‘When Police Become Art Critics’
‘Artistic expression is a space to challenge meanings, to defy what is imaginable. This is what, as time goes by, is recognized as culture.’- Tania Bruguera
Since 1901 the Malecón has served as Havana’s living room. Stretching for some eight kilometres around the city’s edge, the sea wall and promenade is where the city comes to gossip, kill time, fish, swoon, argue, laugh, and otherwise enjoy a breezy reprieve. The Malecón hugs the outskirts of the city, perpetually pounded by Caribbean surf. On a humid January morning in 2018, I walked down the Malecón, being occasionally splashed by errant sea spray as it licked against the stone and concrete walls. As I walked, I caught sight of a painting on a recently patched section of the sea wall. The painting was a crude graffiti head adorned with a balaclava and what looked like a snorkel or a sewer pipe. As I got closer I realized that the head was emerging from a toilet. I had no idea its significance (or lack thereof) but its starkness and its place on Havana’s beloved Malecón told me it was not supposed to be there. Murals and public art adorn the Havana’s walls but graffiti is often little more than rushed tags, hardly ever anything that could be read as political dissent or open expression.
Back in the more familiar walls of Vancouver, I sat sweating from the humidity of a poorly ventilated coffee shop, its outer walls gleaming with a freshly painted mural from the city’s Mural Festival. I was having coffee with Tonel, a prominent Cuban artist who just so happened to be friends with my supervisor and a former TA of mine. I was there to ask Tonel about educational reforms during the Special Period, because I was looking at how university students and professors experienced daily life during a period of scarcity. Tonel all but put the lid on that train of thought by responding to my initial question with “what reforms? You might know better than me.” Sensing my topic was likely so obscure that I alone might be wondering its significance, I asked him instead about his own experience attending university in the late seventies. He talked about the art students on the outskirts of the city at the Instituto Superior de Arte and how the state at that time more or less left the students alone. Apparently the institute was something of an island of reprieve from the more restrictive art world of Havana at large.
For most people visiting Cuba now, the long arm of the state hardly seems noticeable beyond the odd billboard with Revolutionary slogans and cheap trinkets emblazoned with the face of Che Guevara. Tourists often comment that they are surprised at how “open” Cuba seems and how “ordinary” Cubans will criticize the Castro regime in public. Free expression in Cuba is not rare, but it is however, highly surveilled; often what tourists see is a performance of dissent. A man trying to sell illegal cigars in his neighbor’s apartment probably has no need to fear repercussions for an offhand remark to a group of gullible tourists, at least not for his remarks, but an artist seeming to question the tenuous but entrenched Revolutionary government? The level the state will go to in order to intimidate and intervene knows no bounds. On the face of it, a balaclava cloaked head rising from a toilet should seem of little threat to a Revolutionary, but Cuban artists have fought for decades against what “should be there” and what “should not.” When I returned to Havana in July of 2018, the mystery head was gone. I was reminded of a story a friend of mine once told me about her grandparents growing up in the USSR. State officials would scurry around cities and hurriedly paint over graffiti and anything deemed subversive. This led to someone beginning to paint red dwarves all around, for the sheer absurdity of it and since it was a symbol with no meaning, presumably would be left alone. However, these two were painted over, which apparently led to new graffiti slogan “why can’t we even have red dwarves?”[1] To the state, the mere presence of something that was not supposed to be there was threat enough.
In March 2018, the much maligned Decree 349 came into law in Cuba. Touted by the state as a law that will uphold Cuban values, artists have complained that the law unfairly targets them and subjects their work to censorship. Artists have been routinely monitored, harassed, and detained by police. Twitter reports are the one of the only ways that “disappearances” are tracked. In December 2018, the infamous Cuban performance artist Tania Bruguera was arrested and detained, along with other Cuban artists who had planned to protest the new law.[2] While the Cuban state may have ultimately released Bruguera, it would still seem a massive overreach of state resources to be bothered with something as trifling as art. Why then is art, particularly public art, such a contentious issue then? Especially when state resources are thin, why invest the immense amount of time, money, and manpower to bother following around artists, detaining them, and trying to make them adhere to a state-sanctioned tone? It is not enough to say that this is how repressive or authoritarian governments operate. Cuba may lack a freedom of the press but public discourse is still encouraged and literacy rates rival that of nations with GDPs much greater than Cuba’s. The answer must lie somewhere more complex, more elusive, more nuanced. My hope is that by sifting through the sticky and complicated stories, symbols, and power struggles , that we may better understand Cubans as complicated and vibrant, not either a “silent majority” of secret dissidents or hardline Communists.
