Pieces of wood, big rocks, and in places pieces of concrete at the seashore.
We are on a school break. Mothers and children who want to go to the zoo, the aquarium or some other recreation area crowd the bus stops. In Old Havana there isn’t a single nook or cranny without those little ones demanding an ice cream or pulling on their grandmother’s skirt so she’ll buy them a pizza. Outside the amusement park a long line waits to ride the crazy cars and feel the wind in their hair on the roller coaster. Meanwhile, parents reach a trembling hand into their wallets. They know that in most cases only convertible pesos – hard currency – will do for candy and soft drinks, although the entrance fees for museums and movie theaters are in national money. The schools, until next Monday, will be silent vacant sites.
The sand has receded and accumulated in big dunes
My son, who is at that awkward age between childhood and adolescence, also enjoys his week of vacation. Yesterday he wanted to swim for a while at Havana’s eastern beaches, and we went there with my father who hadn’t felt the sand on his feet for a decade. The sea was gorgeous, as always, the sun played its part up above, and even a few clouds offered us their shade in this sizzling April. Nature, in short, put the best spin on the afternoon. A mixture of apathy and neglect, however, has changed the coastal landscape I know so well from my own childhood. In the tourist area in front of the Tropicana Hotel, of course, it was impeccably clean with police making the rounds so that no Cuban would “bother” the foreigners. But outside that perimeter of comfort, the setting for natives is a real ecological disaster.
Constructions destroyed by the sea and by hurricanes
The sand is no longer a rolling area of soft waves. Near the sea it looks gray and compacted, while the wind has blown the finer grains into huge dunes covered with thorny plants. Between the street and what would be the backdrop for the summer beachgoers, there are now these mounds that must be scaled to take a dip. Rocks, pieces of concrete, and even lumber, hug the water’s edge along several areas of the shoreline. Boca Ciega, the part of the beach where families have been going for thirty years — and prostitutes with their clients for twenty — today is an area lacking in the minimal services of restrooms, snack bars and umbrellas. It looks like a battlefield after the bombing. Taking off your shoes to walk a bit is not a good idea, because of the glass and shards of metal. Not to mention the part known as Guanabo, where the sewage ditches drain into the sea. The worst is in the faces of the residents: an expression of neglect and abandonment, of the former glory turned into salt.
My son was paddling about in the water, while the adult that I am remembered all the sand castles built in that place. I thought of those diminutive forts from whose pointed towers the future, then, seemed better and more beautiful.
Apathy and ecological damage jeopardize Havanas eastern beaches
Art has always been feared by dictators for its silent and devastating property of exposing the occult. Because it is the messenger pigeon that conveys the feeling of the people, their fears and hopes. It also has the power to move public opinions and to help displace the warlords.
The response of totalitarian governments, as in Cuba, is the constant harassment of artists from multiple variants. Fear is the best weapon to quell the diverse manners of creation. Criticism through Art is an effective weapon of the transformation process, it is the nature of creation. The Artist, through his contradictions and doubts, struggles internally with what is best for Art, society, and against himself (this should be the logical order of creation), since from the beginning the Ruler and his sycophants molest him, he will be target of attacks to return him to the fold, and to begin the process of self-censorship.
But Art is not manipulated, it overcomes fears and future reprisals, because it is the same need arises in one’s freedom to issue a transparent proposal and only for the artistic, that even thrives and succeeds before any attempt to suffocate it.
In the cosmos of creative expressions, the Plastic Arts attack the megalomania of the Castro family. Much of the grief of a nation is constantly consumed, is found in the canvases of contemporary Cuban painters. Music is occupies a prominent place in the offensive against the totalitarian system, with lyrics that criticize the challenges of a society that survives broken and vigilant.
Among all the arts literature is the disadvantaged, perhaps because it is the most dangerous, according to universal history. If the writers that suggest it could become manipulators, from one side or the other, of the national reality, for this they would merit attention from the powers-that-be. A constant criticism of our generation is that we assume the role of the press.
We occupy the action of real events (no exaggeration, remember socialist realism), and supposedly, according to critics (official), the writer is clearly a storyteller. Many writers let themselves rise. The most you can get from them is silence, in apparently “support” of the system although in the depths of their being they hate it.
