Gail Dines Book “Pornland” and How Pornography Destroys Intimacy and Hijacks Sexuality

I saw a link to this interview on Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish. Gail Dines is professor of sociology and women’s studies at Wheelock College and an expert on pornography. Dines' book Pornland looks at the effects of contemporary pornography on society. It's a pretty sobering assessment and an interesting interview. An interview excerpt:

PULSE

In the preface of your book, you share a personal story about a conversation you had with your son over pornography. You write, “I said [to him] that should he decide to use porn, that he was going to hand over his sexuality—a sexuality that he had yet to grow into, that made sense for who he was and who he was going to be—to someone else.” How and why do boys and young men give their power away to pornography? What kind of power does pornography have in shaping boys’ and men’s perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs toward sex?


Boys and men don’t realize the power they’re giving away to pornography. They don’t understand the power it has to shape who they are, their sexuality, and their sexual identity. In this culture, we think of pornography as a joke or something to laugh about. We don’t take it seriously as a source of information that has the ability and power to impact on the way we think about the world. Most boys and men go to pornography for an ejaculation; they come away with a lot more. I don’t think they’re quite aware of it.

Pornography, like all images, tells stories about the world. It tells stories about women, men, sexuality, and intimacy. In pornography, intimacy is something to be avoided, and—as I say in the book—“In pornography nobody makes love. They all make hate.” The man makes hate to the woman’s body. It’s about the destruction of intimacy.

Is it true that what most boys and men see in current trends of pornography are things that they expect in sex? How did that happen, and how is it impacting on boys’ and men’s perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs toward sex?

Well, a lot of people don’t know what pornography is. The first thing I do in the book is very purposefully describe it in detail. I know that for many people it’s going to be hard to read. I understand that. But if you’re really going to understand what I’m saying and why I’m saying it, then you have to understand the material I’m talking about. A lot of older men and women think I’m talking about Playboy from 15 years ago: a centerfold or a woman with no clothes on smiling in a cornfield. They think, “What’s wrong with that?” Well, that was bad enough in the way it objectified women, but we’re on a whole new level now with this kind of imagery.

How it got to this point is the Internet. It made it more accessible, affordable, and anonymous. You’re seeing a massive rise in use, and the users are getting younger and younger. Children who are 11½ years old are now looking at pornography because it comes straight into the home. There’s no limit on how much you can access. It used to be you had to steal father’s Playboy or Penthouse. Use was limited to how much you could actually pilfer. Today it is unlimited.

So what happens is that desensitization sets in that much quicker and that much earlier. In order to keep the consumer base going, the pornographers have to keep upping the ante. They make it more violent, body-punishing, or abusive as a way to keep men interested. When you think about it, if you’re exposed to it at age 11 or 12, you’re jaded by 20. You’re certainly jaded by 30. Pornography bleeds sex dry of intimacy, emotions, and connection. Once you do that, then there’s not much left. It becomes boring and mechanical. So you have to keep feeding newer and newer ideas just to keep [the audience] interested.

You describe Gonzo porn as “body-punishing sex.” Why is it body-punishing, why is it prevalent today, and what do people need to know about it?

It’s body-punishing because the male performers pound away at a woman’s body. You often see three men orally, vaginally, and anally penetrate her over and over again for 20 minutes or more, and these are often Viagra-fortified penises, so they stay hard much longer. A woman’s body has limits. All of ours do. What you see in Gonzo porn is a woman’s anus that is red and sore and a swollen vagina. All of these things happen because of the way a woman’s body is treated. Even the pornography industry says that Gonzo is very demanding and potentially dangerous for women. If the industry is saying it, then there’s certainly a problem.

What I’ve found with my interviews with men is the more they watch, the more they want porn sex, because they become habituated to that kind of industrial-strength sex. Once you become habituated to that, anything else looks boring or uninteresting. What I find is that some men lose interest in their partners altogether and use more pornography. Other men nag and cajole their girlfriends to perform porn sex, or they use prostitutes because that’s who they think they can play this porn sex out on.

Remember that you are not just reading or looking at porn. You’re actively masturbating and having an orgasm to it. It has a very visceral response in the body. This is one of the reasons it is so powerful.

How/why does pornography misuse and abuse the concepts of sex and how/why does pornography normalize the idea that pain is pleasure?