Figure 4: Malecon by Ernesto Gonzalez Diaz
The State and Cuban Art following the Revolution
In the immediate years following the Revolution in 1959, the new Cuban state scrambled to assemble a Revolutionary government. Sweeping reforms that pushed for health and literacy as priorities were projects carried out on an unparalleled scale. Artists remained, although many fled, but it was a dangerous time to be making art that might out one as sympathetic to the brutal colonial (and American friendly) government that had just been ousted. Despite this, the Cuban Constitution ratified in 1979 guaranteed that art could go on to operate in nebulous forms by declaring “freedom of artistic creation as long as its content is not contrary to the Revolution… [and that] the forms of expression of art are free.”[3] This left a massive loophole for Cuban artists who were able to make subtle, and occasionally not-so-subtle, political messages by encoding them in forms which could be read to have multiple meanings. These coded meanings are replicated in how many Cubans approach discussing Cuba itself. Present with so many contradictions and dangling threads of meaning, it can be hard to decipher at times precisely what anyone is saying, let alone what they mean. Artists dealing with topics of repression and harsh material realities could do so by focusing on the form rather than a clearly bounded message, what some have argued as art that “leaves the viewer guessing.”[4]
It may remain perplexing to some then that artists would stay within Revolutionary Cuba at all, given cultural policies that have often constricted when the island nation has felt particularly strong international pressure and become thus less willing to tolerate upheaval on its own shores.[5] As the political and economic situation in Cuba has shifted throughout the decades following the Revolution, so too have the cultural policies dictating how artists work. For in between the moments of repression, the perpetually cash poor Cuban state has also had provide moments of support to Cuban artists, especially as they gained recognition abroad. Easy understandings of the post-Revolutionary Cuban art world have typically followed this understanding: in times of relative abundance like the establishment of the Ministry of Culture in 1976, artistic freedom followed. Conversely, when pressures abroad and at home necessitated more government control, artistic freedoms shrank. Myself and a few others would argue that this type of simple explanation for artistic repression and freedom in Cuba is too neat and obscures the lives realities of a great number of Cubans. As the historian Nicola Miller has argued, different understandings of the role between culture and politics in Cuba date back to at least the nineteenth century, and through the Revolutionary period, has allowed for creative overlaps between civil society and the Revolutionary state.[6] It is within this framework that complex and sometimes paradoxical meanings may be embedded in art that seeks to engage in critical dialogue but also may have to operate within a political framework that is shifting in its interpretation of what exactly is allowed.
The Revolutionary period was marked however largely by notable events that garnered much attention by the international community. 1971, the show trial of famed poet Heberto Padilla in what became known as the Padilla Affair, saw Padilla put on trial and forced to make a public apology for his association with Cuban exiles, noted in his prized book ‘Fuera del juego (Out of the Game).’ Forced to condemn himself for being unworthy of the Cuban worker, Padilla also outed other counter-Revolutionary artists and writers, in an event reminiscent of Stalin’s show trials. The writer Reinaldo Arenas iconized the moment in his book ‘Antes que anochezca’ with the line: “When we got to the corner of 20th Street and Fifth Avenue in Miramar, I saw Heberto Padilla along with one of those big trees that grew there; he approached walking down the sidewalk; pale, dumpy and lonely – it was the image of destruction. They had also succeeded at “rehabilitating” him; now he strolled between those trees like a ghost.”[7] These “grey years” as they came to be known, where characterized by a Soviet style clampdown on ideas that lead to many Cuban artists leaving the country during this period.
