Author: Miguel Coyula

In September 2022, Ediciones Deslinde published my novel The Vertical Island in Madrid.[10] At the book’s launch, the presenter, artist Lester Álvarez Meno declared that the novel was “beyond saving.”[11] He recriminated me morally for debasing figures of the Cuban opposition, which appeared in the novel as secondary characters, sometimes in cameos. Curiously, the rest of the book showcases its protagonists in more grotesque behavior and situations, and they too were inspired by real people. What was happening here? That none of these other characters were media celebrities with a foothold in the opposition’s political arena? Maybe Álvarez, a member of the 27N movement, expected a mea culpa from me.

With The Vertical Island, I envisioned a narrative that was more focused on the psychology of its main characters. When I finished it, I thought to myself…well…it’s okay, it’s readable. I was happy with the idea that, just as with my film Red Cockroaches, any lover of dystopian anime could understand it without any knowledge of Cuba. But I did not feel that it would generate much political controversy, since despite its multiple narrative voices, its anecdotal essence was a twisted love triangle. My interest in including the secondary characters referenced by the book presenter was essentially based on the fact that I found their contradictions dramaturgically attractive and added stylistic variety to the social dynamics of the environment through satire. But the presentation-recrimination at the book event was revealing: I discovered that I had injected inflammable political content into 4 of the book’s 158 pages. I had arrived at the conflict intuitively: from the gestation of the characters. Not only that, I had entered uncharted territory. My last three films had deconstructed the myth of Fidel Castro, instrumentalizing him as a character, because I felt that there was a critical silence about his figure in the island’s cinema.

Álvarez, the presenter, published a text pointing out the problematic sentences about the opposition celebrity figures referenced in the novel, among which was also the artivist Tania Bruguera. But the text gave prominence to Lumoa, a character inspired by the mutation of Charles Manson and Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara (LMOA). The novel has several narrative voices. In his description of Lumoa, the narrator in question, was accused by Álvarez of being sexist and classist. Interestingly, Álvarez thought this a more serious offence than the incest, violence and murder committed by the protagonists in the rest of a novel where the narrator himself is also “the very expression of uncertainty and failure.”[12] Then, Álvarez makes reference to an excerpt about machismo: “he always kept a brood of women around him,”[13] which rang even more strange since LMOA himself has publicly confessed: “Yes, I care about having money, dressing in my own style, traveling, having women… the good life.”[14] Álvarez also failed to mention that when the book’s protagonist visits Lumoa, he discovers that, in reality, his “brood of women” keeps him doped up in a bed, and one of them informs him: “There is no single leader here. We are a collective.” (La Isla Vertical)

Álvarez’s criticism of the depiction of Lumoa’s humble origins was equally debatable, because it is unrelated to the professional life of LMOA himself, who has never denied his origins, and has since won numerous awards, including the $50,000 prize awarded by Prince Klaus. Then again, in the novel, Lumoa is a mafioso who controls food supply, in a world where the protagonists live a perennial famine. What was the real problem then? Towards the end of the text, the presenter tried to persuade me: “Coyula should not try so hard to destroy a country and people already in ruins, and should devote himself to erasing the traces of his references and frustrations.”[15]

During the presentation he hinted that I sympathized with the Cuban government by saying “It’s OK if you are a communist and love Fidel Castro, surely in Miami you will be eaten alive.”

I felt embarrassed for him, but I confess that his reverse ideology left me with a growing curiosity. Why had Álvarez agreed to present a novel that he so detested? Why was there such an insistence on an edifying and positivist art in the style of socialist realism or of the most conservative Hollywood productions? Was there something beyond mere moralism, or political correctness? I have never been interested in journalistic writing because it kills the possibility of creation. But now it seems a pertinent resource to analyze my sources of inspiration, since there also seems to be a critical silence on the subject.

Days after the book’s presentation in Madrid, page 80 of La Isla Vertical was circulated on WhatsApp among some members of the 27N movement. A sentence was circled in red where a character, referring to Lumoa, confesses to have “taken food and water to the future martyr during his hunger and thirst strike.” Had reality cracked inside the fiction?

During the collective confinement in San Isidro, the non-governmental mainstream media had already written the epic of LMOA, his 10-day hunger strike,[16] and the eviction that gave rise to the protest, spurring the 27N movement.[17] The resistance had thus already created a mythic figure, who also happened to be imprisoned.