Well, it’s because of the way the woman’s body is treated. In pornography, no matter what you do to her, no matter how much you physically or verbally abuse this woman, she loves it. She can’t get enough. What I find fascinating and upsetting at the same time is…

Men believe that!

… That’s right. They believe it. I’ve had men argue with me that they believe women like it. So when I say to them, “What’s your evidence? Have you seen any empirical studies? Have you interviewed these women?” No, of course they haven’t. They’re using the text as their evidence because she’s saying “I love it! Give it to me harder!,” when of course she has no choice. First of all, she wants to get paid. She has to say that, and if she wants to continue working in pornography, she has no choice.

Read the entire interview HERE.

50 Cent, Fearlessness, and You (author Robert Greene)

An anyone learn to be fearless? Robert Greene (“The 50th Law”) considers a famously unflappable rap star and gives an emphatic answer. From bigthink.com.

Robert Greene: Well I wanted to look at something kind of really underneath it all because The 48 Laws of Power I’m looking at these games that people are playing in this kind of court like atmosphere with all these politics going on and strategies being used and all of that. I wanted to like dig underneath it and go into the mind and the guts of what makes a person powerful or successful. Not just with money, but just in the sense of feeling like you’re a powerful person and I had the chance to work with 50 Cent. He was a fan of The 48 Laws. A lot of rappers are...

.....
... Not only did he manage without a mother or father in his life. He never knew his father. His mother was murdered when he was eight. Not only did he manage to be a hustler, but he managed to get out of the hustling racket. He managed to get into music, but he managed to survive that horrible world of music with the crap political games that go on within. He not only survived, but he was able to become successful, but he kept building on it and building on it. It’s a typical American rags-to-riches story. I wanted to know why. What’s underneath it? What was that quality that maybe we could learn? And in spending time with him I felt like if I could summarize it in one word it’s that this is a man who comes to life without fear. So it’s not just fear of death or bullets. That’s the obviously thing we’re talking about. I’m talking about here is a man who is not afraid of change for instance. If something happens where a situation is new, he has lost a job, he has been cut off of his record contract or something happening he doesn’t get upset or worried. He is calm. He deals with it in a fearless manner. He takes risks, but the risks are controlled, but he is not afraid of failing. He is not afraid of being criticized. He is not afraid of being different from other people. When I thought about that it’s just how powerful you could be in life if are not afraid of the things that happen to you. You’re able to feel balanced and in control and make decisions not based on exaggerating risks etcetera, but on reality. I just thought it was an incredibly powerful way to be in the world...

... When you’re afraid and fearful it’s like your mind close… the aperture of your mind closes up to this and you stop looking at the world around you. You want everything to be comfortable and familiar and the same. You stay in your house. You watch the same TV shows. Everything just… The circle closes up. When you’re not afraid and we’ve experienced it all in our lives. When suddenly you’re in a new country and you just don’t… You’re traveling and you feel open. You’re mind is active and alive. You become creative. Everything changes. This is the key to feeling powerful, but also to being creative in the world, so I wanted to get underneath all of the other things, the power, the seduction, the strategy and see that quality that lay underneath it all...

Read the full transcript or watch the video HERE.

Binyavanga Wainaina's "How to Write about Africa"

A devastating (satirical) masterpiece of African literary tropes in GRANTA, which came up in one of TN Coates' great comment discussions.

How to Write About Africa
By Binyavanga Wainaina

Always use the word 'Africa' or 'Darkness' or 'Safari' in your title. Subtitles may include the words 'Zanzibar', 'Masai', 'Zulu', 'Zambezi', 'Congo', 'Nile', 'Big', 'Sky', 'Shadow', 'Drum', 'Sun' or 'Bygone'. Also useful are words such as 'Guerrillas', 'Timeless', 'Primordial' and 'Tribal'. Note that 'People' means Africans who are not black, while 'The People' means black Africans.

Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these. If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress.

In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don't get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn't care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.

Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls, and eat things no other humans eat. Do not mention rice and beef and wheat; monkey-brain is an African's cuisine of choice, along with goat, snake, worms and grubs and all manner of game meat. Make sure you show that you are able to eat such food without flinching, and describe how you learn to enjoy it—because you care.

Taboo subjects: ordinary domestic scenes, love between Africans (unless a death is involved), references to African writers or intellectuals, mention of school-going children who are not suffering from yaws or Ebola fever or female genital mutilation.

