Fer nando Martínez Heredia and Esther Perez visited the U-M campus the week of November 8-18, 2001 to participate in several classes and workshops. Esther Perez, a highly accomplished translator, editor and activist, directs the Martin Luther King Center, a lively community development program located in a working-class neighborhood of Havana that focuses on theological and sociological reflection, as well as outreach of various kinds.

    RNB: I'm curious about how the Martin Luther King Center came to be, how it got its name and what its role is.

    EP: The Center was born out of a local Baptist church. By naming it after Martin Luther King, the founders wanted to signal a relationship between the Baptist tradition in Cuba and the African American Baptist tradition. They wanted two things-to stop being white and to signal the abandonment of the idea that church should be separate from everything else.

    I've been working there for over ten years and during that time the center has changed considerably. First, it became autonomous from the church and evolved into a non-governmental organization. Everyone who wants to work according to our principles and objectives is welcome. In fact, many different people-Cubans, non-Cubans, Christians, non-Christians, Santeros and people who have no religious beliefs at all- currently work in the Center. I work with the popular education area, which is a kind of pedagogy of the oppressed, a pedagogy of liberation. It emphasizes a participatory approach by enabling the people who are involved in these projects to be the owners of the social processes as much as possible.

    RNB: How did you become involved in this work?

    EP: I first became acquainted with the ideas and practices of different groups in Latin America that adhere to various learning pedagogies through a Brazilian friend, Paulo Friere. He traveled a lot in Cuba, and knew Cuba very well. In the mid 1980s, he started preaching to a number of us in Cuba to interest us in getting in contact with the practices and the theory of these groups in Latin America.

    Now this was a very special moment in Cuba. There was a huge, self-critical movement of society, organizations and institutions. It was very open, exciting, and many discussions and debates were taking place at all levels. We began thinking that if we could really contextualize what everyone was saying, it might help us involve more people in thinking about what Cuba and Cuban socialism should be in the future.

    RNB: What kinds of projects does the Center focus on and what is its approach?

    EP: This has changed over the years. In the early 90s, the Center concentrated on trying to help people cope with the economic crisis. We worked a lot in housing, one of the big problems in Cuba, which was, of course, made worse by the crisis. Also, we worked together with international agencies in helping with housing. But we always emphasized that every process we were involved in had an educational dimension. Presently, the Popular Education program has several different activities, including workshops. The only requirement for enrollment is that people should be involved in a concrete process with human beings at some level; that is, we are not a program for theoreticians or people who want to discuss ideas.

    One thing that we do is what we call "accompaniments." That means that if there is a group somewhere in the island carrying out a project that emphasizes participation and democratic decision-making, they ask us to work with them for a period of time, normally a year, and we do that. Our role depends on the group and what they want. It's a kind of advising, but the final decision is the group's because we also believe that autonomy is a precious thing.

    We emphasize that we are accomplices, that we empathize with what they are doing and we've worked on various projects. We have accompanied neighborhoods involved in reconstructing a housing project and we have accompanied groups of peasants and scientists who are trying to work together to transform agriculture into a more organic, sustainable endeavor.

    RNB: What are the greatest transformations you have seen since you've been working there?

    EP: We have all changed. For example, people who came from the Baptist local church I mentioned earlier had to critically analyze and deconstruct their Christian tradition to find its limiting aspects and try to go beyond them. They had to transcend the idea that Christianity was the only faith that could save people. They had to learn to work very intimately with people who do not have any religious beliefs, and to discover that the things that unite us are more than the things that divide us.

    Those of us who came from a different religious tradition had to learn how to grapple with these differences and to see the things that we could incorporate in our work that come from different traditions.

    It's also been a growth process to work with questions of gender, homophobia, race and personal history linked to the history of the country. It's been a difficult, gratifying, wonderful, extremely hard process that repeats itself, but always differently with each group that we work with. We do not avoid resistance in the learning process. If the new knowledge that we build together does not confront the resistances that are inside each of us, then we say there is no real learning that has taken place.

    To give you a more concrete example, we have been working with the question of prejudice, stereotypes, fixed images, etc. One of the materials that we use for that is a documentary film called Gay Cuba, which deals with the question of homosexuals, homophobia and responses to homosexuals and to cross-dressing. It's a very exciting film. Yet, I've seen people unable to watch it to the end because within the process that we create for watching that film, if you feel uncomfortable or resistant, then we all have to address it. I'm happy when that happens, because it means people really are opening themselves to see and to talk with those who are different and that process, I believe, has changed people.

    RNB: What is the most exciting part of what happens when people who are different from each other come together to solve problems or create new practices?

    EP: People get to know about the things that are being done somewhere else, and they discover that they don't have to invent the wheel again. Another very exciting thing is that, through these workshops, new gatherings of people have come about. We try as much as possible to foster networking so that people from different approaches, experiences, settings, etc., get together in projects in the community.

    When people go to our workshops, they stay there. We have a place for people to stay and we ask them to stay even if they live in Havana. They talk until three or four in the morning just exchanging. We have expanded into a video and publishing program to make available to people the experiences that take place in different places. But we don't just go there and document what people are doing; instead, the videos are made in cooperation with the project. We would never make a script-the script would be made with the community.

    RNB: Are there any other international traditions that the Center incorporates?

    EP: There are many. For example, one important tradition that the Center has-and not just embraced, but swallowed and assimilated-is the theology of liberation. Another is that of the Cuban revolution. Still another tradition that we have been able to incorporate is the prophetic tradition, from Christianity. What we understand as prophetism is that the prophets in the Bible were people who were very deeply involved with the social projects of their people, but at the same time, they had their eyes on the project and they were always saying basically what the distance was between the process and the project. We are going to go through the process with the Cuban people. At the same time we say that we all have to look at the project, at the final overall project of a better society, of a more just society, a society without inequality, a society that reflects the utopian project, and that is the only project that is worthwhile. After all, if it's not utopian, why root for it!

    RNB: You're a woman of many roles-scholar, activist, organizer. How has your role as a translator affected your work?

    EP: There are many cultures in the world and they are all valid. It is important that we do not try to judge other people and other social relations only through the lenses of our own culture. Getting to know another language and getting to try to translate from another language to your own awakens the idea that this is another culture in which people live differently because they see it through other perspectives. But if your language and culture are very dominant in the world and your culture forms 95 percent of the films and the TV shows that are shown over the world, and 92 percent of the news that is printed, there is always the risk of saying that this is the world and all the other things are just variations. Translation is one of the practices that helps you understand that this is not so.

    Ruth Nicole Brown, a doctoral candidate in political science, interviewed Perez while she was here.