New Voices of Rebellion Rise in Cuba
A new generation of artists is keeping Cuba’s culture and desire for freedom alive, despite government crackdowns
By Michael Deibert
Newlines Magazine
(Read original article here)
In July 2018, the locals and foreign tourists who
habitually mill around the picturesque Habana Vieja quarter of Cuba’s
capital were treated to a startling sight. Walking up the stairs of El
Capitolio — the grandiose historical seat of Cuba’s congress completed
in 1929 and shuttered after Fidel Castro seized power in 1959 — a
striking woman appeared covered in excrement and railing against the
dictatorship that has ruled the island for six decades.
“It was an
act of fury, a gesture of helplessness, of exhaustion,” says Yanelys
Núñez Leyva, the 31-year-old art historian and gallerist who made the
protest. “The message was that they weren’t going to be able to beat us,
that we were ready for anything, that the Cuban art world followed the
tradition of resistance that preceded it.”
In 2016, Núñez Leyva
and performance artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara created the Museo de
la Disidencia en Cuba, an online platform to highlight acts of dissent —
especially in the artistic realm — from Cuba’s colonial era until
today. Two years later, Núñez Leyva and Otero Alcántara were among the
founding members of the Movimiento San Isidro collective, named after a
poor and historically marginalized Havana neighborhood, encompassing a
wide range of artists, writers, and musicians.
“We observed the
fear that people felt when hearing the word dissident,” says Núñez
Leyva, “It was not only the exclusion of the government, but also the
exclusion of neighbors, friends, and society in general. If you became a
dissident for the state, then you became a social plague. Faced with
this context, we created the museum as a way to legitimize being a
dissident and give it value.”
Núñez Leyva and Otero Alcántara are
among the vanguard of young activists and artists in Cuba today facing
down an ossifying machinery of repression that, though the world has
changed to the point of being unrecognizable since 1959, often seems to
have changed very little at all. Just before Núñez Leyva’s 2018 protest,
state security had bundled Otero Alcántara and the poet Amaury Pacheco
off to detention (they would be released a short time later) following
the group’s attempt to push back against a new government law, Decree
349.
The new law – a draconian edict that prohibits musicians,
artists, writers, and other performers from operating in public or
private spaces without prior approval by Cuba’s Ministry of Culture –
poured cold water on those who had hoped that the piecemeal
liberalization of some aspects of Cuban life that began when Raúl Castro
took over as de facto leader of the country from his brother Fidel in
July 2006 might continue.
To understand the space in which Cuba’s
cultural activists operate, it is essential to process Cuba’s history
and, especially, its relationship with the United States.
After
invading Cuba in 1898 during the Spanish-American War, the United States
would continue to occupy it with a military government until May 1902.
The Platt Amendment of 1901 dictated that the United States could
intervene in Cuba militarily at any time, even as Cuba ceded the Isla de
Pinos and was obligated to “sell or lease to the United States lands
necessary for coaling or naval stations.” The 1903 Cuban-American Treaty
of Relations would enshrine these conditions into law.
For
decades after the invasion, the United States would exercise outsize
influence on Cuba’s turbulent politics, one of its lowest ebbs being the
1925 to 1933 dictatorship of Gerardo Machado. With Machado’s regime in
collapse, in September 1933 a sergeant born poor in the province of
Holguín, whose alleged mixed-race heritage led to him being referred to
as el mulato lindo (“the pretty mulatto”), led a revolt to finish it off. His name was Fulgencio Batista.
Through
puppet presidents and directly as president himself, Batista ruled the
island until 1944, when his chosen successor for president was defeated
and constitutional order returned, however uneasily, to Cuba. The last
time Cubans would be able to vote for the government that ruled them was
July 1948, when they elected a senate, house of representatives and the
dapper, urbane Carlos Prío Socarrás as president. In March 1952, on the
cusp of new elections, Batista, again facing certain defeat, connived
with the army and seized power in a coup d’état.
For the next
seven years Cuba, and Havana in particular, became a debauched
playground for vacationing Americans, featuring plentiful brothels and a
strong presence of U.S. organized crime. U.S. financial interests
exercised an enormous influence over Cuba’s economy and politics,
uttering nary a word of condemnation as the reliably anti-communist
Batista turned a country with a vibrant if imperfect democracy into a
thuggish police state. Discontent grew. In July 1953, Batista put down
an armed attack on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba, in the
country’s east, led by a young lawyer named Fidel Castro.
