A recent editorial by Cuban author Roberto
Zurbano of Casa de las Américas, published on March 23-24, 2013 in the
“New York Times” (NYT) is a lesson in courage and poetic, historically
situated political insights on the part of the author; and bad
translation, cultural insensitivity, historical blindness, and at best
misguided if not deliberately mendacious editorial interference, most
particularly in the final titling. Let’s start with the title: the
original piece in Spanish was “El país que viene: ¿y mi Cuba negra?” (The
Country to Come: and My Black Cuba?) What makes Zurbano’s title
historically true to Cuba’s distinctive commitment to social equality, and
rich with transformative possibilities, is how he explores the future of
Cuba and true equality for its black population while locating his
critique within an active, ongoing Cuban revolutionary process in which
justice must be worked for and cannot be taken for granted. This
understanding of a future to be constructed is significant because the
whole essay/editorial builds on the unfinished nature of the Cuban
revolution, particularly in light of new economic changes that the country
is living through, unleashing new social realities, some good, some
troubling.
I was in Cuba when Zurbano received the NYT translation along with the
multi-page legal contract (in English) stating that the NYT had final say
on both the editorial and its title. This translated and highly edited
draft appeared with a different first (but not final) title, with multiple
insertions of text ostensibly to clarify aspects of Cuban society but with
a great deal of political subtext, and introducing language Zurbano
recognized as contradicting his intentions and potentially politically
problematic. As he knew I was a translator and Cuba scholar, he asked me
to help him respond to the Times and de-code the changes they made to the
piece. The title was the first major change: it now read “For Blacks in
Cuba, The Revolution Isn’t Over”. This title preserved some of the
open-ended element of the original while introducing a subtle but a
somewhat acceptable shift in emphasis toward a similar comment by Henry
Louis Gates, Jr. in his recent documentary about race in Cuba, noting that
a “second revolution” needs to take place to deal with racial inequality
on the island. The title change highlights political and cultural
differences, shifting emphasis from a Cuban emphasis on “el país que
viene”, the country to come, which is followed by the question about Cuban
blacks, to a more typical U.S. framing foregrounding race and suggesting a
determinable future to come. Despite this change in emphasis, the title
was acceptable to the intent of the essay. However, the final title —which
was printed without Zurbano’s consent, and without consideration of
consequences for him — was “For Blacks in Cuba, the Revolution Hasn’t
Begun”.
This about face in the title is not only appallingly false but flies in
the face of the historical record. Even though the Op-ed’s contents
contradict the title, the damage is done. First, it states that fifty-four
years of Revolution have done virtually nothing for Cuba’s black and brown
population, which is so factually inaccurate as to be laughable. Cuba
today has more black doctors, lawyers, engineers, and teachers than ever
before in its history; it has ended legal discrimination in public spaces,
the workplace and schools. Black contributions to the Cuban military,
sports, and culture are huge, not to mention Cuba’s role in ending
apartheid in South Africa. Second, it lays all the blame on the Revolution
or the government. Now the government in Cuba plays a large role in
society, way greater, say, than in the U.S., but even in the U.S. no one
would claim that the racism prevalent in America is entirely the
government’s responsibility. The U.S. has implemented anti-discriminatory
laws, all public forms of discrimination have been banned and yet racism
and racial inequality are still a scourge here. Schools, workplaces,
housing, health care still carry consequences of racial inequalities
resulting in racial disparities in health, educational, and economic
attainment. Is this the responsibility of only the government? No, it
takes the efforts of public and private groups, community and individuals.
And the same holds true for Cuba. The Times’s attitude actually reveals a
kind of paternalism about the Cuban state that ordinary Cubans do not
accept.
Third, it ignores the deeper history of racism in Cuba that Zurbano does
address, centuries of slavery and the kind of anti-black sentiments that
it engendered, decades of exclusion during the period of Cuba’s Republic
(including racial violence in 1912) and certain types of segregation based
on a family’s housing and history of economic and educational achievement
at the time of the Revolution. Although Cuba’s dynamics of race never
included the virulence of Jim Crow America, specific consequences of
slavery generated through specific colonial histories and their political
evolution remain problematic in Cuba as they do all over the world.