Was there a pact to hide a “minor fissure” for the sake of a greater cause? Two narratives circulated: a public and a private one. Obviously, I was inspired by the later. In this one, some of his followers alluded to LMOA’s vulnerability to power as an excuse to lie. In a private conversation, one woman tried to justify him: “If the Cuban dictatorship has lied for 60 years, why doesn’t he have the right to lie too, and thus give them some of their own medicine?”

Cuban dissidents have died from hunger strikes. Others have come close. Sometime after the events in San Isidro, opposition scientist Ariel Ruiz Urquiola, held a live broadcast on Facebook to dismantle the LMOA strike as “a farce to create a theatrical atmosphere.”[18] He was bombarded by negative comments and ignored by the so-called independent press.

The post-truth that Fidel Castro practiced for analogical decades, and which Donald Trump had popularized in the U.S. political arena, seemed to circulate in the veins of many in the Cuban opposition. This was symptomatic of an era where words transmute their meaning in the face of facades erected and demolished indiscriminately, sometimes with a gentle blow, in order to achieve circumstantial objectives.

All cultures have idiosyncrasies that are to some extent immovable. Today Vladimir Putin continues the expansion started by Ivan the Terrible. We in Cuba are partially descended from a tradition-betrayal-idiomatic, a quixotic saga destined to failure, which Edmundo Desnoes in Memories of Overdevelopment says is the nature of all of us who speak Spanish. In short, we inhabit a continent of endemic corruption.

But I want to move the calendar back a bit. Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, had stood out as the most prolific artivist in the country until his last imprisonment on July 11, 2021. In 2018, he announced that he had had a “vision” where Fidel Castro appeared to him in a dream to tell him that in his final days, he had written a testament and had chosen him to make it public because he was “an ordinary Cuban, with a sense of the historical moment.”[19] This work premiered at the Pompidou Center in Paris and consisted of the recording of a comedian imitating Fidel Castro’s voice while reading his fictional mea culpa. Almost all of LMOA’s subsequent performance work responds to a compulsive immediacy, with strategies that can fluctuate from draping himself in the Cuban flag while sitting on a toilet, to wearing the American flag as a cape, or covering himself with his own excrement in front of the capitol in Havana. He is part of a trend of performance art, where notions of quality, inscribed in traditional criticism, are irrelevant. His greatest coherence is to put the dictatorship in check while demanding freedom for Cuba. The independent press constructs him as a popular hero, young, black, of humble origin, charismatic, a self-taught man guided by his intuition and courage. This type of press coverage occasionally confers a certain mystical aura on him.

Under this precept, LMOA is produced as a bearer of virtues that are mostly innate, but such a definition ignores that LMOA was equally produced by the harshness of the post-Soviet urban landscape. We could see it as a gigantic mural of economic, ethical and moral contradictions like the grotesque humans illustrated in Antonia Eiriz’s painting. In other words, the LMOA phenomenon in the idealized independent press, becomes a spontaneous sprout of the current island nature, an earthquake miraculously germinated in infertile soil, to consolidate the imminent liberation of the island. It was a success story that sold the possibility–promised and frustrated by the Cuban revolution itself–to finally give power to the people, awaken them from their lethargy and ignite them like a volcano.

Curiously, the populism intrinsic to this construction is also aligned with the utopian dimension of capitalist neoliberalism. LMOA grew up in a state capitalism that had a socialist facade. He has no creed other than his own person:

I always wanted to be a superstar, I like recognition, fame. I’ve always said that. I don’t hide it. If you go to Cerro, where I was born, and show them the Mona Lisa, everyone will recognize her… But if you show them Da Vinci’s self-portrait, no one can tell you who it is. I don’t want that to happen to me. I want them to associate my work with me, to know who I am. A famous guy! But back then I wasn’t. What was I? Well, I was black, with no academic training, the kind of guy who put himself forward for an event and was almost never accepted. I was ‘de pinga’ and ‘a pinga’ I did so that they would know me.[20]

His actions in public spaces and outside academic or institutional ties, place his body in uncontrollable, unpredictable ways, establishing himself as an element of chaos against the regime, inspiring a good many artists of his generation in need of a voice and a space in the totalitarian society, and also in need of a shield to withstand the bigger blows. The official media defames him and the independent press sanctifies him. During this narrative bipolarity, LMOA’s performances gradually moved into a hardcore activism that was no longer under the blanket of art. His race to destroy the regime seemed to reach an unstoppable rising climax, incited by Cubans inside and outside the island, until Icarus was burned by a midnight sun. His sentence: 5 years in prison.

