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Can A Poet Be More Accurate Than A Journalist? - II.- Cuba

This is the second and last part of Romanian poet and essayist Andrei Codrescu’s series on Reflections on Journalism. His trip to Cuba, of which he tells here some misadventures, was finally made a book called “Aye, Cuba: A Socio-Erotic Journey”. Codrescu, who learned journalism working for mainstream media in the Ünited States, also answers here to the question that gives title to this text.

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I went to Cuba in 1997, just before Pope John Paul IIs visit to the island. This time, I only had an NPR producer with me, Art Silverman, who did all his own recording, and a photographer, David Graham, who’d never been out of the U.S., but was well known for his photographs of middle-class Americans and the contemporary North American landscape. So we had one experienced producer, who’d been almost everywhere, including China, a poet with occasionally crazy ideas, and a photographer who found the tropical colors of Cuba dizzying. In fact, he never got over the fact that Cuba, seen through a photo lens, looks so sexy and fotogenic, that it’s almost impossible to photograph anything else. Having grown up in Romania, I was more alert about the hidden horrors that lay under all that tropical shimmer, and I was planning on not letting myself be seduced by it. Consequently, the sober prose in the book contrasts starkly with David’s delirious photographs. There is an interesting parallel here: David’s work has often been compared with that of Walker Evans (a “Walker Evans in color” as someone dubbed him). In 1933 Walker Evans went to Cuba with a left-wing journalist, Carleton eals, and together they produced a book called “The Crime of Cuba.” The journalist’s prose seethes with marxist and populist cliches and angry rants, while Walker Evans’ 33 pictures are filled, even in black and white, with light and sexy street scenes. No matter what Evans believed, his camera had a mind of its own, just like David’s. I don’t know to what extent the medium becomes the message in places as fotogenic and romanticised as Cuba, but there are times when neither words nor pictures function the way their author intends.

I was planning not to fall in that trap, so we pre-planned carefully a series of interviews with well-known Cubans, including dissidents and officials, leaving a smaller amount of time for improvisation and impromptu encounters. Naturally, the improvised and the impromptu soon took precedence over the planned (which sounded often rehearsed). One of my innovations, which my producer actually liked, was to start each morning at breakfast with a collective poem, an Exquisite Corpse, before setting out to find our stories. An Exquisite Corpse works this way: a person writes a line, folds the paper so that only the last word is visible, hands to the next person to do the same, and so on, until the heet of paper is full. I wanted to do this in the morning for two reasons: 1. we wouldn’t have to talk (I hate talking first thing in the morning), and 2. we would have a kind of psychic, if not factual, record of the beginning of each day. As it turned out, these collaborations became quite prophetic because they predicted, in some inexplicable way, the unfolding of the day to come. Our collective subconcious had all kinds of clues for us.

Example:

EXUISITE CORPSE No. 1
by Ariel Pena, David Graham, Art Silverman, and Andrei Codrescu
while eating indifferent fish at Capri Hotel Restaurant
Underage fusion brought me this far
When the Pope kisses Castro a plume of black smoke will spew & they    
will both croak

And the Lord said: let the bubbles rise to a veritable throb.
Communist lava congealed with Buicks
hitchhike on the Pope mobile.
The corpses of generals are full of sugar.
Will there be a crystal through which to see the world?
pig skin, pork snouts, ways out.

Many unexpected things happened to us in Cuba, but I will only mention one that seems to me in keeping with the idea that there is an area where journalism and poetry meet, and that a journalist has to have a poet inside, just as a travelling poet must have a journalist inside if he is to render credible a world in words. For a poet, Cuba can be a delight to the senses: my nose, recorded, quite independently of my mind, the intoxicating scent of frying fish, tropical wind, cheap perfume, sweat, and diesel. My ears delighted in the sounds of voices on the street, sounds from transistor radios, laughter floating from house balconies. My eyes were kidnapped by the slim beauties walking by, not just the deliberate ones on the Malecon. My skin picked up a thin film of salty oceanic sweat and induced euphoria. At the same time, I was fighting all this poetry with what I knew to be true: much of the smell that delighted me was the stink of poverty; the sound I heard was composed of discreet parts, many of them angry or desperate, and  those slim and gorgeous bodies had been shaped by hunger not fashion magazines and voluntary diets.

We hired a translator, Ariel Pena, a young Salvadoran woman, who was married to the then BBC correspondent in Havana, Tom . One morning, Ariel arrived early in the lobby of the Capri Hotel, before any of us came down. Hotel security asked her rudely to leave. When she asked why, one of them said, “Because you’re a jinetera!” Offended, Ariel tried to explain that she was the translator for a group of journalists, but they would have none of it. One of them grabbed her arm. Ariel shouted: “What makes you think I’m a jinetera?” He laughed and pointed to her skin, which was only a little darker than that of the whitest Castilian among them. This truly infuriated Ariel who had come to Cuba two years before believing almost every cliche of  Cuban propaganda, among which was the idea that there was no racial discrimination in Cuba, that black and white were invisible to all and that harmony reigned. She had been disillusioned about most things that she’d first believed, but discrimination because of skin color just wasn’t one of them. Now she saw red. She resisted and started making a scene. We arrived downstairs just as one of the goons was about to pick her up and throw her physically into the street. Art sized up the scene quickly and stuck his biggest microphone right between Ariel and her aggressor and I started asking a rapid series of qestions that Ariel translated even as she was calling the guy some nasty names. David clicked away. Now, normally, because of the way I’d seen people react to microphones and cameras elsewhere, I expected the goons to back off and for the whole thing to blow over. Instead, one of them left briefly and came back with a guy in a short-sleeved khaki shirt, who was obviously his boss. This guy ordered us to hand over our equipment and to sit down in a remote corner of the lobby, to wait there until we were interviewed one by one by a major from the Interior Ministry who was going to arrive shortly. All of this happened pretty quickly, without attracting much attention.

