<\/p>\n
Alfredo Guevara pointed to that piece of furniture, an avant-garde armchair, too low for him to sit on at the height of his already 80 years, and he said: \u201cone day Leo Brouwer called me to tell me those furniture were being sold in the Ten Cent store and I ran out to buy them.\u201d That day was one in the 1960s, they were Knoll furniture and, after the 2000s they remained in the offices of the International New Latin American Film Festival in Havana.<\/p>\n
The love for Knoll furniture could seem contradictory to Guevara\u2019s well-known veneration for baroque and colonial furniture. While looking at the armchair, its defense of the Knoll aesthetics dates back to the origin of Russian conventionality and German rationalism, and to the context of Stalinism and fascism.<\/p>\n
Guevara had studied in depth the Russian avant-garde movement from before Stalinism and considered it the seed, together with the Bauhaus, of almost all the western avant-garde. He always regretted that, in the Russian case, that avant-garde had been lost due to the \u201cStalinist blindness, a blindness that got to be criminal.\u201d (Or, in the German case, Nazism.) Based on that understanding, he used to say: \u201cI can\u2019t stand Los fundamentos del socialismo en Cuba [The Fundamentals of Socialism in Cuba], by Blas Roca,\u201d and questioned the \u201cMarxism-Leninism\u201d drawn up by Stalinism about Marxism which was \u201cneither Marxist nor Leninist.\u201d<\/p>\n
There are those who will see one \u201cmore sign\u201d of Guevara\u2019s \u201celitism\u201d in his love of Knoll furniture, \u201cwhile the Cuban people were going through so many shortages.\u201d Neither Guevara nor the Cuban revolution are saints. The scarce presence of women filmmakers, and of a gender-based focus, in Cuban cinema produced by the institution that he headed (the Cuban Institute of Cinema Arts and Industry \u2013 ICAIC), as well as its conflicts with the cinema of black filmmakers, like Nicol\u00e1s Guill\u00e9n Landri\u00e1n, are not the most brilliant pages of his biography.<\/p>\n
However we can take his explanation about the Knoll as another lesson. No one like Leo Brouwer himself could give it a better title: \u201cTradition is broken, but to do so is difficult.\u201d That difficulty supposed in Guevara a commitment with a universalist conception of culture, a task of making visible and recognition of the exclusions perpetrated by the hegemonic uses of universalism, an intellectual formation as rigorous as critical, and a direct vocation for justice.<\/p>\n
During his time as a university student Guevara devoted a complete summer holiday to reading Jorge Ma\u00f1ach, with premeditated attention to detail, and to being informed about what he read. He would soon have as a professor the author of La crisis de la alta cultura, whom he admired as an intellectual but whose political positions he challenged. His confessed objective was to constantly ask things \u201cto make life unbearable for him.\u201d Guevara obviously knew about Ma\u00f1ach\u2019s biography as minister in the Caffery\/Mendieta\/Batista government, and the role played by the ABC in the Mediation, but, in the university sphere, he considered it more important to really read him and question his theses, appropriating, from the intellectual viewpoint, the anti-elitist criticism of the conception of the society of masses of Ortega y Gasset, whose most outstanding disciple in Cuba was Ma\u00f1ach himself.<\/p>\n
Guevara did something different with Fernando Ortiz, who at that time (second half of the 1940s) was the most outstanding Cuban intellectual, with a global influence, although without an official university chair. Guevara would finish his classes and would go with two or three friends \u2013 among them Mario Garc\u00eda Inchausti, as he would do later with Tom\u00e1s Guti\u00e9rrez Alea and Lisandro Otero \u2013 to knock \u201cwith great nerve\u201d on Ortiz\u2019 door to sit in his rocking chairs and have endless conversations about \u201cAfro-Cuban\u201d culture.<\/p>\n
It was a second university for Guevara and that related group \u201cof small bourgeois boys.\u201d Through Ortiz they became friends with an outstanding Havana Santeria priest and they went \u201cto absolutely all the drum-beating Santeria parties.\u201d Guevara had had his first political socialization in anarchist and socialist circles with a great black presence \u2013 and specifically black Abakuas \u2013 from the port of Havana, and he had later created in the University of Havana a student committee against racial discrimination.<\/p>\n