Throughout the book, adopt a sotto voice, in conspiracy with the reader, and a sad I-expected-so-much tone. Establish early on that your liberalism is impeccable, and mention near the beginning how much you love Africa, how you fell in love with the place and can't live without her. Africa is the only continent you can love—take advantage of this. If you are a man, thrust yourself into her warm virgin forests. If you are a woman, treat Africa as a man who wears a bush jacket and disappears off into the sunset. Africa is to be pitied, worshipped or dominated. Whichever angle you take, be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed.

..........
There's a lot more. read the full post HERE.

Interview with author of important new biography on Thelonius Monk

The Atlantic

The Secret Life of Thelonious Monk
By Douglas Gorney

Free Press
Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of An American Original by Robin D. G. Kelley is the first biography to put the idiosyncratic music and eccentric behavior of this jazz legend into factual context. With unprecedented access to Monk's family and records, Kelley dispels many of the myths around the eccentric pianist and the psychiatric, legal, and professional challenges he faced before he died in 1982. Through it all, he renders Monk's world in rich detail, from hardscrabble North Carolina roots to the demanding and uncertain life of the working jazz musician. Kelley, on sabbatical from the University of Southern California, spoke to me from Oxford University, where he is the Harmsworth Professor of American History. You write about Thelonious Monk getting up from the piano and dancing around in circles on stage, falling asleep at the keyboard, sporting strange hats, staring off into space and wandering out of nightclubs during gigs. On eccentricity alone, I can see why he'd be a good subject for a book. But what were you really after?

For me, Monk had been an obsession—aesthetically and culturally—pretty much from the moment I was introduced to his music as a teenage wannabe jazz piano player. But when the subject of Thelonious Monk comes up, the eccentricities are what people talk about first, as you just did. Descriptions of his music become conflated with descriptions of his behavior, onstage and off. I wanted to disentangle those things, understand who Thelonious Monk was as a human being, and who he was as an artist.

What did you find when you teased them apart?

I won't lie to you—when I went into this project, I didn't know I would find what I ended up finding. I was surprised by the depth of Monk's musical education. I was surprised by the way he suffered, financially, as an artist—even after he became the one of the most recognizable faces in jazz and was on the cover of national magazines, he just wasn't making much money. I was surprised by his deep commitment to his family and his community. It was the mundane things that I found most fascinating, not the outlandish, eccentric character we usually associate with Monk. As a consequence, I ended up writing a very different book than what I thought I would write.

See web-only content:
http://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2010/03/the-secret-life-of-thelonious-monk/38128/
This was one of the most assiduously researched biographies I have ever read. I have a feeling that if I asked you, "What did Monk have for lunch on August 12, 1958," you could have told me—

[laughs] Almost...

Did you think that you'd get as deeply immersed in Monk's world as you did? It took you 14 years to write this book.

Well, of those 14 years, a good six was spent trying to convince the Monk family to give me access to them. Once Thelonious Monk, Jr. let me in, though, I suddenly had unprecedented access—not just papers, but family members who had never talked to anyone before. Nellie, Monk's wife, had never granted interviews until I came along.

Once that happened, I wanted to approach this project as a historian—meaning the more you find out, the more you have to look up. Too many biographies of jazz musicians are written by critics using liner notes from albums and articles and interviews in the jazz press, and then filling in the rest with their own commentary.

To tell Monk's story and the story of the people who shaped his world, I was uncovering some of the most obscure individuals, people in the jazz world we know nothing about now. And what I found was that so much of what we think we know about Monk's life is just wrong. It was so hard to figure out the most basic things—in fact, I'm still finding mistakes in the book that I'm correcting for the paperback.

So what else has jazz history had wrong? In what other ways did you find the real Monk different from the image we have of him?

With jazz musicians, issues and assumptions about of drug use always come up—particularly in Monk's case because he was...odd. So odd, in fact, that the question of mental illness always looms large when we think of him. But with access to medical records and to his family, I got a sense of a man who suffered more from prescription drugs and bad diagnosis than he did from illicit drugs and bipolar disorder. He received very bad medical treatment, bad advice and bad prescriptions for a very long time. The impact that had on his ability to function shocked me.

I was also struck by the role of his wife, Nellie. In films of Monk, we get an image of Nellie as the loyal helpmate—there's some truth to that, she was the person most responsible for keeping him together. But I really came to see her as a fully realized human being with her own goals and dreams, desires and frustrations, as someone who suffered quite a bit. One of the things my book tries to do is look at the so-called male genius in the context of his family...to understand how important his spouse was, his partner, in the realization of that genius.