Simultaneously, young artists, academically trained writers and LMOA followers were breaking ties with Cuban institutions. Some emigrated, others engaged in activism until state security–using their most recent strategy–pressured them to negotiate their own exile. For much of this group, the boundaries between left and right are archaic or deliberately blurred. Some align themselves with a social-democratic discourse, yet their actions are neoliberal. Today, they carry out actions from a distance for the sake of LMOA’s liberation. Exhibits are curated in his name, poems dedicated, documentaries made and banners bearing his likeness are raised in demonstrations outside of Cuba. But the echoes on the island are virtual. The regime has assumed them as collateral damage that has no immediate impact on the physical reality of the country. For this group, LMOA seems to represent indistinctly symbolic capital, and sometimes, capital itself. The aestheticization of courage instrumentalizes his figure and freezes the instant before departure in order to postpone their individual impact in exile. In many cases, the drama of such dislocation also responds to a hedonistic longing whose generational imprint is represented by the authors of the song “Patria y Vida.”[21] This is also the consequence of a regime that has tried to hide its economic failure and the material welfare of its elite, under the iron-clad preaching of self-sacrifice. The freedom of the masses is no longer an idea. Contemporary life has turned it into an abstraction.

I am not too much of a follower of José Martí, but I cannot help quoting him now: “Just as he who gives his life to serve a great idea is admirable, he who uses a great idea to serve his personal hopes of glory and power is abominable, even if because of them he exposes his life.”[22] Cuban leaders have created a sad tradition with these words, and Fidel Castro was their maximum exponent. LMOA now dwells in the shadow of his prison. To date, he has not been able to negotiate his exile. Alongside him await hundreds of other political prisoners without the same media protection. The light at the end of the tunnel has not changed in size. Many of the most valuable artists are no longer on the island.

What then is the function of art in Cuba? Tomás Gutiérrez Alea in the 1960s saw cinema as an instrument of change to develop critical thinking in the population in order to build a better society. Like Eisenstein, he had (including the ups and downs) the support of the official industry. Alea achieved a masterpiece with Memories of Underdevelopment. But in this gregarious tableau there was little room for individual poetics, where the excessive illumination of an inner world could be labeled as ideological diversionism and the commitment to an artistic discipline, as exaltation of the spirit, was often interpreted as egoism, or simply as being disconnected from reality.

The artivist Tania Bruguera has likewise referred to the need for a useful art, able to transform the current Cuban reality. Bruguera now confronts the once luminous Cuban revolution of 1959, turned into authoritarianism with chronic metastasis. In 2016, Bruguera created INSTAR in Havana: an institute that promised to align and provide space to multiple artistic disciplines, alternatives to the governmental discourse. For a while, the space attracted many young creators and thinkers. But the growing activism of its members caused the regime to collimate the space to the point that face-to-face activity was made impossible, nullifying its objective of disseminating critical art. On the face of it, INSTAR could itself be seen as a work of performance. Perhaps its ephemeral physical nature, in the face of the regime’s repression, was part of its strategic budget to denounce it. Today INSTAR continues virtually from abroad, but the country’s primitive, costly and controlled level of connectivity makes it difficult for the Cuban islander to interact with the space.

I confess that my reaction to activism is controversial. I respect the tenacity of some activists, because I recognize my own tenacity to create. But as a creative engine, I do not find it a vehicle for inspiration. I have done activism on a few occasions. In January 2020, the artist Javier Caso was summoned to an interrogation after taking photographs during a shoot for Blue Heart, the audio of which he recorded with a hidden cell phone. On top that audio, I edited a visualization in photo-animation to ironize the exchange he had with two police agents. I posted it on YouTube and it went viral, far surpassing the views of all the videos on my channel.[23] An acquaintance told me “Now, that is political art.” I think it is activism, maybe even artivism, but I don’t think it is Art. Even if the form was novel, when seen from a broader perspective, its dramaturgical essence adheres to a scheme: rebel artist versus two cartoonish cops.

