On the Margin of the Periphery

By Mike Fuller

Havana, Mar 28 (Prensa Latina) Outside a former colonial fortress a group of Cuban art students and professors support a colossal fusion of creative decolonizing power at the Havana Biennial.

The tenth edition of this exhibition from March 27 to April 30 includes over 200 artists from 40 countries concerned with integrating against homogenizing forces amid global complexity.

The pursuit of identity against the center without falling into its conceptual traps calls for interrogation of the core-periphery paradigm itself.

On the official bienalhabana website Nelson Herrera deconstructs that dynamic by affirming that artists from the so-called third world have always been contributors to universal culture, albeit historically marginalized.

A student and a professor from the National School of Art Instructors explained to Prensa Latina they have been backing up the Havana Biennial for over two weeks from a campground in a depression outside the bastion walls.

Darian Izquierdo laid his mallet next to a wood carving and said he and his classmates have helped out by hanging huge paintings, filling sand bags and much more.

His teacher Alfredo Duque said they've also done work in municipalities recovering from hurricanes, supporting major Cuban artists in that effort like Alexis Leyva (Kcho), known for his creative healing energy.

Duque nudged his work in progress, called Birth of the World, a reclined carving that rocks like a cradle from stretched cables. He said it has to do with rebirth, dislocation, and explained that his family is originally from the Congo, of Ganga Longoba ethnicity.

Questioned about its totemic qualities, the sculptor says he broke with verticality to show insecurity, like a "hernia of doubt" between generations of slaves that includes guarded secrets.

The close relationship between student and mentor is evident as Darian listens to his professors analysis of the work inside versus what they do with their chisels. "They are more conceptual, whereas in our work you can see the hand of the creator."

The wood chips on the ground are testimony to that, but there are plenty of well-crafted pieces inside and as the friendly teacher says about his own work, they refuse to be excluded.

Living, Thinking Revolution in Cuba

By Mike Fuller

Havana, Feb 2 (Prensa Latina) The first workshop of a monthly series called Living the Cuban Revolution 50 Years after its Triumph opened with about a hundred participants called to build a complex but committed vision of the socialist project here.

A group of young academics set the discursive field by hanging open lists of expectations for people to complete as unedited Silvio Rodriguez music filled the Ministry of Culture"s Juan Marinello Center.

Organically inserted into the audience, the conceptual architects of the Gramsci professorate enunciated positions from their seats, energizing the critical mass before splitting into four groups.

A cluster of university aged Argentines sipped mate tea next to a grandmotherly Afro-Cuban, with local law students, provincial visitors, published academics and more to "explore and perfect the Cuban Revolution on its 50th year."

Some agreed that access may exist to mainstays like education and health care, but said work could be done to improve their quality.

There was consensus that the Revolution had produced profound and positive changes in socio-political structures, but recognition that it needed to provide greater inclusion today.

The humanist character of a process that has far surpassed the reality of its birth in 1959 was praised but the need for successive transformations within the system and non-state actors were cited as essential ingredients to fully change "bourgeois common sense."

Timelines of revolutionary memories were drawn and shared, framing as positive or negative historical moments like Fidel Castro"s speeches in the United Nations or the terrorist explosion of a Cuban passenger plane off Barbados on October 6, 1976. The latter killed 73 people and the National Security Archive has posted declassified documents that show the CIA learned previously of "plans of Cuban exile extremists to blow up a Cubana airliner."

The years of the US Bush administration bottomed out the table while the last Cuban university students congress flew off the chart with its call for a "new society in challenging times, erasing mechanistic thought and deep debate for solutions."

Cuban historian Juan Valdes Paz was one of the oldest participants, and said if his generation has more memory it is because it had more participation, and that space must be gained institutionally.
Known for his thought on new socialist paradigms, Valdes roamed the groups and reported solidarity seemed to still be a measured value here, but said he observed an agenda of unconformities that need to be changed.

