[Marxism] Sergio Corrieri, star of "Memories of Underdevelopment" and Cuban revolutionary

[Joaquin Bustelo]

Sergio Corrieri, star of "Memories of Underdevelopment," "The Man from
Masinicú," and other Cuban films, and since 1990 president of the Cuban
Institute for Friendship with the Peoples died in Havana Friday two days
before his 70th birthday.

Corrieri was also the founder of the "Teatro Escambray," which combined the
two passions of his life, art and the Cuban revolution, bringing plays with
a revolutionary message to the mountains in central Cuba where only a few
years before counterrevolutionary bands had been active. For Corrieri was a
committed revolutionary and recognized as such. He was a delegate to party
congresses, as well as to the national assembly of People's Power, which
elected him to serve on its 30-member Council of State during the past five
years. He served on the party central committee and was the founding head of
the CC's cultural department.

Having met him in the early 90's, when the new Council of State was elected
last Sunday, I was disappointed not to see his name among those elected. Now
I know why. Tribuna de La Habana reports that months ago illness had forced
him to abandon the position of president of the organizing committee of the
upcoming Congress of the Union of Cuban Artists and Writers.

But for Cubans in their 40's and older, Corrieri will be remembered above
all as "David," an undercover agent of Cuban intelligence who infiltrated
the CIA-sponsored terrorist groups in Miami. The ten part TV series, "In
silence it has had to be," caused a sensation on the island as Corrieri
portrayed an agent as daring as any James Bond but much more human, one who
missed his homeland, his loved one and his friends, all of whom thought he
had become a counterrevolutionary. But despite the pain of distance and
separation, he nevertheless stayed at his post, re-living in a different way
the experience of José Martí, the leader of the Cuban Revolutionary Party of
the 1890's, who on the eve of his death wrote a friend telling him that
everything he had done had a single objective, to prevent the United States
from using Cuba as a stepping stone on a march of domination of what Martí
called "Our America."

"In silence it has had to be," Martí wrote, "because there are things that
need to be hidden if they are to be achieved."

A second miniseries, "The return of David," was filmed in the early 1980's,
as a co-production with Nicaragua, with David trying to thwart CIA/gusano
plots against the young Sandinista revolution. He is discovered, captured
and eventually rescued, and with his cover completely destroyed, is finally
able to return to Cuba. Not as accomplished as the first series, it is
nevertheless testimony to Cuba's commitment to the Nicaraguan cause. 

On visits to Cuba I met Corrieri twice, once around the time of "In silence
it has had to be," and again in the early 90's, during the worst years of
the "special period" following the collapse of East European bureaucratic
socialism, and each time found him to be completely unassuming, reticent to
speak of his own fame and accomplishments as an actor, and perhaps even a
touch embarrassed when visiting delegations would bring it up, saying he
understood any praise to be not for himself, but for the heroic  combatants
whose real-life experiences he was portraying in a fictionalized way. And
Corrieri spent the last years of his life defending the real-life "Davids,"
the five Cuban heroes who have spent a decade in U.S. prisons for the
"crime" of trying to prevent terrorist attacks against their homeland. 

In recent years, the absolutely shameless pitiyanquis of U.S. propaganda
outlet TV Martí broadcast a series on how these five Cuban heroes were
captured. Titled, "In silence it has had to be -- the response," it is, in a
grotesque way, testimony from the enemy to the impact Corrieri had as an
actor and a cadre of the revolution. 

Joaquin