For its part, Cinema bets on an art film without political commitment. Of the Arts it is the most convincing, but the high cost of production decreases its chance of fighting in the social scene.
Among the Performing Arts, Theater deserves an aside, it is the most immediate and tangible for its ephemeral format palpable in time, but in turn it is the imprint of the thinking citizen who interacts with social events which the media silences.
The “Bertolt Brecht Theatre,” for two months, provides the setting “Our Village,” version and direction by Juan Carlos Cremata Malberti with his project “The Sugar Refinery” based on “Our Town” by the American Thornton Wilder.
Cremata has the ingenuity to contextualize the work and bringing it to our reality, offers us an amazing actuality that, through the skillful management of emotions, exposes us to the most ordinary needs, creating a show which fuses with an excellent illumination, music, circus art and dance, until they sprout vibrations and feelings, in the act of receiving and returning to the public what only theater can fully achieve, and that leads us to pursue every movement and wink between light and shadow that at times delights, and others gives us a lugubrious aura of the smoke and hollow of a world we resist entering, but that ultimately we are drawn into its interior, grateful, from the moment of realization, for the compelling performances of the actresses and actors, the complicity of the technical team who, at some point from their airy corridors, conspire with its characters.
The Director again turns our attention to the living generation, aging, death and childhood, with all that dramatic premise without leaving the popular mockery, the joke, releasing his actors not to be confined to a tight script, and providing the possibility of improvisation.
The story, in three acts, follows the life of Emily, who is the love of George, his neighbor and schoolmate, whom she later marries, and in the second act she dies; and who then asks to return, she wants to exist among the living even one day because she misses her son, her husband, home, and despite the advice of relatives who live in the land of dead who tell her not to return.
Emily returns, picking up on the day of her twelfth birthday, but discovers that the pain is even greater, it becomes unbearable to remember, to live outside time knowing that we must return, to that place that definitely is no longer among the living. So she asks to return before the end of the day, finding that “the living do not understand death,” she, meanwhile, she has also failed to understand the living, her languages and perspectives are no longer the same.
With the particularity that in Cuba the difficulties are multiplied when compared to the rest of the world, recognizing our reality convulses and the times where we live with such haste, provide a work stages in three hours that seem impossible to achieve, however “Our Village ” won over in most ways an audience eager and excited, that gave it a standing ovation and thanked the immense artistic effort of the cast and crew, no doubt, a sign of success.
Of course, many laughs and tears about the reality that surrounds us, as all roads lead to Rome, in Cuba all lead to covert censorship, the proof being the absence of any official representative of Cuban culture. Despite that their seats have remained vacant waiting for the dark shadows of the functionaries, they occupy the space of creation without limit or fears, that in hopes of achieving transparency and creativity, with ARTE, the deepest and most international of languages, which even manage to pull from its viewers their joys, fears and sorrows.
And we left the theater with this emotional richness for which we will forever be grateful.
During the mass in Santiago de Cuba, a young man who is desperate, like the rest of Cubans, shouted “Freedom”. Immediately, and quickly, some members of State Security, disguised as members of The Red Cross, threw themselves at him to beat and arrest him. Thanks to technology it was filmed and came to light publicly. Now we are waiting for him to be released, or to be tried for whatever reason occurs to them.
It is the duty of all Cubans that we denounce this and demand his release, to join together to demand he be released without charges. To scream in a supposedly “public place” is not a crime, of course, thinking of the rest of the world, not like it is under a dictatorship. In Cuba everything that goes against the tranquility and ideas of the Castro brothers, is a crime against humanity.
Unfortunately the Pope is still in Cuba and the story remains to be told. His Holiness came to review his troop of cadets of the cloth, who have shown little appreciation for him since he has been placed next to the dictator.
I, Angel Santiesteban-Prats, a common citizen who dreams of being a writer, would not accept being placed next to the Castros, unless by force. That would be the only way they could manage it. With Castro brothers, zero negotiation, that would be the best approach for Cuba.
We must sweep away their kind and all their followers who suck milk from such miserable cow.