Good versus evil in a revealing document of the workings of state security. It is terrible and funny. But as a work of art, it is not polysemic. Its gestation arises as a denunciation and this unique objective made it an aestheticization of a political tool. With some exceptions, the essence of this type of expression is generally contextual and therefore ephemeral. Political art is, at a semantic level, a term that could be problematic, since an art about politics is not necessarily a political art, if we understand the latter as a tool designed strictly to denounce power, or to navigate it. If art has some utility, bravo. But preconceiving its usefulness beforehand has little to do with a state of grace; that which true inspiration achieves, the terrible purity that can emerge from a subconscious that erupts in multiple directions. I feed on dreams; and if I ever had a dream or nightmare that was political in essence, I cannot remember it. The ones that stay with me are connected to the darkest zones of human nature.

In this mode of expression there are no pragmatic goals or answers. To claim them would be a betrayal of the creative act. Let us take this very text. I started this essay trying to talk about art and I have ended up dirtying it with politics. I could divide it in two, but I would lose the essence of this organic sabotage. I remember Cuban poet Heberto Padilla in his mea culpa: “Can one be a poet in Cuba?”

I turn off the monotony of social networks. The virtualities of the postmodern world do not inspire me. On desolate streets, people wander terrified by the new penal code. The science of the future has failed on the island. Some claim that poetry has been buried. Others continue to wait for a new messiah. But I am not into ideologies, parties, religions, political corrections, movements, sects, guilds, herds, or crowds. I could say that one of my creative gratifications is to burn the ships down over and over again. Only I have never needed other people’s ships. The material world is not a priority for me. I know that such an attitude can complicate life, but it facilitates creation. And that is my raison d’être. I am attracted to protagonists who are misfits for a number of reasons that include destabilizing narrative perspective. A good number of audience members expect a film to reinforce their political convictions and are rarely interested in a debate with themselves.

An American flag burning in Blue Heart (Miguel Coyula, 2021)	A burning Jesus in Blue Heart (Miguel Coyula, 2021).

The brothers Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, a scientist and poet respectively, wrote science fiction books together in the Soviet Union. Tarkovsky would adapt their novel Alien Picnic in his film Stalker (1979), a culmination of science being devoured by cinematic poetry. Would something like that be possible in Cuba? Perhaps not. But the mistake is to try to mold beauty strictly under foreign cultural patterns. We are a young, fragmented culture, a fetus that has not germinated satisfactorily. The poet Rafael Alcides said that behind true beauty there is always drama. Finding beauty in Cuba can be a traumatic experience for someone who does not know how to appreciate the terribleness of the discovery.

Sergio (Ron Blair) in Memories of Overdevelopment (Miguel Coyula, 2010).	Gorki Aguila and Lynn Cruz in Where is freedom? (Miguel Coyula, 2022)

Is this masochism? Migration is not an option for me. I have already “lived in the monster and know its entrails…,” although I insist that my vision of the human being is too dark to be aligned with José Martí. (Obras Completas). I return to another hell, but it is my hell. I felt that my multidisciplinary independence would allow me to make films that otherwise would never materialize here. For a while I assumed that I had to continue creating in Cuba like a fanatical monk on a romantic mission to contribute to the national culture from the margins. Today, I am tempted to say that I no longer care about national culture, nor about the country. I recently finished a music video with the Cuban rock band Porno para Ricardo covering Pappo’s Blues’ “¿Adónde esta la libertad?”[24]

In it, I blow up the island in a nuclear explosion. An unnecessary underlining, since the war of time is palpable and the worst destruction is that of the soul. Why am I still here? There are a few artists left, but I trust that others will emerge. That helps me to continue as a witness. This is not 19th century nationalism. I took the plunge to film 9/11 in New York. Now I wish to go to Ukraine, even if I end up documenting my own annihilation.

Where does this death drive originate? It is not from José Marti. There is no other reason than the pursuit of art as a collage of contradictions. Independent art should be uncomfortable. This friction is essential as my creative engine.

My life has never been important. Partial brain blackout: I return and try to observe my city divorced from any historical political context. Sensory memory survives. I inhabit the apartment where I was born, with the same view of the ocean from the window. The buildings no longer matter. I rescue the scarce smells of the green, I swallow particles of saltpeter. The nature of this land will last until the sun explodes. I still believe in an art free of utilitarian expectations: Annihilation in order to be reborn. I start filming again on the Vertical Island.

Poster of Chronicles of the Absurd (Miguel Coyula, 2024)

Epilogue: June 5th 2025 began a strike of Havana University Students soaring into a magnitude of dissent never seen since the previous regime of Fulgencio Batista, more than six decades ago. It is a lifetime, but as poet Rafael Alcides once said in Nadie (2017): “We are but an instant in history. Logically this government will end.”