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Dateline Havana: An Interview with Cuban writer Eduardo Heras Leon
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
Progreso Weekly - Nov 22, 2007
http://progreso-weekly.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=245&Itemid=1
Dateline Havana
An interview with writer Eduardo Heras Len
~Intellectuals are revolutionaries who criticize and
think with their own heads
By Manuel Alberto Ramy
Last week, I interviewed two musicians about the next Congress of the
National Union of Cuban Writers and Artists (UNEAC). Music was present
at the birth of our nation, and poetry wrote the lyrics for our
national anthem. The wars of independence and revolution, as well as
the Cuban reality, have been told in novels and stories by many
writers. Writers like Eduardo Heras Len, one of the most im****tant
story-tellers our country has produced.
Heras has been very committed to the truth, to the search for a high
literature that reflects the lives, the here-and-now of Cubans. There
are two books in his oeuvre that I would describe as pinnacles. One is
The War Had Six Names, winner of the 1968 David Award, where he dealt
with the 1961 Bay of Pigs battle. (Heras, a militiaman, fought in that
transcendental historical event.)
The other is Steps on the Grass, which won the 1970 Casa de las
Am(c)ricas Award. In it, he gives a gritty ****trait of the men and women
who fought against the counterrevolutionaries on the Escambray mountain
range in the 1960s. Some scholars call this period a civil war; others,
a struggle of cl*****.
His unorthodox vision of the revolutionary combatants cost him dearly.
At the dawning of the Gray Quinquennium, he was separated from the
University of Havana, where he studied journalism, and was sent to work
as a common laborer at a steel factory (Socialist Vanguard) outside the
capital. Years went by before he could return to the university to get
his degrees in journalism and Spanish literature.
In the interim, as a writer, he extracted from his daily life stories
with a labor theme. The topic had not been explored until then, even
though society was defined as a working society. With his book Steel,
the writer-laborer (or laborer-writer) vindicated the essence of his
concerns and anxieties: the human being.
Today, we talk with this multiracial man with an orderly mind and a
facile tongue. Winner of the 2006 Publishers National Award, his
vocation as an educator led him to found the Onelio Jorge Cardoso
Center for Literary Formation, which he directs.
Progreso Weekly: What are, in your opinion, the fundamental topics that
the Seventh Congress of the UNEAC should deal with?
Eduardo Heras Len: The 1998 Congress was really a very special
Congress, to such an extent that many comrades compared the issues
discussed and the conclusions reached with those made during the Party
Congress, particularly because topics of national incidence were
discussed that were a concern not only to the writers and artists but
also to the entire intellectual movement. In other words, not only the
professional problems typical of any institution but also the problems
that had to do with society, with the crisis of values we were
experiencing.
Other problems broached were racial prejudice (zones of racial
discrimination that exist in the country), marginal zones for the
youth, hegemonic globalization and the penetration of that
globalization in sectors of the nation's life such as tourism, the
economy, the press. And above all, what has always been a fundamental
concern of the intellectual community: the role of the writer, the
artist, in our society.
I think this is one of the essential issues, because in our country the
teacher, the doctor, the engineer, the architect have a pretty clear
idea of what their role in society is. The teacher knows he must
educate. The doctor knows he must save lives, he must cure. But, what
is the role of the writer. Simply to write?
No. If we are -- as I like to phrase it -- a participating conscience
of what is happening in the country, we need to participate actively in
the whole set of problems that are under discussion, more so today,
when the fate of the country assumes a special im****tance.
I am the First Vice President of the Writers Association, whose board
of directors will change when the Congress ends. I am a member of the
UNEAC Congress' Organizing Committee and I think that, logically, we
have to deal with the guild's problems, which involve the writer's or
artist's economic situation. For example, in the case of writers, the
problems of copyright, promotion, printing and literature are very
im****tant.
Along with that, a series of topics will be broached that will place
the UNEAC at the heart of the nation's problems, same as in 1998. On
the table again will be the UNEAC's insertion into that agenda and the
UNEAC's reflections on the political, economic and social situations in
the country during a period that many people call a "transition." This
is a period that is being felt at a social level. There is an awareness
among the people that these problems should be discussed, and the
country's leader****p is stimulating those reflections.
Right now, I would tell you that the whole of society is reflecting
about how to do things better and how to improve the society we are
building. So, I think that the UNEAC will have an effect on the
problems, on the work with the young people, which seems to us to be
most im****tant because -- although the UNEAC is not a youth
organization -- it has a very im****tant relation****p with young people.
The Saz Brothers Association, which brings together young writers and
artists, is closely linked with the UNEAC, and the UNEAC is enabling
and evaluating those links.
Therefore, I think that the role of the intellectuals in society is one
of the topics that will be discussed and reflected upon during the
Congress.
There is something that often seems a common site: what the Commander
in Chief called the Battle of Ideas. Culture has a capital im****tance
in that Battle of Ideas. Culture is the nation's moral ****eld, its
ethical ****eld, and we are -- as Cintio Vitier said -- a nation that
can be characterized as a flag inside a trench. We are defending our
identity and that's where the role of the intellectual acquires
meaning. By defending our identity we defend our culture.
