Luis Pavon Tamayo - Symphony in Grey Minor

Luis Pavon Tamayo: Symphony in Grey Minor / Norge Espinosa
Posted on August 10, 2013

It took five minutes of broadcast television for his brief resurrection
to send a shudder to Havana. In January 2007, the first broadcast of
Impronta (Imprint), a space that sought to the highlight relevant names
of Cuban culture, generated amazement and protests. Those who saw this
very short program couldn't get over their shock or indignation, because
as the initial figure the producers chose was Luis Pavón Tamayo himself,
not so remembered for his flimsy poetry, but for his role of censor and
extremist during the time he presided over the National Council of
Culture, between 1971 and 1976.

Those dates are enough of an encrypted signal for many, etched in the
memories of more than a few, and in the official amnesia, of the
infamous Five Grey Years. Five years, ten years, a dead time, in which
from these offices, Luis Pavón and others of no less fatal memory, like
Armando Quesada, who were determined to make a painful reality from the
arguments of the proceedings of the First Congress of Education and
Culture, relying on them to expunge from the artistic world those who,
in several cases were undisputed leaders in letters, drama, dance and
many other expressions.

Mediocrity that was imposed under those orders still operates as trauma,
and no doubt along with those who now rejoice at the news of the grim
profile to Luis Pavón, there are some who still see him return like a
ghost to follow them robbing the peace from their dreams. Because in his
last days Luis Pavón was already a ghost, and not even that attempt on
Cuban television could transform him, as perhaps was intended, in the
palpable body within the culture to which he himself railed so much and
that he'd already begun to forget.

That old man we saw in those quick minutes on Impronta was about to die.
His unusual reappearance in that program unleashed the little email war,
which, in the way it usually happens in Cuba, started as a surprise and
ended as a hangover. Several Cuban intellectuals, direct victims or not
of his leadership, sent emails to denounce the ghost, to demand the
exhumation of the buried corpse, and why not, to demand apologies that
never came. These messages attest to the trauma: those more restful, or
concentrated on disclosing rarely aired data, along with those that
linked spasms and pathos, and a badly silenced thirst for delayed revenge.

Cuban television then fell apart in internal gibberish that lasted some
weeks, without knowing how to fix the mess, while the emails went pack
and forth piling up in that wave in which, like we hadn't seen much,
their voices and demands united Cuban artists living on and off the
island, without getting official responses.

UNEAC, which had little to do with the failed revival, published a note
that clarified less, and figured it would be better silent about it,
under pretexts as petty an not wanting to torment people with possibly
irrelevant clarifications, while the "naivete" committed was blamed on
the youth of some of the members of the Impronta team.

Doubtful naiveté, considering that Armando Quesada was walking through
the halls of ICRT until shortly before the program aired, and was trying
to conceal the silent battle that was going on at the institute itself
blaming not the veterans who saw the furry ear of parameterization* up
close, but those who never explained to them the hidden truth behind
that bitter concept.

The results of all this were motley, but without doubt the most enduring
was the lecture series organized by Desiderio Navarro from the Centro
Teórico Cultural Criterios, in order to reorganize part of the
undigested memory of that time of terror and Pavón, and that ran through
spaces as diverse as the Casa de las Américas, the Instituto Superior de
Arte and the ICAIC (Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry).

A book with several of these conferences was published and quickly sold
out. The expected edition that would add to these texts the remaining
pieces about rock, Cuban cinema, and theater (a theme I assumed given
the reticence of several specialists who doubted the challenge), was
never consummated. By the time I delivered my lecture, "The masks of
grayness, theater, silence and cultural politics in the Cuba of the
'70s," it was already January 2009. In those two years the fervor, the
demand, the flare ups of the first moment, had been melted into the
great Cuban forgetting, that keeps us coming back over and over to the
same ghosts, because in reality, we never completely exorcise them. Or
they don't let us carry the exorcism to its ultimate conclusion.

Neither weight nor name nor work

Luis Pavón was born in 1930 in Holguin, and just died in Havana, perhaps
in his house in Playa, or in some hospital. He was a member of the Cuban
Writers and Artists Union (UNEAC) and became known as a poet, shall we
say "modest," from the time of the triumph of the Revolution with
notebooks as Discovery, and Time and its flags flying, titles charged
with the scent of slogans.

He was a lawyer, and when the CNC was closed to make way for the
Ministry of Culture, he became rector of the School of the Cuban
Communist Party (CCP). Urban legend transforms jim into Leopoldo Avila,
the specter who attacked with martial prose, from the pages of the armed
forces' magazine "Olive Green," Virgilio Piñera, René Ariza, Anton
Arrufat and other "deviants", persisting in the theater of the absurd,
in works too ambiguous in personalities too inappropriate.