He spoke of the need to rethink Marxism in terms of socialization, remember the concept of daily life and make operational findings by social scientists.

He said reduction of uncertainty and definition of goals can only be gained through a culture of political unity, which landed him a healthy round of applause from old and young alike.

The next workshop is scheduled for the end of February and will concentrate on the political system in the Revolution, participation and citizenship.

See www.cuba-urss.cult.cu for more information.

Dancing across Cultures in Cuba

By Mike Fuller

Havana, Jan 19 (Prensa Latina) Glocalized choreographies by the Cuban Danza Contemporanea muscled modernity into representations it could never have made of itself.

On its 50th year this troupe offered a sweaty vision only possible from the bottom up as it deconstructed simple acts like fishing or the complex machinery of fascism.
Weaving multilingual operatic sound tracks with homemade and historical video segments, they hybridized images as powerful as a nuclear tsunami with the female nude.
Some of the first pieces in this commemorative year were Breath Fragment and Carmina Burana, performed at the Gran Teatro de la Habana this weekend after the latter opened to twelve thousand seats at the Mexico National Auditorium in November.
Common to both was a sophisticated critique of power, whether from an underwater view of a fish negotiating with the hook, or dancers mocking military march films in the background.

The strength created by fusing local imagery with world history is nothing new for transculturalized Cuba, and after 280 original pieces since its creation, this group can even put the apple back on the tree.

US Historians in Cuba on Slavery

Mike Fuller

Havana, Jan 17 (Prensa Latina) US historians Ada Ferrer and Rebecca Scott gave a conference here on colonial powers and slavery in Haiti and Cuba, spanning over two centuries to issues of race addressed by Barack Obama last year.

After major upheavals in the United States and France, the Haitian Revolution ended in 1804 with a republic of African descent, but "left a gap in sugar production, which Cuba strove to fill," said Dr. Ada Ferrer from New York University, who compared the two countries as declining and growing slave societies, respectively.

At the Juan Marinello Cuban Institute for Cultural Investigation, she discussed "material, urgent and intimate" transactions of Spanish troops deployed from Cuba in Haiti against the French, and how they would illegally buy slaves to take back with them.

Ambiguous situations and illicit trade abounded between the nations as they defined themselves against colonial rule, which opened opportunities for a 19th century "with different limits," said Dr. Rebecca Scott from the University of Michigan.

With compelling micro histories of that turbulent time, she discussed the tenuous negotiations which people used to move from slavery to freedom and sometimes back again.

Based on documents discovered in 2005, she traced to the turn of last century data of the lives of normal civilians fleeing Haiti to Cuba with unclear legal status.

Captain's lists for ships of passengers categorized as servants or slaves were subject to interpretation, giving rise to extreme situations like people being forced to return to slavery after having lived a decade of freedom, she explained.

A Cuban participant commented on the humiliation of forced African emigrants bearing the last names of their new world owners, and it could be said that a slave is the ultimate Other.

Dr. Scott cited valiant attempts to redefine that alterity in the colonizing consciousness that created it, like legislating limits on physical punishment of slaves.

Prensa Latina commented on the value of sharing those untold stories of people seeking dignified positions and Scott said it is not only a case of "subaltern voices, rather a whole series of apparatuses to resist, including bureaucracy."

Fernando Martinez Heredia of the Marinello Institute applauded the courage of these border intellectuals, who on this Cuban foray abstained from direct political reference.

For that, Scott pointed to the March 2008 A More Perfect Union speech by Barack Obama, a son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas.

In that text he said that slavery stained the unfinished US Constitution, and only a powerful coalition of African Americans and white Americans can finish it, two-hundred and twenty one years later.

Cuban Culture in the Digital Era

By Mike Fuller

Havana, Nov 30 (Prensa Latina) Transdisciplinary specialists in Havana last week discussed equal access, new carriers of knowledge and digital security threats at the Juan Marinello Institute for Cultural Research.

