Cuba has had only ten years of revolution. It is a country still struggling to overcome a history of economic imperialism, social oppression, and hurricanes. Before 1959, Cuba was the world's leading supplier of dope and whores, and in Havana alone were the three most famous pornographic theatres in the world. By most standards, however, a Cuban culture, Cuban art, did not exist. (The one exception was the folk culture of the Afro-Cubans which is now flourishing and statesupported.) “Cuban theatre” consisted of a few professional groups in Havana who, by and large, did European imitations aimed at the tiny Cuban bourgeoisie.

Since 1959, the Cubans have developed an excellent professional theatre which is open to stylistic experiment; a large public which is much more honest than polite; and amateur theatre on all levels of society—in schools, factories, small towns, hospitals, cane-cutting brigades, youth brigades, the armed forces, etc.

The basic development of Chilean theatre has been from amateur to professional. In this there are strong similarities to the theatrical movements of Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil in the last thirty to forty years, but with one main difference: the renewal of modern Chilean theatre began in the universities, and these student groups in time became the theatrical establishment. This process, its initial aims accomplished, has now reached a dead end. And once again there is a search for new approaches and objectives.

The evolution of our contemporary theatre began in 1941 with Cervantes’ La guarda cuidadosa and Valle Inclán's Ligazón, presented by a group of University of Chile students which became the Experimental Theatre; in 1943 the Catholic University began a similar venture: the Teatro de Ensayo under the direction of Pedro de la Barra. Commercial theatre in this country, however, goes back to the nineteenth century.

Generally, the person least equipped to talk about any Latin American cultural activity is a Latin American. Each of our countries is an isolated island arrogantly disparaging every other country. We are not a continent. We are an archipelago: nineteen cases of nationalism and of an astute reactionary politics which divides and exalts the small differences that separate us. Any Chilean or Argentine writer is perfectly familiar with the roster of productions in New York, Paris, and London. But he hasn't the slightest idea what has been written or staged in the last twenty years in Peru or Mexico. Any Latin American theatrical director receives publications in three languages, but if he wants to read a book on Colombian or Uruguayan theatre, it is likely that he can find it only in the library of a romance language department or theatre department of a university—in the U.S.

After World War II, United States businessmen found it cheaper to run their own factories in Brazil, rather than ship goods from the U.S. They could profit from a low standard wage, and the factories would be closer to both the markets and the raw materials needed: steel, minerals, oil, etc. So it was decided to make São Paulo the largest industrial city in South America. U.S. money started pouring in, U.S. companies were granted enormous loans from Brazilian banks at low interest, and São Paulo soon became a prosperous city.

The nouveau-riche bourgeoisie, created by this boom, invited important European theatre companies and artists to perform in São Paulo. Brazilian artists began to imitate them and imported directors, mainly from Italy, to build and train theatre companies in São Paulo. As a result, actors began to resemble Italian actors and playwrights European playwrights.

In 1963, during the Cuban crisis, several playwrights in Rio de Janeiro called a meeting to write a script: The Blockade of Intervention: An Indictment. The following afternoon some students, workers, and artists from the Popular Center of Culture of the National Student Union rehearsed the script hurriedly, and performed it that night before a large crowd gathered in front of the Municipal Theatre in the heart of the city. The play opened twenty-four hours after it was written.

The Blockade of Intervention: An Indictment was one of the most important manifestations of popular theatre—Brazil's “theatre of agitation.” It belongs to a large repertory of plays, which include Patria o muerte, Cuba s, Yankee no, and others which deal with international politics. This theatre of agitation also includes small “raids” made by theatrical brigades during special occasions. For example, during, a political campaign a group of actors meet on a corner and begin arguing about politics to the point of threatening physical violence; people gather around them and the group suddenly begins an improvised performance that deals with the most urgent political issues.

During 1968 a group of avant-garde artists, moved by their own direct working experience, started openly to discuss the decrepitude and uselessness of prevailing Argentine culture and of their own art, which until then they—and their society—had perceived as a revolutionizing force.

The oligarchic-imperialist dictatorship in our country has increased its oppressive measures. Censorship has become obvious and crude, enforced by “cultural” institutions (museums, prize committees, etc.) as well as by the police.

We have shattered our own illusions that we were able to create, inside the bourgeois cultural apparatus, work that truly opposed the prevailing social structure. Our development now demands a complete restatement of the purpose and conduct of the artist and the intellectual, a search for new institutional frameworks, for new audiences, for new media and messages.

Imagen de Caracas was presented in the east central part of the city at the specially constructed production/exhibition site, the Dispositivo Cuidad (Mechanical City). The project was the most ambitious effort made in Venezuela to integrate the arts, combining image, colors, forms, various stages and kinds of architecture, movement, music, sound, light, the spoken and written word: everything available in the new world of audio-visual expression. The work took two years of continuous labor to complete.

The principal objective was to tell the violent four-hundred-year history of our city. The film about Caracas’ history was divided in two parts: the first part, from the founding of Caracas through the beginning of the last century; the second, from 1800 until the present.

The first stirrings of the Cinema Nôvo movement were in the early 1950's, when some young filmmakers began to protest the expensive imitations of Hollywood and cheap musical comedies (chanchadas) that made up the traditional Brazilian cinema. This protest found an immediate echo among young film critics.

In 1952, Italian neo-realism was the main inspiration of my first film, Agulha no palheiro (Needle in a Haystack), for which Nelson Pereira dos Santos served as assistant director. Neo-realism dominated dos Santos’ own first two films, Rio, 40 grans (Rio, 40 Degrees), 1955, and Rio, zona none (Rio, Northern District), 1957, as well as his production of Roberto Santos’ O grande momenta (The Great Moment) in 1958. From 1958 to 1962, there was a series of experimental short films.

The name of the movement, Cinema Nôvo, appeared for the first time around 1959-60, but even then it was as fluid and undefined as that of the French nouvelle vague.

Like every other culture in this technologydominated world, Brazilian culture shows the influence of cinema. Film arbitrates life-styles, activates the imagination with its fantasies, and shapes moral life. Yet it is impossible to speak of the cinema in its Brazilian context without referring to North American film, whose influence and aggressiveness distributes North American culture throughout the world so that audiences now expect from all films only those images they are accustomed to seeing in Hollywood cinema.

The Brazilian public, which is economically and culturally much closer to the United States than to Europe, has also based its images of life on North. American films. A vicious circle: when most Brazilians make films, they make them “a la Americana,” and it is primarily for this reason that Brazilian spectators try to make any Brazilian film they view into a Brazilian film “a la Americana.”

At a 1967 symposium in Montreal, I, along with other colleagues, had to answer the question: “What kind of theatre should we do?” Throughout almost my entire professional life, I have been asked that same question and with each new stage of my life I responded differently. But when I heard it in that foreign country, where the only thing familiar to us Latin Americans were the Indian reservations, I suddenly felt I was on another planet, stunned. I don't remember what I answered. I said something vague and unrelated—“anti-culture”—and I realized I was again entering a new stage.

At this time I had just finished Documents from Hell, which was staged by Danilo Tenorio of TEC (Experimental Theatre of Cali), my own theatre in Colombia, and was the most serious attempt we at TEC had made to become involved in the life of our people.