/ARTS WEEKLY/LITERATURE-CUBA: Controversial Invasion of International Book Fair

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Dec 3 2002 (IPS) - A veritable invasion of Cuban art – from the island and from abroad – has occurred at the annual International Book Fair in the Mexican city of Guadalajara, stimulating dialogue and charging the air with tension.

The Book Fair is dedicated to Cuba this year and has received the largest delegation of artists to have ever travelled from the socialist-run Caribbean island.

Some 300 representatives of the Cuban art scene – including writers, editors, academics, musicians, dancers, actors and painters – are in the western Mexican city at the same time as cultivators of Cuban art in exile.

A parallel programme includes presentations by Cuban exiles, authors who do not maintain ties with the island, and a tribute to Jesús Díaz, the noted anti-Castro Cuban novelist who died in Spain last May.

The Book Fair is an encounter of "Cuban literature from all shores. with some authors who have a hostile attitude towards the cultural and revolutionary project" of the Fidel Castro-led country, Cuban essayist Ambrosio Fornet told IPS before heading to Mexico.

Author of "Memorias Recobradas: Introducción al discurso literario de la diáspora" (Recovered Memory: Introduction to the Literary Discourse of the Diaspora), Fornet is participating in the Book Fair’s panel discussion on that topic.

Fornet recognises that the Guadalajara event is serving as a "double space for encounters and dis-encounters," but notes that the presentations of clearly of cultural and literary merit, and hopes that the event does not decay into a political confrontation.

"Our attitude is that this is a space for unification and not confrontation," he said.

The Castro government, after decades of refusing to acknowledge Cuban culture in exile, shifted its policy in the 1990s towards a more conciliatory position on the diaspora.

As evidence of the change, official sources mention the more than 2,700 titles Cuba is presenting at the Guadalajara Book Fair, including numerous works by Cubans living abroad, though produced by the island’s government-run publishing houses.

"There is no important writer living outside Cuba who hasn’t published here," said Edel Morales, vice-president of the Cuban Institute of Books, in an interview with the on-line cultural weekly La Jiribilla (http://www.lajiribilla.cubaweb.cu).

Morales noted that the only exception is Guillermo Cabrera Infante, one of Cuba’s leading contemporary authors. His exclusion is his own choice as he has "refused to be published in Cuba as long as Castro remains in power."

Historian Rafael Rojas, a Cuban émigré and editor in Mexico of Encuentro magazine, questions the sincerity of the Cuban government’s position. His cultural magazine was founded in the 1990s to publish works by writers on and off the island.

The so-called cultural "opening", says Rojas, meant "a closing, a readjustment of borders, a new demarcation of limits, in which those artists who take part in public opposition to the Castro regime are excluded from the national cultural space."

He says it is "inexplicable" that the Cuban delegation in Guadalajara does not include Pedro Juan Gutiérrez or Ena Lucía Portela, who live on the island but whose writing is based on a vision that is not content with the country’s reality.

The parallel programme in Guadalajara includes a presentation of the latest issue of Encuentro and a roundtable discussion on Cuban culture in Mexico, with the participation of Cuban intellectuals living in that country, such as Eliseo Alberto Diego (Lichi).

Among the publishers representing the Cuban diaspora at the Book Fair are Plaza Mayor, of Puerto Rico, Universal, of the U.S. city of Miami, and Colibrí and Verbum, both based in Spain.

Cuba’s minister of Culture, Abel Prieto, said prior to the event that the island was sending to Guadalajara "a representation of the most consolidated Cuban art, of already mature people with a long trajectory, as well as young people with a great deal of talent, and with a recognised body of work."

The public attending the Book Fair is also taking in concerts by popular Cuban singer Silvio Rodríguez and other Cuban musicians, as well as encounters with Olympic champion Ana Fidelia Quirot and poet Nancy Morejón.

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