“ a blinding light, a blaze of snow”
by Israel Centeno
Ojalá se te acabe la mirada constante
La palabra precisa, la sonrisa perfecta
Ojalá pase algo que te borre de pronto
Una luz cegadora, un disparo de nieve
Ojalá por lo menos que me lleve la muerte.
Silvio Rodríguez
I started to write a series of articles about Cuban Nueva Trova for a digital magazine. I wanted to look into the subject, to investigate in depth what, in my opinion, was an artificial musical phenomenon promoted by the Cuban Communist Party.
It was based on a simple premise — in a Totalitarian State there is small room for artistic, musical and literary phenomena with a spontaneous profile.
This way I came up with two articles where I talked about Silvio Rodriguez’ role and I also mentioned Pablo Milanés, an even more interesting figure because he had left a camp of re-education becoming the second most important troubadour of a project by Haydee Santamaría — La Nueva Trova.
One day I received a friendly email from the editor of the magazine. He wanted to share with me that some editorial policies had changed, and he wanted to discuss their adjustments with me. He didn’t tell me anything else in the email. We had coffee, very casual. We talked about the weather and the arrival of spring. We barely touched on the subject of what was happening in Venezuela — at that time there was one of those insurrectionary arrests that had awaken so many hopes and frustrations on those who conjured the possibility of change.
Thinking back, he only asked me, using a phony journalist tone: “Who is the man that’s backed by the United States in that scenario?” I shrugged, not because I thought that the United States didn’t have a man in Caracas, which seemingly never had one, but because he knew, or I thought he knew as much as I did, that the country that had a well-defined man and all the alternatives covered in my country was Cuba.
Then he cut to the chase. Before sending my articles I had to send him a headline summarizing the content of the article. He said that they preferred me to write a little more about Venezuela, to relax my contents a little, but above all, to stick to Venezuela.
My smile never happened. I was silent. After that, I gave my only potential answer: “I am not going to continue writing for the magazine”.
This didn’t happen in East Germany or Cuba, nor was I talking to the director of a college pamphlet. This was going on in the United States, in a space that supposedly celebrated freedom of expression and human rights.
Very well, then.
Days went by, I lost some sleep. I was reflecting on my situation a lot. It was delicate. I could not accept those conditions. No other media for which I wrote back in Venezuela had even suggested anything similar to me, in spite of the lack of freedom of expression and the risks involved in writing what I wanted to write in moments of revolutionary tension.
No. This couldn’t be. I reflected on it for days. Everyone knew my political views. I never expressed any sympathy for the Cuban revolution, or for the Venezuelan revolution, or for any other revolution. I have always studied the character of revolutions. I am passionate about that human dialectic where everything gets lost in the search for the whole. The absolute happiness turns into an absolutist State.
Why had I been censored?
An intern for the magazine answered this question for me later on. The intern had left the magazine. She was minding her own business. She was pursuing a Master’s Degree and wanted to get a real job.
We met up at a bar called Hemingway’s near the University of Pittsburgh. She looked a beautiful and fresh. She didn’t have that typical tormented look of someone who hasn’t been able to overcome his or her adolescence, or who is constantly looking for a good reason to squeeze a pimple from the world’s ass.
It was mid-summer already. Out on the streets celebration was in the air, a University town like Pittsburgh makes that possible — peaceful streets pierced by the sun and shaken by the breeze.
We talked about her future, while I watched the foam stains on her glass, and looked at her green eyes, a tropical green, full of subtleties.
She asked me if I remembered when I published those two articles about Silvio Rodriguez and La Nueva Trova. “Of course”, I answered. She made it clear that she liked them very much, but the other staff members of the magazine were uncomfortable with it. I asked her why did it bother them. I didn’t know what could offend them from it.
Wall Street occupiers disgorged Bernie Sanders. Ever since then, those boys and girls, full of enthusiasm to change the world, ran into Silvio and Pablo. Then they discovered the whole Nueva Trova. They liked the music, it sounded familiar and then it became an ethnic challenge to translate those pieces, and to give a correct and a radical interpretation to those lyrics. They partied to Nueva Trova, read Benedetti’s not at all naive propagandist poems. The singer/songwriter of the group would play these with their own revolutionary music. This was the music and lyrics of all timeless tribes, persistent in the gregarious condition of adolescence.
Many of those children overdosing with redemptive ideals were part of that magazine staff. Whenever my first article came out, the translator blurted out a big “Fuck”. When they issued it, they mentioned it in their petit committee, and calmly said: “It’s only a column, and we believe in freedom of expression. This is a right-wing writer.”
By the time I sent the second article the staff found it less pleasant. A right-wing writer was contaminating their lullabies. They began to refuse to correct the text, to translate it, or to edit it.
“It was almost a strike”, said the girl putting her glass of beer aside, and she looked at me with her green eyes. “I had to carry out the entire edition of the article. It didn’t bother me. You know what bothers me? That you gave up writing the third one. That you didn’t fight. You gave up your rights. Can’t you see that? It was about your rights”, she told me merging the words over and over again.
And then I left, wishing her a good life.
Her voice echoed in my head, “You have your First Amendment rights”.
She was so right.
Silvio’s lyrics “a blinding light, a blaze of snow” erased my First Amendment rights in U.S.A
I couldn’t help feeling a sort of total defeat.