At present, in Cuba Fernando Ortiz has been \u201ccanonized\u201d in a certain way and the place his work on \u201cCuban identity\u201d as a specific discourse of a progressive sector of those years\u2019 democratic liberal Cuban bourgeoisie has been depoliticized \u2013 that is, it is not politically understood. (His argument is almost never studied as a debate built in the face of other positions \u2013 among them: Marxists, communists and non-communists.) However, Guevara was able to take from Ortiz\u2019 work something that is still fundamental until today: the image of the \u201cajiaco\u201d (a stew and also referring to a melting pot) recognized the injustice committed against those who entered by force as slaves the national pot and expressed an effort whose key is retaken in our days by the criticism of the nationalisms conceived as merely \u201cethnic.\u201d<\/p>\n
Guevara\u2019s admiration for Sergio Vitier translates his argument. The principal virtue of the guitarist and composer lies in his \u201ciconoclasm based on rigor.\u201d Sergio was the \u201cman of all the ruptures and of all the achievements\u201d not just because of his very particular insertion \u2013 lively and conscious \u2013 into the \u201cblack\u201d world (his interpretations with Rogelio Mart\u00ednez Fur\u00e9, for example, are extraordinary) but rather because of the formation he received from Jos\u00e9 Ard\u00e9vol who, in turn, had been the founder in Cuba of the musical neoclassicism, as a way of inserting national music into universal musical tradition through a \u201cmodern eclecticism.\u201d<\/p>\n
Based on that, when Guevara and Sergio Vitier thought of how to musicalize the union of Alicia Alonso\u2019s classical ballet with Antonio Gades\u2019 flamenco dance they understood that it was not a question of a counterpointing (said thus, in Ortiz\u2019s style) of dances but of the counterpointing of culture. Vitier made Tata G\u00fcines, the greatest Cuban percussionist after \u201cdrummer\u201d Chano Pozo, enter accompanied by his guitar. For Guevara, that piece, Son ad libitum, would be \u201can unforgettable moment for culture.\u201d<\/p>\n
The same foundation for the argument can be seen in the appropriation \u2013 so dear to Guevara \u2013 that Humberto Sol\u00e1s made of Alejo Carpentier\u2019s novel Explosion in a Cathedral, with music by Jos\u00e9 Mar\u00eda Vitier, about which similar things can be said. Or of Guevara\u2019s reticence with respect to the professional, specialized, formation of filmmakers in film schools, since for him a filmmaker should be, first of all, a humanist. Or about his conception of the Film Festival as a space for regional cinema, and also as a marketplace for Latin American music, visual arts, social thinking and the politics of resistance, since cinema is culture and culture is also politics. It is known that Guevara appreciated Ernesto Lecuona\u2019s music, but another of his lucidities is less known, like when he said: Benny Mor\u00e9\u2019s greatest contribution to Cuban culture lies, of course, in his music, and in more specific questions like the creation of the type of band he imagined, but also, and perhaps above all, in having sung to Cuba\u2019s cities in times of great penetration of U.S. music in the country. What Ma\u00f1ach, Ortiz, Lezama or Carpentier did on the one hand, Benny did on the other. When he sang \u201cCienfuegos is the city I like the most,\u201d or \u201cBeloved Santa Isabel de las Lajas\u201d it made millions of us, Guevara would say, love Cuba more, and to better understand it in the diversity of its geographical, social and human spaces.<\/p>\n
This understanding, so political as well as informed, and therefore very sophisticated, is what made him admire a Knoll piece of furniture and to repudiate art as propaganda. In brief, the International New Latin American Film Festival will have its 39th edition in Havana. The current organizers of the Festival have already asked themselves in previous years if it is \u201cnew,\u201d if it is \u201cfilm\u201d and if it is \u201cLatin American.\u201d They are realistic questions open to our times. However, perhaps they would not be queries alien to Guevara himself, who understood how a tradition is created, how difficult it is to break it, and how indispensable it is for making culture: \u201cthat necessary miracle so that everything that comes gets here and can be received without possible rendering, received from the hard diamond of what is ours.\u201d<\/p>\n
* In this text I have used materials belonging to Alfredo Guevara\u2019 public archive, like the transcription of interviews and presentations for diverse media, as well as excerpts of his recorded participation for the documentary Identidad, by Lourdes de los Santos, about Sergio Vitier.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Alfredo Guevara pointed to that piece of furniture, an avant-garde armchair, too low for him to sit on at the height of his already 80 years, and he said: \u201cone day Leo Brouwer called me to tell me those furniture were being sold in the Ten Cent store and I ran out to buy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2445,"featured_media":110900,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[33669],"class_list":["post-121908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n