Three years ago, in April 1980, the Fidel Castro dictatorship began to hand over to the history of the West one of its most random and hellish episodes: the Mariel-Key West sea bridge. At the same time that thousands and thousands of individuals, harassed by the suffocating Castroite society, threw themselves into the sea, empty-handed in crowded and unsafe boats, the Havana regime allocated large sums of money and more demagoguery than usual to deploy an international campaign, with intent to distort both the social content and the political significance of the exodus.
The diabolical monstrosity not only caught the governments of several democratic countries by surprise, but was greedily consumed by the world press, part of which did nothing but exploit the most sensational or irrelevant aspects of the events. For months, not a few reporters and commentators from Western nations gave Mariel interpretations very similar to those that Fidel Castro had conceived for the naive reasoning of certain mass media. The fact, for example, that Castro had included hundreds of criminals and insane people among the refugees did not lead these media to investigate the reasons for this crime and insanity, in a country that insists on presenting itself as a paradise, but rather to contaminate, with that label of dangerousness, the other refugees. Also the fact that the mass of dissidents fleeing Castro had been infiltrated by subversive agents, probably hundreds of them, with short and long-term missions, was an element that contributed to the tendency of public opinion to confuse the vast majority of refugees with the fraction of them that was undesirable for any country. Although another part of the world press tried to readjust these erroneous assessments, the truth is that the enormous burden of terror and human discontent that the Mariel refugees contained was overshadowed by the simplest characterization of a tiny part of them: those who had been driven to crime or insanity by the same ruler who irresponsibly expelled them. Much of this unfair assessment is still valid in the minds of broad sectors of public opinion.
Three years have not been enough for the whole truth of Mariel to come to light, but they have been enough to allow a group of creators who left Cuba on that occasion to dedicate our efforts and small savings to the creation of this magazine.
If the whole truth of Mariel, as part of the most meticulous and mutilating nightmare of Castroism, will take a long time to become palpable in all its details, it is time that we begin to throw upon the intelligence and sensitivity of free men the elements most overwhelming of that truth: the literature and art of those who are now privileged to be in the United States, a country that allows them to express themselves and to fight.
Mariel magazine, which in this first issue has been fully financed by those of us who came to North America three years ago, penniless, will primarily aim to serve as a vehicle for the writers and artists of Mariel's generation. If any of us are chosen, because of Castro's hatred, to disappear, it will be known where the order came from and what the cause was, but there is no doubt that the magazine will continue to appear.
We have not come into exile with schemes for welfare, or to dwell on puerile anecdotes or classroom gossip: we have come to carry out our work. The daily persecution and the moral and physical misery suffered in Cuba taught us very well which are the essential things that will save us from hopelessness and silence, and which things will be swallowed up by insignificance or used cleverly by our enemy.
We reject any political or literary theory that can restrict free experimentation, self-assurance, criticism and imagination, fundamental requirements for any work of art. A doctrinal art is the opposite of true creation. Both fiction and essays must be - their names say so - profound experiments and not mere academic monstrosities crammed with fashionable jargon and preconceived theories.
In perfect totalitarian countries, public art (the only authorized kind) is limited to developing a partisan thesis, the state thesis, which culminates in an expected, imposed and understood end. That means the death of art as such. The examples are obvious. Countries with vast and rich cultural traditions such as Russia or China today only produce unfortunate monstrosities, lavish in sterility and boredom.
Also under capitalism many writers fall into the trap, or into the temptation, of turning their work into a commodity that allows them to live comfortably. From creators they pass to the level of producers. Hence the very obvious dangers currently conspiring against the true work of art: the mercantilism of creation in the West, and the bureaucratism of so-called culture in communist countries, where the artist is either an officialdom of the system, or a criminal who is silenced, imprisoned, shot or expelled.
There is no mercantile art, just as there is no doctrinaire art. Literature is not even a profession; it is a sacrifice and a fatality, a pleasure and a curse. Every work of art is a challenge, and therefore, implicitly or explicitly, it is a manifestation - and a song - of freedom.
Mariel magazine greets and offers its pages to Cuban writers and artists from exile who, by maintaining in their works above all at very high levels of aesthetic quality, honor us by submitting their contributions to us. In a broader sense, we will not refuse the contribution of Latin American, North American or European creators who approach our effort with a common rejection of any totalitarian system and from creations of genuine aesthetic, critical or analytical value.
Let the spokesmen of Castroism, occasional or persistent, know definitively that each of their infamies, however elaborate or concealed they may be, will find in our works the best and most enduring response of all: that of the artist, who by virtue of being so, is incapable of lying.
