Annotations for Countries: Italy

In further news of Brazil, Prensa Latina reports, the scandal involving the Fiat Auto Corporation and the Minas Gerais state government is one of the main topics in Brazilian political and business circles. According to the Brazilian press, the government has submitted for the approval of the State Assembly, a bill for setting up a Fiat plant without clarification of important data on the amounts of investments and with large parts of the commitment completely blank. For example, the articles on the transfer of know-how and the technological aid to be provided by the parent corporation in Italy to its Brazilian subsidiary are all left blank, thus permitting endless undercover deals. 

The bill with all its defects was passed by the two existing political parties without important commentaries simply because none of the members of the state Assembly had seen the bill beforehand. Another point criticized in Brazil was the decision by the new partners to name the International Court of Justice at The Hague, not Brazilian courts as the body to settle any future disputes. Thus starting a precedent extremely favorable to transnational corporations. Meanwhile, Italy's Fiat workers have protested against the exploitation of Brazil's extremely cheap labor. The main reason why the plant was set up in Minas Gerais, this from the Latin American News Agency, Prensa Latina. 

Excélsior of Mexico City announced last week that representatives of three international organizations sent by the United Nations to investigate the situation in Chile have accused the Chilean military junta of systematic violation of human rights by submitting political prisoners to treatment so humiliating and degrading that they had never seen such treatment in any country. 

This group, which included representatives of the International Movement of Catholic Jurists, the International Federation of Human Rights, and the International Association of Democratic Jurists issued a statement in Santiago before leaving for New York to make its official report. And it said that it had irrefutable cases proving mass executions in workers' communities, tortures of men and women, and outright military attacks on streets filled with people. 

At the same time in Rome, the secretary of the International Bertrand Russell Tribunal denounced the arrest by the junta of a Brazilian mathematician whose tongue he said was cut out by the military. Also, the secretary general of the Organization of American States said in Columbia that the committee and human rights of that organization will investigate the violation of human rights in Chile. 

In response to this international outcry, the military junta has imposed strict censorship on the diffusion of information on executions, death tolls and political prisoners. Newspapers and radio and TV stations were ordered not to release anything except officially authorized bulletins on these matters. Excélsior also reports that the junta has been feeling other types of international pressure as well. At the same time that it announced the executions of nine more civilians, the junta expressed its profound concern and disagreement with the statement issued by Pope Paul VI when he criticized the violent repression being conducted by the junta. 

The head of the junta, Augusto Pinochet, expressed concern about the possibility that the United States Congress might pass a bill sponsored by Senator Edward Kennedy, which calls for suspension of all aid to Chile until the junta ceases its campaign of political repression. General Pinochet insinuated that Senator Kennedy was under the influence of communists. Senator Kennedy's measure has passed the Senate and is currently under consideration by a House-Senate conference committee.

And further coverage of Chile last week, Excélsior reports that the junta has announced a series of austerity measures for the Chilean economy, which according to the junta will affect all Chileans, but the burden will fall most heavily in the poor of Chile. The goal of the new measures, say the generals, is to be sure that Chile produces more than it consumes.

A late bulletin by the Asia News Service, which has been monitoring events in Chile, reports that in Chile, a wave of price increases was announced over the weekend by the ruling military junta. According to Prensa Latina, price hikes effective October 15th varied between 200 and 1,800%, and it affects products like rice, sugar, oil, feeds, shoes, clothes, and 70 other items. Sugar was brought up by more than 500%, while bread and milk are up more than 300%.

The junta has eliminated the popular program initiated by Allende of providing a half liter of milk free to all children. The largest price increase was for tea, a popular item, which was brought up nearly 2,000%. Excélsior reports that one of the first steps taken by the junta was the cancellation of wage and salary increases, which had been granted by the Popular Unity government to keep up with price increases.

Another subject which Chile watchers are concerned about is resistance to the junta. The London Weekly, Latin America, notes that the calling up of Air Force reserves last week and the announcement that the Army was considering a similar measure combined with the linked-in curfew suggests that resistance to the junta was persisting. Excélsior talked with Luis Figueroa, one of the highest leaders of the now outlawed Central Workers' Union, the communist led Chilean trade union syndicate. 

