Cuba - February 24/06
WARM WEATHER: NOT JUST FOR ALPHA-MALES!
Art snobs embrace the South!
It may come as a bit of a surprise to you, dear readers, but your beloved, pasty-white, library-frequenting, urban area-worshipping, arts snob columnist is heading to the Caribbean for this reading week. Yes, I admit it is strange; I had my own problems with it. I mean, shouldn’t I be going to Iceland or something? Venturing to Prague, perhaps? Even Montreal would be more appropriate, for goodness sake! Alas, as classes end for the break, I will be trudging with the eager masses from the beautiful gloom that is the Canadian winter to the horrid heat and humidity of tropical lands, where sand will invade my white loafers and loud, horny students will interrupt my philosophical ponderings.
Why, you must be asking, would I submit myself to such a pedestrian pleasure? Why would I choose to go for a week wearing shorts instead of my tight-fitting blue jeans? What in god’s name would convince me to spend a week with scantily-clad, drunk-off-their-face co-eds?
My decision was affected by quite a few factors, actually, many of which have led me to believe that perhaps spending reading week in the south may not be such a bad idea for an art snob.
First off, the island that calls my name is the Communist Republic of Cuba. You know all those fashionable CCCP shirts with the hammer and sickle? Well, this is the REAL DEAL, suckas: communes and workers revolutions and statues of Lenin and murals of Che and missile crises and those really sweet-looking Fidel Castro military caps. It’s one thing to say you’re a socialist (and grow a beard to prove it), but its another thing to actually experience life under a Leftist regime. I hope to be able to get out my plough and collectivize with those drably-grey peasants while in Cuba, really get a taste for the life, you know?
Cuban culture, perhaps surprisingly, has a fairly developed and diverse arts sector. This is due partly to the society’s mix of European, African and indigenous cultures, but has also been somewhat enhanced by Communist rule. The result of being completely cut off from American culture means artists, film-makers and musicians are generally vibrant and individual, uncontaminated by the poison of such Western models for success as “Reality TV”. Francis Ford Coppola, who filmed part of his famous Godfather trilogy in Cuba, commented on the nation’s film industry in 1975: “I know very well the pain of a country like Australia that's a wealthy civilized place and yet has no film industry, because it's cheaper for them to buy our old television shows and our old movies. You see them struggling to have a little bit of a film thing. Yet here you have Cuba, which is a small place by comparison, and they have healthy, real, ambitious films.” Much of Cuban art is government regulated, however, so you get a lot of movies about the revolution, but this sort of intervention is also responsible for extremely high literacy rates and billboard/commercial-free streets, which can’t be a bad thing.
And history has shown that it’s not just beer-guzzling frat boys and impressionable valley girls who have frequented the area. Many brilliant Northerners have shown an affection for Cuba’s colourful towns and dark Havana bars, most famously perhaps being the modernist novelist Ernest Hemingway. The writer wrote his Nobel-prize winning novel The Old Man and the Sea about the small coastal village where he lived in the 1930s and 40s. He was so well loved in Cuba that Havana’s marina is named after him, and photos of him still decorate the bars he frequented.
So, it seems, Cuba is not one of those single-minded, non-creative countries that is often associated with Communist rule, but instead a well-educated and creative force. It is also, as shown by the patronage of Hemingway and Coppola, not simply a retreat for hormone-accelerated university students in board shorts and Corona t-shirts. So all ye art snobs out there, I beckon you: do not underestimate the South. If you’re not convinced by the above article, don’t forget that they do drive mopeds. I mean, what more could an art snob want?
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