Havana Cuba. — The signatures in support of the recent declaration called by the Union of Writers and Artists (UNEAC) to deny the repression in Cuba show the amorality of the body of intellectuals related to the regime. Worse still when several of the signatures were once victims of the Castro dictatorship, repressed, parameterized and condemned to ostracism.
One of them is Antón Arrufat. A cultured and brilliant man of the theatre, a little over half a century ago he was marginalized and excluded. His work The Seven against Thebes (1968) irritated both the regime and the collection of poems Out of the gameby Heberto Padilla.
In his essay titled 71, anatomy of a crisisa text too biased in favor of the regime, Jorge Fornet refers that in the late 1960s and early 1970s “there was a state of suspicion based on an ideology that promoted anti-intellectualism and subordinated literary and artistic to the political gesture”.
In this way, the idea of ”with the revolution everything, against the revolution nothing” was turned around. It was the UNEAC, managed by the poet Nicolás Guillén as a commissioner and other Castro minions, the vile club used to intimidate, humiliate and criminalize the creators who made the regime uncomfortable.
The penalty for Arrufat was to send him to a municipal library, the one in Marianao, to clean floors and carry books for nine years.
Eduardo Heras León, as punishment for having written footsteps on the grassahe was sent to work at a steel mill and was prevented from continuing his university studies.
Rogelio Martínez Furé had to witness how Lieutenant Quesada burned the Guiñol dolls and puppets that represented orishas and patakines characters.
The victims’ options were exile or resign themselves to leading a life of kneeling. Some, as in Christopher Marlowe’s piece “The tragic work of Dr. Fausto”They made a pact with Mephisto, Satan’s subordinate in charge of capturing souls.
Years later, already rehabilitated and some even with the National Literature Prize, that same UNEAC that punished them yesterday summons them again, through other commissioners —the one on duty is Luis Morlote Rivas—, to apostasy.
Former victims of reprisals today gladly deliver their loyalty offering to power. On their knees, humiliated, they agree to sign whatever statement the regime puts in their hands.
Nancy Morejón, Gerardo Fulleda, Lina de Feria or Miguel Barnet, were shot in the sixties for publishing in The Bridge Editions, a label that they accused of being the center of a Cuban Black Power and having an intimate, selfish, hermetic and existentialist aesthetic; when in reality the scandal occurred because that circle of intellectuals was seen as a niche for blacks, homosexuals and dissolutes. Time passed and an eagle flew over the sea…
Having learned the lesson of fear and stripped of faith, the reprisals of yesterday -according to the level of adhesion- were escalating, winning prizes and occupying positions. But the time has come to collect and there are your signatures in support of the repression of the Black Spring 2003condemning the San Isidro Movement, supporting the repression against the people during and after 11J.
They gladly chorus the ruling party by speaking of “media manipulation” and condemning the US embargo, which they blame for all the evils that have been and will be. They are the most refined version of evil, with a rationality and logic in which they trap other artists who follow their twisted designs.
OPINION ARTICLE
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