"We communists," said Figueroa, "Have always enjoyed peaceful means of struggle in Chile, and we would like to continue in that way, but the military junta through its brutality and repression have forced us to use other methods, and we must now continue our struggle clandestinely." This report on Chile was compiled from reports from The New York Times, The Guardian, the London Weekly, Latin America, and the Mexico City Daily, Excélsior. 

Also concerning Chile, according to the Latin American reporter for The Guardian, the military junta in Chile has placed under house arrest the Chilean Air Force General, Alberto Bachelet, pending charges of incitement to rebellion. That announcement by the military in Chile is the first official admission that members of the military high command had refused to participate in the coup that overthrew the constitutional government in Chile. In a further report on Chile, the Chilean Press Association has asked the military junta about the death of a newsman, Carlos Berger, who was shot while supposedly attempting to escape.

Also, the body of another journalist, Duit Bascunan, was found in the desert. Military spokesmen said that he had probably died of starvation. In other news relevant to Chile from Britain, The Guardian reports that the British Labor Party, the labor union organizations at the Tyneside Shipyards in Britain, have called for refusal to work on two destroyers, which are scheduled when refitted to be turned over to the Chilean junta. The Chilean cruise for the vessels have not been allowed to communicate with the press or with the local townspeople.

Also, from Britain, The Guardian reports that the dock workers at Merseyside have agreed not to handle any cargoes bound for the junta, including Hawker Hunter fighter aircraft awaiting shipment. The Liverpool City Council had voted overwhelmingly to ban all purchases by the city of Chilean goods until "the complete return of civil and political rights in Chile". And in Italy, The Guardian reports that a coalition of groups has raised over $120,000 for the movement of the revolutionary left, known as the MIR, in Chile, and contributions are continuing at the rate of over $1,000 a day for the support of resistance to the military junta in Chile. That report from the international reporters of The Guardian. 

This week's feature focuses on culture, a Cuban view of Cuban culture, exploring especially the history of efforts in Cuba to support and extend the arts in a country that historically was impoverished. The material and viewpoint of the feature on Cuban culture comes from the Cuban News Agency, Prensa Latina. 

Art in Cuba is not just the Rumba, one of the few forms Yankees visiting pre-revolutionary Cuba got exposed to out of the island's enormous contribution to jazz. Nor is it only films and posters, which are perhaps the best present-day forms of art in Cuba. To appreciate the significance and role of the arts and the artists in Cuba today, it's necessary to briefly review the history of the arts there. Of the many contributors to Cuban culture, the most important were the Spanish colonists and the African peoples brought to the island as slaves.

These two peoples eventually fused their arts, music, folklore, mythologies and literature and ways of thinking into an authentic Cuban national culture. Under colonial rule from the 15th through the 19th centuries, Spanish art and architecture prevailed. Stained-glass windows and integrate wrought iron railings on balconies and gates were familiar decorative elements in upper-class homes in what is now Old Havana. The upper classes furnished their manners with imports from Madrid.

After the Spanish American War, the United States remained in Cuba, directly or indirectly, until 1959. Frustration with American intervention was reflected in the works of early republic literature. By 1910, a younger group founded the magazine, Contemporary Cuba, where possible solutions to problems of the new nation had ample forum. After the revolution, as Cuba began the development of a new society, the role people played as individuals and participants in society began to change.

Responsibilities, priorities, values, and motivations were radically altered. None of these changes were automatically defined, nor did they appear in practice and in people's consciousness all at once. For intellectuals, for writers, painters, artists of all media, this transitional process of redefinition was and can continues to be complex and difficult.

In 1961, continues Prensa Latina, the first official encounter of artists, writers, and representatives of the revolutionary government took place. Various intellectuals expressed their concern over freedom of expression in the arts and asked what the parameters were in a time of change and polarization. "Was the form to be dictated by a government policy?" they asked.

Fidel Castro made a now famous speech in which he said, "With the revolution, everything. Against the revolution, nothing." And expanded and interpreted that to mean that no one was going to impose forms, nor was anyone going to dictate subject matter. But counter-revolution would not be tolerated in the arts or in any other activity.

