Cuba and the Coming Cultural Battle

By Fernando Ravsberg*

HAVANA TIMES — One of the greatest challenges the Cuban nation will likely face in the future involves the sphere of culture. The normalization of relations with the United Sates – a cultural force to be reckoned with – involves great benefits but also enormous risks.

Around the world, people appear to have a sense of this and are stampeding towards the island to see it “before the Americans get there,” before McDonalds begin to replace pork sandwiches and yachts begin to block the view of small fishing boats.

Cubans, however, won’t be taken by surprise. They’ve grown up watching Walt Disney cartoons, and adults have long been consuming US television series, films, documentaries and music videos (which Cuban television airs without paying for any distribution rights, courtesy of the embargo).

Cuba has the advantage of an impressive cultural reservoir: good cinema, excellent ballet, great visual artists and prodigious musicians. It also has brilliant intellectuals and a religious community that survived the Catholic colony, the influence of Protestant capitalism and atheistic socialism.

A show of this cultural prowess is the fact that, no sooner have the first barriers been torn down than Cuba has made its way to Hollywood with “Cuban Quartet,” a series based on the crime novels of Cuban author Leonardo Padura, starring Antonio Banderas.

That said, there are still challenges that individual cultural consumption habits cannot adequately “filter.” Learning to separate the trash from good film and television will be as important as avoiding the temptation of feeding our children junk food.

The “Inefficiency” of Censorship

The Communist Party’s Ideological Department plays the role of Big Brother, telling Cubans what programs they can watch. In the course of history, it has banned music by Celia Cruz (because of the singer’s anti-Castro views) and even The Beatles, without any clear explanation as to why.

There’s little they can do, however, with the cultural avalanche that’s coming – it’ll be simply uncontrollable. There’s no clearer proof of this than the fact censors have already been beat by “the package”, about one terabyte of materials which reaches millions of Cubans every week without passing through any official filters.

As though unable to grasp reality, they continue to censor television, the radio, newspapers, movies and plays. While they’re busy banning shows by comedians on the island, people watch comedians from Miami in the package or from illegal TV from satellite dishes.

They live in the 19th century: they ban a baseball documentary for 5 years, take years to approve the script of Cuba’s best animated film, take plays off the stage and prohibit a music video by Buena Fe because it shows a “sinful” kiss between two women.

For 20 years, they kept the film Strawberry and Chocolate away from the small screen, and Guantanamera is still banned from television. In both cases, a large part of the population is being denied access to the best of Cuban cinema.

If the government does not hold back the extremists, the cultural cost will be very high. Nothing weakens the nation more today that a censorship apparatus that ties down culture, keeping it from unfolding its wings while forcing some of the country’s best talents to emigrate.

Freeing the Country’s Cultural Forces

At the beginning of the revolution, Cubans were told: “do not believe, read.” Then came the Stalinists, determined what could be read and buried the most brilliant intellectuals in basements, steel factories or ostracism.

They wanted to create a “revolutionary culture.” At the time, Julio Cortazar wrote Fernandez Retamar: “Could you imagine a man of the complexity of Alejo Carpentier transforming the thesis of his novel (…) into an implacable combat slogan? Of course not.”

The times have changed and, today, the strictest censorship is powerless before ubiquitous new technologies. The control over what Cubans consume culturally is a battle that has already been lost, even though the people who make a living from this do not want to accept it.

For years, thanks to satellite dishes and the package, the selection of these materials has become an individual process, but Cubans have two powerful weapons on their side: a high educational level and a live and deeply-rooted culture.

Broader Internet use, coupled with greater freedom to navigate the web, appears to be a good means to learn. Cybercafés and public Wi-Fi areas are already operating and the “dangers” announced by the soothsayers have not materialized.

Cuban culture can stand up to any foreign influence, but it can’t do it with its hands tied. It needs to free itself from the mediocrity of censors, those who are suspicious of everyone because they do not understand the codes of intellectuals and artists forged in Cuba’s educational system.

The nation has invested many resources to give its children a good cultural education. It must now trust Cubans to take on the best of universal thought without thereby losing their roots. That is what will allow Cuba to continue evolving without losing its identity.
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(*) Visit the website of Fernando Ravsberg.