The Pope has arrived today in Havana, tomorrow he will have his mass and then he will leave. And we Cubans will continue with the premise of resolving our problems with the dictatorship. As a friend would say “The Pope does not cut it or colorize it,” that is, he can do nothing.
Maybe tomorrow other people will shout the word “Freedom.” Each person has his own way of doing it, and it is his right, although many Cubans ignore it and others prefer to ignore it.
The truth is that there is a Cuban man who shouted “Freedom” and because of that he has been abused. All the power will fall upon his body. But what the dictators can not do is extinguish his shout of independence that is traveling the archipelago like the bird that awakens dreams. And nobody will be able to ignore it.
Dams are good for containment while keeping the wall intact. When some fragment cracks, first imperceptibly, then uncontrollably, the water escapes and runs off. This is what has happened to Cuban private initiative; you can see it, for example, at the portal Cubisima.com, which opened a site on the corner of San Lázaro y Basarrate, Vedado, Havana, where you can publish or search classified ads of swaps, sales, rentals and several offers.
There, for a reasonable price in national money, that is Cuban pesos, you can put an ad on Cubisima without having to be able to access the Internet, and you can, also for a modest fee, get a printout of the classifieds you’re interested in. Some will remember Opina, a monthly tabloid that could have continued with support from ads.
Infanta y Basarrate. You can’t miss it. It’s the yellow and green house 100 yards from the University of Havana.
In these southern lands characters abound who seem right out of One Hundred Years of Solitude, the famous novel by Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The terrible thing is, unlike in the novel, they become ministers and even presidents. One of the latter appeared some time ago declaring that to end drugs it was necessary only that the consuming countries stop consuming them.
A simple and ingenious formula: no consumption, no production. It’s surprising that such an intelligent solution has never occurred to anyone before. With this formula many problems could be solved: if we stop drinking alcohol, alcoholism will end; if we stop smoking, no cigarettes will be produced and smoking will end; if the poor stop having children, they won’t be born and there will be no more poor people.
It’s noteworthy that after this important discovery, the character has not been nominated for a Nobel Prize in something.
Also, some time ago, I think the same character suggested that if men continued to eat poultry, within a short time they would all be gay. So along with his homophobia, he proved one more time, in case anyone had any doubts, the freshness and depth of his thinking. Pure Macondo cubed!
The concern is that, despite these demonstrations of mental acuity, some international personalities are lavished with applause and even laudatory articles. This is just one example: characters like this are too abundant around here. Perhaps this is one of the causes — not the only one of course — of our difficulties and problems over the centuries.
They can hold many summits of heads of state and organize all the groups, pacts and economic and political communities they consider suitable to solve problems and achieve integration, but as long as these eccentric buffoons form a part of them, it is very difficult to achieve serious results. Let’s be optimistic and trust that sooner or later they will be replaced by intelligent and responsible people and that the latter will prevail and constitute a majority.
“Between individuals as between nations, respect for the rights of others is peace.” Benito Juarez
From the pages of Granma we learned, on April 9: “The United States confiscated more than $493,000,000 from 2010 to date,” and in addition that this was, “a part of the economic blockade imposed on our country for more than half a century.”
They allege that the information was confirmed in a communication from the Office of Assets Control under the Department of the Treasury, a Federal agency that lists Cuba as a “nation sponsoring terrorism.”
Under the same concept, Washington has frozen 223,700,000 dollars intended for our country in 2009. They add that the document was quoted by Prensa Latina and in a side note published on the first page of the official 8-page tabloid, they mentioned that U.S. authorities also maintain similar blockades against six properties owned by the Cuban State in New York and Washington.
A week later, this Monday the 16th, in an extensive article published on page 3 of the same daily, under the title “The Truth About The Stolen Funds,” in the third paragraph, they declare that the “the Cuban funds frozen in the United States, in virtue of the economic, commercial and financial blockade,” total 245 million dollars, not the 493 million asserted in the earlier note.
What is not mentioned in either of these articles, is that it was the Cuban authorities who first confiscated American property on our soil as a part of their multiple outrages on the way to their total seizure of power. Never — that I know of — have they mentioned the amount of these appropriations from American citizens, nor from Cubans themselves.