........

Read the entire post HERE.

Italian scam sought to link American authors with anti-Obama statements

New Yorker

Ink
Counterfeit Roth
by Judith Thurman April 5, 2010

Last month, Paola Zanuttini, a journalist from La Repubblica, the progressive Roman newspaper, interviewed Philip Roth about his latest novel, “The Humbling,” which has recently been published in Italian. “We had a lively and intelligent conversation about my fiction,” Roth said. The Q. & A. ran on February 26th, as the cover story of Il Venerdì—La Repubblica’s Friday magazine—with a fierce-looking closeup portrait of Roth, and the title “Sex and Me.” Zanuttini focussed on the relationships of Roth’s aging protagonists with their much younger inamoratas, the feminist response to them, and his own marriages and romances. “Your descriptions of sex are ruthless,” she asserted. “Ruthless?” he countered. She backed down a little: “They describe things as they are, raw and naked.” “I am pleased by the notion that I can still be scandalous,” he said. “I thought I had lost that magic.”

The real scandal revealed by the interview, however, came at the end, when Zanuttini asked Roth why he was so “disappointed” with Barack Obama. She translated, aloud, remarks attributed to him in an article by a freelance journalist, Tommaso Debenedetti, that was published last November in Libero, a tabloid notably sympathetic to Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister of Italy (who is embroiled in his own sex scandals with much younger women). “It appears that you find him nasty, vacillating, and mired in the mechanics of power,” Zanuttini said. “But I have never said anything of the kind!” Roth objected. “It is completely contrary to what I think. Obama, in my opinion, is fantastic.” He had never heard of Debenedetti, or of Libero. The interview, with its bitter judgment of Obama’s banality, failure, and empty rhetoric about hope and change, was a complete fabrication.

The Italian blogosphere quickly and gleefully picked up the story. Libero’s editor grudgingly expressed embarrassment, and its Web site took down the interview. Debenedetti turned off his cell phone and dropped out of sight. (The only Facebook page bearing the writer’s name shows a bearded, curly-haired young hipster with a goofy expression.) Roth, however, was curious about him. “I went online to do some research,” he said. He discovered that Debenedetti had claimed to possess recordings of their “telephone conversation,” but, Roth said, “he couldn’t find the tapes.” An op-ed piece in Corriere della Sera, Italy’s newspaper of record, had praised the frankness of Roth’s critique of Obama, contrasting it to the pusillanimity of Italians in calling their own leader to account. “But what I was really looking for,” Roth continued, “were other interviews by Debenedetti, and I found one, with John Grisham, that was published in three newspapers”—Il Resto del Carlino and La Nazione, both conservative, and Il Giorno, which is centrist. “They contained the same sort of denunciations, which sounded implausible to me.” (“Last year’s enthusiasm is remote now,” Grisham allegedly told Debenedetti. “People are angry with Obama for having done little or nothing and having promised too much.”)

Roth asked his agent, Andrew Wylie, to contact Grisham’s agent, David Gernert, and, sure enough, the Grisham “interview” proved to be another hoax.

.............

Read the full story HERE.

NYT Article About Difficulties of Digital Archiving

If anyone has tried to access files they wrote on media that no one uses anymore, they can relate. How long will my digital photographs last? The words on this blog?

NYT

March 16, 2010
Fending Off Digital Decay, Bit by Bit
By PATRICIA COHEN

Among the archival material from Salman Rushdie currently on display at Emory University in Atlanta are inked book covers, handwritten journals and four Apple computers (one ruined by a spilled Coke). The 18 gigabytes of data they contain seemed to promise future biographers and literary scholars a digital wonderland: comprehensive, organized and searchable files, quickly accessible with a few clicks.

But like most Rushdian paradises, this digital idyll has its own set of problems. As research libraries and archives are discovering, “born-digital” materials — those initially created in electronic form — are much more complicated and costly to preserve than anticipated.

Electronically produced drafts, correspondence and editorial comments, sweated over by contemporary poets, novelists and nonfiction authors, are ultimately just a series of digits — 0’s and 1’s — written on floppy disks, CDs and hard drives, all of which degrade much faster than old-fashioned acid-free paper. Even if those storage media do survive, the relentless march of technology can mean that the older equipment and software that can make sense of all those 0’s and 1’s simply don’t exist anymore.

