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Art
and Culture
Havana’s 2004
International Book Fair
By María de La Soledad
soledad@progresemanal.com
Havana is currently celebrating its annual International
Book Fair, being held from February 5 to February 15 at
the Morro Cabaña Park, followed by a tour of 30 cities
throughout the country until March 7.
This year’s fair will be dedicated to Carilda Oliver
Labra, the Matanzas born poetess, and Germany is being
honored as guest country. In its honor, special
editions have been published with works by German
writers such as Crab Walk, by Nobel Prize winner
Günter Grass, and Life of Galileo Galilei, a play
that has been repeatedly staged in Cuba by the group
Studio Theater and actor/director Vicente Revuelta.
Also published are Katharina Blum’s Lost Honor,
by H. Boll, and Hoffmann’s Fantastic Tales, among
other books.
And
as we write of literature from other countries, already
on sale at the fair are Essay on Blindness, by
Portuguese Nobel Prize winner José Saramago; The Dead,
by James Joyce;
Meridian,
by
American writer Alice Walker, author of The Color
Purple, published in Cuba some years ago; and
Augusto Roa Bastos’ Poetry andThe Complete
Short Stories. Also, the Complete Poetry of
Spaniards Antonio Machado and Miguel Hernández;
Fabulations and Essays, by Augusto Monterroso;
Literature is not Enough, by Roque Dalton,
Anthology of Poetry, by Mario Benedetti. The list
is, of course, only a sample of what has been published.
The
emphasis of the fair, as always, will be Cuban
literature, which includes our national hero José Martí,
one of the greatest poets in the Spanish language, to
Alejo Carpentier, Cuba’s greatest novelist, and José
María Heredia and Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, great
Cuban poets from the 19th century, all the
way up to the newest writers on the island. Here is a
token example of what is being offered by one of the
Cuban publishing houses, Letras Cubanas: there will be
three new books by Carilda Oliver Labra: The Lighted
Bones, Personal Anthology, and At
One
O’clock.
The novels Oviedo’s Harem, by Marta Rojas, a new
edition of Memories of Underdevelopment (the
novel on which the 60’s namesake film by Tomás Gutiérrez
Alea was based), Founder of Swords, by Pedro
Llanes, and another edition of Horse Fever, the
first novel by popular writer Leonardo Padura; Ancora,
by Alberto Ajón, Prisoner of Water, by Alexis
Díaz Pimienta, best known for his talent for improvising
in “décima”, a poem with a ten verse stanza; Smoking
as I Wait, by Jorge Ángel Pérez; the short story
book Silk Stories, by Ernesto Pérez Chan; and two
books of essays, Mañach and the Republic, by
Duanel Díaz, and The Imprint of Time, by Nara
Araújo. Two other novels, Saga of the Persecuted,
by Guillermo Vidal, and The Damned Meet, by David
Mitrani. There is much to choose from, and much to see
as one walks around the great and very beautiful Morro
Cabaña Park. Here’s a suggestion for the public: buy as
many books as possible and then just settle down to read.
News from all over
Two
Cuban musicians were honored with Grammy’s February 8:
Ibrahim Ferrer, for Buenos Hermanos, in Best
Traditional Tropical Latin Album; and Manuel Galbán,
whose album Mambo Sinuendo, done with American
Ray Cooder (for an interview with Galbán, see “I’m Just
a Musician”, on Progreso Weekly, Sept. 4-10,
2003), garnered Best Pop Instrumental Album. But neither
Galbán nor Ferrer had the joy of receiving the award.
They weren’t allowed a visa to travel to the U.S., and
adding insult to injury, the denial was based, according
to the musicians, on Section 212 (f), which is
applicable to persons that are considered a threat to
U.S. national security. For the same absurd reason
nominees Barbarito Torres, Moisés Hernández, the
National Septet and Guillermo Rubalcaba, an old and
excellent pianist, were also denied visas. Rubalcaba
said that the only “terror” that has anything to do with
him is the one he feels in front of a piano that is out
of tune.
