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.

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).

Anthropologist Backs LatAm Identity

By Mike Fuller

Havana, Jul 1 (Prensa Latina) Mexican anthropologist Mariano Baez Landa told dozens of Cubans at a cultural study center here that the science of diversity can be applied to overcome a conspiracy against Latin American identity.
"The time is ripe to build alternatives," said Dr. Baez Landa at the Juan Marinello Institute of Cuban Cultural Investigations, after a lengthy paper on Academia, Politics and Action.
Based on his original The Impossible Science, he traced the dilemma of anthropology that maintains and foments indigenous civilizations or that which improves their material conditions.
Practical anthropology did not have its first congress until 2005 in Mexico, where one out of every ten people is indigenous, and he listed several reasons why.
He traced the "deep epistemological divide" that opened last century when most of the academic writing on Guatemalan indigenous people was in English.
Baez Landa lamented a pervasive theoretical contempt for practical application, which he confessed can have some relation to funding.
He said scientific cultural study without application has had serious faults and cited the 50 years of anthropology carried out by major institutions like the US Smithsonian or Harvard Project, which failed to predict the 1994 uprising in Chiapas, Mexico.
But social investigation can be constructive, not only academic, he said, basing himself on seminal works like the 1952 Action Anthropology by Sol Tax.
He mentioned the importance of Marxism, critical anthropology and revolutionary capacity to counter neoliberal theories, and admitted some appearance of pluricultural discourse in state policy, with the opening of an indigenous coordination office in Chiapas.
He described resistance by regional power elites, a phenomenon to which Bolivia is no stranger in its attempt to integrate indigenous voices into the national decision making process.
Prensa Latina asked Baez Landa if he thought the Bolivarian Alternative for the Peoples of the Americas (ALBA) could be the "new theory" which he said was necessary to balance globalized interests.
The US-sponsored Free Trade Agreement of the Americas was buried over two years ago at the America's Summit in Argentina, and ALBA was born at the parallel People's Summit, as an "anti-capitalist, revolutionary and endogenous alternative for integration."
Much of it has to do with indigenous principles of reciprocity with the community and nature, and Baez Landa said the time is ripe for a proposal like this and anthropology applied to make Latin American cultures visible.

Cuban Drama, US Expert on Fear

Text and images by Mike Fuller

Havana, Feb 27 (Prensa Latina) Cuban playwright Edgar Estaco said the United States "threatens us psychologically," which Boston psychoanalyst Stephen Soldz explained has profound effects, especially when the fear that can generate is of "the greatest power on earth."

At a Havana performance of his piece November by Teatro D'Subito, dramaturgist Edgar Estaco told Prensa Latina it is not strange for conscriptees to sit for days with bulletless guns in the woods, facing no more than enemy mosquitoes.

The trauma of a "War of All the People," and state of perpetual readiness to fight it lie beneath this tragedy of jealousy at the Llaurado Theater, directed by Pedro Vera, the other half of a thespian "binomial" that has been heating up Cuban stages for the last two years.

Vera explained to this reporter that they dissolve the traditional distance between authors and directors, and have designed this moving piece in a forest around a huge tree stump. Two brothers in fatigues roll, stand up and sit on it, creating a jealous tension over the missing Matilde, who they both love.

All that's left of her is an ephemeral ghost, thanks to brother Alejo, who killed their former sweetheart in a fit of jealousy inspired by his slower smitten sibling.

"What are we doing here? We don't even have bullets," asks the mentally-challenged brother Martin, played by Gregorio Reyna, and the self-assured Alejo, acted by Carlos Ramos, answers "We're here to survive. War is like that."

Psychological Warfare

Edgar Estaco told Prensa Latina that "Cuba has been in a psychological war for 40 years. It has almost become a custom to be on the alert and truthfully it is not unheard of for men to be sent off to the countryside on drills with nothing but wooden rifles."

Estaco is a hydraulic engineer by profession, and another casualty related to US aggression against Cuba has been the eroding infrastructure, which includes leaky pipes and other headaches which surely have plagued this creator.

"This work is a parody of the Cuban psyche, but the covert threat really exists and these maneuvers may be of some value," he says, explaining "the United States threatens us psychologically and we defend ourselves psychologically."

When the Tears Dry

The brothers banter about insects, hunting lizards for snacks and the invisible enemy, as the specter of Matilde floats in and out, played by Lenia Maria Perez in a mottled robe.

She urges them to leave their anxiety behind, to come home, begging in her feminine voice of wisdom, "you don't know what a woman is capable of saying when her tears dry."

Alejo, who originally had planned on bumping off his brother Martin in the woods with the one loaded gun, ends up directing the shot to his own head in a tragic suicide and the white flag is raised by Matilde to a Frank Delgado tune written especially for this piece.

No White Flag for Cubans

But there is no surrender by the people in the theater, faced with the concrete intimidations of the faceless enemy depicted in this play.

The website Cuba vs. the Blockade explains how the US blockade threatens to some degree practically all realms of life here from music, family visits, education, travel and sports to banking, including billions lost in trade, energy and telecommunications.

Perhaps some of the most distressing bullying is that of the health care services, and "the impossibility of acquiring the necessary medicines or equipment has sometimes prevented Cuban doctors from saving lives or relieving suffering."

Just today in Havana the visiting Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, said the blockade was "immoral, irresponsible and illogical," waged by a difficult foe to which Cuba cannot and will not admit defeat.

Deep Effects of Chronic Anxiety

After Prensa Latina shared information with him about the psychological warfare addressed in this play and some examples of adversity caused by the US blockade, Stephen Soldz, Professor at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis, said he was not surprised to hear about how widespread the tension is in the Cuban population.

He said "To the extent that people live in chronic underlying fear of a vague threat, it has profound effects," and that he would be interested in studying those with psychologists here.

The courageous PhD holder must know the taste of fear after visiting and confronting top US military brass responsible for "abusive interrogations" at the prison on its illegal base in Guantanamo, Cuba. Dr. Soldz said the consequences of living in a state of constant alarm include "both emotionally and cognitively, low-level anxiety and difficulty concentrating, among other effects."

He explained that the US has many connotations, not just intimidation, but also longing.

That craving is created and fueled in hostile campaigns like the pro-US propaganda broadcast from Radio Marti, promises of aid to a "transition" government or instant citizenship to any Cuban who makes it to the border with dry feet.

Soldz summed up the pathos of this situation and said "When fear is of the greatest power on earth, which also has many desirable features, it can confuse one's sense of place in the world."

So in the psychoanalytical terms laid out by this US specialist, it is disturbing to be scared of something that also attracts, which like the tale of the two brothers in a love triangle gone awry, is a tragedy.