[Marxism] Hispanic playwright keeps his sights set on Cuba

[Walter Lippmann <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Inspired reporting on someone who wasn't tortured into becoming a
hate-monger by his Pedro Pan experience. Fascinating. Enjoy this!)
============================================

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ent/arts/theater/4254795.html

Oct. 12, 2006, 6:26PM
Hispanic playwright keeps his sights set on Cuba

By EVERETT EVANS
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle

Eduardo Machado arrived in the United States from his native Cuba in 1961, at
age 8. He and his younger brother were part of "Operation Pedro Pan," which
airlifted to the U.S. 14,000 Cuban children whose parents feared their
communist indoctrination in Fidel Castro's revolution.

"The Voice of America, essentially an arm of the CIA, was saying Castro was
going to send kids of well-to-do families to Russia to retrain us, so we had to
be airlifted out," he says. "It wasn't true, just an effort to disrupt Cuba."

Machado was told that he was going to Miami for the weekend. "An hour later, I
found myself poor, not speaking the language, living with an aunt and uncle in
Hialeah. And not knowing if I'd ever see my parents again, since I had no
communication with them then. It was a devastating experience."

But he was one of the lucky ones. Many young evacuees never saw their parents
again; some grew up in orphanages. But his parents followed eight months later,
and the family moved together to Los Angeles.

Today Machado lives in New York. He's head of Columbia University's graduate
playwriting program and is artistic director of Intar, a company devoted to
Hispanic playwrights. But he's never forgotten Cuba: Most of his 40-plus plays
deal with his homeland's people, culture and history.

Houston audiences can see one of his most popular works with Stages' production
of The Cook, which opens tonight. Premiered at Intar in 2003, the play centers
on a cook who vows to look after her wealthy mistress's house when the family
flees Cuba during Castro's coup. The Cook follows its characters through 40
years, as the dream of revolution settles into a troubled reality.

Despite his success, the traumatic nature of Machado's arrival has colored his
life. He began writing plays, he says, to deal with those "unresolved issues."
By his 20s, still in Los Angeles, Machado was a professional actor, doing stage
work and guest shots on TV series like All in the Family.

"All of a sudden I couldn't function, couldn't get out of bed," he says. "I
knew I'd had tremendous resentment as a child toward my parents for sending us
here. But at age 15 it disappeared. I didn't think of it again till it came
back at age 26. A therapist suggested I write a letter of forgiveness to my
mother. I tried but couldn't write it. Then one night, at 3 a.m., I wrote a
one-act play about a woman who'd lived in our building in L.A. â another
dislocated Cuban, who hanged herself because she couldn't bear her life here."

Machado's theater friends suggested he apply for a National Endowment for the
Arts playwriting grant. He did, then forgot about it, moving to New York to
pursue his acting career.

"Six months later, I got word that I'd won the grant. I felt guilty because I
had many friends who were struggling playwrights and couldn't get a break. Here
I was just starting, getting this."

He decided to dedicate himself to writing for a year, and the result was
Floating Islands, a four-play cycle tracing four generations of a Cuban family
from the 1920s through the '70s. It established Machado.

Machado has mixed feelings about Cuba and U.S. policy toward it. "There is much
dispute in Cuba, among Cubans, about the good and bad of the revolution and its
aftermath. My plays are about that dispute."

Havana Is Waiting, his acclaimed look at a gay writer returning to Cuba, is
Machado's most autobiographical work. Yet he deems The Cook the play of which
he's proudest. "It's the one that comes closest to expressing the struggle of
the Cuban people. It's what I wanted Havana Is Waiting to be, but I was too
emotionally involved there to be objective."

The Cook resulted from one of Machado's six return trips to Cuba since the late
1990s â only one of them made legally, he admits. Gathering research for a 
play
about Cuban prostitutes and the economy, he found the subject "boring." But in
Havana, Machado discovered a particular paladar, a restaurant in a private
home, to which he kept returning.

"It had an Old World feel, and the woman who ran it was 72, very poised. She
made food the way I remembered it from my childhood. Sitting there one day, I
spotted a picture on the wall I hadn't noticed before, of a blond woman in
1950s clothes. I asked who she was. Gladys said, 'That's the person who used to
own this house.' I marveled that her picture was still up on the wall. I went
home, and I wrote the play. It's about 'how do you survive?' "

Machado calls current U.S. policy toward Cuba "stupid and wrongheaded,
especially the embargo, which Bush supports." He sees the Miami Cuban-American
community's opposition to Castro as revenge-driven.

"They don't have the right to feel they own the country, when they haven't been
there in 47 years. Castro was useful as a liberator. I remember living under
Batista (Fulgencio, whose dictatorship Castro toppled). He was a monster. On
the other hand, no one should be in power for 47 years without an election."

"Part of me is really glad I live in New York and have the life I have," he
says. "But there's another side that feels, in being sent here, my real voice
was taken away from me. Yet if I'd stayed, I'm sure I would have rebeled, been
put in jail â and eventually wound up coming to America."

everett.evans@xxxxxxxxx




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