Ariel was the first to be interviewed and she came out looking shaken. There had been some incident a few days before, a hotel bombing, that involved a salvadoran national, or so the officials said, and the officer had practically accused Ariel of being part of the plot. This kind of charge, in a police state, is as good as proven once it is made. All that remains is fabricating the evidence. She had called all that nonsense and had insisted that she’d been discriminated against because she was dark-skinned. There was shouting. No wonder she was shaken. While Art and David were comforting her, I was called in. The major greeted me jovially, “Codrescu! Romanian, eh?” “I said, “I want my translator!” He looked at me reproachfully. “Romanian. You don’t need a translator. You speak Spanish.” I protested some more, but he decided to ignore me and proceeded to reminisce, “Ah, the Romanians,” he said, “we loved them. We hated the Russians. But Romanians, they are our Latin brothers! Tzuica! Pizda!” He tried a few more Romanian words on me and fully expected me to share his sympathies.

A lot of things were going on here. Mainly, the Cubans were determined to remove at all cost the idea that this was a racially-provoked incident. They were quite ready to accuse Ariel of being a terrorist rather than have it get out that there is skin-color discrimination in Cuba. We were there on the eve of the Pope’s historic visit to the island, and the attention of the world’s press was focused on Cuba. Secondly, since I wasn’t REALLY a Norte Americano, like most of the crew, the major thought that might find it in my Latin heart to sympathise. He said, “Have her give up the idea that this had anything with race and we’ll forget everything! There is no racism in Cuba!” I didn’t want to point out to him there that the Cuban Communist Party’s Central Committee, including Fidel, were all white. That the poorest of the poor in Cuba, which was definitely a matter of degree, were dark-skinned. In the following days I followed up on this story and discovered that racism was not just alive and well in Cuba, but that it thrived and was institutionally manipulated.

We were at an impasse, under hotel-arrest, but everything was resolved the way all things are resolved in most countries in the world. Ariel had succeeded in telephoning her husband who appealed to someone higher than the major in the ministry’s hierarchy, and some guy with a star on his shoulder soon appeared and declared the incident over. He also promised to look into the behavior of hotel security and to note our opinion of Ariel’s treatment.

There is nothing like a little brush with the authorities to take the poetry out of a beautiful day. Even David’s camera, unfailingly optimistic until this point, started seeking out darker corners. And so, another distinction between journalists and poets was driven home to me: journalists never waste connections: their cell-phones are full of useful numbers. Reporting from any place can involve danger and one should know how to protect one’s back and flanks. It is all very well to believe in improvisation, but there are plenty of suspicious people who don’t believe for a second that you are really, really improvising. Poets have no institutional affiliation, no identification card, so it helps to be associated with a media organisation just to be able to flash some credentials.

In Latin America, poets have often been drafted to be diplomats. Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz are best known for representing Chile and Mexico and doing a pretty good job. In North America we name ambassadors from among campaign contributors, so it’s little wonder that our prosaic representatives rarely gain the kind of respect accorded to renowned poets. On the other hand, most situations in the world today call for prose, not poetry. As struggles over resources, demographic shifts, and climate changes are rapidly transforming everything, prosaic and sober ambassadors are needed as much as sober and scrupulously factual journalists, to keep up with the increasing pace of change. But honest journalism must rely on poetry also, because the best now poets no longer romanticise: they demistify, try to unmask delusion, and still experience the world with open senses, with all those organs of pleasure and attention without which facts and figures are only information.

We are drowning in information now. How do we bring it to life?

Call me and my two thousand friends. I titled this talk, misleadingly, “can a poet be more accurate tha a journalist?” because I know that in Latin America, like in Romania, poets are still prized, and many of them practice journalism to make a living, or from a sense of mission. Gabriel Garcia Marquez springs to mind, of course. Marquez is not MORE accurate in his fiction than in his journalism, but his art would have been impossible without his journalism. So, to answer the question of the title, a poet cannot be more accurate than a journalist, but a journalist has to be accurate so that poets can continue to be credible. Being both is, of course, ideal. One day, I’ll be both.

See also from this series:

• Can A Poet Be More Accurate Than A Journalist?
  Por Andrei Codrescu
• Construir un medio con valores, no modas
  By Patrice Schneider
• El Faro and the Challenges of Journalism
  By Jim Bettinger

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