Intellectuals who found themselves in the midst of the revolution faced adjustment of a lifetime of habits and ways of thinking to new realities and needs. For example, a painter in the 1950s sought some way of making a living rarely through art. He catered to rich patrons, if lucky enough to be recognized at all, and sold his works to individuals, invariably to friends or upper-class collectors. Most artists, as artists, were self-oriented. The very forms of artistic expression were narrowly individualistic.

Artists created canvases which hung in galleries and homes that only a fraction of the population could or would see. How could one put society first in an each man for himself world? There were diverse attempts to make art a vital part of the new society. One of the earliest projects the revolution initiated was the National School of Cuban Art, a gigantic complex of very modern one-level buildings in a luxurious residential area of Havana, for students of dance, sculpture, music, and theater. Young people from all over the country can apply for scholarships to this largest of the arts schools.

Prensa Latina continues that young art students in the search for new media, more accessible to the whole population, went to the factories, the farms, and the schools, and exchanged ideas with workers. Art students and established artists asked themselves and were asked, "What are the obligations of a socially-committed artist, a revolutionary artist? Are there specific forms, say, murals, that best reflect and contribute to the revolution?" Fortunately, says Prensa Latina, Cuban artists and government agencies did not fall into the trap of imposing a simplistic formula, the happy triumphant worker theme à la Norman Rockwell.

Throughout the 1960s, Cuban painters were exposed to the art of many countries. In 1968, the International Salon de Mayo exhibition was held in Havana, and artists from Western Europe, the socialist countries, Latin America, Africa, and Asia, participated. Young Cuban painters and old experimented with pop art, pop up, abstraction, and new expressionism. There were no limitations.

Out of all this experimentation and dialogue came the means of visual expression best known outside Cuba, poster art. Because of massive distribution possibilities and the functional character of poster art, it has become second in importance, only to film, as the visual vehicle of the message of the revolution. 

Art is also architecture. Before the revolution, architects designed residences for the rich, factories, and luxury hotels. Since 1959, construction priorities have shifted to the creation of housing complexes and thousands of schools and living facilities. With a tremendous growth in population, a demographic shift to newly inhabited zones of the island and a drive to get people out of urban slums, housing demands are massive and are met as fast as building materials and labor allow.

Volunteers have been recruited from every industry to put in extra hours on housing construction brigades. In housing and other construction, new functions have required new architecture. Extremely new designs and styles can be seen in the remotest corners of the countryside, as well as in the city.

Another art form much cultivated in Cuba is dance. The National Ballet of Cuba is world-famous, and Alicia Alonso is recognized as one of the greatest contemporary ballet artists. 

Music cannot be left out while reviewing the revolution's cultural activities. Traditional Cuban popular music flourishes. By wave of radio and films, western rock has also become known to Cuban youth. The task is seen to create a consciousness and a demand for genuine Cuban and Latin American music so that Cuban youth won't simply imitate foreign pop music. And at present, there is a big push to encourage amateur musicians in the ranks of workers and students and everyone, so as to maximize music and not leave music only in the hands of a few professionals. 

To speak of Cuban cinema, says Prensa Latina, is to speak of revolutionary Cuban cinema. In the course of the armed struggle against the dictatorship, a few protest documentaries and news reels were made by revolutionaries in the Sierra and the urban underground. Again, these were of the barest cinematic qualities. 

Following the winning of the revolution in 1959, Cuban cinema was aided by the creation of an institute of artistic and industrial cinematography. The institute supports the training of film students, the production of films, and the importing and exporting of films. One of the institute's highest priorities is to extend the availability of cinema to those who, before the revolution, had no access to films. So efforts have been concentrated in the areas where the cinema was once unknown, and there are now some 13 million moviegoers a year and over 500 theaters that dot the island. And other methods have been developed for reaching the more remote areas of the countryside and mountains. 

For instance, redesigned trucks, equipped with 16-millimeter projectors and driven by the projectionists, spread out across the country to show films in those areas where there are not yet theaters. These movable movies are now numbered at more than 100. One of the institute's most engaging short documentaries called "For the First Time" is actually about this part of the institute's operation. The episode photographed shows one evening when a projection crew went to an area in the Sierra Mountains to show a film to people there for the first time. The movie was Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times".

