/ARTS WEEKLY/THEATRE-CUBA: The Disquieting Voice of Virgilio Piñera

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Sep 3 2002 (IPS) - Trends in the art world come and go, but Cuban playwright Virgilio Piñera, who died in 1979 and whose works were censored here until the mid-1980s, continues to be presence in the island’s theatres.

Piñera, who suffered discrimination because he was homosexual and because of the truths he spoke out loud, is perhaps the most studied and published author in Cuba since his “rehabilitation” as a cultural icon more than 10 years ago.

Even Granma newspaper, voice of the ruling Communist Party, announced as a festival in July and August the staging by La Luna Theatre of four “not at all outdated works by Piñera.”

Among the plays is “Los Siervos” (The Servants), a controversial work that Piñera wrote in 1951. It portrays a world in which everyone has achieved happiness in a reality that is closely identified with communism.

Paradoxically, in this “happy world”, in which the characters have Russian names — a clear reference to the Soviet Union, which still existed at the time –, there is one person who wants to continue being a servant.

“‘Los Siervos’ is a difficult and iconoclast work. Its staging is an example of the openness that Cuban theatre has experienced in the past few years,” playwright Amado del Pino told IPS.

And this reflects Piñera’s characters, who themselves undergo transformations. A peaceful man turns into an assassin, a humble barber is worshiped as if he were Jesus Christ, and what should have been a Greek chorus becomes a very Cuban ‘guajira’, singing songs typical of this Caribbean island.

“Even if I were to love you more than anything in the world, don’t come back to this damned country. The heat! Politicians! Cockroaches!” shouts one of the characters in “Aire Frío” (Cold Air), a 1959 play in which Piñera returned to one of his obsessions: life on the island portrayed as a prison.

However, says Del Pino, “this constant return to Piñera is beginning to wear itself out. Without casting him aside, it’s time to see contemporary plays that are as disconcerting as his.”

Del Pino, who is working on a book about what occurred in Cuban theatre in the wake of each Piñera premiere, says the beginning of the playwright’s rise was in 1990 with “Dos viejos pánicos” (Two Old Panics), which won the coveted Casa de las Americas prize in 1968.

This ascent, says Del Pino, “is related to the fact that there was a growing thirst in Cuba for irreverence, crudeness, and the paranoid sense of his theatre works and of Virgilio himself.”

Piñera was born in Cárdenas, a town some 150 km from Havana. As he wrote in his autobiography “La vida tal cual” (Life As It Is), he realised at a young age that he had arrived in this world with a tragic destiny.

“Not long after I was old enough that my thoughts were translated beyond gurgling and waving my arms, I learned of three things that were dirty enough that I would never be able to cleanse myself of them. I learned I was poor, that I was homosexual and that I loved art,” Piñera wrote.

Journalist and novelist Leonardo Padura said in a conversation with IPS that, “from then until his death in 1979, Virgilio Piñera would be a poor, homosexual artist, and would suffer all the punishments that these ‘three dirty things’ warranted” in a conservative Cuban culture.

Piñera began to face the reactions of a Cuban society, “as prudish as it was corrupt”, in the 1940s, “when he began to publish his first verses and stories and to stage his memorable first works of theatre,” said Padura.

“Even in those days Piñera refused to obey social, aesthetic, moral and even political rules, although he was never a political man. And he dedicated much of his literary and journalistic efforts to expressing his nonconformity and his dissidence in a hostile universe,” he added.

Out of this “negative” attitude of Piñera emerged what the late essayist Rine Leal referred to as the “aesthetic of negation”, a stance “that always situated him as sharpshooter who was feared because of the accuracy of his shots.”

“The years will show that this negation, which he never abandoned, was the way he embodied a culture of resistance against frozen values, the established rhetoric and lies, superficiality and the social indifference to intelligence,” according to Leal.

Piñera, author of some 20 plays, also put together several collections of poetry, short stories and novels, but lived his last 10 years completely ostracised, because the Fidel Castro government banned the publication of his books, the staging of his plays, and even the mention of his name.

The 1970s in Cuba, remembered as “the grey decade”, were characterised by the domination of a cultural bureaucracy that established the parameters for works of art and even for artists if they sought a place on the cultural scene.

Those parameters covered everything from ideology to sexuality. In the 1980s, these restrictions were lifted in a process of relative flexibility, and a real cultural opening in the 1990s paved the way for the Piñera renaissance.

The best part of the story, says author Padura, is that “Virgilio never stopped writing, not even in the worst of times.”

“It’s as if his death were just a joke and he were hidden somewhere, writing and writing.”