Short Subjects
TTHE LOUISIANA ROCK FESTIVAL this sumA mer, everything went wrong. About 100,000 young people turned up, in search of music, companionship, fresh air, and other things. What they found was...
...One must be hopeful...
...If he had agreed not to emigrate but to turn into an "itinerant showpiece of socialist culture"— forbidden at home, but exhibited abroad to fill the state's coffers with foreign exchange— then a solution to his case might well have been worked out...
...Preliminary censorship, a hollow hoax, has been abolished and the producer made responsible for any undesirable public reactions in the course of a performance...
...For the first time the issues and struggles in this unhappy land may be on the point of shifting to the sphere of economics, with the dispossessed classes of peasants and workers able to join in a real tussle for a greater share of the growing national pie...
...President Balaguer, keeping a tight hold on all the financial strings of the country, is credited with much of this success and with introducing a measure of financial responsibility and honesty into a country where corruption has long been a way of life...
...sugar import quota, which has brought the economic growth rate close to 7 percent a year...
...LTHOUGH THE GENERAL POLITICAL ATMOSA PHERE in the Dominican Republic re mains disturbed, with indiscriminate assassina tions continuing, there is reason to hope for a better future...
...At the same time, the Dominican economy is reported to be enjoying a "boomlet," based upon a new wave of foreign investments and an upping of the U.S...
...Physical terror indeed was more savagely inflicted, but there was far less destruction of people's ethical and cultural values...
...Some of the promised big-name rock groups never turned up...
...But Krejca's own firm attitude, his stubbornly reiterated intention of staying in Prague led to the...
...They saw the commercial possibilities of exploiting the innocence of their generation, and no solidarity of age could stand in their way...
...There is a certain method in the way which plays are censored In Czechoslovakia...
...he had become a symbol...
...A recent photo in El Caribe, leading daily of •the Dominican Republic, showed a smiling, nattily dressed Juan Bosch at a ceremony opening a new headquarters of his PRD (Dominican Revolutionary party...
...What they found was an ill-organized racket...
...TV is currently breaking all records for silliness...
...More than $300 million has been invested in this manner during the past few years, including a $200 million Canadian Falconbridge ferrous-nickel mine...
...the dress rehearsal for Shakespeare's Henry IV unexpectedly aroused such a demonstration that government representatives attending the performance left the theatre when the curtain fell for the interval...
...Further, by courting foreign investments —successfully—through such devices as tax exemption to foreign plants producing only for export, Balaguer is laying the ground for future problems involving ultimate control of foreign concessions and corporations...
...In thecurrent phase, all allusions to fascism are verboten...
...All controversial plays have been gradually withdrawn from the theatres' regular repertories...
...The American presence in the economic sphere retains all its potency...
...A play dealing with the Paris Commune was banned at the last moment before it was due to go on the air, and replaced with an arrangement of poems which was afterwards severely criticized...
...The Dominican middle class is benefiting most (shown by a surging demand for foodstuffs, an 8 percent rise in gasoline sales, etc...
...The Czechoslovak leadership's present policy is to humiliate people and to force them to go back on what they have said or signed to deprive them of all moral authority in the future...
...As if this were not enough, Bertolt Brecht's play Mother Courage suffered twenty-five important cuts because the audience attending the dress rehearsal—and it was a carefully selected audience—turned the show into a veritable political demonstration...
...He was in fact punished precisely because he wanted to remain in the capital with them...
...Those people take things too seriously...
...hard drugs were all over the place and two young people died from them...
...There are certain resemblances, not all favorable, between this wave of development and the old Puerto Rican "Operation Bootstrap...
...They were right...
...Radio listeners have recognized the presentdirector of political programmes—noted for his attacks on Zionism—as the onetime editor of the fascist broadsheet The Aryan Combat, published in 1938 and 1939...
...About 100,000 young people turned up, in search of music, companionship, fresh air, and other things...
