ABBADO AND CUBA

Corriere della Sera
March 18th 2005

Claudio Abbado

Maestro Abbado, among the first to sign the pro Castro appeal, replies to the critics

Cuba, the country of avant-garde. Veronesi knows it too.

by Claudio Abbado

Travelling around the world, in all these years of work, I have always tried to find positive sides to every culture. To learn something new, to develop: in the end, we are all a little bit ignorant.

First Vienna, then Berlin and London, and then also Venezuela and Cuba: in these and other stages I have constantly tried to get in touch with the most valuable, the strongest and the most important aspects of these countries. The man, in his nature, is however brought to destroy or to extract almost only the negative sides of other societies. It seems to me that same thing is now being done with Cuba.

I know Cuba, I have been there quite a few times and I will be back. Why, I ask myself, are the positive sides of a culture like the Cuban not recognized? Let us try, at least once, to put aside the political instrumentalisation that is prone to do anything and let us try to simply bring out the facts.

Strangely, the most valuable things that exist in Cuba are never talked about. Let us start from medical research which in Cuba is in avant-garde. There is a doctor, Gregorio Martinez Sanchez, who is working on a research to defeat cancer and who has 'dicovered' a new and, as it seems, important cure. It is only that, a little detail, he needs to be able to realize, to put in practice his research. I have informed about it the Professor Umberto Veronesi who wrote a letter to me a few weeks ago to tell me that he would approve the project of this Cuban doctor.

He will do it because he thinks it is a right thing to do. But medical research is not the only strongly positive aspect of this island. Perhaps the powerful are fogetting it, but in Cuba there is no illiteracy. something that however is quite spread in many other parts of the world. In Cuba, with a little bit of free land, there are no speculations: they prefer making enormous gardens which will serve to everyone (an example that was later followed by other countries). Not long ago, I came back to Habana and I saw that in the last 5 years there had been improvements in restauration of houses and squares. In December I brought the Mahler Chamber Orchestra for some concerts, in January the Youth Orchestra Simon Bolivar the members of which were also 44 Cubans. There is a beautiful and useful exchange between Venezuela and Cuba. An exchnage related to music and ballet. Venezuela is more beyond in the sense of musical formation, thanks to the system of Antonio Abreu that includes 240 000 (two hundred and forty thousand!) youngsters saved from the street and Cuba however is more beyond in the sense of ballet: their exchange is a cultural one for learning from each other, to develop, as I said earlier. The fact that I rbought those 44 Cuban musicians to Caracas and that next year I will bring them with the entire orchestra to Europe, denies the claim that Cubans cannot go out of the country. Five years ago I was in Cuba with the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester and we brought materials, chords and musical instruments because, let us not forget it, it is a poor country and being such should be helped, not attacked. There is also a group of excellent Cuban musicians, Ars Longa, that I wanted to support and who are regularly invited to the Festival Gesualdo in Basilicata. We also introduced them last year through a tour that included also Bari, Matera, Rome and Bologna.

In short, Cuba is also this, not only Guantanamo which however is an American prison. I also ask myself why we hardly ever talk about new Italian ideas and realities, in my opinion very important for ecology and environment, such as trains with new locomotives which transport Tir or other lorries, via Brennero, from Munich to Innsbruck, Bolzano, Trento, Verona, with a new clutch from Veneto to Emilia Romagna. Or that little town near Trento that is realizing a project directed to traffic and global warming by using natural sources of energy (solar panels, hydrogen). This little town has won, among other things, the first prize for the best project in Europe.

Claudio Abbado