Abel Ponce of the Jose Marti National Library spoke about access for the disabled, domination of English on the web, text readers and a new category of technologically disabled people, which includes those born out of reach of the digital revolution.

He mentioned projects with the United Nations and Spain's ONCE and reminded that the term disabled always refers to one specific activity and never is general.

Karina Benitez of the Center for Author's Rights spoke of copying and manipulation, open code software and access to protected content as issues of the originality-heterodiscursivity paradigm.

Carlos del Porto Blanco of the Office for Informatization said there is currently about one PC for every 20 Cubans, 1.3 million have e-mail and there are about 327,000 internet users.

He said the slowest, most expensive way to get online is through satellites, which Cuba must use as its national telephone company assets in the United States are frozen.

Since 1996 the US government has taken millions from that fund to pay families of failed aggressors against Cuba.

This situation has complicated connectivity, which should improve by 2011 with an underwater fiber-optic connection to Venezuela, said Porto Blanco.

His office practices "social, ordered, intensive use of connectivity, for the greatest population."

He discussed an on-line government portal, free software, e-commerce, food and agriculture pages, a digitalized Cuban encyclopedia, and sites for media and legal advice. Prensa Latina asked him what was the most sensitive point of friction from globalization, and he said digital aggression is a real threat.

"Major US software companies are linked to security agencies of that country, with considerable segments of its military dedicated to cyber war," he said.

Ana Hernandez Martin of the University of Havana Psychology department spoke on homogenization, refunctionalization, accelerated flows and the reconfiguration of daily life according to the market.

She discussed how children consume imported cultural products, senile adolescence, misogynies, dissolution of public and private spaces, new ways of socializing through mobile telephones and video games that electronically shock players who lose.

The psychologist prescribed transcending technology to center on human relations of belonging, identity and personal growth.

Rafael de la Osa of the Cubarte website said there are currently at least four computers in every public library, and the public computer youth clubs are being redimensioned with major changes set by 2012.

Participant and editor of the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information's bulletin Manuel Linares told Prensa Latina that the "biggest cultural challenge of the digital era is the contradiction of it being an excellent medium of communication and at the same time a tool of manipulation."

Awareness of binary situations like that were voiced by other audience members, who said the change has already happened abroad and what needs to be done is catch up in a nontoxic way.

From the array of original thought and perspectives that could never be created from the digitally advanced elite, this event suggested a local capacity for going much further than that.

Saturday Night Television in Cuba

By Mike Fuller

Havana, Oct 27 (Prensa Latina) Typical Saturday night Cuban television programming could include a historical film on the horrors of colonialism, dialogues of the Brazilian middle class or an obscure suspense movie, with no commercials in between.
I snuggled into my favorite chair this weekend to watch Zapata, Dream of a Hero, by Alfonso Arau, the biography of Emiliano Zapata, who fought in the Mexican Revolution against the sadistic Spanish colonialists.
The film showed how those early capitalists preferred to grow sugar to corn on the land they stole from the indigenous, and one could understand why over 100 years later Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation found inspiration in him.
As that trussed hero was being fed feet first into a raging oven by the Spanish Generalisimo, a technique that could make even acontemporary torturer cringe, my son changed the channel to the Brazilian drama series.
Most members of my Cuban family claim to be noveleros, and are addicted to the current Mujeres Apasionadas telenovela of glamorous women, beaches and men with checkerboard stomachs at the volleyball net.
This particular series portrays serious themes like violence against women or alcoholism, and Cuban academics have praised it for providing a forum for social issues but criticized it for being superficial.
When the novela ended my family was reunited and managed to sit through the feature film Ripley Underground, a murder and art forgery thriller directed by Canadian-born Roger Spottiswoode, which was not very popular with us.
Spottiswoode was quoted on the Internet Movie Data Base website as saying that "The movies I want to make are not people's priority. Nobody would touch them. They cost a lot of money, and studios no longer finance development, so if I didn't pay for them myself they wouldn't happen."
His distancing from the profit motive may have had to do with the film's prime time slot designation from a culture industry whose Minister Abel Prieto has pronounced against "canned TV programs fromthe United States."
In the last few weeks Cuba has aired cinema dealing with European hatred of those who cross its borders and anxiety in the United States inspired by its deteriorating relationship with the Islamic world.
Revolution, frivolity and oblique drama from abroad were broadcast last weekend during peak viewing hours, in a sometimes overlapping display of mixed origin media.
Hybrid programming is not uncommon in postcolonial nations but it is often commercially oriented, and can include overt copying, morphing or plagiarism of international material into the local context formarket success, as Divya McMillin says in International Media Studies (2007).
Cuban mediators in this genre seem to respect original content and formats, and even subtitle films instead of dubbing, as if arranging the representations on a platter for interpretation.
It is the prerogative of any nation to regulate the flows of global media that enter it, but it seems like the Saturday evening splash here is relatively balanced and like all other time slots is absolutely free of commercial advertising.
Better scheduling, more professionalism, interaction and relevance were addressed in recent self-critiques of the industry, but one who has tasted market-based entertainment media may appreciate this flavor of Cuban television.