How can they protest, then, when they do the same thing? They address the issue casually, as if here the government would have allowed, not only the American government, but any citizen from there, to own property in our territory in the last five decades.
It’s not that I’m in favor of the old law of retaliation or any kind of reprisal, simply that I question the facts, as do many people within Cuba. According to the logic of power, they can rob others — although they call it “nationalizing” — whenever they want, but others cannot do the same to them. I’m surprised that the leaders of the Greater Antilles, which so often accuse the U.S. administrations of wanting to impose its laws and vision on the world, act in a pattern similar to that they criticize.
It seems that, contrary to what the historic Cuban leadership suggests, arrogant attitudes are not only a trait of the leaders of the rich countries. It is unethical to hide behind the prerogatives of a Revolution to justify violations of elemental rights — individual and group — such as respect for private property. It is necessary to renew the political model from which so many national disasters originated in order to erect a truly just, humane and enduring work.
Sonia Garro Alfonso, a member of the Ladies in White and the Afro-Cuban Independent Foundation, was transferred to the women’s prison in Havana and will be processed by the investigative body of State Security, according to her sister, Yamile Garro, who informed this reporter on Tuesday.
Sonia, in a note, managed to send the file data for the preparatory phase, located under the number 9 of 2012, when she was still in police custody at the police station at Seventh and 64th in Playa. However, neither she nor her family know the crime they are charging her with.
Sonia was arrested last March 18 in a raid by riot police at her home located on Avenue 47 in Marianao, at which time her husband, Ramon Munoz Alejandro Gonzalez, was also arrested and taken to the Combinado del Este prison in the capital.
According to reports from Yamile Garros’ neighbors, political police agents took her off the public bus, forcing her to return to her house.An act of provocation that upset her husband Muñoz González. The military, wearing helmets and shields, broke the fence and broke into the house, firing rubber bullets.
According to Yamile, in the raid they also detained three other people, whose names are unknown. One is in prison, along with Sonia and her husband. The others were released.
Garro Alfonso belongs to independent civil society organizations, such as the Afro-Cuban Independent Foundation, the Ladies in White, and he directs the Independent Cultural Center. State Security often threatens him with the initiation of a criminal process against him. Between October 2010 and June 2011, he was the object of more than 17 warnings for disorderly conduct.
The warnings can lead to the imposition of pre-criminal security measures, and a sentence of between 1 and 4 years in prison for anti-social conduct, which according to the Penal Code is seen in people who habitually break the rules of social coexistence by acts of violence, provocation, or disturbing the order of the community.
The authorities of Las Mangas Penitentiary in Bayamo are prohibiting that the Cuban political prisoner Ariel Arzuaga Pena, who is serving a sentence of 6 years for the supposed crime of double attempt, receive his medications, according to his wife, Lady in White Yakelin Garcia Jaenz.
“Since the beginning of April, Ariel has not been able to take his medications to treat his pharyngitis and chronic gastritis. He has also not been able to take Captopril for his hypertension”, his wife, notably emotional, told me via telephone during a conversation. She told me that the culprit of the refusal of medicines is the operational official from the political police known as Major Yoel, “who is in charge of all the orders made by Ariel, but is also in charge of imposing limits of restriction in order to strip him of all the literature he possesses”, said Yakelin. She also explained to me that the books they have confiscated from him dealt with Christian and environmental issues, and other works of a non-political character, which are prohibited in Cuba.
Yakelin told me that, thanks to the call of a prisoner who phoned in from the prison, she found out that Ariel still had no medications on April 8th. In addition, a group of other prisoners shouted insults at him, as instigated by the political police of the penal ward. According to Garcia Jaenz, this happened because Captain Hector removed the phone dial of the prison and, when the prisoners asked about this, he said that it was due to “the rebellious posture, the counter-revolutionary stance of Arzuaga”. As is logical, this provoked various aggressions from other recluses against Ariel and not against the ones who really are the culprits.
Mrs. Garcia Jaenz is still suffering because of the carelessness of the Provincial Fiscal Office and from all the manipulations of the political police in the city of Bayamo, which, in addition to the instigations against her husband, they also impede her from participating in activities with the Ladies in White. Because of this, she has been beaten and harassed by paramilitary Rapid Response Brigades and has been arrested arbitrarily for various hours, despite the fact that she is the mother of two small children.
