The actor Erdwin Fernandez Collado showed its support for the filmmakers and professionals close to cinema who protested against censorship in Cuba, following the events related to the documentary "La Habana de Fito", by director Juan Pin Vilar, whose exhibition was banned by the Ministry of Culture.
"Cinema has to be free, it's true. It has my support and my name," said Erdwin, one of the more than 330 signatories of a protest manifesto, which denounces "the irresponsible way in which officials" of the cultural sector act. Cuban, who after suspending the scheduled screening of the documentary, then decided to broadcast it on television, without authorization from its director.
On his Facebook wall, the Miami-based actor sent his admiration and respect to Juan Pin Vilar, whom he has known since they were both children, to the Assembly of Cuban Filmmakers and to the entire public. Regarding the latter, he stressed that "we [artists] owe our existence to him," and assured that he also "has to be free to choose and express himself."
"Come now, dear fighters and clari..., unlike you, everyone fits in the Artistic Party, we do not discriminate. Welcome everyone," he concluded.
A total of 355 Cuban artists, among whom are the singer-songwriter Silvio Rodríguez, the director and screenwriter Eduardo del Llano, and the comedians Luis Silva and Ulises Toirac, signed the statement in which the cultural authorities are accused of acting in systematic violation of ethical principles.
The signatures of the actors Luis Alberto García, Jorge Perugorría, Néstor Jiménez, Laura de la Uz and Héctor Noas also appear on the letter, along with those of the singer-songwriter Polito Ibáñez, the composer José María Vitier, the screenwriter Senel Paz, the directors Gerardo Chijona and Juan Pin Vilar himself, and the critics Joel del Río, Frank Padrón and Gustavo Arcos Fernández-Brito.
This letter is the result of a meeting that filmmakers held last Thursday at the 23 and 12 cinema, in the capital's Vedado, where They demanded from the government a Cinema Law that protects their work.
"Cuban cinema is damaged and I say it with pain. We are running out of our young people," declared the prestigious director Fernando Pérez, one of the attendees.
The meeting had as a background the official censorship of the documentary "Havana...", which was scheduled to be shown in April at the headquarters of the El Ciervo Encantado theater group, when it was banned by the Ministry of Culture.
Based on the rejection that this decision generated, the authorities tried to disguise the censorship with other actions that were equally arbitrary and disrespectful of the will and commitments of director Juan Pin Vilar.
It was so that the television broadcast the documentary on the program "Espectador Crítico" without authorization from its director or the audiovisual production company, although several pro-government commentators did make comments.
"I apologize to the viewers because they are seeing a bad and stolen copy. Explicitly, this morning, after consulting it, I said that I did NOT authorize the projection on television. It is not the final cut," Vilar said on his social networks.
After his initial ban on exhibition, the filmmaker sent a letter to ruler Miguel Díaz-Canel showing his disagreement with the measure, which he described "as a deplorable act that imposes a biased view on the documentary and subjects Fito Páez's testimony to political questions or historical credulity."
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