rrizzo@bbncca.ARPA (Ron Rizzo) (01/22/85)
AN ISLAND OF THE ARCHIPELAGO I second Steve Dyer's recommendation & urge people to see the film IMPROPER CONDUCT (in Boston it ends a short 2-week run at Copley Place on Thursday 1/23/85). Although focussed on the fate of gay people in Cuba, the movie has a broad appeal & offers the first comprehensive anatomy of Socialist Cuba. It drives the final nails into the coffin of Fidelismo, that odd & irrational cult among North American & European leftists that blandly postulates that Cuba represents the vanguard of social change, especially for the Third World. The "talking heads" interview format includes nearly every major figure in Cuban literary & intellectual life (& those not interviewed figure prominently in the accounts given) plus highly-placed former members of Castro's junta. The story they tell is uniformly terrifying: ALL of the infamous mechanisms of repression familiar to readers of Solzhenit- syn's GULAG ARCHIPELAGO (3 v. in pb, Vintage/Random House) are there: -- dozens of concentration camps & prisons throughout the country, including in & around all major cities, from the early 60s through the present. -- frequent use of torture, routine & systematic physical de- gradation and psychological humiliation of prisoners, mur- der & summary executions (the use of soccer stadiums for detention, torture, & murder made infamous by Chile's Pinochet falling Allende's overthrow WAS ORIGINATED BY CASTRO IN THE 1960'S), deliberate starvation, forced labor approaching the slave labor of Stalin & Hitler (it now becomes a matter of serious documentary & humanitarian interest whether Cuban Communists have also practiced "de- structive labor", the calculated slow extermination of camp inmates by simultaneous starvation/brutality/working-to- death characteristic of the Gulag's worst camps). A Havana prison, El Cabana, became known as a killing center: priso- ners transfered there were likely never to be seen again. -- for all other Cubans, a daily life lived in a state of gov't- organized & perpetual terror: with spies for every residential block; a large & omnipresent secret police; the everpresent threat of arrest (people are rarely charged unless & until they come to trial), imprisonment, torture, systematic abuse, & even murder by guards or summary execution; etc., right out of Orwell or Solzhenitsyn. -- even if you avoid the police, rituals of public humiliation in school, on the street, at work are common resorts to punish the slightest perceived deviation from ideological orthodoxy or a rigid code of puritanical behavior. Having long hair is a criminal offense (& you though only Central American juntas fascistically persecuted "hippies"!). More than a few victims of these public ceremonies have killed themselves. -- all tourists & diplomats are systematically spied on, lied to, & literally misled. A former tour guide gives the byzantine details in the movie. The model villages visiting leftists are shown are populated by actors impersonating peasants. The houses are filled with goods in extremely short supply in Cuba. Much of Cuba is physically shabby or deteriorating (as Orwell foresaw for all totalitarian states): a mere 200 yards from impressive tourist sights are ruinous slums. Taxi drivers monitor every visit or move foreigners make, directly reporting to the secret police. A entire class of prostitutes is tole- rated by the regime (which viciously abuses other prostitutes who don't possess interesting information) to service the di- plomatic corps, visiting engage' intellectuals & politicos and other tourists (this happening in a violently anti-erotic regime): the ladies work directly for the secret police in exchange for immunity from arrest. -- Havana residents are "obliged" to attend the monster rallies in the Plaza of the Revolution to approve & applaud new laws & policies, the very laws that will soon be used to crush them: you must constantly reaffirm your love of Big Brother even as you perish. Until recently, even professional anti-Communists were inclined to concede that, Red though Cuba may be, Castro was moderate, rational, open to nego- tiation, & somehow managed to avoid most of the abuses expected of Communist regimes. New Left critics of Cuban authoritarianism, public show trials & executions of the early years & the curiously massive emigration from Cuba (over 1 million, 10% of the population, higher than any other Latin American country), have long been mollified by impressive economic progress & military influence: Castro seems a benevolent, socially aware, despot. IMPROPER CONDUCT reveals Castro as a pathological liar. A well-known interview with Fidel is intercut with victims' testimony which bluntly & overwhelmingly contradicts every single claim Fidel makes. Castro's Cuba is a carbon- copy totalitarian hell, spared none of the horrors of the USSR, China, the east European satellites, etc. But Cuban Communism has made novel contributions to the catalog of revolutionary Marxist crimes: perhaps because it's a Latin country, Castroites have been obsessed for decades with "the homosexual problem" & its "solution" (their own words), and have treated women with violence & debasement. High Cuban officials repeatedly traveled on official business to other Communist coun- tries to find out how these regimes dealt with "their homosexuals" (see below). Interviewees both gay & straight agreed that gays became the main targets of "revolutionary wrath", and typically were the most maltreated in the prisons & camps. Although prostitutes & female prisoners were the only women discussed in the film, the abuse they suffer is so extreme that it suggests not only "liberation, not emancipation" has been the lot of Cuban as well as Russian & Chinese women, but that not even "liberation" occur- red & that the Revolution intensified & institutionalized the extreme mis- ogyny implicit in Cuban (or any other form of) machismo. Even children aren't spared: there are "concentration camps for minors", two notorious ones near Havana being New Dawn and Rainbow. For viewers familiar with the holocaust literature about Nazism & Soviet Communism, the testimony will be instantly recognizable & ring true even down to matters of incidental detail. Gay moviegoers will be stunned to learn that their worst nightmares had been "implemented" in toto for a quarter century now on an island just 90 miles from the US (in fact, from Key West). But there's more: the film opens a chain of Pandora's boxes. In their repeated official visits to other Communist countries in search of a "solution to the homosexual problem" (their own words), Cubans inadver- tently opened the door a crack & exposed I believe for the very first time to the light of history major atrocities of this century as yet completely undocumented: in Bulgaria, an official told them that Bul- garian Communists had rid their country of homosexuals by establishing "a concentration camp", apparently a large one & long ago. In China, the mayor of Shanghai (formerly the most westernized treaty port of China, free of many of the more severe constraints of Chinese society, with a long tradition of having a very large & visible gay population) told a Cuban official that early on in the regime Communists had taken advantage of a popular Chinese holiday. On this day it was customary for Shanghai gays to gather in a particular riverside park to celebrate. The mayor said that top Party officials were all issued clubs. They went to the park, surrounded it, & clubbed to death everyone who was there. They dumped the bodies in the river. (If this is in any way typical of Communist practice after achieving power in 1949 --- and the historical record strongly suggests we should expect to find that it is --- then there must be scores, even hundreds, of similar mass murders directed against gays & straights throughout China from 1950 on. Actually, very little is known publically about the details of Communist repression in China. What we know of the 1 or 2 million "landlords" & others killed in the countryside in the early 50s, the violent clashes & persecutions of the Cultural Revolution, & an entire city of maximum security solitary confinement prisons called Qin City 40 miles from Peking (see the New York Review of Books a few years ago) provides an extremely fragmentary, barely suggestive picture.) IMPROPER CONDUCT obviously provides gay leftists with "a problem" of the most severe kind, nevermind straight Fidelistas around the globe. I hope the film gets longer & better publicized runs in large theaters: the prospective audience for it is VERY large. It was made in 1983. Booklength studies and prison memoirs, the first of their kind, are scheduled for publication soon (or have already appeared); look for authors' names: Armando Villadores, Herman Padilla, Reinaldo Arena. "The people united shall never be defeated." Ron Rizzo