The rants also reached out for Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Heberto
Padilla and playwright José Milian, branding as pornography his work
"The Taking of Havana by the English," released in 1970 by Teatro
Estudio, very shortly before the First Congress of Education (and later
of Culture, at the suggestion of Fidel Castro during one of his
speeches), granted him almost total power which he used to erase names
such as these.

Whether he was really Leopoldo Avila is something that Pavon is carried
to the grave, at a time when we have also reported the death of Alfredo
Guevara and Jaime Crombet. Everyone has taken their secrets, like faces
in a large album that is never opened. It will be some time before some
of these truths are aired, and national memory becomes a bit more rich.

He had an old age, but greyish and far from the glare of attention that
he himself managed, neither cleaning up or softening his past. In
Impronta he wanted to represent himself, manipulating a phrase from Che,
which it wasn't really, rather a dedication that the Argentine had
stamped on a copy of his book about his journeys as a guerrilla.

If the idea of the program was to launder his image, resurrect himself
from the effigy of an innocuous and quiet gentleman, the reaction
sparked by such an endeavor prevented the maneuver being repeated by
others with their own history. Buried alive, this mock tribute only
served to throw a few more shovels of dirt over his head.

His poetry is now unreadable and unmentionable, though perhaps it sounds
more dignified translated into Slavic, if we remember that among his
decorations, Pavón held the Order of Saints Cyril and Methodius, awarded
to him by Bulgaria. His articles in the press, an invitation to the
worst oblivion, stand as examples of the worst intolerance that
prevailed in our press for a long time, leaving sequels that are seen
even today, from time to time.

In an anthology prepared by Luis Suardíaz, David Chericián and Eduardo
Lopez Morales, his face is found sandwiched between the verses of
Roberto Fernandez Retamar and José Martínez Matos, in the same volume
where some of his victims emerged once again as part of a generation
that never actually was one.

I remember another picture of him, where he appears next to Alfredo
Guevara at the funeral of Bola de Nieve, who had died suddenly in
Mexico. It was 1971 and Pavón was beginning to enjoy his power at the
CNC. Functionary and undertaker, he must have felt profound relief
before the body of the scandalous Piano man. One down, he would have
said, at the front of that literally funeral procession.

I spoke with Luis Pavón Tamayo, as I recall, only once. By phone. I had
already given my lecture, and the materials that supported it, I
realized I had to go deeper into the subject. There's a book, I thought,
in all this, I am still mulling over these testimonies of those who
experienced first hand the grayness of that time.

I wanted, however, to hear as many voices as possible before entering
into such an undertaking. And as I spoke to and interviewed Ramiro
Guerra, Ingrid González, Antón Arrufat, Armando Suárez del Villar, José
Milián, Iván Tenorio and many others, I wondered what Luis Pavón could
tell me about that time.

I got his number, I called him. They had already warned him. He repeated
through the wire the pantomime that the TV program wanted us to believe.
He appealed to his old age, his infirmity, to delicately refuse me an
interview. He was not, like Julie Davalos has done, reveal to me to the
other sides of the matter.

Perhaps, while we spoke, he would have shrunk into his chair, to more
credibly plat the part of the elderly martyr. A panicked old man, like
those imagined by Virgilio Piñera in a work that presaged the silence
and terror of his final days.

Thus, there was no interview. I don't think I would have gotten much out
of it. But to be fair, I felt I had to at least try. Archives disappear,
ashes blow away, diaries and pages — dictated by others from the dark
side of the mirrors that saw what we would, perhaps, like to know — are
erased, and so a certain side of History is dismantled.

Some of the personalities of this other work die, and with them some
nuance, chiaroscuro, an index of truth, is thus corrupted, it escapes us
in the effort to rebuild the keys to a mistake. What I would have
revealed given news that pushes me these lines, for example, by Suarez
del Villar himself, disappeared almost a year ago. To imagine that
answer, I will persist in the chapters of my book.

Luis Pavón died, and Havana said goodbye to him under a drizzle. At this
point, I find no news of his death in the national press news. I will be
interested to see if they remember him and how. In what way they say
goodbye to a person who no longer has weight, nor work, nor name.

Some of his old colleagues: those other gray and barely surviving
commissars, measuring the time they have left in this world from the
disappearance of one who was such an energetic soldier in fulfilling his
fatal mission, to whom they might dedicate a moment of silence. Probably
less than a minute: the time in a downpour between one lightning flash
and the next.

Norge Espinosa Mendoza | La Habana | 28 May 2013

Translator's note:

*Parameterization/ parametración: From the word "parameters."
Parameterization is a process of establishing parameters and declaring
anyone who falls outside them (the parametrados) to be what is commonly
translated as "misfits" or "marginalized." This is a process much
harsher than implied by these terms in English. The process is akin to
the McCarthy witch hunts and black lists and is used, for example, to
purge the ranks of teachers, or even to imprison people.

Source: "Luis Pavon Tamayo: Symphony in Grey Minor / Norge Espinosa |
Translating Cuba" -
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