Nevertheless,
the Cuba of the 1950s was not, as some would like to portray it, a
place of utter squalor. There were great inequalities between town and
country and between the races (Batista himself was famously refused
admittance to one exclusive Havana club on this basis). But as the PBS
documentary Fidel Castro (2005) notes, Cuba ranked fifth in the
hemisphere in per capita income, third in life expectancy, and second
in per capita ownership of automobiles, and its literacy rate was 76
percent – the fourth highest in Latin America. It ranked 11th in the
world in the number of doctors per capita, its income distribution
compared favorably with that of other Latin American societies (and
certainly in the Caribbean itself), and there was a vibrant, engaged
middle class. Music, especially, thrived.
The illegitimate son of a
well-off landowner, Fidel Castro — jailed and subsequently released
into exile in Mexico — would sail back to Cuba clandestinely in December
1956 with a small band of revolutionaries that included his brother
Raúl and the Argentine revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara. When the
revolutionaries finally succeeded in ousting Batista on New Year’s 1959,
revolutionary euphoria soon turned to bloodletting. In January 1959,
outside of Santiago de Cuba, forces under the command of Raúl Castro
conducted a mass killing in what became known as the Massacre of the 71.
In the months immediately after the revolution, hundreds of people were
killed after the most cursory of trials, many of them at the Fortaleza
de San Carlos de la Cabaña, which guards Havana’s harbor and which was
under Guevara’s command.
This did not escape the view of Cuban intellectuals of the time. In his novel En mi jardín pastan los héroes
— a shattering portrait of the moment when the great hope of the Cuban
revolution disintegrated into tyranny — the author Heberto Padilla wrote
that “a revolution is not simply the excited rush of plans, dreams, old
longings for redemption and social justice that want to see the light
of day which the revolution gushes at its beginning. It has its dark
side, too, difficult, dirty almost — repression, overzealous police
vigilance, suspicion, summary verdicts, firing squads.”
Initially a supporter of the revolution, Padilla would eventually be imprisoned and then flee into exile.
The
political compass of the island swung wildly after the revolution.
After the Cuban state nationalized U.S. property, U.S. President Dwight
D. Eisenhower severed relations in January 1961 (by the end of the year,
Fidel Castro would openly declare himself a communist). When Eisenhower
was succeeded as president by John F. Kennedy, relations between the
United States and Cuba grew even more fraught. An attempted invasion by
exiles in April 1961 — the Bay of Pigs — ended in blood-soaked failure,
and in October 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis took the world to the
brink of nuclear war.
Beginning in the early 1960s, the United
States enacted a series of punishing economic measures against Cuba’s
new regime, which barred not only U.S. businesses, but businesses that
do business in the United States from interacting with the communist
state. Largely sealed off from the giant to the north, the Cuban state
developed into a reactionary military dictatorship centered around the
Castro family. A network of neighborhood spies and enforcers, the
Comités de Defensa de la Revolución (Committees for the Defense of the
Revolution, or CDRs) were set up and, as former allies like Carlos
Franqui would later attest, what was acceptable in the island’s cultural
life became inextricably linked to what its dictator deemed
appropriate.
Describing this system of government repression in his 1998 novel Trilogía sucia de La Habana,
Pedro Juan Gutiérrez wrote that “it’s the only way to turn people into
mercenaries: by convincing them they’re part of the power structure.
When the truth is they’re not even allowed to approach the throne ….
They’ve enjoyed the power of weapons, the stick in hand, of lording it
over their fellow citizens and humiliating them and beating them and
shoving them into cells. Finally, some of them understand, with their
livers shot, that they’re miserable beasts, club in hand. But by then
they’re so scared, they can’t let go.”
Heberto Padilla was far
from the only writer that suffered terribly after the revolution, though
he only faced rage because of his ideological deviation. Other writers,
such as Reinaldo Arenas, José Lezama Lima and Virgilio Piñera, were
subject to wrath not only because of their ideas but also because of
their sexual orientation. Actual or suspected LGBTQ people were
imprisoned and tortured while government critics found themselves
without work, as the government was the only legal employer. Millions of
Cubans fled abroad, especially to Florida, where the Cuban-American
population is estimated at more than 1.5 million and plays a pivotal
role in U.S. politics.
Somehow, through it all, Cuba’s
dictatorship retained an allure for many on the global left. Perhaps the
most infamous example of this was the Colombian author Gabriel García
Márquez, who not only failed to denounce the dictatorship’s human rights
abuses but, as former dissident and later U.S. Ambassador to the United
Nations Commission on Human Rights Armando Valladares alleged,
collaborated with Cuba’s security forces to entrap academic and
pro-democracy activist Ricardo Bofill. As a result, Bofill spent years
in prison.
Many on the left were quick to point out Fidel Castro’s
support for different global insurgencies and roundabout role in
helping to end apartheid in South Africa via his military intervention
in Angola. What remained unspoken was the irony that the right to vote
is something denied to all Cubans – Black or not – every bit as much as
it was under the apartheid regime.