...It was rare, and heart-warming...
...Perhaps the crowning blow came when Alexander Griboyedov's play Gore of Uma (Wit Works Woe) had to be banned two weeks before the ceremonial first night scheduled for the anniversary of the October Revolution...
...In Prague, the National Theatre's performance of Don Juan, Moliere's subversive libertine, underwent extensive cuts...
...When the festival broke up, a group of young people rode off in anger, shouting it was all a "rip-off...
...For Krejca was setting a very bad example...
...Russian classics have fared no better...
...P. q...
...Out of the question...
...The "normalized" head of one of the nation's theatres explained recently, not withouta certain ingenuousness: "Contemporary West ern plays...
...The capital city, Santo Domingo, is experiencing a construction boom, and the interior of the country is making substantial infrastructure progress in the form of irrigation, hydroelectric development, land redistribution, roads, etc...
...A number of varietyprogrammes dating back to the German occupation of Czechoslovakia have been dug out ofthe archives to fill in radio time, since they canhardly be politically damaging...
...food was being peddled at outrageous prices...
...But Brecht, once regarded as subversive in the U.S., was not the only victim...
...Cuts SHORT SUBJECTS massacred Gorky, Ostrovsky and Chekhov...
...Short Subjects Everyone was aware, of course, that the issue did not only involve Krejca alone...
...Never before, it seems, had so many signatures been collected to protest against a measure taken against someone in the world of theatre...
...The play was not performed again...
...In the summer dust of Louisiana, where the locals gaped at dust-baked kids bathing nude and the sharpers tried to multiply a fast buck, Consciousness III took a fall, apparently no match for the great capitalist tradition of grab, cheat, and lie...
...The entrepreneurs of this rip-off were themselves young...
...11 A Dominican Detente...
...the sanitary facilities were disgraceful...
...We noticed that, for once, Communists—a few Communists—had signed with the others...
...And last January, at the time the Brussels Congress of Jews was discussing the lot of Soviet Jews, a programme was abruptly cancelled at the last minute, when it was discovered that the four actors who were to take part in itwere all of Jewish origin...
...A few excerpts: Czechoslovaks were most impressed by the protest against the dismissal of the producer Otomar Krejca (he founded the Za Branu Theatre in 1966...
...but the lower and largely illiterate class is also gaining (27 percent increase in beer consumption, higher attendance in country schools, etc...
...Krejca was punished, we read, despite the fact that he had always wanted to remain in Prague with his actors...
...So the yare not for us...
...One comes to understand how the absence of a cause to defend weakens morale and resistance within the country...
...repressive decision...
...he has dropped his extended radio polemic with the Balaguer regime and, conceivably, is making a contribution to a general calming of the Dominican political atmosphere...
...A few minutes before another programme, a well-known actor was expelled from the show, He made the mistake of turning up wearing a roll-neck pullover which was reminiscent of the style of dress of a very popular television commentator in 1968 and who is currently serving a three-year prisonterm...
...The fixed U.S...
...The arena could be a democratic one—elections, parliamentary institutions, the legitimate institutions of the people —unions of workers and peasants, professional organizations, etc., rather than the gun, bomb, jail, etc., of recent memory...
...In this respect, the situation was better during the years of the German "protectorate" between 1939 and 1945, for all wars have an end...
...For plunking down his $28, each of the customers got a large return in frustration, deceit, and misery...
...Most producers have been replaced by men whose lack of talent is, for the authorities, the best guarantee of absolute devotion...
...sugar quota remains the key to the situation...
...They had already learned their lesson in the ethos of screw-all-comers, quite as if they were robber barons ripe with age...
...Bosch seems to have emerged from his semiclandestine existence...
...LE MONDE, in its June 10-16 English edition, prints an inside report from Prague that gives a depressing picture of the gradual reStalinization of Czech culture...
...Either they are pessimistic or else they are antifascist...
Vol. 18 • October 1971 • No. 5