Imagine having a record but no record player.

All of which means that archivists are finding themselves trying to fend off digital extinction at the same time that they are puzzling through questions about what to save, how to save it and how to make that material accessible.
........

Read the full article and view media HERE.

Noël Coward: The Playboy Was a Spy

New York Times
April 13, 2008
Essay
The Playboy Was a Spy
By STEPHEN KOCH

“Celebrity was wonderful cover,” Noël Coward said near the end of his life. “My disguise would be my own reputation as a bit of an idiot ... a merry playboy.”

In 1973, a month before he died, the epitome of flippant British sophistication decided to permit himself a few clipped words about one last secret. In a filmed interview with the biographer of Sir William Stephenson, the spymaster code-named “Intrepid,” Coward made his sole public statement about his wartime espionage work. A scrupulous public servant, he got clearance before discussing how he had been a spy for England, trained (with his friend Ian Fleming) in covert action in the secret headquarters of Bletchley Park, which, as he tossed off with characteristic offhandedness, “I should have thought would be fairly easy to find by any German agent with the faintest enterprise.” Working with Stephenson (among others), he had toured three continents singing, being amusing, acting as a courier, filing eyes-only reports on influential people and probably meeting covert British contacts. “I learned a lot from the technical people,” Coward said, and “could have made a career in espionage” — except, he sighed, “my life’s been full enough of intrigue as it is.”

The revelation did not come as a total surprise. In his autobiography, “Future Indefinite” (1954), Coward had written in a vague way about his war work. The surprise in 1973 was how serious and official it had been. Yet until the recent publication of “The Letters of Noël Coward,” edited by Barry Day, few have had a firm grip on what the man really did as a spy. Now, Coward’s letters and Day’s excellent commentary have pulled a fair amount of the covert nitty-gritty out of the archival murk.

Coward’s spycraft had a Scarlet Pimpernel side. The idea was to use his public personality — the merry playboy, the “don’t ask/don’t tell” gay celebrity — as a mask for his passionate antifascism. By 1936, Coward’s unchic loathing of appeasement and Neville Chamberlain (“that bloody conceited old sod”) was turning him into something of a Churchill bore. In 1938, when his old friend Ivor Novello shed “tears of relief” over Chamberlain’s let’s-pretend peace, Coward threw a punch that nearly decked him. “We have nothing to worry about,” he wrote to another friend, “but the destruction of civilization.” His intense patriotism could get a little thick — “It’s still a pretty exciting thing to be English,” he declared in a 1931 curtain call — but he knew how to give it a comic glow. Perhaps a lifetime of concealing his own private life gave him a knack for the clandestine. In any case, he said, “I wanted to prove my integrity to myself.”

So he played the fool. “I was the perfect silly ass,” he said. “Nobody ... considered I had a sensible thought in my head, and they would say all kinds of things that I’d pass along.”

It was a senior diplomat named Robert Vansittart, routinely dismissed in the Foreign Office as an anti-Nazi Cassandra, who in late 1937 or 1938 spotted how to use Coward’s flamboyance, intelligence and flawless memory to help tend an unofficial, off-the-books anti-Nazi intelligence network he had set up across Europe. Vansittart dispatched Coward on tour in such un-Cowardy places as Warsaw, Moscow and Helsinki, where he sang songs, gauged Nazi influence among star-struck V.I.P.’s and (very likely) contacted sources on the ground. If he fooled the V.I.P.’s, Coward failed to fool the Nazis. He was soon on the Gestapo’s list of people to be “liquidated” when Britain fell.

When war came, Coward was sent to Paris as a figurehead in a propaganda office, where he made it part of his cover to mock intelligence work as childish games carried out by inept duffers. When someone proposed leafleting the enemy with speeches from Chamberlain and Lord Halifax, he recalled, “I wrote in a memorandum that if the policy of His Majesty’s Government was to bore the Germans to death I didn’t think we had enough time.”

Being Noël Coward, he also partied — notably with the recently abdicated pro-Nazi Duke of Windsor and his more intelligent and even more pro-Nazi wife. The Windsors may have looked like Coward’s type, but Coward had always privately despised the former king. In 1936, he wrote, “I’ve known for years that he had a common mind and liked second-rate people, and I am sure it is a good thing for England that he abdicated.”

