the publishing industry in Cuba produced about 80 million books, but the system was virtually wiped out by the crisis. Magazines practically disappeared at the beginning of the 1990s and have only recently begun to slowly remerge.

The Infinite Island joins magazines such as Union (of the Cuban Writers’ and Artists’ Union), the Gaceta de Cuba, Revolucion y Cultura, Caiman Barbudo and Casa de las Americas.

Experts, however, say that the country did not have a magazine that was purely literary, a void that will be filled by the new publication.

“We do not want anything programmatic, nor a declaration of principles. We want a magazine that is very free and open, in which we talk about the things that give us nourishment, that accompany us, and in which we believe”, Vitier explained.

If there is a precedent to this magazine, it is Origenes, which brought together the best of Cuba culture between 1944 and 1956. It was headed by novelist and poet Jose Lezama Lima.

“I want us to be like Origenes, which did not establish intergenerational barriers”, said Vitier, though he does not hesitate to say that it would be impossible to emulate the quality of the movement to which he belonged when he was young.

The writer worked hand in hand in the production of the first issue with his grandson, Jose Adrian Vitier, a 24 year-old poet and graduate in English language.

One of the magazine’s sections will be called “The Quail Whale”, the title of a small independent magazine that the young Vitier directed as a university student.

Jose Adrian is part of the magazine’s editorial staff, together with Daniel Garcia Santos and Rinaldo Acosta. The advisory board includes poets Fina Garcia Marruz and Nancy Morejon, Roberto Fiol (winner of the National Literature Prize in 1998), poets and essayists Omar Perez and Francisco Lopez Sacha, theater specialist Lilliam Vazquez and literary critic Enrique Sainz.

The first issue, which will have 2,000 numbers, will open with a study of Lezama Lima from a Buddhist perspective, by Omar Perez. “It is the first time that Buddhism is used as an element to interpret Cuban culture”, said Vitier.

In the presentation of the first issue, Vitier will spell out The Infinite Island’s model for the cultural movement in Cuba.

“Where there is a space of grace, imagination and beauty, that is where the nation is, and where it is the strongest,” he says.

“It is from this certainty that we begin, lifting the anchor of this vessel that is a metaphor for Cuba’s destiny in the world. And the world’s destiny in Cuba”.