Now Playing in Cuba: `The Interview’

One door opens, another closes.

Cuba is open, or opening; and yet North Korea, one of the last countries on earth that shutters itself from the outside world, has closed down free artistic expression in a stroke by inducing Sony Pictures to withdraw The Interview.

It has done so, paradoxically, by opening up to the world the movie company’s digital vaults, putting business correspondence on display for the general public to see. Strange that we can read the studio chiefs’ emails about the movie but not see the movie.

One door opens, another closes. It was in 1989 — as Czechoslovakia opened; as Germany opened; as China opened, in a way, through the image of a Chinese citizen facing down a government tank in Tiananmen Square – that the Ayatollah Khomeini closed down free expression in a stroke by urging Muslims to murder Salman Rushdie, the author of The Satanic Verses.

Let’s never forget that Rushdie had to spend those years of opening – the years after the supposed “end of history,” in Francis Fukuyama’s silly formulation – behind closed doors in a series of safe houses.

And let’s not forget that the book – one of the truly great books I’ve read; a Moby-Dick for the age of terror – was recognized as a classic because it was published in the first place.

For twenty-five years the principals involved in the book’s publication have been involved in a cold war over whether the publisher yielded to terrorism in the months afterward. I told that story earlier in the year in a long piece for Vanity Fair, and the reaction from the protagonists made clear that the war is not over.

At Sony, apparently, there was no war over whether to stick to plans for the movie’s general release; and as Evan Osnos makes clear on newyorker.com, that’s par for the Hollywood course.

Meanwhile, terror regimes have figured out that the way to instill fear in our society is not just to threaten our artists, but to threaten our credit cards.

Everybody knows that next time a movie like The Interview won’t be green-lighted in the first place; and everybody knows that the time to go to Cuba is in the next six months, before an open Cuba becomes a place like everywhere else – a place where artistic expression is stifled not by the government but by the strange partnership of terror and the free market.

One door opens, another closes.

• 19 December 2014