Some Cuban-American leaders, including Mayor Xavier Suarez, and some non-Hispanic politicians appeared to side with the actions of the counterdemonstrators.Promoting Understanding of the Latino Experience Radio Commentators Led AttackĪ Miami rally in March organized to oppose continued United States aid to the rebels fighting the Sandanista Government in Nicargua was broken up by counterdemonstrators, most of whom were Cubans. Artists and performers whose personal politics are suspect are routinely unable to find work in Miami. Those who originally participated in what has come to be known as ''the dialogue'' with Castro have been assailed and ostracized by right-wing elements in the Cuban community here, and their loyalty to the United States impugned.
Miss Prida said she later worked with the Cuban-American Committee for the Normalization of Relations with Cuba, a Washington lobbying group, and last returned to the island as a working journalist in 1980. These efforts led to a thaw in relations that enabled some 300,000 exiles to visit the island until United States relations with Havana worsened in this decade. But in 1978 she was one of 140 Cuban exiles who, with unofficial backing by the Carter Administration, went to Cuba to open a dialogue with the Government of Fidel Castro. She said she grew up more concerned about life as a Hispanic-American and about her art than about Cuba. Miss Prida and her family came to the United States 25 years ago and settled in New York. ''I've never even read Karl Marx,'' she said with a soft laugh, adding, ''Or seen the movie, for that matter.'' Visit to Cuba in 1978 ''If I'm to be called anything, I am a liberal Democrat and an activist,'' said the 42-year old playwright, who is also the editor of the newsletter of the National Association of Hispanic Artists. Miss Prida, in an interview Thursday after the police escorted her from the airport to a downtown hotel, said she had never been a Communist and laughed that any in the Cuban community of 700,000 in the Miami area would label her as such. He was one of a number of outspoken Cuban-Americans demanding that the festival bring down the curtain on Miss Prida's play. ''She's pro-Castro and I'm going to protest everywhere,'' George Valdes, a Dade County Commissioner, said last week. Yet she has been reviled here over the past fortnight on some Spanish-language radio stations as ''an enemy of Cuban exiles,'' ''a Communist'' and ''a Castro agent.'' ''Coser and Cantar'' is apolitical, as are Miss Prida's other plays, all of which were produced originally by Hispanic theater groups in New York. ''What is really sad is that the political leadership and leading Cuban-Americans didn't take a stand by saying that we won't tolerate this kind of terrorism and intimidation in America.'' ''Feelings run very hot and irrational here,'' Ray Dielman, the managing director of Teatro Nuevo, or New Theater, remarked today. The cancellation prompted college officials to offer Miss Prida the chance to present her play in workshop form. There were also telephoned threats against individuals involved in the production.īecause of the threats, Teatro Nuevo, the Miami theater company that was to perform Miss Prida's 40-minute comedy, canceled the performances and the drama festival became a centerpiece in a heated debate over politics and the right to artistic expression. Some Cuban exiles in Miami have denounced Miss Prida for her efforts a decade ago to improve relations with Fidel Castro's Cuba, and bomb threats were directed against the Museum of Science, where ''Coser y Cantar'' (''To Sew and Sing'') was to be performed this weekend along with two other plays by Cuban exiles in Miami's first Festival of Hispanic Theater. And campus security guards at the door were frozen-faced when they searched everyone entering the building for weapons or bombs. They were undercover police officers whose interest was not in the play but in making sure no disruptions occurred. Some in the hall found no humor in the production, however.
It is a comedy, and when the play was read by two actresses in a lecture hall last night at Miami-Dade Community College, the audience of 150, mostly young Hispanic people, laughed at the warring elements searching for accommodation in the same person. In Dolores Prida's bilingual one-act play, ''Coser y Cantar,'' the Cuban-born New York playwright puts two actresses on stage to represent one Hispanic woman torn between her cultural roots and her growing Americanization.
0 kommentar(er)