In 2013, when the journalist
Yoani Sánchez conducted a speaking tour of several countries, defenders
of Cuba’s dictatorship harassed her as she arrived at the airport in
Recife and interrupted a film screening she attended. When she visited
Brazil’s congress, left-wing politicians berated and insulted her in a
manner reminiscent of the behavior of the CDRs. Two days after the 2016
death of Fidel Castro, the official Black Lives Matter account tweeted,
“Although no leader is free from shortcomings, we must respond to
right-wing rhetoric and defend El Comandante. Fidel vive!” During his
campaign for the Democratic nomination for president earlier this year,
Bernie Sanders praised Castro’s 1961 literacy campaign, only to be
rebuked by those who actually experienced what it was — political
indoctrination as much as education — and who pointed out that many
countries supplied decent school and decent health care without the boot
of dictatorship on the necks of the citizenry. Earlier this year, on
the 53rd anniversary of Che Guevara’s death while leading a quixotic and
unasked-for insurgency in Bolivia, Spain’s Deputy Prime Minister and
leader of the left-wing Podemos party Pablo Iglesias called Guevara an
“example for history of the liberation of peoples and social justice.”
All
of this adulation of a totalitarian system is, as one can imagine,
somewhat hard to swallow for those facing down Cuba’s dictatorship on a
daily basis.
“When it comes to Cuba, every human being on this
planet, mainly people on the left — and I consider myself to be on the
left — has something positive to say about how people live in Cuba,”
says Núñez Leyva. “They always have a point of comparison; they always
have a justification for cleaning up the government’s image. That, to
me, is ignorance, arrogance, and neocolonialism.”
For the young activists in the county, the idea that Cuba’s government is a champion of racial equality is laughable.
“The
Cuban regime is weighted on the basis of white men — macho,
patriarchal, white men — with white women and wives as well,” says Otero
Alcantara. He grew up in Cerro, one of Havana’s poorest neighborhoods,
and one that has one of the richest traditions of Afro-Cuban culture.
Since 2017, he has been detained by state security 30 times.
“Cuban
television and all the Cuban cultural apparatus still operate on a
racist basis,” Otero Alcantara says. “One of the great themes in Cuba is
that when Castro comes to power, he erases racism with the stroke of a
pen, and now there is no more racism and you can’t talk about it and
everyone who talks about it is counter-revolutionary. Therefore racism
remains intrinsic within society. Racism does not evolve backwards, it
is not capable of dying, because it is entrenched within the nation.”
When
it comes to art forms that explicitly address race, the Cuban
government even tries to control the output and content of the
inherently rebellious hip-hop genre through two government-funded
groups, the Asociación Hermanos Saiz and Agencia Cubana de Rap. Many of
its purveyors on the island, however, aren’t receptive to this.
“Hip
hop is a philosophy of life, a social therapy and a kind of liberation
for me,” says Soandry del Río, a 42-year-old rapper who helped found the
Movimiento San Isidro, though now he identifies as an independent
activist. “But we have a government that wants to control all areas of
society and that includes the cultural space.”
Which is not to say
that, particularly since Fidel Castro stepped down from day-to-day
ruling of the island in 2006, there have not been changes in Cuba.
Raúl
Castro, who had a more uncompromising reputation than his brother,
became acting ruler of Cuba in July 2006 and then head of Comité Central
del Partido Comunista de Cuba, the most powerful post in the country,
in April 2011. While maintaining an unyielding monopoly on political
power, he ushered in changes that were unimaginable 20 years ago,
largely ending restrictions on the ability of Cubans to travel abroad
(though dissidents are still frequently stopped at airports), allowing
private use of cell phones, allowing citizens to connect — for a price —
to the internet, and relaxing restrictions on private businesses, which
in the last decade has led to a thriving market for services like
Airbnb.
In December 2014, Raúl Castro and then-U.S. President
Barack Obama announced that long-standing travel and commercial
restrictions the United States had placed on Cuba would be relaxed and
full diplomatic relations would be restored. In August 2015, after 34
years, the United States reopened its embassy in Cuba. In March 2016,
Obama landed in Havana, becoming the first U.S. president to visit the
island since Calvin Coolidge in 1928. The image of the young, vital
leader of the United States strolling the streets of Habana Vieja,
cheered by Cuban citizens, was a striking one when compared with the
aging Raul Castro who, at their dual press conference, was peppered with
questions about human rights and political prisoners he wasn’t used to
answering.
I visited Cuba frequently during this period, and the
sense of hope and expectation among ordinary people was palpable.
American tourists and businesspeople — and their ideas and their money —
flooded onto the island. One night, I sat on the roof of a restaurant
in Havana’s Vedado neighborhood with two friends of mine, a gay couple.
