Havana Cuba. – The official Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC) has orchestrated a ring tantrum on the occasion that in Paris, due to the protests of the writer Jacobo Machover and other exiled Cuban intellectuals, the poet Nancy Morejón was withdrawn from the honorary presidency of the Mercado de la Poesía event.
The always obedient to the guidelines of the regime members of the UNEAC tied the offense against Nancy Morejón with the recent boycott in Spain of the concerts of the group Buena Fe to ensure that “a plattista and fascist sect” that intends to “mimicize Europe” (Abel Prieto dixit) has launched a campaign against Cuban art and culture, which according to their understanding, is none other than the official culture, that is, the one that approves the dictatorship because it serves its interests, among other things, representing it before the world and serving as a propagandist.
The UNEAC commissioners and their choruses have had the tough face to affirm that the anti-Castro exiles want to “exclude from the culture of the nation the writers and artists who live in Cuba and support the Revolution.”
They dare to speak of exclusion when they serve a regime that for six decades has systematically excluded hundreds of writers and artists for the mere fact of disagreeing with official thought, of not being “inside the Revolution.”
It is the same regime that exiled and prohibited Celia Cruz, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Reinaldo Arenas, Zoé Valdés, Amir Valle, Bebo Valdés, Paquito D’Rivera, Arturo Sandoval and Mike Purcell, just to name a few of the most prominent. ; that he ostracized Lezama Lima and Virgilio Pinera; forced a mea culpa to Heberto Padilla in the Stalinist style and swept away the best of national art and culture during the Gray Decade; who imprisoned the poets Raúl Rivero, Jorge Vall, Tania Díaz Castro, María Elena Cruz Varela, Belkis Cuza Malé, Manuel Vázquez Portal and Jorge Olivera; the same regime that today claims the right to tighten censorship, dictate who is an artist and who is not, and keep Luis Manuel Otero and Maikel Osorbo in prison.
The Castroites describe as “haters”, without making any distinctions, all those who oppose him when they have been the ones who, since January 1959, have been in charge of keeping the fire alive in the chair of hatred and intolerance.
One strives so that resentment and hatred do not eat away at him, but one must ask oneself and understand why those who lost everything, even their country, are going to be tolerant and loving towards Castroism and its representatives; those who suffered death on the wall of family and friends; those who spent years in the gruesome Cuban jails; the mothers who right now have their children imprisoned because the dictatorship does not admit the right to peaceful protest.
In truth, it is very unfortunate that we have reached this degree of polarization. Art and sport should not be politicized under any circumstances. But Castroism was the first to do so. It sowed winds and now it gathers storms. His adversaries are paying him with their own coin.
The repudiation in the Parisian event is not so much Nancy Morejón, the poet, and the value of her work, but rather the dictatorial regime she represents.
There will be no shortage of foreign intellectuals who show solidarity with Nancy Morejón and follow the rhyme of the UNEAC fools. As my friend Guillermo Labrit, an exiled writer living in California, points out, Nancy Morejón is revered in academic and university circles dominated by left-liberals who are fascinated by stories of personal improvement, especially if they come from an Afro-descendant poet, from a Third World country. World.
But the story of Nancy Morejón, more than self-improvement, is a story of fear, submission and opportunism. Let’s remember that she, like more than a dozen authors, mostly black, was one of the reprisals after the closure of Ediciones El Puente, that publishing house directed by the poet José Mario, with which in the mid-1960s, Fidel Castro was fierce.
Nancy Morejón, by force of compliance and swallowing toads, emerged from punishment and was rehabilitated. But, as she confessed on a certain occasion, she felt afraid every time Ediciones El Puente was mentioned in her presence. That can explain her unconditional support for Castroism, the kind that has just cost her the little trip to Paris and the honorary presidency of the Poetry Market.
OPINION ARTICLE
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