Apropos the painful, nonsensical problem in Homestead about suspending a musical event in the U.S.-Cuba cultural exchange, I always try to picture the essence of a true exchange of that type between nations or groups divided by governments with different political ideologies.
I visualize the following analogy:
My Spanish neighbor invites me some Saturday to a barbecue in his back yard and I, to show my good will and thank him for the invitation, sing to him an out-of-tune Cuban folk song while strumming an out-of-tune guitar. He listens to me, spellbound (or fakes being spellbound) and applauds me at the end. And while he's at it, he pours me another glass of Rioja wine.
The next weekend, to reciprocate, I invite my neighbor to my home and he stomps a Galician “giga”on my living-room parquet. He resembles a colt kicking the wooden floor (he almost breaks it) but at the end I give him a big hug for his effort and pour him a shot of rum.
That's cultural exchange. Warts and all.
If we expand the exchange, my wife, who's an American, bakes a keylime pie (which is better than apple pie) and takes it to the Galician's wife the following week.
And it doesn't end there. The Galician's wife, who's French, comes to our dining room the next day and sings to us La Vie en Rose, accompanying herself on a leaky accordion with two missing keys. But we applaud her, just the same.
Actually, the keylime pie gave my neighbors an acid stomach and neither my wife nor I understood the lyrics the French lady sang (I was too busy staring down her cleavage), but the cultural exchange remained intact.
But what ruins a cultural exchange is for me to go to my Spanish neighbor's home and, instead of strumming a Cuban folk song, I pull out a bugle and blow the “off-with-their-heads” call sounded by the Cuban mambises when they fought the Spaniards during the independence wars.
That raises hackles, even though the rumble between the island and Spain began a century and a half go.
It doesn't help if my neighbor, in reprisal, comes to my living room to recite an ode to the Spanish fleet sunk by the Yanqui armada in 1898 off the coast of Santiago de Cuba, so my American wife can hear.
What makes it worse is when my American wife (offended) goes to my neighbor's house and reads to his French wife the names of American GIs who died during the Normandy landing and, on top of that, complains that France did not support the coalition forces against Iraq.
By then, the cultural exchange between my neighbor and me has turned worse than a poorly refereed game between the Heat and the Celtics. It ends in a fight.
That’s why when we talk about a cultural exchange between Cuba and the United States (obviating that Miami is not the American Union), when it comes to island Cubans coming to Miami and Miami Cubans going to the island, there is no room on the Malecón for Willy Chirino to sing “Ya Viene Llegando.”
Just as there is no room in Miami Beach for Silvio Rodríguez to sing “La Canción del Elegido.”
Please understand that. Because that both sides suffered casualties that need to be respected.
A real cultural exchange is, let's see, the Florida Philharmonic playing at Agramonte Park in Camagüey and the Cuban National Ballet dancing at the Miami Convention Center.
It's Vida Guerra with her silicone derrière (not Gloria Estefan with her harangues) giving interviews on Cuban TV and the Buena Vista Social Club entertaining patrons at a Calle Ocho club – not the Cuban Navy Band playing outside the Versailles Restaurant.
Let's see if we Cubans can learn that cultural exchange is good will and protocol, not hassle and propaganda.
Our best cultural exponents should be ambassadors with permanent smiles and agile minds who can forestall embarrassing situations that might annoy some people.
Our journalists should not needle the visitors into saying something that can be used as fuel for a media confrontation.
Promoters and their associates should not control their artists, as did Romay, the owner of Channel 41, with Los Aldeanos and Silvito the Free. Otherwise, they should hire puppets, not artists.
The artists in a cultural exchange (from both shores) have no reason to be political messengers or spokesmen for pressure groups. Not from one side or the other. In other words, avoid exacting political statements from artists, the way Miami yellow journalists constantly try to do. And that goes for the other shore, too.
