Distorted Words

Francisco Castro 

HAVANA TIMES — I have the sensation that everything I’ve written or said in the last few months has been methodically misinterpreted. What’s most troublesome is that those “misinterpretations” have been made by a few individuals who at one point or another played very important educational roles in my life.

These are people to whom I’m very grateful. Without them, I wouldn’t be attempting to advance my career right now as a film professional. These are people who I still consider capable and qualified guides.

Notwithstanding, after having read certain of my opinions reproduced in various publications, they decided to “level their cannons” at me, and in the most merciless manner.

There are several the reasons why I’m wounded to the heart when I think about how I’ve been suddenly ostracized by these people. The main reason is that, with impunity, they’ve violated one of the first and most important values that they themselves instilled in me over the successive years of their teaching: trust.

Trust is one of the strongest foundations that sustain any type of relationship. In the case that’s now weighing on me, I believed I had constructed professional and friendly relations with them, ones with excellent outcomes.

I felt I held their trust when they assigned me tasks requiring high levels of responsibility. I believed myself to have deserved it when they put me in complete charge of carrying those out.

And I should add that it was evident that they were satisfied with my work; this was demonstrated by their praises of gratitude and gestures of friendship, which went beyond the day-to-day job.

Nevertheless, once they read my opinions — which weren’t consistent with their precepts — they decided to “cut off my water and lights.” They didn’t think about having a reasonable meeting of the minds, an illuminating exchange. They didn’t give me the benefit of the doubt.

Perhaps certain things I said might have seemed ethically wrong, but they didn’t care about corroborating those ideas, they didn’t care about helping me correct my errors, and much less did they think it possible that they might have misunderstood what I was saying.

It’s as if everything they had told be before about our well founded friendship was a colossal lie, a simple hook to keep me working with them.

It seems like they read it in a single sense, something that they themselves warned me to be careful not to do. Something that is the bread and butter in this profession whose precise objective is to create meanings, an objective that should be to uphold and promote the richest exchanges of ideas.

The void of such exchanges was filled with their definitive, unilateral and condemnatory judgments.

This is the price that’s paid for words, whether they’re accurately interpreted or not. In the end, such a thing as a good or bad interpretation doesn’t exist.

There are people who read what they can or what they want. Words don’t distort or sort themselves out. It’s the people who write them that become twisted, or the people who read them.