Laida A. Carro Florida International University in Miami will offer this summer a course called "Humanities in Cuba" which includes a one-week stay in the city of Havana touring museums, architectural landmarks and attending cultural activities. A flyer announces this course with color photographs of colonial architecture amidst thick foliage, people dressed in costumes dancing on stilts in a sunny plaza, and historic fortresses under a radiant blue sky. Behind the color, beauty, and joy in these photographs hides a desolate and repressed island in pain. The theme of this FIU course seems to mock the true reality of a nation under a regime that has been desecrating, embezzling, forging, and manipulating the history of its art, literature, architecture, poetry, and music. Fidel Castro's historic decree on June 30, 1961 before Cuban intellectuals at the José Martí National Library in Havana, "Everything inside the revolution; nothing outside the revolution…" -- copied from Benito Mussolini's "Everything inside the State, Nothing outside the State" -- initiated an "official culture" and set the stage for the Cuban government's self-appointed right to censor any artistic work. As thousands of Cuban artists have paid a very high personal and professional price for choosing not to become instruments of an official "political culture," other Cuban artists, used as spokesmen of the regime, create their work in an atmosphere of double standard and self-censorship, given that "privileges" such as publishing a book or traveling abroad are granted only to those who obey and applaud "the Revolution." Roberto Fernández Retamar, the present director of the House of the Americas, delivered a speech titled "Forty Years After" on June 30, 2001 at the National Library, defending Castro's 1961 decree that creative rights are subordinate to a Revolution that must prevail: "What are the rights of writers and artists, whether they are revolutionaries or not? Within the Revolution, everything; against the Revolution there are no rights." How genuine is a course about the art, music, dance, literature, and architecture of a country controlled by a totalitarian regime that politicizes every aspect of its society and alters historic truth for its own benefit? Will the FIU students be informed of how the humanities in Cuba are used as a means of propaganda? Will these students learn about what happens to artists who are not ideologically faithful to the government? And will they find out that the literary works of Cuban exiles such as Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Zoe Valdes are banned in Cuba? Will the course discuss those artists subjected to forced labor for their "anti-social" behavior at the infamous UMAP Cuban prison camps? Will the FIU course mention the book "Out of the Game" by the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla, imprisoned and subjected to a "Stalinist" trial in 1970 for questioning Cuban society through his verse? Just last March and April, seventy-five peaceful Cuban citizens, among them writers and poets, were arrested, tried summarily, and condemned to prison sentences of up to 28 years. Will this FIU course mention two of these poets, Raul Rivero and Manuel Vazquez Portal, serving prison sentences of twenty and eighteen years, respectively, for publishing dissenting views of the government? In 1971, Cuba held its First Congress of Education and Culture "to ratify the permanent decision to struggle for a broad and in-depth study of a culture for the masses, and make the arts a weapon of the Cuban Revolution." Most of the seventies became despotic years for artists such as Reinaldo Arenas, who suffered violent censorship, jail and exile for their "ideological deviations." The unveiling of John Lennon's bronze statue by Castro in Havana on December 8, 2000 became a true parody of a new façade which the Cuban government began promoting to improve its international image. The figure of John Lennon, whose music was once forbidden on the island, was politically manipulated for propaganda purposes. The new Cuban cultural facelift includes recognizing deceased exiled artists whose works were erased from the Revolution's "official history." Also, some Cuban writers living outside the island who are allowed to publish their work in Cuba are meeting with the same cultural apparatus that considers the poets Raul Rivero and Manuel Vazquez Portal "counterrevolutionaries." I recommend the FIU students traveling to Cuba in June bring books to the Cuban independent libraries that strive to offer Cuban civil society access to books reflecting all points of view. For this they are subject to government persecution. As an FIU alumni and as an ex-visiting FIU professor; as a parent of an FIU graduate and a would-be graduate; as the daughter of an architect and as an art professor; as a human rights activist and a Cuban exile, I appeal to all those concerned about this issue. Please write to, call, fax or email your local and state legislators, FIU's President, its board of directors and the FIU Cuban Research Institute, sponsoring this course. The FIU course "Humanities in Cuba" is an ideal instrument to publicly promote a false impression of cultural tolerance and freedom in Cuba, and it is not in the best interest of any American university to have an educational exchange with a country that considers independent thought a criminal act. -------------------------------------------------- Laida A. Carro is a Cuban exile and President of the Coalition of Cuban-American Women.
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