Cuba Film Director Protests Censorship
HAVANA TIMES, March 14 — Institutional censorship of a documentary about a Cuban rapper compelled filmmaker Fernando Perez to quit his position as director of the Eleventh Youth Film Festival, to be held in Cuba from April to 3 to 8, reported the EFE news agency.
“The failure to demonstrate consistency in practice, even for what I proposed for the festival, prompted me to make the personal decision not to continue as its head,” said Perez after the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC) refused to screen one of the selected documentaries.
According to the controversial blogger Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo, the excluded work is about rapper Raudel Collazo, of the “Escuadron Patriota” project, and was directed by documentary maker Ricardo Figueredo Oliva.
In its official section, this year’s festival includes 88 productions, of which 38 are feature films, 41 documentaries and 9 animations.
No comment regarding the censorship or Perez’ decision has been reported on by the Cuban press which routinely avoids such issues.
This censorship is the type of thing P-J Proudhon, the beloved French working class socialist intellectual, predicted in the mid-1800s. When he finally concluded that a post-capitalist state would still be necessary, at least for a time, he reasoned that a force in society would need to be in place, to counter-balance the raw and growing power of this state, to keep it from becoming tyrannical. The only power in society he could find was private productive property rights. This was in line with many bourgeois thinkers who equated such rights with political and social liberty.
All the privileged-class socialists of the day, the Utopians and Engels and Marx, attacked such rights as the source of capitalistic evil. Where the Utopians called for a stateless, private property-less post-capitalism however, Engels and Marx called for private property to be abolished by having the state owning and administering “all” the instruments of production.
The various countries that have achieved socialist state power have implemented a Marxian economic formula that abolishes the very power in society that Proudhon believed would be necessary to guarantee political and social liberty. The censorship Fernando Perez is protesting would not be necessary, if Cuba were a modern cooperative, state co-ownership form of socialism. Such a form would not abolish private property rights, but would utilize them for the building of workable socialism.
As long as the Utopian/Marxian deviation is in place in Cuba however, political and social absolutism will have to remain, to defend an unnatural and quasi-religious ideology, and the bureaucratic state that is its creature.