NEWSDAY SECTION B Sunday April 14, 2013, Page 3
GALLERY
Freedom through the Arts
Cuban exile Jorge Morejón
in his ‘magic moment’
Dr. JORGE LUIS MOREJON
(at right), gives guidance to one of the
performers in the UWI student production
Maria Antonia, currently being performed
at the Little Carib theatre in Woodbrook.
Dr. Jorge Luis Morejon
Director, lecturer, singer, dancer,
actor and theatre arts teacher
teaches theatre courses at the
Universty of the West Indies.
PHOTOS BY MAYDELAINE
RODRIGUEZ-CASTILLO
The 48-year-old thespian is in Trinidad to teach theatre courses at the University of the West and is currently directing the UWI student production Maria Antonia on at The Little Carib theatre in Woodbrook this weekend. He took time off to reflect on his journey thus far.
“I grew up in Cuba and am a product of the system,” he says. “I was born in 1963. The Revolution was in 1959. My father was one off the rebels – at a young age, 24 – so I got firsthand impressions of what the Revolution was like. So on one hand, I was being educated by the school system, which was state-run: you got one version of everything. Then I would get home, and my father and mother would say: ‘No, no, no, no, no. That’s not the way it was. Let me tell you how it was. You cannot say anything to anyone, because we will be in trouble. But we don’t want you to grow up blindfolded.’ I grew up in that duality, which is the duality of almost every Cuban. They don’t allow themselves to be honest because they are afraid – they don’t know who you are, they don’t know how it will affect them.
“So I rejected any version that was not the official version. I was a very good student: I sucked it all up. When it was time for me to go to secondary school, the government was already closing all urban schools, and moving students to boarding schools in the countryside. So from ages 12 to 16, I was in a boarding school in the country. I had to work four hours a day planting. And then I would go in the afternoon for academic classes. It was good because I was in touch with nature, doing something very tangible – growing things – instead of being a parasite, which you are in most education systems, because you don’t know where things come from.
“What was bad was the lack of choices. If I wanted to do something else, I couldn’t. Everyone is funnelled according to the expectations and needs of the country. So for instance, in one year, if the country needed teachers, you would be a teacher. The individual has very little say in what he or she is going to do with her future. There are open spots in the universities depending on what the country needs and on your grades, and your political affiliation. Because I was in a school for students focused on science, there was no artistic education.”
Morejón remembers going to his cousin’s family for summer holidays, and realising they skipped lunch time entirely because there was little to eat. After three days of being hungry, he returned home. His father asked him what happened. “Dad, I was hungry all the time because they don’t eat.” His father replied, “I am glad that happened to you. Because you are a Communist with a full belly. It’s very easy to be a Communist that way. But I want you to know that most people in this country live like them. And the reason you don’t live like them is because I risk my freedom everyday.”
When Morejón graduated from school at age 16, that was the year of the Mariel boatlift.
He says during the Mariel boatlift time, when the Cuban government allowed Cubans to leave freely, they also emptied the jails, the asylums and collected all the vagrants. They also gathered up Jehovah Witnesses, and homosexuals, and anyone else thought to be ideologically disenfranchised by the government, says Morejón. Then when family members would come to Cuba in rented boats to pick up a relative, they would be told they also had to take some of these people. This is when the family decided to leave.
“Right before Mariel, Cubans who had left in the first wave of the Revolution, in the 60s, were allowed to come back and visit,” he remembers. “There was a huge social shifting. For 20 years we were told all the stories about capitalism and the Cubans who left, who were called ‘worms’ – a term Castro coined. Popular wisdom now re-christened them ‘butterflies.’ These butterflies would bring jewelry, clothing, stuff for their families; gum, candies, spices, little things, you know? Things we had not seen for 20 years. Because the country had become centralised and everything came from the government.
“My aunt was a butterfly. She came via Jamaica because there was no direct flight. My aunt had raised my Mom.
Morejón’s family – or half of it, comprising Morejón and his father – managed to leave Cuba in 1984. Their aunt had worked furiously behind the scenes to wangle visas for them – “through Honduras, through Panama, Costa Rica – there’s this market for visas that Cubans have been victims of,” says Morejón. His aunt eventually got a visa through the Dominican Republic. And Cuba let them go because the family were considered useless outcasts. But they had to leave their mother and their younger brother behind.
They flew to the Dominican Republic via Jamaica. In the process, they had to leave all savings behind – that was the law. They couldn’t even afford to pay for the airline ticket, because they had no dollars. Like all other departing Cubans, they had to leave the country penniless, and ask relatives to pay for their tickets. Morejón stayed in the Dominican Republic for one year, then was able to go to Miami ahead of his parents, to help support them.
“Leaving my mother and my brother in Cuba was difficult, because we did not know if we were going to see them again. But I remember that during those four to five years in Cuba (before leaving), I also had made some new, real friends. When I came to the Dominican Republic, I felt free. I felt free. But I felt like I had left my friends in a pit, and they were extending their arms to me, asking for help to get out, and I couldn’t help them. I remember feeling very guilty about that.”
Eight months later, his mother and brother were able to leave Cuba and join the family in the Dominican Republic. Then the family had to negotiate approvals to enter the US, a process which took a further four years. The entire family eventually reunited in Miami, their new beginning.
What does Morejón consider as his nationality, or his homeplace, now?
“Miami is the closest to home now. But I move from place to place, as if I am looking for some magic spot that feels like home. I think the arts often attracts those who feel displaced not only in a physical sense, but also for varied traumatic reasons, or because they feel like outcasts. In the making of that “magic moment” in art, you inhabit a creative space to which you can relate, without depending on a physical frame.”
LINK: http://www.newsday.co.tt/features/0,176286.html
No comments:
Post a Comment