This woman demands, before people of solidarity, that her voice be heard “much stronger and much farther”. She asked me this, almost desperately, a few days ago and I told her that “a piece of this blog is now yours”. I have put it on Twitter and various cyber-activists have already joined in solidarity with her, Retweeting each message.
Sometimes a call of consolation reminds us that we are not alone. Her phone is 53401221. If we send her a message through Skype or Free Call, reassuring our support, then that helps. And a lot.
To my reader friends who share this blog as their own, to those who have 30 spare minutes, let us send messages to international organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Send this post to other blogger friends and independent journalists, in and out of the island. A pat on the back, an extended hand to show some human warmth, the gesture… she needs all of that right now.
The images we publish today, were taken through the lens of my camera on our walk down Obispo Street last Sunday. The Art of Mime is a must-see for those strolling down this central artery of the oldest part of Havana.
For Cubans and foreigners alike, the presence of the mimes is something new to the streets of Havana. Pirates with chests on their shoulder, fictional gunslingers, clowns and even those who pretend to come from the far east, are some of the most seen and applauded by those who appreciate the art that has never before been seen on our streets.
The resurgence of these mimes or performing artists, is due to the reforms of the Cuban economic model. These artists pay a fee to exercise their work and what they collect becomes their earned salary. In speaking with one of the performers, he commented that what concerns them is that despite their contribution they have nowhere to buy the supplies they need to refine their craft. He also said that many Cubans refuse to pay to photograph the characters they create.
When in the presence of these artists of the streets of Havana, give them a hats off and recognize them as part of the resurgence of a new community that stands today.
Due to the well-known inability of Cubans to connect to the Internet at will — and because I didn’t feel I was in a condition during the first week of April to travel to Havana — it is only today that I can update my page. In the end, it turns out, censorship reaped its fruits and I was unable to report each story in real time as the situation demanded. But better late than never and here I describe the last days of my hunger strike, which lasted from March 5th to 31st, although its end was announced officially on April 1, once I had in my hands Ministerial Resolution 185.
The last week of the strike started with a distinctive sign: the absolute silence maintained for 21 days by the Cuban government authorities and the Ministry of Public Health (MINSAP) with regards to my case and the state of my health — already by that time widely known publicly — and it would do nothing but get worse over the following days.
I decided, then, on March 26th, that I would report in person to MINSAP headquarters the following day to request an interview with the Minister, which I announced on Twitter and by way of phone calls to several international news media accredited in Havana and to the newspaper Granma, the Official Organ of the Cuban Communist Party, as well as several independent journalists and bloggers in Havana. I intended, at that time, to also attend the Mass to be held in Havana where Pope Benedict XVI would officiate, on Wednesday, March 28, which I also announced via Twitter.
None of this came to pass because on Monday, March 27th, on leaving the Catholic Church in Guanajay where I was sleeping, I was forced into an ambulance from MININT Medical Services, in custody of a State Security agent, and in the presence of the MININT Chief of Medical Services for Artemisa Province, and was taken to a rest house on the outskirts of the neighboring municipality of Caimito, where I was held against my will through that day and until the evening of Wednesday the 28th.
Once the airplane taking Benedicto XVI back to Rome took off, I was “freed” in the Emergency Room of “Ciro Redondo” Hospital in Artemisa. During the entire time in which State Security held me in custody, never — neither in this nor in any other previous attempts — did they exercise any kind of physical violence against me. They treated me with courtesy, offered me food, which I always refused, and allowed my wife and my mother to stay with me whenever they wanted during the entire time. Of course, I was held against my will and they took my cellphone, so I was disconnected for a day and a half from the outside world.
On the evening of Wednesday the 28th, after being rehydrated via IV in Artemis Hospital, I returned by my own means to Guanajay, where I spent the night, but at noon on Thursday the 29th, feeling the weight of the fast and my body at the point of collapse, persuaded by Dr. Rodolfo and my wife, I moved to Artemis Hospital, where I was admitted to the Emergency Room and rehydrated again, and where they performed additional tests and observed the severe ketosis of fasting. During the early hours of Friday 30, a drop in urine output caused fear of acute renal failure, but it went no further because once my state of hydration improved, diuresis returned to normal.