Cuban art enjoyed something of a revival in the 1970s due at least in part to a push from the newly formed Ministry of Culture.[8] As Cuba found its feet following the immediate needs created by the Revolution, the 70s and early 80s saw something of an artistic boom. The Minister of Culture, Armand Hart, proudly proclaimed “We do not isolate ourselves but rather open ourselves to the world; not to limit ourselves, but to enrich ourselves.”[9] Cuba did not want to be seen as isolated rogue state, but rather as the cultural crown jewel of an independent, and Socialist, Latin America. To achieve this end, money flowed from state coffers into art initiatives and soon artists from all backgrounds saw opportunities at home and abroad. But as the 80s wore on and economic pressures mounted, the relationship between artists and the state began to sour. The Mariel Boatlift at the beginning of the decade cast a long shadow over the Island. Economic conditions in Cuba were wrought with slapdash solutions and poorly executed endeavors on massive scales which saw Cuba hugely indebted to the USSR. Fidel Castro, seeing a need to lift the political pressure release valve, declared anyone who wanted to leave should do so. By the end of 1980, some 125,000 Cubans took him up on his offer.[10] As pressures mounted, tolerance for artistic freedom once again constricted. What are some ways in which artists flourished during this time?
Figure 1: Author’s photo of grafitti on Havana sidewalk likely done by grafitti artist Yulier P.
The Special Period, Participatory Art and Cuban Grunge
In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed and Cuba, already shifting away from Soviet style industrialization, endured years of economic and material scarcity. This time was declared to be ‘The Special Period in Times of Peace’ by Fidel Castro but is most often shortened to the more sarcastic and euphemistic ‘special period.’ This was a time of immense food, fuel, and financial scarcity on the island. The sudden loss of the ideal Socialist utopia, with the added demands of the market, necessitated and generated new approaches to art. This new artistic scene became known for its cynicism and hedonism, a sort of Cuban “grunge.”[11] Political unrest followed and the state responded with a series of reforms that both restricted freedom of speech while also lifting some economic measures which included the legalization of the American dollar and the some private business in order to provide an influx of much needed cash. This time is often regarded as being a time where images of Cuban independence and the Revolution where drummed up by Castro in ways not seen since the 1960s to refocus Cubans’ energy on ideology over economic and social realities.[12] This period has also become synonymous with Cuban dissent which have re-enforced Western ideas of an all-consuming Cold War ideology being the only lens through which to understand Cuba. Given the heavy handedness of the Cuban state during this time, this is not really a surprise. However, I would caution that to view the reaction of the state to forms of expression as not necessarily meaning that dissent was meant or even replied. That is not to say dissent and critique of the Cuban government was not present, merely that reading any and all punished artists as inherently “dissident” possibly obscures more complex meanings and messages, reducing all of Cuban identity to either that of a Castro adherent (often referred to as fidelistas) or that of an anti-socialist dissident.
Figure 2: Bruguera remounting Displacement in 2017 in Philedelphia. Photo uncredited.)
In 1990, just before the Special Period began, artist Angel Delgado was imprisoned for six months for a public impromptu performance, which included him defecating on a newspaper.[13] Albeit a less subtle political message than others, the allowances made to more “experimental” art forms in years prior were beginning to dwindle even before the harsh realities of the Special Period took hold. This would imply that simplistic readings of the Special Period being one of artistic dissent miss that state reactions actually predate protests and unrest that would mark the early 90s. Long the target of Cuba’s police, ignominious acts like that of Delgado’s defecation fell into a vague legal framework of counter-Revolutionary acts. Similarly to my friend’s anecdote about her grandparents in Soviet Romania, the mere presence of something that is not supposed to be there is enough to raise the ire of the state. While artists may have avoided lengthy jail sentences, the constant surveillance and threat of arrest caused many to leave Cuba during the Special Period. This in and of itself however presented unforeseen artistic opportunities.
With the departure of many of Cuba’s prominent artists, something of a vacuum which was then filled by eager young artists, many of them graduates of the Instituto Superior de Arte.[14] The 1990s also saw the rise of one of Cuba’s most notorious performance artists: Tania Brugeura. In 1998, Bruguera performed her piece Displacement. In the performance, Bruguera roamed the streets of Havana as a Nkisi figure, a cultural figure of the Kongo and a familiar figure for those who practice the Afro-Cuban religion of Santería. The figure was made up of Cuban earth, glue, wood and various textiles. The performance turned into a procession, where Havana’s residents followed Bruguera and the meaning of the piece depended dramatically on the interpretations and histories of the participants following her. While not officially sanctioned for the piece, the fact that she staged it on Fidel Castro’s birthday certainly would suggest heavy political themes. It is this time of performance that Bruguera has become known for, most notoriously by Havana’s police, and perfectly demonstrates the fluid and fraught nature of participatory art and Cuban civics. The slipperiness of interpretation that rests solely with the participant in public performance art, means that Bruguera is often not directly critizing the Cuban government, at least through her work, but rather on broad statements of surveillance, public space, control, social mores, and iconography. In turn, participants themselves become wittingly and unwittingly entangled in complex performances of expression. So the state’s reaction is cannot necessarily be for a direct “illegal” message, but rather to the implied threat. In other terms, someone can be arrested simply because the meaning of what they are doing is not clear or clearly understood to the viewer, in this case, the state police. In a system where interpretation of meaning falls to police, the meaning of the art becomes secondary to the reaction to it.