One of them sighed and said, “I’m just hoping things change. I’m pushing
50 and I’ve waited so long, and I don’t feel like I have much time
left.”
When Donald Trump took office in January 2017, of a piece
with his seeming obsession to undo most of his predecessor’s
accomplishments, he returned to the Cold War policy that had been so
ineffective for decades: restricting U.S. residents’ ability to travel
to and do business in Cuba and increasing financial, banking, and
shipping restrictions to the country. Many observers feel this was a
mistake.
“Part of the logic of Obama’s policy was taking the
United States out of the middle of Cubans’ battles with themselves, and
that was always a long-term bet,” says Michael J. Bustamante, an
Assistant Professor of Latin American History specializing in modern
Cuba at Florida International University in Miami. “The objective of
that policy was not regime change.”
“By and large, that long-term
bet made sense and still makes sense,” says Bustamante. “The amount of
good that it did in terms of improving people’s lives, opening up space
for internal debate in Cuban society, and unleashing civil society was
kind of unprecedented.”
The activists in Cuba itself can often
seem to be inhabiting a kind of twilight world, denounced as public
enemies by the Cuban government and yet not entirely accepted by the
Cuban exile community, either. They operate on a shoestring budget,
unlike the well-heeled lobbyists and political operators in Washington,
D.C., politically connected and advocating for the hardest line possible
against Cuba. This past June, at the urging of just this sector, the
United States blacklisted Fincimex, the Cuban military-controlled entity
that processes remittances for Western Union — a key source of hard
currency for Cubans — which has led to the closure of more than 400
Western Union offices on the island.
Nor would the Cuban activists
fit in well with many of the younger arrivals in the United States,
some of whom have allied themselves closely with the racist, xenophobic
policies of the outgoing Trump administration. These are perhaps
personified by no one better than YouTube personality Alexander Otaola,
who frequently mocks Black Lives Matter protesters as “criminals” who
“use someone’s death to destabilize a government” and claiming there is
“no difference between these communists and Hezbollah.”
When Trump
made a campaign stop in Miami in October, Otaola approached the
president to give him a “list” of Cubans with U.S. visas whom Otaola
charged were too cozy with the Castro regime. Among those, somewhat
absurdly, was Antonio Rodiles, an opposition activist who has been
repeatedly detained by Cuba’s state security services. Otaola did not,
however, present Trump with a list of the many Cubans languishing in
immigration detention, some of whom say they were violently coerced to
sign forms claiming they wanted to return to Cuba.
By contrast,
after the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis in May, the
actress Iris Ruiz, one of the founding members of the Movimiento San
Isidro, wrote of how “intersectionality” was key to any civic struggle
and that “our societies are structurally and culturally racist and
oppressive.”
Some Cuban-Americans in Miami are not above engaging
in historical revisionism when it comes to characterizing their
relationships with the civil society in Cuba itself, either. When
democracy activist Oswaldo Payá showed up in Miami in 2003 to seek
support for his Proyecto Varela, an initiative that proposed a variety
of measures to increase democratic representation and freedom of
expression in Cuba, many exiles mocked him as a “bringer of false hope.”
Since Payá died in a mysterious auto accident in Cuba in 2012, however,
he has become revered by many among the exiled right-wing, apparently
forgetting their previous suspicion of him.
In Cuba itself,
meanwhile, despite 60-year-old Miguel Díaz-Canel having become president
in October 2019, Raúl Castro remains head of the Communist Party and is
widely believed to have remained the ultimate power behind the scenes.
Those
connected to the Movimiento San Isidro continue to be targets of not
only official police harassment but also of the so-called “acts of
repudiation,” ostensibly spontaneous (though always carefully
choreographed by the government), such as happened in Havana last month.
On Oct. 7, Otero Alcántara and a number of other members of the
collective, including rapper Maykel Osorbo, were in a building in Habana
Vieja creating posters as part of their initiative dubbed
#MiCartelParaElCambioEnCuba (“My Poster For Change In Cuba”) when Cuban
police sealed off the street, ordered curious residents back into their
home as people in civilian clothes arrived brandishing pictures of Fidel
Castro and trying to destroy the posters. During the conflagration,
Otero Alcántara was beaten and fined by police.
The artists vow, however, not to back down and to keep Cuban culture vibrant and alive.
“The
Cuban government has a lot of hostility to popular culture because they
know popular culture is the most uncontrollable kind of culture in the
world,” says Otero Alcántara. “You can control your intellectuals
through cultural structures. You can control the thinking of a group of
artists. But popular culture is born from the spontaneity of need, of
misery, of experiences that no government, no regime in the world has
the power to control.”