Significantly, as Editor of Casa de las Americas press, Zurbano edited and
introduced a new edition of Franz Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks, a text
which confronts how Blacks internalize messages of inferiority, lies the
colonial master tells to protect privilege, regardless of the violent
costs.
Zurbano’s original Spanish text offers a politics and poetics of
historical change in the making of a future yet to be determined which is
intricately woven throughout the text and worth discussing in detail. The
first paragraph of the original Spanish speaks about the recent economic
changes: “The results of these gestures which are not only economic, will
bring about true change and permit Cuba to exit History and enter, once
and for all, into the Present. The Future (the country to come) approaches
swiftly, desperately, and in that race dreams and utopias shared until
recently by Cubans fall by the wayside.” Zurbano is not suggesting that
Cuba will avoid history, but a certain static, utopian vision of History
(with a capital “H”) that seems entirely tethered to the past and unable
to move forward. His use of the Present, then, is to highlight the notion
that Cuba has some catching up to do before it can go fully forward into
the future.
His reference to the future recalls Zizek’s distinction of futur and
avenir in French, both which translate as future in English. Futur, he
claim is a “future as the continuation of the present as the full
actualization of tendencies already in existence; while avenir points
towards, a discontinuity with the present —avenir is what is to come (a
venir), not just what will be.” (Slavoj Zizek, The Year of Dreaming
Dangerously, Verso, 2012, p. 134) The original title, el país que viene is
an example of avenir, that interruption or disruption of the automatic
drift to the fixed point of the future. It is the notion of avenir that
ends the piece, when he says “The country as yet to come has not arrived,
but aside from dreaming it, I go out each morning searching for it.” This
leap into the unknown is what underlines the whole piece and is entirely
missing from what the New York Times printed.
In addition to these political and historical mistranslations, the editors
initially inserted text ostensibly to clarify historical or contemporary
information unfamiliar to U.S. readers but clearly emphasizing a
particular editorial vision and reporting bias. These included irrelevant
references to Fidel and Raúl Castro. Again, Zurbano is looking at the
future (avenir) where Cuban society is building something different
(youth, blacks, women). The Times was always trying to explain everything
through Raúl (or Fidel), a fairly common feature of Western reporting.
Zurbano’s piece is trying to move beyond those clichés and several
insertions made by the New York Times were taken out at his request.
Another section added had to do with an insertion about the Special
Period, which does not appear with such detail as in Zurbano’s original
piece. One can understand the Times’s decision, since not enough of its
readership might be familiar with what Cuba went through in the nineties.
But even here the idea was to highlight the difficulties of 1990-1994 and
then state that the average Cuban salary is $20 a month. The author
instead insisted on inserting information about the Cuban social safety
net (education, low or no rent, health care). But that was not enough
since putting the Cuban salary equivalence in dollars is already setting
up an unfair comparison that makes Cuba look like a country where people
eat once every three days. Anyone who has been to Cuba knows that
despite the shortages, high prices (for products priced in CUC) and lack
of variety of food items, Cubans still eat reasonably well, with the help
of el invento. But to simply put this figure without context or any
qualifying data or interpretation is irresponsible at best.
Again, when speaking of Raúl Castro’s recognition of the persistence of
racism the initial translated version said that nothing had been done to
alleviate this problem, again blatantly untrue. Here the author had to
re-insert his text noting that more black teachers and black
representatives had been added to the National Assembly.
There were multiple examples of this type of editing/translating
travesties throughout the piece. It is not necessary to go over every
single one, but overall, what was a piece that was looking into the future
with hopefulness about solving Cuba’s racial dilemmas has been transformed
into its opposite by the New York Times, which owes the author a public
apology at least. As of Friday (April 5th) we learned that Zurbano had
been dismissed from his position as head of the Editorial of Casa de las
Américas, but will remain working at CASA as a researcher. On Saturday,
April 6th the times had a reporter from Mexico write about the incident,
but on the important issue of changing the title elided the issue by
claiming that Zurbano had agreed to the change, which is flatly untrue.