When last I wrote this column (January 29) the 2004 Casa
de las Américas Literary Prize were being awarded. As I
didn’t have the time to tell you about them, I promised
I would report in this edition. Here they are. The
Poetry prize went to This Afternoon as the Night
Arrives, by Luis Llorente (Cuba). In Short Story,
Anything Can Happen, by Pablo Hernán Pettito
(Argentina). In Brazilian Literature, Cidadanía no
Brasil, o longo caminho, a sociohistorical essay by
José Murilo de Carvalho (Brazil), and in Caribbean
Literature in French or Creole, the prize went to George
Mauvois (Martinique) for his dramatic trilogy Ovando.
There was an Extraordinary Prize for an essay on studies
about women, won by Carmiña Navia Velasco (Colombia),
for her book Wars and Peace in Colombia: Women Write.
As is customary, there were three honorific prizes to
the best books published in Latin America and the
Caribbean in the past year. They were, in Poetry,
Step of Grass, poems about Chiapas, by Juan Bañuelos
(Mexico), in Fiction, Limón Blues, by Anacristina
Rossi (Costa Rica), and in Essay Empire and
Imperialism, by Atilio Borón (Argentina). The jury
chose the winning books from among 255 works from 24
countries in Latin America and the Caribbean
The
Casa Prize commemorated the bicentennial of the Haitian
Revolution, and as such celebrated the 55th anniversary
of the publication of the novel The Kingdom of This
World, by Alejo Carpentier, whose centennial will be
celebrated this year. Several special editions of his
works will be published. Letras Cubanas publishing
house, which already has fifty editions and re-editions
of the works of this important writer, will launch a new
edition of Music in Cuba. It will also present
other books by the author, such as A Baroque Concerto,
Rite of Spring, The Harp and the Shadow, and the
collection of essays City of Columns, dedicated
to Havana. There will also be a book on Carpentier’s
passing through Cuban radio in the 1940s, Alejo
Carpentier and Radio, by Oscar Luis López. By the
way, Radio Habana, the station on Havana’s historical
nucleus, is preparing a CD with the still existing radio
programs that Carpentier made, and that have been
donated by his widow.
The
great Spanish actress and director Nuria Espert has
taken on the tough task of producing the opera Tosca,
a very difficult work. The result was such a grand
success that on the first night at Madrid’s Teatro Real,
the audience gave it a 15 minute standing ovation. And
this season of Tosca had another milestone: the
Bulgarian soprano Raina Kabaivanska, who sang this opera
for 35 years and made of the performance one of the
peaks of her career, retired from the stage.
Great news for the stage: Yasmina Reza has written a new
play. The French writer, born in 1959, is the author of
Art, one of the most staged contemporary dramas
all over the world – in France and Great Britain, in
Japan and Argentina, in Cuba and the U.S. – and it has
been translated to more than 40 languages. Reza is so
well known and appreciated in her country that her works
(7 dramas) are among the contemporary classics that are
part of the curriculum at the Sorbonne University. The
new play, premiered a couple of weeks ago in Paris, is
called A Spanish Piece, and is about a woman and
her two actress daughters, one of them a star, the
second a failure. The playwright has said that she has
written the play based on the famous Russian dolls, the
matrioshkas, and that it’s a play inside a play inside a
play. It will soon be in other stages around the world.
Cuban painter Carlos Garaicoa, born in Havana in 1967,
is one of the young talents recently launched to fame at
home and abroad. In Cuba, some of his pieces are shown
in the Cuban Art Hall of the Museum of Fine Arts, and
abroad he spends all year round with his exhibitions.
He has just inaugurated an exhibit in Madrid in which he
shows his usual style of mixing photography, sculpture,
drawings and installations. This time he has found
inspiration in the architecture of his native city, and
not lacking in irony, he works on the idea of buildings
that have not been finished or are used for a different
purpose than originally planned. It’s not Garaicoa’s
first exhibit in Spain. Last year he had another show
in Madrid, History Lessons, and another in
Barcelona, Self-flagellation, Survival and
Insubordination. Last month, before leaving for
Madrid for his present show, he told me that he’ll have
an exhibit in 2004 in another Spanish city, Bilbao.