On the evening of Saturday 31, at 26 days of fasting, MINSAP finally broke its silence: in the afternoon senior officials from the Ministry appeared in the emergency room and informed me that the Minister of Health had reinstated both of us and that I would be allowed to finish the Specialty in Internal Medicine as I had demanded.
Given this reliable guarantee, I decided to start drinking juices from that moment, which I immediately reported on Twitter. On the morning of Sunday April 1, with my metabolic state stabilized and longing for the company of my children — extremely stressed by my absence — I decide to go home, where I was visited in the afternoon by the officials of the Ministry of Public Health, who handed me a copy of Ministerial Resolution 185 issued on 31 March by the Minister, Dr. Robert T. Morales Ojeda, reinstating me to the practice of medicine throughout the country, which was also released via Twitter. The news was immediately broadcast by the alternative blogosphere in Havana and many people from many places were glad to hear the details of the story. Other tweets posted a few minutes later announced that I had officially ended, from that moment, my hunger strike.
On April 6th I was called, along with Dr. Rodolfo, to the Provincial Health Directorate of Artemis, where the Director of Legal Department, Ministry of Public Health gave us both Ministerial Resolution No. 185 and Ministerial Resolution No. 251 and officially certified that we are both reinstated in the exercise of our profession throughout the country.
In addition we were paid in full the remuneration lost during the entire time we were disqualified (66 months) for the last quarter of 2006, from 2007 to 2011, and the first quarter of 2012; in addition, in my case, on confirming that in 2006 I concluded my Residency without problems, this balance was paid me on the salary scale according to the Internal Medicine Specialist and Specialist in General Medicine, which was my salary at the time of being disqualified.
We also were allowed to choose where we wanted to be located: we both responded in Guanajay, and then they told us we could start working, after a 2 or 3 week rotation with a doctor in the area, in the “Jose R. Martinez” Hospital in that town, where we had worked at the time we were disqualified. That day they also ratified the decision that I be permitted to resume the study of my specialty in Internal Medicine in its third year, with the term to begin in September in the coming course.
Meanwhile, Dr. Alfredo Felipe Valdés, my colleague and friend, in exile in Spain, days earlier had updated me about the pending negotiations with respect to his professional title — the release of his paperwork from Cuba — which was my third demand. He informed me that the document was in Madrid and that it was now in the hands of the authorities of that country. According to the established procedure for such cases, it will take a few more months to resolve, but the Cuban side has met its responsibility.
Once the storm has passed and while I endeavor to recover as quickly as possible the 26 pounds lost in the war, it’s time to recap and reflect on what happened — because this is something that deserves its own post — to which from today, dear friends, you are invited.
Alamar – a pile of concrete blocks without order or agreement – is in this case the work, the artistic object, the clay and the wall on which one has molded and daubed. The artists can be you, me, or anyone else, although for the moment we are going to call them Juan Carlos, Amaury, Luis Eligio, René, David, Fito, Yoyi, Yohamna, Livio, or Ailer. The name of the project could move around Generación Omni, Franom-Uno, Grupo Uno, but we select – at least until the next mutation takes place – a mix of mantra and space for convergence and liberty.
Omni-Zona Franca does not allow us to remain without giving an opinion, which can go from the common insult “eccentric” to the quiet admiration by the “anti-establishment.” What they really are, not even they want to define it; “creating spaces in which to grow” is enough along with people from Alamar, Havana, and Cuba living in these places and expanding them with their spirituality.
We arrive at the omni-territory, we enter the frankness of the zone and we we make the evocative action of throwing some questions at them. We keep in mind that they may respond with a poem, a burst of hip-hop, or a vote of silence.
Why in Alamar?