UN Supports Global South from Cuba

By Mike Fuller

Havana, Oct 29 (Prensa Latina) In Havana this week a film about progress on the Millennium Development Goals was shown on the 63rd birthday of the United Nations, the night before its vote on the resolution against the US blockade of Cuba.
The United Nations officially came into existence on 24 October 1945, and according to its charter strives to "maintain international peace, cooperation and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms."
The MDGs range from halving extreme poverty to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education, and were set in 2000 by all the world’s countries and leading development institutions.
They include Ending Poverty and Hunger, Universal Education, Gender Equality, Child Health, Maternal Health, Combat HIV/AIDS, Environmental Sustainability and Global Partnership.
The United Nations System Resident Coordinator in Cuba, Susan McDade said on stage last night at the opening of 8, a film by eight world directors broken into eight segments dedicated to each of the MDGs, that the "different stories strive to show the human side of the suffering."
Right after premiering at the Rome Film Festival the movie aims to raise awareness of world poverty through the cameras of Gael Garcia Bernal, Gus Van Sant, Mira Nair, Jan Kounen, Abderrahmane Sissako, Gaspar Noe, Jane Campion and Wim Wenders.
McDade congratulated Cuba for having officially fulfilled several MDGs and the film opened with scenes of increasingly acute North-South disparity, using inversed gender roles in a divorce scene, a parched dam and bleeding mother to get across some of the messages.
The African schoolgirl Tiya told her teacher in the film that she was skeptical about fulfilment of the top goal to eradicate poverty, because to do that "we need to share the wealth, and people don't like that."
Some progress is being made in sharing with NGO microfinance projects, and the film featured the Mohammed Yunnis global partnership project from Bangladesh to provide direct loans from the haves to the have nots.
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in the 2008 Millennium Development Goals report that the global economic slowdown, food security crisis and global warming will directly affect efforts to reduce
poverty.
McDade told Prensa Latina the crisis would affect official assistance flows, but said that it is not a justification for unfulfilment of the MDGs by 2015.
Ban Ki-moon said it is urgent to "put all countries, together, firmly on track towards a more prosperous, sustainable and equitable world," and McDade agrees "that is a shared responsibility, and governments alone can't handle it."
Clearly a contradiction to MDG 8, Global Partnerships for Development, the United States has maintained an economic blockade against Cuba since 1962, against which the United Nations has overwhelmingly voted for 16 consecutive years.
One year ago today, the General Assembly voted 184-4 in favor of ending the 45-year-old United States trade embargo against Cuba, which has caused billions in losses and humanitarian suffering for the island, and is expected to do the same today.

"We're looking forward to it," said McDade to Prensa Latina.

NOTE: For the 17th time, the UN General Assembly voted 185 in favor of ending the blockade, 3 against (US, Israel and Palau) and two abstentions (Micronesia, Marshall Islands).