The New York Times will say that their contract clearly states neither the
author nor the translators and editors working with the authors have final
say about the text itself nor about the all-important title, which sets
the context for the editorial. However, we wonder whether the New York
Times would make such a contentious/controversial editorial decision for
other activists in other parts of the world, whose ability to contribute
to needed societal change might be compromised by the Times’s willingness
to trade accuracy for the controversy that sells papers.
More important is the reaction in Cuba, much of which has come out in La
Jiribilla. Since they have only what came out in the New York Times they
do not know the original Spanish text, nor do they know what was truly
lost in translation, especially with the title. The title has elicited the
most contentious response from commentators in Cuba, but interestingly
enough few have engaged the real issues brought up by the piece: why has
racism persisted after fifty-four years of revolution, why are black and
brown Cubans still on the low end of the societal totem pole, why are they
still largely living in poorer housing, why are they such a large
percentage of the prison population, why are they largely absent from the
Central Committee of the Communist Party (or the Politburo), why are they
cast in stereotyped roles in the media and vastly underrepresented as
anchors, newscasters and TV reporters?
Zurbano’s critics have also brought up insightful critiques of the piece,
not surprising since to deal with the full dimensions of Cuban racial
realities in 1,200 words is impossible. Some have questioned how Zurbano
is defining blackness, or issues brought up by the Cuban census, the
economic realities of the Special Period (which hit all Cubans hard, not
just blacks), the continued presence of black professionals in Cuba, the
country’s increasingly lively debate about race (even if it’s not on the
nightly news), or differing strategies about how to advance the plight of
their black brethren. All of these themes are important, but I will wait
to discuss them in a separate article. What is significant for now is that
Zurbano has brought up some important issues about contemporary Cuba:
blacks and their sense of citizenship, the combatting of racial
inequality, the kind of society Cuba wants to be in the coming years, how
the recent economic changes have class and racial dimensions, how a new
Cuba will embrace racial, cultural, religious, and sexual diversity.
In Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s film The Last Supper, set in the 1790s, there is
a banquet scene where twelve slaves eat with their master. Sebastián, one
of the slaves, tells a Yoruba story about Olofi, who made the world,
including the Truth and the Lie. “The Truth was beautiful and strong, the
Lie ugly and skinny. To compensate Olofi gave the Lie a machete to defend
itself. One day the Truth and the Lie met and fought, since they were
enemies; when the Truth lets his guard drop the Lie cuts off his head. Not
being able to see, the Truth searches for its head and blunders, grabbing
instead the head of the Lie and places it where his own had been”. At this
point Sebastian takes the head of a pig from the banquet table, places
before his own like a mask (a man with a pig’s head) and says: “And from
then on he goes about the world, deceiving all the people, the body of the
Truth, with the head of the Lie.”
This cautionary tale should be kept in mind as we look at what has
transpired between the Times and Zurbano. The head of the article (the
title) turns out to be the head of the Lie, even if the body (the text) is
the Truth. But in viewing what happened in the translation process we also
see that a pig’s head wound up on the top of a thinking, perceptive, body.
As we look closer at what has transpired we can begin to join the rightful
Head with the truthful Body.
In a perverse way, the New York Times has done us a favor: by
exhibiting such flagrantly mendacious and insensitive behavior, it might
allow us to actually discuss not only what Zurbano is truly saying but
also to examine how easily and brazenly the U.S. press can distort the
realities of a foreign country or twist the thoughts of an important Cuban
thinker into the opposite of what he meant. The real lesson here is not
that the New York Times lies and Roberto Zurbano is telling the truth, but
that even when the Times is lying there are truths that can be glimpsed,
and when Zurbano is putting his finger on the wound of Cuba’s struggles
with racism, it forces us to confront the lies we tell ourselves about
race, wherever we live.
Alan West-Durán
Boston
April 6, 2013