U.S.
actor, director and producer Robert Redford was in
Havana for the premiere of his latest production,
Motorcycle Diaries. The film, starring the most
famous Mexican actor of the moment, Gael García Bernal (Amores
Perros, And Your Mother Too, Father Amaro’s Crime),
is about the motorcycle tour through South America of
the young Che Guevara and his then student friend
Alberto Granados, who was invited to the premiere
together with Che Guevara’s family. Motorcycle
Diaries, directed by Brazilian director Walter
Salles (Central Station of Brazil), was shown at
the Sundance Independent Film Festival, also sponsored
by Redford. Granados, an eighty-something architect and
resident of Cuba, could not make the trip to Utah. He
was denied a U.S. visa.
By
the way, this year at the Sundance Film Festival and for
the first time in its 25 years of existence, a Spanish
speaking film won the audience’s prize as best drama.
The film is María, full of grace, starring the
Colombian actress Catalina Sandino Moreno, and tells the
story of a girl that swallows heroine to take it to the
U.S. Terrifying. Another Hispanic subject won the
prize for best documentary in the festival. It was
Farmingville, directed by Carlos Sandoval and
Catherine Tambini, about the harsh life of migrant
Mexican workers in the United States.
Minimal Stories,
by director Carlos Sorín (Argentina), is yet another
Latin American film recently receiving an award, this
time the Spanish Goya for best foreign film. At the
Goya, it competed with the Cuban Suite Habana, by
Fenando Pérez; The Mystery of the Trinity
(Uruguay), by José Luis García Agraz; and The Journey
to the Sea (Mexico), by Guillermo Casanova.
Speaking of Suite Habana, it just took part in
the Miami Film Festival.
And
after the Goya, and the Berlin Film Festival about to
begin, everybody is picking their winners for the
Oscar. The great Latin American success has been the
four nominations (best director, best script adaptation,
best cinematography, and best edition) for the Brazilian
film City of God, by Fernando Meirelles, which
won the Havana Film Festival in 2002. The nominations
come now, in spite of having being nominated for last
year’s Oscar as best foreign film and not winning. But
this year it was commercially exhibited in the U.S.
Contradictions of the infamous Oscars.
Balseros,
by Spaniards Carles Bosch and Josep María Domenech (a
Spanish production on a painful Cuban subject) has been
nominated as best documentary for the 2004 Oscars. The
film tells the story of seven Cubans that went out to
sea in rafts in order to reach the U.S. and their life
there, several years later.
Bosch and Domenech came to Havana as journalists in 1994
to report the rafters' crisis and were so touched with
the stories of their characters that they located them
years later and interviewed them again.
Cuban troubadour Pedro Luis Ferrer finished a six month
tour through Germany and Spain, and after four months
ago without a working proposition, he began on his own
what he calls a Tour Through Yards and Roofs. The first
concert with free admission was a couple of weeks ago in
the backyard of an aunt in Havana, in the open. There
was no formal promotion, but the concert was packed with
his fans that listened in this original settings to
Ferrer’s songs, among them his “guarachas” of biting
political satire. Good music and good guitar playing.
Here’s another original idea: A Cuban journalist has
called on everybody for the Big Smooch campaign. All
who want to join, no matter where you are in the world,
will kiss the person he loves most on February 14, at 8
p.m., preferably in a public environment – a street, a
park–wherever it can set an example. He is not
restricting the idea to Cubans, but to all inhabitants
of the planet Earth. Everybody, at 8 o’clock, will kiss.
I second the motion. Let’s all kiss each other. Let
the whole universe hear, on February 14, at 8 p.m., the
warm sound of the Big Smooch.
And
that’s all for today. See you in two weeks. |