Because this city without a cemetery, without industry, without churches, but yes, with a funeral parlor, can accept novelty like no other municipality in Cuba. New rhythms and art forms are welcome here. Perhaps because Alamar needs to be reinvented by its inhabitants, in the absence of a handle on some previous history to validate their existence. It needs to be humanized and recreated. Art is born here with lots of freshness and youth. For example, social action groups, environmental art (group La Cuadra, Don Quixote, Art-Native), graffiti, rock, and hip-hop have proliferated in Alamar, and even the Havana Abierta project and the group Criteria had a base here. Events also occurred that marked them all, such as those related to Maria Elena Cruz Varela and the Carta de los Diez .Poets like Angel Escobar and Mario Benedetti lived here and wrote part of their work here and radiated with the city for a generation of young poets. The visual arts also had figures like Belkis Ayon, who lived, created some of his paintings, and committed suicide within these buildings.
Alamar was the Project Haus of the Revolution. It was supposed to be the most beautiful development in all Havana. Before the Revolution, it was thought this place would be a luxury development, and they even constructed part of the sewer system. Each house would have a beautiful ocean view.
Later it was projected that this would be the city of the “New Man.” For example, on a visit that Leonid Brezhnev made to Alamar, he forecast that in the future this would become a “prosperous suburb.” Many people came here from all over, including many Latin American political exiles and foreign technicians from the former socialist camp that grew out of the 70’s and 80’s. It now has about one hundred thousand inhabitants. Because of this, Alamar is the most heterogeneous and rootless neighborhood in Cuba. We ourselves were not born here, but came from other places and we live with people from all over the island.
Living here is to inhabit an area with poor structures, with many limitations when it comes to moving around, but it is also an incredibly favorable space to create, precisely because of all those deficiencies that make spirituality and creativity soar.
Foundation for Omni-Zona Franca
Omni was founded in 1997; right now we are celebrating our tenth anniversary. At first we started making sculptures in wood that we took from collapsed buildings in the city, and we managed to sell some at fairs in Malecon and the Plaza de la Catedral. We mix everything into the sculpture: our ancestors, gestures, nature and a lot of internal forces that we dump out into the wood.
Juan Carlos Flores was the axis around which we began to turn. He came from San Agustín and began working here as the custodian of the gallery. He brought with him an impressive body of poetry and an extremely influencing management of the form. He had won a David prize and a Premio de la Crítica. He came here with the idea of forming a group of poets and experimenting with new forms of literature. Other young poets from Alamar were added, like Grisel, Leonardo, John Curri, Luis Eligio, Nilo and Yohamna, and Zona Franca was born. Uniting those from the ZF and Omni, we formed a bond between the visual arts and poetry that converged in the Fayad Jamis Gallery. We were attracted by a journey to our origins, to what we were in a primitive stage. Everything was pure intuition; we had no preconceived idea or schematics.
The idea was to work for the community and in time we adopted forms such as painting, photography, installations and, later, performance. We took on discussions that others considered marginal and expressed ourselves through them.
Performance
For us, performance is an attitude that favors the constant demonstration of the creative state, but it is also the artistic demonstration that characterizes us best, and through which we can combine all of our creative possibilities. Through it, we assume elements of the body, orality, poetry, writing in its visual aspect, dance-theater, music, singing, and all of the visual arts, those that we emphatically project on urban spaces as well as in theaters and galleries. Finally, performance is like life, and through it we adopt a civic-minded behavior of involvement in the nation’s issues and public spaces.
In relation to the Fayad Jamis Gallery and the Center for Art and Literature
The Center for Art and Literature, situated in the Fayad Jamis Gallery and currently directed by Alejandro Pujol, in this cultural house in Alamar, is unique in Cuba. However, this center has never been part of the national avant-garde. Nor has it been allowed to commercialize its work, although we have fought a long battle to allow sales.
The Culture House was constructed practically under protest by artists forming part of the “El Quijote” group. Once created, the Gallery has radiated its spirituality and been the center of wonderful things, thanks to the dedication and determination of people like its first director, Alarcón. Nancy Maestequi and Pablo Rigal, for their part, supported numerous projects, among which are Omni and Zona Franca.
One of the first expressive actions was precisely to defend the autonomy of the Fayad Jamis Gallery in relation to the Culture House. We prefer to not be subordinate to the Culture House in Alamar, since enthusiastic artistic work is being realized. Therefore the space that we occupy here belongs to the City Cultural Management.
Then are they usufructuaries of this space?
Rather, we are squatters.
