Cuba’s Cultural Policy - Reaping What You Sow

Cuba's Cultural Policy: Reaping What You Sow
November 8, 2013
Fernando Ravsberg*

HAVANA TIMES — I don't doubt Cuba's Council of Ministers thoroughly
evaluates its decisions before taking any concrete steps, but,
sometimes, it does not clearly explain these decisions to the public.
Many of us are still struggling to understand why the government thinks
it necessary to "immediately" shut down 3D home theaters or computer
game locales.

Nowadays, people's reactions are not as silent as they were some years
ago: now, there are hundreds of blogs expressing support for or
discontent about the government's measures. Cuban journalist Elaine
Diaz' Polemica Digital ("Digital Debate"), for instance, is anything but
diplomatic:

"The Executive Council of the Council of Ministers, exercising the
faculties vested upon it and the ones it takes upon itself thanks to our
enabling silence and tolerance, realized, months after these businesses
were opened, that they constituted a source of employment and a space
for cultural recreation – that they were outrageously illegal and could
not be regulated."

It's true these private home theaters were never authorized by the
government, that they were a spontaneous initiative by the people, in
view of the absence of a State offer in this connection. The same thing
happened with blacksmiths, but the government's reaction then was to
legalize the trade and sell them the supplies they needed.

3D cinemas, however, have more powerful enemies than do blacksmiths. The
Chair of Cuba's Film Institute, Roberto Smith, was categorical on this
issue: "I don't believe a commercial activity that violates the
revolution's cultural policy can ever aspire to legal recognition."

Vice-Minister of Culture Fernando Rojas, however, made clear that "our
aim is not to restrict these offers, but have them promote cultural
products of a higher quality", as these movie theaters screen materials
of "extremely poor taste."

Up until that point, it seemed as though there existed a balance between
those who called for the prohibition of private 3D theaters and those
who sought to legalize them and regulate their activities in order to
guarantee the screening of films with a certain degree of cultural,
esthetic and recreational value.

The Seed of 3D Film Theater Programs

I have a goddaughter who frequented 3D movie theaters and, from what she
told me, I know that many of the films shown there were cheap trash, but
certainly not any worse than some of the violent and frivolous movies
aired on national Cuban television.

Cuba's cultural policy would first need to be applied to the country's
mass media. Cuban television itself fed into the demand for that type of
frivolous cinema by broadcasting Hollywood movies for decades (and only
because it can do so free of charge).

Now, as was to be expected, it's paying the high costs of this. The
founder and director of Cuba's Film Institute, Alfredo Guevara, used to
say Cuban television was so bad that, in order to change into a vehicle
for culture, it would first have to commit "suicide."

What's more, the island's radio stations never grow tired of playing
salsa songs with lyrics like those that advise young women to look for
an old sugar daddy who'll take them shopping. This is just one example
of what is being sown, culturally.

In addition, pirated movie "banks", where Cubans rent films and
television shows from around the world, have existed in Cuba for many
years. Who controls whether these materials promote ethical values or,
at least, trivial but healthy forms of entertainment?

Many families in Cuba pay to receive cable programming picked up by
illegal satellite dishes, to watch programs made chiefly in Miami,
including high-budget, poorly-scripted soaps, vulgar talk-shows and news
programs that run puerile, anti-Castro pieces.

Young Cuban journalist Javier Ortiz stated he "had no idea private 3D
home theaters could make our authorities worry so much" and added that
if the government "wants to shut something down because of its
inconsistencies, it best shut down its own cultural policy."

Intellectual Victor Fowler has warned us about the dangers of a cultural
policy that ought to be public and at the service of the people but
which "becomes autonomous and becomes an end in and of itself, hovering
above the changes that have taken place over time."

Cuba would do well to adopt a more coherent cultural policy that is "at
the service" of the nation, a policy which, instead of forbidding
certain things, should spread to all aspects of life to promote ethical
and aesthetic values, both common and those that are specific to
different generations of Cubans.

There is no shortage of intellectuals capable of creating many different
magnets that can attract citizens, from a very early age on, and
transform them into consumers and promoters of their own culture and the
best of the world's culture.

My wife was a poor, orphaned country girl who was brought to and
educated in Havana. When she was 10, they took her to the Garcia Lorca
Theater, where she cried her eyes out during a performance of Giselle.
That first show was enough to make her a ballet lover for life.

My kids, by contrast, have only received academic instruction. At some
point in time, we stopped sowing the seeds of culture, and that's not
something you can revert in one fell swoop. We have to furrow the earth,
spread millions of seeds and care for them patiently and regularly,
until the nation can reap the harvest it longs for.
—–
(*) An HT translation of the original published in Spanish by BBC Mundo.

Source: "Cuba's Cultural Policy: Reaping What You Sow - Havana
Times.org" - http://www.havanatimes.org/?p=99914