The attempt to demystify the cinema for an audience of novices is more than a little difficult to understand for a North American, whose sensibilities are bombarded by the electronic media. The institute has set itself the task of bringing young people interested in the cinema into discussion circles at student centers, union halls, and workplaces, and to explain its work.

More important, it seeks to explain the methods of the film to the entire population to work in a way against its own power, according to Guevara, the institute head, to reveal all the tricks, all the recourses of language, to dismantle all the mechanisms of cinematography hypnosis. To this end, the institute has a weekly television program, which explains all the gimmicks used to attract the viewer's attention.

When it began, the institute used the most elementary techniques. Most of the film workers were uneducated in the media, although a handful had studied in European film schools. Today, with a number of fully-developed trained persons, the acquisition of skills is now a secondary concern at best. The head of the institute explains that the priority is to break down the language structure of the film and find new ways to use film, being very careful in the process not to divorce the filmmaker from the audience for the filmmaker's own self gratification. 

He put it this way, "We must not separate ourselves from the rest of the people, from all the tasks of the revolution, especially those that fall into the ideological field. Every time a school is built, every time 100 workers reach the sixth grade, each time someone discovers something by participating in it. As in the field of culture, it becomes easier for us to do our work. Our work is not simply making or showing movies. Everything we do is part of a global process towards developing the possibilities of participation. Not passive, but active. Not as the recipients, but as the protagonists of the public. This is the Cuban definition of socialist democracy in the field of culture." 

In addition to production of films, as many as possible are imported. US films shown in Cuba are, of course, from the pre-revolutionary period: "Gigi", "Singing in the Rain", and "Bad Day at Black Rock". Late night television repeats, from time to time, a Dana Andrews or Ronald Colman melodrama. The economic blockade against Cuba has denied the island access to US movies of the 60s and 70s, though from time to time, a bootleg print gets through. A recent favorite there was "The Chase", with Marlon Brando and Jane Fonda, from the early 60s. Imports are in large part from the European socialist countries: France, Italy, Japan, and, to a degree, Latin America. 

Prensa Latina continues that obviously the shortage of currency is a great burden. To this day, the institute does not own even one eight-millimeter movie camera. There are no color facilities in Cuba, although a lab is now under construction. In this country where there were millions of peasants who never saw movies, the problem arose that many preferred to buy trucks and equipment to help with the work, rather than new camera equipment. 

From the beginning, the institute has faced a bit of a dialectic contradiction. It wants to capture, for posterity and for the moment, the complex reality of these years, but the reality is always changing. Alfredo Guevara, head of the Cuban Film Institute says, "These are surely the most difficult, complicated years, years in which the experiences we have are sometimes not recorded. To reflect them in the cinema means, in some way, we must crystallize them, which is the last thing we want. But every time we film, it is there. Whether or not we want to do so, we are always a testimony." 

Prensa Latina continues that the poster commemorating the 10th anniversary of the founding of the Cinemagraphic Institute shows a camera with gun smoke exuding from the lens. The imagery of filmmaker as cultural guerilla corresponds to the value system throughout revolutionary Cuba. Guevara says, "In the success of the revolution, we have placed, in our hands, a thing, the means of production, whose power we knew very well because it had been in the power of the enemy up to that point."

"When this force fell into our hands, it was clear to all of us that the revolution had given us a very serious job. I'm talking of everyone who has participated in the work of giving birth to the Cuban cinema or, what is really the same thing, the job of giving our people and our revolution a new weapon, a new instrument of work, one that is useful above all in understanding ourselves."

That concludes this week's feature, which has been a Cuban view of Cuban culture taken from the Cuban News Agency, Prensa Latina. 

Excélsior also reports from Chile on the death of Daniel Vergara, a former minister in the Unidad Popular government of the late president Salvador Allende. Vergara's death, which was reported by the Unidad Popular government in exile from Rome, was due to gangrene in the arm. He reportedly died in a prison camp in Chile. Vergara was remembered as one who had been in the presidential Moneda Palace with President Allende when the president died.