Culture is the first thing we must save, Fidel said in a UNEAC Congress
(in 1992, I believe) and he paraphrased Mart by saying that "without
culture, freedom is impossible." Or, as Mart said, "To be educated is
the only way to be free."
Fidel pointed out something that's essential. In other stages of the
revolution, culture possibly did not have the role it has today, but,
to the degree that our leaders matured and we ourselves matured,
culture has come to occupy the place it deserves. In other words,
culture is the nation's moral ****eld and it's the first thing we need
to safeguard.
That's one of the topics we shall reflect on during the Congress. As we
have seen in the meetings prior to the Congress, there's going to be a
very serious approach to the problems of education, of education as
part of the enormous plans the Revolution has in mind. We can already
draft a balance sheet on the latest modalities of education.
To some, that subject has not been as positive as it should be, so I
think we must reflect on that; writers and artists have things to say.
But we're dealing not only with the problems of education and the press
- -- which to us are essential -- but also with the problems of popular
participation, because the society we are building and the system we
want to make and perfect is based fundamentally on the people's
participation.
In other words, when we talk about democracy we talk about
participation, participation with criteria, with decision-making,
participation by the real people in the making of decisions in this
country.
That's where we are headed. All the reflections being made at this time
and the decisions that indisputably will follow point to that end. So,
I think the Congress will be held in a very im****tant point in time and
I think it will be as im****tant as the 1998 Congress.
PW: Do you think that, at any time, there will be a reversal in the
nation's cultural policies, or at least in the government's policy
toward creators, as happened during the so-called Gray Quinquennium?
HERAS: Look, I lived through that period.
PW: In your own flesh.
HERAS: Yes, I was one of the victims of that process, but I am
absolutely convinced that it will not be repeated. For several reasons:
firstly, because the country's leaders have matured, have grown
intellectually and now have a better understanding of the problems of
intellectuals and of literary creation.
On the other hand, the leaders' trust in intellectuals has increased
enormously. The 1998 Congress demonstrated that intellectuals are
revolutionaries, just like anyone else, they are intellectuals who
worry, who criticize, who have their own opinions and think with their
own heads.
Sometimes those opinions, those reasonings trouble some thinkers who
are more dogmatic, who are conservative, but I think that the [1998]
Congress demonstrated the valor and revolutionary quality intellectuals
have. That's on one hand.
In second place, intellectuals also have matured. They have a better
understanding of the role they must play within society. And on the
other hand, there is a unity in the intellectual movement that never
existed before, that didn't exist in the 1970s. A unity based on
principles and, what's im****tant, in diversity. In other words, don't
look for unanimity because it doesn't exist.
As Cintio Vitier said in a lecture, "We are a universe and universe
means uni-verse, unity in diversity." And that's precisely what we see
now. And, let's be honest, Culture Minister Abel Prieto is the best
thing that has happened to Cuban culture in the past 30 years. He
really is an intellectual, a revolutionary and a leader, something that
has seldom been seen in the culture world.
[Prieto] is a man who enjoys not only the sup****t but also the trust
and admiration of the intellectual movement, because he has earned
them. This is not adulation, I am not praising the leader, on the
contrary. I am bound to him by ties of friend****p. I published his
first tale, because he was a student at the School of Letters at the
time I was a professor at the School of Journalism. At this moment, he
enjoys that sup****t and understands what the cultural processes should
be, what cultural policy should be.
As he said not long ago during a meeting at the Writers Association:
"The role of the leader and functionary of culture is to serve the
intellectual movement, to permit the intellectual movement to find a
channel, to create the conditions so that movement may create, because
as it grows it enriches the nation's culture." Do you understand?
PW: Will the UNEAC have greater access to the formulation of policy, of
the cultural programming broadcast on TV, for example, or on the mass
media in general?
HERAS: Look, that's another problem, and I'm glad you mentioned it.
That's another problem that is at a crucial point and evidently will be
discussed during the Congress. There are many criteria about the mass
media, something that was discussed in the previous Congress. It's
going to be a permanent concern.
What we don't want is two cultural policies, that is, the ICRT (Cuban
Institute of Radio and Television) has one cultural policy and the
Culture Minister has another. There must be only one cultural policy. I
think we're going in that direction and the UNEAC has a lot to say
about this and will say it, I'm sure, during the Congress.
I don't know if there will be an immediate change of policies at the
ICRT, but we shall make our influence felt. At this moment, I would say
there is a rapprochement; in some ICRT committees there is open and
critical talk about the existing problems. Of course, they have a
difficult task; they must maintain a daily programming for everyone,
for every taste.
But I think there are many things that can be improved, that are
problems of principles, problems of policy. And agreements can be
reached, so I think the Congress will debate these issues in depth and
will accomplish something.
[Manuel Alberto Ramy is Havana bureau chief of Radio Progreso
Alternativa and editor of Progreso Semanal, the Spanish-language
version of Progreso Weekly. ]
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