CFI

Inquiries

Volume Three, Number Three - Spring 2003

To Talk or Not To Talk?

The question of the United States' relations with the rest of the world is on all of our minds these days. The focus is, understandably, on the Middle East. And yet, some 90 miles off the coast of Key West sits a neighbor with whom our relations seem to be frozen in time. At the Center for Free Inquiry, we decided to explore the current state of U.S. - Cuban relations, not through diplomats and policy wonks, but through the eyes and hearts of writers wrestling with their own Cuban identities. The result was a symposium, on March 16, 17, 18, 2003, titled "Identity, Autonomy, and Assimilation: Cuba, the United States, and the Future." Just a short time after our symposium, the Cuban government, perhaps seeking to take advantage of the world's preoccupation with events in Iraq, embarked on another round of systematic violation of the civil rights of Cuban dissidents. These events have served to underscore the fundamental question of U.S. foreign policy towards Cuba: Is engagement or isolation the correct policy? In ways we never anticipated when we held our symposium, the conversations that took place on our campus offer potential insights into the subtleties and complexities of that question.

For featured participants, we invited four writers who differed from one another in both the nature of their relationship to Cuba and in the genre of literature in which they choose to explore those relationships. Specifically, we invited: Louis A. Pérez, Jr., J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and author of numerous works on Cuban history; Gustavo Pérez-Firmat, David Feinson Professor in the Humanities, Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Columbia University in New York City, a writer and critic whose works include a moving tale of his own struggle with identity: Next Year in Cuba: a Cubano's Coming-of-Age in America; Ana Menéndez, a former New York Times Fellow and reporter (for The Miami Herald and The Orange County Register) turned fiction writer whose short story titled "In Cuba I was a German Shepherd" was awarded the Pushcart Prize; and Ambrosio Fornet, a Havana-based columnist, literary critic, and screenwriter who currently presides over the Editorial Council of the Union of Cuban Writers and Artists.

Each accepted our invitation to participate in two-and-a-half days of spirited discussion, and made their plans to travel to our wooded campus in southern Indiana. Professors Pérez and Pérez-Firmat came from Chapel Hill and New York City, respectively. Anna Menéndez's journey was more of an adventure, starting from her current home in Istanbul. But it was the saga of Ambrosio Fornet's experience that turned out to be a metaphor for relations between our two countries. He accepted our invitation six months in advance and immediately began the process of securing the proper travel permissions and papers. As the date of the symposium approached, and the necessary documents were not forthcoming from U.S. officials, he and we both began to make frequent inquiries. "Don't worry," we were told. "His request has not been denied, just not yet approved. We will get to it soon." They were still telling us that on the day that Mr. Fornet was to depart, making the trip impossible. A sort of unofficial isolation was to be the order of the day.

But what happened next calls into question the very possibility of isolation in today's world. In this age of global communication, Mr. Fornet's physical absence was simply a minor inconvenience. Through the internet, we chatted with him each day of the symposium; he sent us his paper in electronic form and it was read at the symposium by a surrogate; he even fielded questions from Hanover students via e-mail. In short, there was significant cultural interchange between Havana and Hanover, though officially it hadn't happened. Though we deplore the actions that the Cuban government has taken in recent weeks, we have decided to share with you, in this issue of Inquiries, the fruits of our dialogue in the form of the views of a Havana insider, Ambrosio Fornet. In the next issue, we will contrast those views with those of a second generation "Cuban exile."

Jeffrey Brautigam

Jeffrey Brautigam is the Director of the Center for Free Inquiry at Hanover College, where he also teaches modern European history and the history of science.