The Mail Cuban 'Memories'

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

I apologize for my delay in responding to Mike Prokosch's review of the Cuban film, Memories of Underdevelopment, but write this in the hope that it is not too late to correct some important misrepresentations contained in Prokosch's article.

While I suppose I ought to feel flattered at having been dubbed a "beloved leftish writer" (whatever that is), I must first of all insist that the Center for Cuban Studies, for whose benefit Memories was shown at the Harvard Square Theatre, is not, as your reviewer stated, a fellowship fund for leftist writers. Had he taken the trouble to read the front page of the same brochure from whose back page he took the names mentioned in his article, Prokosch would have understood that the Center for Cuban Studies is a tax-exempt, non-profit cultural institution whose purpose is "to make available to serious scholars and to all interested people a comprehensive collection of documents and study materials about revolutionary Cuba." The Center, still in the process of being formed, represents the effort of a group of scholars, writers and professionals, including myself, to offset the defacto embargo on information about contemporary Cuba in this country, an embargo which persists in the face of a steadily rising level of interest in the subject both on and off campus.

As for Prokosch's review itself (headlined "Another Counter-Revolutionary Film Bites the Dust"), I found his criticism as irresponsible as his reporting. Although he pretends to be writing from a revolutionary point of view, Prokosch makes the same essential mistake about the film as Time magazine did about Desnoes' novel when it was published here in 1967: Time praised it as "counter-revolutionary" and middle-class, the same qualities that Prokosch attacks. What both reviewers, writing from politically antipodal positions, failed equally to understand is that Memories is a rich dialectical confrontation with the Cuban revolution. By viewing its form and content literally, by taking it as a straightforward piece of interior fiction. they missed its true meaning, which is: this is why there had to be a revolution in Cuba (and why there must be other revolutions everywhere).

Prokosch complains that he fails to find the revolution anywhere in the film. But the revolution is everywhere in it, and that is its power. Thus the reviewer's rather presumptuous lecture to the Cubans, that they have no right to "waste" their precious resources on such "reactionary" films, misses the point completely. Whatever its defects may be, Memories of Underdevelopment is a daring departure, not only from traditional socialist esthetics but from the exhausted fictional forms of Hollywood and Western Europe; for that alone, it ought to be seen, and praised.