Many articles describing travel to Cuba open with clichéd statements about how time has supposedly "stopped" on the island. But our group of UB-affiliated poets and artists discovered that imagery to be inaccurate on a recent trip to Havana.

	Rosa Alcalá (left) reads her poetry as Kristin Dykstra listens.
	Photo: Brian Collier

Cuban poet Reina María Rodríguez and prose writer Jorge Miralles first proposed a cultural exchange involving poets and artists from Buffalo when they came to read at the university in the spring of 2000. But Rodríguez later was asked by Cuban officials to broaden the focus of the event and she quickly expanded the list of participants. The daily schedule was packed with events featuring speakers, not only from Cuba and the United States, but from Nicaragua, Argentina, France, Luxembourg, Norway and Spain. World-famous cultural figures from Cuba, such as literary critic Roberto Fernandez Retamar and poet Nancy Morejon, also were added to the program.

The festival, held in the Book Institute in Havana, was entitled "Encounter: First Festival of Language Poetry." This title illustrates Rodríguez' and Miralles' original interest in hosting an exchange specifically with UB, which is known for its connections to a movement now loosely described as "language poetry." An anthology of language poetry in translation had gone hand to hand around Havana in 1999, generating conversation in intellectual circles.

With the expansion of the festival program, however, critical papers addressing local and international aspects of language poetry took a back seat to the experience of sharing the poetry and art of the participants.

"We saw poets and artists in a country that is often represented here as being impoverished-not only impoverished economically, but culturally because of its so-called separation from the rest of the world," said UB doctoral candidate Rosa Alcala. "Sometimes that's described as a self-imposed separation, and sometimes it's explained as a separation due to the U.S. embargo. But in fact, the art and the poetry that is being produced there is incredibly invigorating-new, exciting, radical, experimental. That may or may not be due to the situation on the island, but to me, it seemed almost impossible to imagine that anywhere else," Alcala said.

Nick Lawrence, another UB doctoral candidate, also disputed that the Cubans were isolated. "One night at a restaurant, we-a group of Cuban poets and some of the norteamericanos-came up with maps of our respective poetry scenes, which were basically configurations of names. In our case, the map stretched back to the New American Poetry-for example, Charles Olson and Jack Spicer-and down to our contemporaries," Lawrence recalled. "Carlos Aguilera, a young Cuban poet, recognized a good 50 percent of the names that we put down. So, clearly, he has been following international trends and there was some reversal of expectation among us about what the Cubans would or wouldn't know.

"You couldn't say the same about their cultural map and what we knew," he added. "Another young Cuban poet, Javier Marimon, gave his sketch of important writers. I recognized a few, like José Lezama Lima, Virgilio Piñera and Reina María Rodríguez, but I left feeling that I had my work cut out for me. I need to follow up, not just by learning a language but by learning a whole tradition."

We found the Cubans to be extraordinarily interesting-and energetic. They remained bright-eyed and articulate through marathon stretches of intense reading.

In addition to reading their own work, festival participants took part in translation workshops involving Spanish, English and French materials. The workshops, proposed by our group, were an attempt to engage other writers one-on-one, to encourage the development of personal connections.

Perhaps the best part of the festival came late in each day, when participants headed out to cafés to continue discussions that had begun during the translation workshops.

	UB students Nick Lawrence (left) and Joel Bettridge relax on a terrace outside the Book Institute.
	Photo: Kristin Dykstra

Festival participants agreed it was a unique event, but now are trying to determine exactly why it was unique and what it means to have participated.

One interpretation came from Abel Prieto, Cuba's minister of culture, who visited the Book Institute to meet participants and celebrate the release of a new magazine organized by Anton Arrufat, Rodríguez and Miralles. The name of the magazine, Azoteas (Rooftops), is an explicit reference to the alternative (non-state) cultural salon Rodríguez has provided at her rooftop home over the past 20 years.

As a way of explaining the unprecedented cooperation between the Azoteas group and the state cultural institutions-which led both to the festival and to the publication of Azoteas-Prieto emphasized the shared values of cultural resistance and artistic quality.

An Argentine poet asked Prieto if the U.S. presence at the festival represented "a new openness to U.S. culture." Prieto argued that Cuba has never been closed to U.S. culture-just to bad U.S. culture, noting he has seen some terrible U.S. movies.

For some festival participants-and perhaps for some of the organizers-there is lingering uncertainty about the long-term meaning of combining a symbol of alternative culture within Cuba, "Reina's Rooftop," with the official spaces and printing presses of the government. "We'll see how long this lasts. It may not be permanent," Arrufat said.

In explaining what the festival had meant to her, Rodríguez framed her response with personal examples, rather than in political terms. "It wasn't a cold encounter, but a warm, emotional one," she said.

Similar sentiments were expressed by visual artists. Brian Collier, a 1993 graduate of UB, showed an art installation in the nearby Ra£l Martínez Gallery. When Collier arrived at the gallery, he found another show already set up in the next room. He hit it off with the artists-Cuban brothers Carlos and Omar Estrada.

"I couldn't have imagined how incredible this experience would be," Collier said of the artistic and personal connections that he found with the Estradas.

Reflecting on the festival, Omar Estrada noted: "One of the pieces I had made with Carlos for the Havana Biennial (a festival held earlier in the year) deals with the possibility of unity through art because we anticipated meeting other artists from around the world during the biennial. Then Brian arrived and installed his work in another space in the gallery. Visitors thought it was meant to be part of our show, even though they were separate. To me, that demonstrates that no matter where you are from or what your philosophical ideas are, artists have the same soul everywhere. I think that art is the language of tolerance."