O M A R P E R É Z
__________________________________________________________THE INTELLECTUAL AND POWER IN CUBA
Translated by Kristin Dykstra
1. Consider my passport. In the personal data where you define your “profession,” it states “writer.” Though I'm not trying to mimic Mayakovsky, I can't forget the flavor, the euphoria of that poem we learned in school: I'm a poet, I serve the power of the people. In real life I limit myself to verifying just one fact: the Republic of Cuba recognizes my condition as a writer. This has two secondary effects. One, that my mother is proud. The other, that police at Customs ask me, “What do you write?” “Poetry,” I answer. On a certain occasion, a certain policeman took it farther than the others. The incident took place at JFK airport in New York some weeks after September 11: he asked, “What kind of poetry?”
“Philosophical poetry.”
“What is philosophical poetry?” he insisted, putting me in an awkward situation. I don't remember what I answered. I don't know what poetry is, much less what philosophical poetry would be, or even philosophy, bios kubernitis, governor of life, as the ancient Greeks said. Despite the difficulty of the question I must have given a satisfactory answer in the face of power incarnate. It's not lost on me that a good many truths are told in order to get out of tight spots, then forgotten. You will ask what relationship the interrogation by a New York airport officer has to the theme in question. First, the dialogue between poetry and power is always the same, latitude and circumstance aside. Second, the situation of a poet confronted by power in Cuba is not disconnected from his situation when confronted by power in the United States of North America. This point, which might seem to a European intellectual like a mere theoretical sleight of hand, has been a constant reality for more than a century on our lands. Don't worry; this time I'm not going to quote José Martí. I proceed with the interrogation: the uniform persisted, “Your name is Omar. Are you Arab?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Then are you a Muslim?” Good question: in the sense of being “abandoned of God,” be God whatever he is—Tao, Buddha, cosmos—we are all muslim. However, not wanting these theological considerations to aggravate my status as a poet originating from a nation now considered to be “terrorist,” I said no.
“Then why is your name Omar?”
“In honor of the great poet Omar el Khayamm—Persian, not Arab—my mother gave me his name.”
Persian or Arab, Cuban, atheist or believer: poet, always suspect to power constituted in uniform. So far though, in one place or another, that power has—after some interrogation—let me go on down my road in peace.2. Every time I come back to Cuba, I return with intensity to the fundamental political condition: daily life. I feel an imperative to organize political discourse, and poetic discourse, not around criticism of power incarnate but around observation of the people's way of life, beginning with mine. I understand this observation to ennoble humans in their existence and prepare them to modify reality. Their reality. In this process I am not the passive object of some power external to me, telling me what I should see and how, what I should or should not change and in what way. As long as I am a poet, here and there, lord of my own reality. Naïve? Romantic? Pushkin said it, that he was neither safe nor completely defenseless in the face of power: the poet should be a little stupid. But it's not this basic and immemorial stupidity of the human-poet that blinds or denigrates. In it reside ideals, the sediment of our eternal life, and these are eternally realizable.
Now what, etymologically speaking, is criticism without crisis? Welcome be this crisis of systems, discourses, powers that in the end is the crisis of an entire civilization and its model of consciousness. Without crisis not even poetry would be given to us today; not even reflection; not even philosophy. Who will throw the first stone upon it? Today, obviously, it has come to be considered a normal act to throw stones, invectives, bombs. He who criticizes today should also know how to plant flower seeds. And if necessary, to throw them. This would be the greatest act of power.3. I pause a moment on this point. Maybe it will be said that I have tried to use rhetoric to evade the matter of the relationship between the intellectual and power in Cuba? Not by a long shot. I have firsthand knowledge of censorship and other extreme resources of political therapy. They can't dissuade the poet who has devoted his energies to spying on a higher state of consciousness. Having turned the poet into a hostage of reality is not the fault or privilege of any specific system. Even when all systems, by their nature of being systems, may have in some moment been attributed the doubtful merit of subjugating all nature, and therefore human nature and the root of poetry, it has in reality been the poet, in his or her purest impulse and at the four cardinal points of the world, who has decided to subjugate him- or herself, to remain among men, chanting. The force of this choice is what has caused the poet to subsist among the persecuted and the silenced to the present day: we who will watch the sun move across the other side of the mountain tomorrow.
4. I go out for a walk. Yes, I know. It's the devastated city you've all seen on the pages of Le Monde Diplomatique and in Wim Wenders' Buena Vista Social Club. I leave my son at the door of the renovated school, formerly a store for goods decommissioned by the state. According to the state, my son's future is guaranteed. According to my instincts as a father and a poet, his present is no more or less uncertain than that of all inhabitants of this planet in turmoil, our everyday volcano. The price of the noni, or Indian mulberry, a prodigious fruit said to possess 101 curative properties, is 5 pesos per bundle in the state market and 7 pesos at the herbalist's store. The young women I bump into on the road to central Havana look as beautiful and healthy as ever, “like precious pearls, the adornment of dream . . .” On the Malecón a typical scene of latin socialism: a man in charge of the excavator, working; 19 men observing. They're not curious; they're workers and bosses on the job. These gesticulate, those remain absorbed in contemplation. One even stretches his body along the wall, rests his head on a colleague's thigh, and smokes a cigarette. Marx and Lafargue, father and son-in-law, eternally reconciled: the right to work and the right to rest in dialectical unity.
For their part, those people from think tanks of the Christian and materialist West who have determined Cuba, among other non-hegemonic nations, to be a poor country, profess not only an extreme and fundamentalist materialism but also a limited vision, one impoverished in turn in the spirit-matter of development and movement. Because spirit-matter is not just object, its liberty is not only free will, and its realization is not only gratification.5. Who said that all reality was rational: an ideologue in the service of a party or a poet in the service of publicity? In the propaganda of capitalist society the call to an individualist carpe diem is paramount: BE YOURSELF. And even, as I have observed in the Amsterdam airport, BE A TIGER. Don't let others consume for you. Here and now, consume anything, so long as the one consuming it is you. GET A LIFE. In the most austere society that Cubans have ever lived through, propaganda attempts to activate other regions of consciousness. For example: IDEAS CANNOT BE DEFEATED, IDEAS ARE IMMORTAL, etcetera. Platon dixit, Marx dixit. There is, furthermore, a word in which commercial and political propaganda coincide: revolution. And still another word into which all ideological, economic, mystic, and sumptuary messages and values flow: energy. Supreme mystery of our unreality.
As long as I'm an individual, a poet, and in a certain way an idiot—following the Hellenic interpretation of an independent individual—I find both calls sympathetic and stimulating. Full of grace, yes, and empty of meaning. Grace and meaning: here is one of the points around which the intellectual can take action in the face of power and in the social matrix. I propose combinations. Such as: BE YOURSELF, IDEAS ARE IMMORTAL. Naturally one knows that to dialogue directly with power, one must have better tools than the mere verbal and conceptual ingenuity that underlies all philosophical poetry. But at the end of the day, we won't lack for work or for materia prima: how do we go back and fill these pairings with meaning if not by using contraries, by using the badly applied concepts that we have inherited from our decomposed civilization: messianism and productivity, saving and dignity, future and death, honesty and democracy, revolution and consumption. Revolution: today they name you in advertisements at the four corners of the world: alleluia!
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