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from acm #21: allen ginsberg, a conversation
acm: Why were you kicked out of Cuba in '65?
ag: For protesting Castro's denunciation and break-up of the theater school for being filled with homosexuals, and for sending all the members of the theater school who were gay, and some who weren't, to work camps.
acm: What kind of a protest was it?
ag: Private. Complained to newspaper people in Cuba, asking
them about it, reminding them of it, and making a stink about it
in
private. Not even publicly. But it's such a closed society, with one
party press, that everything you say to the press is reported to the police.
And Castro still has got his antigay program. As well as persecuting younger
poets who weren't just following the complete Castro party line. Castro
even supported the invasion of Czechoslovakia.
acm: Though at the same time, some people you know, I'm thinking of Pablo Armando Fernandez, were allowed to flourish under Castro. He returned to Havana from New York, and he certainly didn't adopt a doctrinaire party line.
ag: But on the other hand, some people weren't allowed to flourish, including Manuel Ballagas, who in '73 was busted for writings in his desk being antistate writings, and formally accused of sending information to the American provocateur Allen Ginsberg-as part of the formal accusation-and sent him to jail for three years. And then there are a lot of other cases-Heberto Padilla-it was a celebrated case, that caused everybody to protest, including Sartre.
I don't think anyone argues that it's not a police state, with block wardens and gossips and all of that. Anymore than I don't think anyone would argue that America isn't also approaching police state and monopoly centralization.
acm: Even more so now than at the height of the Vietnam era?
ag: Oh yes. The gridlock on free expression is much stronger
now in the United States than before. The FCC regulations as of the beginning
of this year [1988] have effected the ban of "Howl" from the air, some of
Ulysses. They finally defined it as "indecency" and have been upheld
by a court that they have the right to limit indecency or channel it to
hours when children aren't listening. So they limited it-first there was
an administrative declaration saying that indecency was not allowed on the
air between 6 A.M. and midnight, thus reducing the entire adult population
to child ears.
acm: At the same time we find much greater freedom of publication of things now, more so than say when "Howl" was published. Certainly the kind of obscenity trial it precipitated would never happen in the current climate.
ag: Well it is happening- a rollback-in terms of radio. And television also. In rock-and-roll, with the Tipper Gore Commission and the Meese Commission and the raid on the Dead Kennedys' office and the long suit that they had to go through. The crippling of the Pacifica Foundation with a hundred thousand dollar lawyers' bill to defend themselves for broadcasting a sort of Vietnam vets' play that they were cited by the FCC for. They fought it to a standstill but they lost a hundred thousand and they were unwilling to spend another hundred thousand to defend "Howl," which they broadcast every year until this year, and now can't broadcast.
In terms of general freedom of expression, I'd say we've lost a lot. First,
it's harder to get at your Freedom of Information Act material. Second,
the new regulations forbid people working in the government to write about
their experiences without it being approved-an outgrowth of the Frank Snepp
and other CIA books, but now affecting the entire range of all government
work. So that limits the amount of information on secret dirty deals. The
newspapers are less forward than they were during Watergate, so that the
freedom of information acts and the Federal Detention Act in case of emergencies-discussion
was suppressed during the Irangate Hearings-Jack Brooks asked Oliver North
about his plan for detention camps for dissidents in case of national emergency,
and Inouye said this is a national security matter, it can't be discussed.
It was astounding. And it's filmed in the film
Cover-Up. That section
of the Irangate hearings was just passed over and not investigated by the
Times or anything.
The whole dope scandal between Bush and Donald Gregg and Felix Rodriguez and the Contras has been bypassed. The love affair that Bush had with Mrs. Fitzgerald, and Mrs. Dukakis had with somebody in California was cancelled out, whereas Hart was knocked off. The entire hypocrisy of Irangate was bypassed in favor of a minor point, whether or not Reagan knew. The whole psychological underpinning of the administration, tall in the saddle, don't negotiate with terrorists, was never questioned even though the Irangate thing blew it apart, and yet nobody noticed during the election, it was note even brought up. Bush was able to attack card-carrying members of the American Civil Liberties Union; he never could have gotten away with that ten years before. I mean, the floor would have been wiped with him.
So the press has completely caved in and allowed shadow government to take
over-the National Security Agency, the CIA-with the exception of the
Boston Globe, which reported the shadow FBI, consisting of right wing
vigilante groups who collect information and funnel it to the FBI. Of which
the conspiracy against the Salvadorian aid group in America, CISPES-the
CISPES scandal was the only thing that emerged in the press about that,
though it was much larger. They reported that the FBI had been unfairly
and illegally wiretapping and persecuting and doing surveillance of the
CISPES group-Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador-on the
suspicion that it was a foreign agency, on the complaint of a double-dealing
fink within the FBI that the FBI renounces and says was unreliable anyway,
but millions of dollars were spent investigating the surveillance of CISPES.
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