By 1940, the Windsors had graduated from mediocrity into real menace. One factor in the abdication had been that the prime minister had been told, reliably, that the woman inflaming the king’s already fascistic sentiments was a friend of Ribbentrop and the next thing to a Nazi agent. After the abdication, the Windsors were married in the residence of a Nazi collaborator. As the Battle of Britain approached, British intelligence believed — correctly — that Hitler, assisted by Ribbentrop, planned to restore the duke to the throne as a quisling monarch. Worst of all, intelligence suspected that the couple may have been complicit in this treachery.

Here was a man Coward had mistrusted even before he became an enemy of his country. And yet — hi ho! Off to another Windsor soiree! We can only speculate whether Coward was keeping unofficial tabs on the couple. When the facts started surfacing in the ’60s, his sole comment was two dry lines about the duke in his diary: “Secret papers have disclosed his pro-Nazi perfidy, which, of course, I was perfectly aware of at the time. ... What a monumental ass he has always been!”

Coward’s contacts were at the top. Visiting America in the spring of 1940, he received a surprise invitation to the White House, where he kept the dinner party in stitches singing “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” straight through, very fast, twice. Then, over a private nightcap, Roosevelt discussed his desire to “manage” the march of events toward aid for Britain.

A month later, Coward was invited back. There were no more songs. It was just after Dunkirk, and the talk was grim. Back in London a month later, Churchill’s secretary handed him this memo: “Mr. Noël Coward ... would like to see you tonight if you can spare the time, as he has been staying with the president.” But Churchill had a mixed response to Coward as intermediary. “I had a gnawing suspicion that there was something about me that he didn’t like,” Coward wrote.

Still, Coward’s involvement in secret work deepened. Sometime during that same visit, on an unmarked floor in a gloomy building near Victoria Station, he had his first meeting with Intrepid, who immediately sent him back to the Americas, with a stop in Hollywood. Guided by a fellow celebrity-spy, Cary Grant (!), he was to assess pro- and anti-British opinion. On the right, a minority of stars — Errol Flynn, for example — were suspected of being pro-Nazi. On the left, Stalinists were using fronts like the Yanks Are Not Coming Committee to rationalize Stalin’s alliance with Hitler and the defeat of Britain, while the American Communist Party began a campaign denouncing Coward as an agent of British warmongers.

How important was Coward’s work? We still don’t know the details, but in 1941, Intrepid was sufficiently impressed to propose Coward for a still-mysterious job requiring approval from the top. On April 2, word descended almost certainly from Churchill himself, and the word was “no.” Coward was too conspicuous. He called it the “forbiddance.”

The star was only briefly crushed. “With me,” he said, “everything always turns out for the best, because I am bloody well determined that it shall!!” Looking for another way to fight, he vowed to compose the best patriotic song; make the best patriotic movie; and write the best play. The song was “London Pride.” The movie was “In Which We Serve.” And a week after the “forbiddance,” Coward packed off to a resort on the Welsh coast, where he sat down and wrote “Blithe Spirit” in five days flat. A bit of froth about a man haunted by the ghost of his dead wife, “Blithe Spirit” ran just shy of 2,000 performances. It kept Londoners laughing for the rest of the war.

Stephen Koch’s most recent book is “The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Murder of José Robles.”

Cubans in Spain: In Cultural Haven, Cubans Need Not Choose Sides

NYT
August 3, 2007
Madrid Journal
In Cultural Haven, Cubans Need Not Choose Sides
By MIRTA OJITO

MADRID — This is surely not the only city in the world where a handful of Cubans can spend a day together and avoid talking politics. But it is certainly the preferred one for Cuban artists and intellectuals of all political stripes, who find the freedom here that they could never have in Havana and the opportunities that may elude them in Miami, both polarizing cities in the endless debate about Fidel Castro and the nature of exile.

To wit: In a nondescript musical studio here recently, two Cubans who for years were separated by politics got together to record an album and announce their first joint concert tour of Spain. They were the legendary pianist Bebo Valdés, 88, who left Cuba in 1960 and has vowed not to return until there is a democratic government in place, and his son, the jazz pianist Chucho Valdés, 65, who keeps a home in Havana and still informs the Cuban Ministry of Culture of his artistic whereabouts.

With two Cuban exiles from Miami, the producer Nat Chediak and his wife, Conchita Espinosa, and a Cuban-American filmmaker, Carlos Carcas, who was raised in Miami and lives in Madrid, they talked mostly about music, not an unusual scene in a city that has become a welcoming neutral ground for the great many Cuban artists and intellectuals who live here.