Graffiti and Decree 349: the 2000s
The 2000s, along with an increase in tourism in Cuba, runs alongside something of another paradox. Where ordinary Cubans continued to struggle with the harsh realities of scarcity created by the enduring US embargo in place since 1961, Cuban artists augmented by international recognition and art collectors eager for an aesthetic of “authenticity,” were able to make a considerably better living than many of the nation’s doctors and lawyers. Persistent desire to own a piece of Cuba, art collectors have increasingly turned to Cuba as something of a cultural oddity. In other words, despite its restrictive government, somehow vibrant and robust artworks flourish. Never mind that institutes like Casa de las americas have exhibited European and Latin American artists for decades[15] and has become something of an institution, the enticing idea that Cuba remains a country locked in a Communist past proved just too irresistible to collectors abroad.
This is not to say Cuban artists had it easy by any stretch, merely that an uptick in tourism and international attention has meant that in a cash poor world, Cuban art became and remains highly valued. At the same time, artists like Tania Bruguera became more outspoken, particularly when traveling abroad. Bruguera said in 2017, after a remount of her work in Philadelphia, “in repressive political contexts, you learn to create metaphors to not say directly what you should say. (In that sense) fear becomes a code. I wanted to change that, so I had to learn to talk, to tell the story and make sense on its own terms.”[16] In this way, some Cuban artists have become more direct and outspoken in their critiques of their material condition.
Decree 349, introduced in November of 2018 and officially coming into law in March of 2019, perhaps perfectly sums up the current state of Cuban Socialism. The decree leaves much to interpretation by insisting that all art be approved by the state, as there is very little clear language that determines exactly what gets approved and what does not. Any optimism that the government argued was meant to help artists rather than muzzle them has been more or less erased by the arrests of high profile Cuban artists who have protested the law.
Figure 3: Yulier P photo posted to Facebook in 2019
The graffiti artist Yulier P. who has prolifically decorated Havana walls with his art posted a video to his Facebook wall “Freedom for my artist brothers and sisters unjustly detained by the Cuban Government, No to 349.”[17] A scarcity of materials has hung over Cuba since the Special Period and Yulier, along with many others, roams the crumbling and derelict remains of Havana’s buildings, turning their bits of plaster, iron, and brick into his canvases. Yulier had been adorning Havana’s walls with his ghostly figures as a part of massive murals but was arrested in 2017 while painting. Yulier described his treatment by police: “They kept me in a room with serious criminals, men who had committed violent acts…. The police told me my art was ugly, that it was trash. They said I was being held because of my disrespect—desacato…. They said, ‘We will let you go, but you have to sign a letter’—a declaration that said I would no longer paint on walls. I signed it because I wasn’t in stable condition psychologically.”[18] While his arrest and subsequent harassment would seem to point to a state once again consumed with their role as art critics, when Yulier was threatened with legal action if he did not remove all of his murals from the city and he did nothing, no action came. The fear however has become that with the new Decree, Cuban artists that may have been tolerated before, will be held as criminals and social pariahs in a way not seen since the early days of the Revolution. Yulier continues to paint however, now cleverly on bits of concrete he finds in ruins, which he places around the city. Ironically, where his images before were largely innocuous, tortured and ghostly faces, or dogs and other creatures, now his work carries blatant political messages. In the complex world of state versus artist, the heavy handed reaction from the state has only resulted in more direct political defiance. It seems Yulier, like his Soviet compatriots long before him, has found his “red dwarves.”
