Carlos Cruz's Second Act

The professional stability he knew in his early career made his life radically different from that of most Cubans, who were suffering under a period of economic crisis. "It was the era when the government called for a sugar harvest of 70 million tons to improve the economy, and there were great shortages of food," Cruz recalls. Even he felt the effects on occasion: One year he spent six months away from the stage, harvesting citrus.

"At the same time the Communist Party consolidated its power," Cruz says. "It was building the cult of personality around Che and doing more to define society in its own way." One such method was the strengthening of neighborhood committees that were used to spy on ordinary citizens.

Meanwhile repression of homosexuals continued. Two acting acquaintances, Maria Aguilar and Sara Planellas, were accused of being lesbians and driven out of the profession, according to Cruz. Another friend, the painter Servando Cabrera, also was harassed. "Servando had been painting homoerotic themes, and they let him know he couldn't do that," Cruz says. "So he went back to painting guajiras [peasant women]. It was a terrible thing to do to an artist."

It was indeed a "witch-hunt," agrees Alejandro Rios, a former film critic in Cuba who defected to the United States in 1992 and is now director of the Cuban Film Series at Miami-Dade Community College. "The government brought in an officer from the military, Luis Pavon, to run a body called the National Council of Culture," says Rios. "It was he who enforced a lot of these measures against gays." (Today Pavon hosts a radio show in Cuba on which he reads poetry.)

Government censors controlled not just who was allowed to perform but how texts were interpreted, even altering passages in classic works. "They would change passages if they thought certain lines might be interpreted as critical of the Cuban government," notes Cruz. Soliloquies about tyranny or repression were especially vulnerable. Cruz recalls the time he appeared in a production based on the works of Cuban writer Nicolas Guillen. A reference to the anti-fascist Spanish playwright and poet Federico Garcia Lorca was removed by censors. "They didn't say why, but you knew it was because Garcia Lorca was homosexual," he says.

Censorship, however, was haphazard. Sometimes productions reached the public without interference. In one notable staging of Shakespeare's The Tempest by another Havana troupe, Caliban, the wild, menacing spirit who inhabits the island where the play is set, bore a striking resemblance to Castro. The amount of control exerted by censors depended on the political situation and the mood of the country at the moment, Cruz says.

"I'm sure Carlos was censored many times," reveals Jesus Vega, a former official of the Cuban government film archive, the Cinemateca, who now lives in Miami. "It happened all the time."

But apart from some complaints to trusted colleagues, Cruz still said little. He continued to work, and his reputation grew. "When you're an actor, you can escape from the reality that is in front of your eyes and into the roles you play," he explains. "I played a role. I most often didn't say what I thought. I lived with a double morality."

Like the theater, Cuban cinema also had come a long way under the revolutionary government. The first new institution created by the Castro government, in March 1959, was the Cuban Institute of Cinematic Art and Industry (ICAIC).

Alfredo Guevara, an old classmate of Castro at the Jesuit-run Belen secondary school and the University of Havana, was named ICAIC's director. Despite their long-time acquaintance, Guevara reflected a radically different image from that of Fidel and the uniformed comandantes who surrounded him. Delicate, pallid, clearly gay -- despite the official position -- Guevara affected a European look, draping a jacket over his shoulders and often traveling with his pet Yorkshire terrier. "The policy against homosexuality," says Cruz, "didn't apply to Guevara, because he was an old acquaintance of Fidel's who stayed loyal to him."

Guevara turned his taste for European avant-garde film into a guiding light for the development of new Cuban cinema. Some films were even permitted to make mild criticisms of the system.

"Make no mistake about it: Guevara was a commissar," comments Vega. "But he set a standard. He said certain films could say things because they were true works of art, not just propaganda. The media and literature, they were censored from early on. Writers like Heberto Padilla and Reinaldo Arenas went to jail. But film managed to say things. A lot of that had to do with Alfredo Guevara."

Even during the ideologically strident Seventies, Guevara permitted films to be made that expressed frustration with the regime, acknowledges former film critic Rios. Poverty, scarcity, and corruption in the lives of ordinary citizens occasionally were depicted.

At the same time, however, those in the Cuban arts scene were growing increasingly frustrated. Ramoncito Veloz, a star of many Cuban movies, including 1989's The Beauty of the Alhambra, describes a late-Sixties meeting with cultural bureaucrats over his singing career. "My father was extremely well-known as a singer of guajiras," he says, referring to Cuban country music. "When I tried to start a singing career, I wanted to sing different kinds of music -- boleros, whatever. But I was told by the government officials that I could sing either guajiras or nueva trova [Latin-American revolutionary folk and popular music], but nothing else. They had an official line, even on songs." Veloz eventually defected and now sells real estate in Miami, where he sometimes appears in variety shows.