“Madrid has been one of the few places in the world where they have been able to find a breather,” Mr. Chediak said.

Cultural expressions — from literature to music — that cannot possibly take place in Havana because of government censorship and may be difficult to negotiate in Miami because of the fervent politics of some Cuban exiles, are finding an outlet and an audience in the country many Cubans still call, and not always in jest, la madre patria, the mother country.

The reasons vary, and range from Cuba’s shared heritage and language with Spain to the fact that for many Cubans, Havana and Miami continue to be the two extremes of a political spectrum that forces Cubans to define themselves by making only one, but crucial, decision: the rejection or acceptance of the Castro brothers’ government by opting for exile or staying on the island. Miami begs the question; Madrid accepts ambiguity.

“In Cuba and Miami, there is no middle ground,” said Boris Larramendi, 37, one of the lead musicians of Habana Abierta, a group that has already released three albums in Madrid and has played both in Cuba and Miami. “Here you can feel somewhat distant from both extremes and take certain positions that would be difficult to maintain in Havana or Miami, particularly in Cuba, where I know that if I said the things I say here, I’d be jailed.”

Cuban performers and intellectuals who live in Madrid say they do not necessarily reject the option of living in South Florida. Spain has simply become an increasingly easier country to get to because the Cuban government is more lenient with exit permits to Europe than to the United States. Those who decide to stay here find a welcoming attitude because of the familiar ties that for generations have bound the two countries together.

Washington’s policies, too, have contributed to the mushrooming presence of Cuban intellectuals here. While a decade ago, under President Clinton, Cuban academics and artists freely traveled to cities like New York, Chicago and Miami, and returned to the island, or not, the Bush administration has severely curtailed such cultural exchanges. They are happening, instead, in Spain’s universities, cafes and concert halls.

It is difficult to determine who among the Cubans here intends to stay or is just passing through. Kelvis Ochoa, one of the lead musicians of Habana Abierta, for example, is now in Cuba. Mr. Larramendi said he did not know if Mr. Ochoa planned to return or stay. He has not asked.

Some writers and musicians say they will never live in Cuba again under the Castro government; others are reluctant to commit publicly to any political position for fear they will not be allowed to return to their families on the island. The result is a revolving door of Cuban intellectuals and artists.

“Here, what’s important is your work, not your biography,” said Antonio José Ponte, a 42-year-old Cuban writer who has lived in Madrid for one year. “In a city like Miami people want to know who you are, what you think, when you left. They want to know who they are talking to. Here, the outlines are fuzzier.”

Yet, Mr. Ponte said he understood that eagerness to know: “It’s the nature of the altered and confusing state of being an exile.” The increasing importance of Spain in Cuba’s cultural life is the newest twist in the relations between the countries. In the 19th century, when Cubans were waging war against Spain to obtain their independence, rebels were sent here as punishment. Later, many Spaniards escaping the civil war here found refuge in Cuba. And, in the 1960s, Cuban refugees fleeing Castro found haven here, but the majority eventually moved to Miami or Puerto Rico. Now, for those eager to have close contact with Cuban artists and thinkers, Madrid has become a necessary stop.

“It’s been an accidental and slow process,” said Raúl Rivero, who left Cuba for Madrid in the spring of 2005, after two years of imprisonment for his work as an independent journalist and dissident.

Even if they could travel to Miami, many artists and intellectuals choose to stay here for “practical reasons.” They have the backing of publishing houses, art galleries and even the film and television industry, in a country where the Spanish-language market is not a niche business, but the only one.

Yet, Mr. Rivero said going to Miami was a problem for Cuban intellectuals and artists who were simply passing through because the Cuban government scrutinized those visits.

Some artists, like Chucho Valdés, have reached such heights of popularity and professional achievement that they have much more freedom than younger, emerging artists. Mr. Valdés informs the Cuban Cultural Ministry of where he performs, but he does not seek permission, he said.

He would be eager to play in Havana with his father, he said. Then he paused. “But I don’t know if Bebo will be willing to go. That’s a different story.”

His father said there was no reason for him to return to Cuba.

“If the regime changes and there is a constitution and I don’t have to ask permission from anyone to return to my own country, then I’ll go back and play,” he said. “And that would be a joyful day.”