As most of us understand in the West, Cuba is an island locked in an ancient Communist past, where ordinary Cubans are either for or against the last remnants of the iron curtain. But as real life often is, the situation is far more complicated. It is easy to say that all those who opposed Castro left, and indeed, many of them did. In the 1980s, and again in the 90s, massive waves of Cubans fled the island. For the Cubans who stayed, there remains the everyday realities and complexities that they must navigate. For artists, this means a reality that art is a culturally and ideologically valued sphere by the state, insofar as it supports the Revolution. Famed for its art “biennial,” the streets of Havana are dotted with public murals and sculptures. But pockets exist where less sanctioned work also can be found. By looking at how artists responded to and protested their complex realities, we may better understand how vacuums left by waves of emigrants represent sites of contested Cuban identity within Revolutionary Cuba, outside of the tired Cold War idea of an island nation locked in a Communist past. Criticism of how the government responded to the Special Period within Cuba had to be measured and tempered, as the long arm of State surveillance has remained ever-present. State surveillance is a helpful and practical device for understanding artistic expression in this period but must also be viewed within the bounds of its own limitations, as artistic reckoning with surveillance is at this point possibly also considered by some artists as overused to the point of being banal.[19] Nevertheless, surveillance remains an important lens through which historians can approach post-Revolutionary history, even as it remains a potential ideological blind spot that overstates its importance and denies or obscures more nuanced understandings of how Cubans interact with the State.
The type of cultural and legal grey area created by laws like Decree 349, which the Cuban state likely sought to avoid, has meant that in the rush to provide a clearer framework for the next phase of the Cuban Revolution, more confusion and room for interpretation has been created. Indeed, much of the protest from Cuba’s art community and public is targeted at the vague nature of the legislation itself. With artists being detained and then released, only to be arrested again, it would appear that the police themselves are also unclear on exactly what role they are meant to take as art critics. For artists, they continue to explore Cuban identity and belonging through slippery and multifaceted performances that remain difficult to pin down while also being firmly rooted in Cuban cultural traditions. As Cuba’s economic position once again becomes precarious with political and economic instability in Venezuela and a refreshed vigour for punishing sanctions from the U.S., it may be tempting to once again view Cuban artistic expression as one of a voice purely with or against, rather than as a highly complex, informed, and participatory act that remains as multidimensional as Cubans themselves.
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[1] I have never been able to find historical mention of this slogan.
[2] Basciano, Oliver. “Cuban Artists Fear Crackdown after Tania Bruguera Arrest.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 6 Dec. 2018, www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/dec/06/cuba-artists-tania-bruguera-arrest-crackdown-decree-349.
[3] Joyce Beckenstein. (Women’s Art Journal. 2016) 24
[4] Ibid.
[5] Nicola Miller. “A Revolutionary Modernity.” 2008. 677
[6] Ibid. 681-682. Similar arguments can be found in Rafael Hernandez’s Looking at Cuba: Essays on Culture and Civil Society (Gainesville. 2003)
[7] Translated in Alfredo Hernandez. The Havana Times. April 26 2011. https://havanatimes.org/?p=42423
[8] Alejandra Hernandez-Reguant. Cuba In the Special Period. Mcmillan Palgrave, 2009. 180
[9] Ibid.
[10] Edward Walsh Washington Post Staff Writer. “17 Americans Summoned Home: Carter Moves to Stop Cuban Boatlift.” The Washington Post (1974-Current File), 1980.
[11] Alejandra Hernandez-Reguant. Cuba In the Special Period. Mcmillan Palgrave, 2009. 182
[12] Katherine A. Gordy “Introduction: Spheres and Principles: Theorizing Cuban Socialism.” In
Living Ideology in Cuba: Socialism in Principle and Practice. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015) 24
[13] Alejandra Hernandez-Reguant. Cuba In the Special Period. (Mcmillan Palgrave, 2009. 181
[14] Ibid.182
[15] When I last visited in July 2018, the institute was hosting prominent works by Peruvian feminist artists
[16] Edwin Lopez Moya. http://aldianews.com/articles/culture/cuban-artist-tania-bruguera-took-streets-philadelphia/47898. May 5, 2017
[17] Havana Times. https://havanatimes.org/?p=145062. Dec 6, 2018
[18] Deni Ellis Béchard. “How Havana’s Street Artists Are Adapting to a Rise in Censorship.”
Mar 20, 2019 https://www.citylab.com/design/2019/03/havana-street-artists-censorship-cuba/585394/
[19] Rachel Price. Planet/Cuba: Art, Culture, and the Future of the Island. (London. Verso, 2015) 186