When we arrived, this place was torn apart. We had to reconstruct it, paint, raise walls, and make it suitable to what we wanted. I had started Native Art here before, and from that group Jorge Pérez (Yoyi), Nilo Julián González, and Jesús Miguel Roura (main Gallery specialist) joined us. This is a space of convergence and tolerance where any expression of spirituality fits. For example, on this same site, Catholic, Buddhist, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Rosicrucian movements have reunited. This space of liberty that we have created serves everyone.
We create and meet in this Culture House, which is an intermediate point between the people and the cultural authorities. We have direct contact with those people, we direct ourselves to them, and it does not matter if they are an opponent or lieutenant colonel.
The best is that we are in a neutral space. Our objective is neither capitalism nor socialism, but rather that Omni-ZF is marked by spiritual fusion. We are neither above nor below anything, neither against nor in favor; but we are for poetry, liberty, and collective spirituality. Among the things that interest us most is Martí’s patriotic sentiment for Cuba, which is expressed as:
Community of interests
Unity of traditions
Unity of goals
Sweet, comforting fusion of loves and hopes (note the use of the plural)
Diffusion in Cuban media
Within the emerging Cuban culture, we have had the opportunity for a little diffusion of our work, but we prefer alternative means of spreading. Since the beginning, some of us have talked about non-publication, because we believe that the media here and everywhere distort the legitimate metaphor that we bring to the Nation and the world. When our work spreads through the media, it is not on our initiative, but for the sole right to also be in the media.
The magazine Esquife has echoed what we do and the last issue of the magazine Extramuros is dedicated almost entirely to Omni-ZF. Caimán Barbudo and Gaceta de Cuba have also run articles about us. The catalog of the Biennial Exhibition in Havana and in the Magazine of the Cuban Rap Agency have made reference to what we do.
The truth is that our tranquility to create and to really connect with the people is very important to us. Because of this, we are not interested in the bombast of the media. We do not want to be like those artists that have already separated themselves from reality and who are just creating for the media and publicity. So, most things we make have that mystery behind them and are protected by it.
Control and censorship
We are making original art and the policing authorities have no precedents similar to this, although Arte Calle and Volumen Uno had already made history. For example, we made one of our first acts there in 1997, when the whole city – and especially Alamar – was full of trash on the corners. It piled up weeks after weeks, without anyone coming to collect it, with the flies, the rats, the people passing close to it. We then had the idea of burying ourselves in the trash. The people gathered around us when they saw a pair of legs or a hand rising up in the middle of the waste. The police arrived quickly along with other authorities like the Municiple Director of Culture. Minus the garbage truck, everyone met there. We ended up being detained for six hours.
At the beginning, the police did not understand that we would make these sorts of public acts. Because of this, we almost always ended up in the Unit after a presentation. However, our perseverance has meant that we have continued to run along the border of what is allowed. There has been a lack of dialogue between the institutions and the new players in society. But we have been pushing the limits. This does not mean complaining about what they have not allowed us, but rather about creating a space of liberty where it is possible to do all of what we are doing today.
There is also a lot of sensationalism about what really happens to us. We have had enough shocks and encounters, but we have never been jailed, only detained and warned.
It happens frequently that Cuba’s key problems are much discussed out there, although they are not talked about inside the country. At times, when dealing with these themes, there is a desire to satisfy some morbid pleasure, to see political motivation in everything. Of course the Cuban system is to blame for this, since it has a war-like attitude and censorship is its fundamental mechanism. But we do not like the distortions that are sometimes made about us; we prefer to see ourselves as people that create space, move borders, push the limits. But without sensationalism.
For us it is more important to free ourselves from self-censorship. This has not been an easy task, but we have achieved a space where everyone can be themselves without fear, complexes or blame, without all of these obstacles that on many occasions have caused Cuban intellectuals to not talk about the true problems of the people.
The disk Alamar Express
The disk is a film that shows how space on the Island is being inhabited, reduced to the scale of Alamar and structured in zones just like this city. It is a sample of the poetic-sonorous discoveries and the experience of intervening in reality that we have reached in ten years. One could say it is an anthology of the counterculture in Alamar. Many artists appear in the film, from Juan Carlos Flores, passing through poets from Arte-Nativa, El Quijote, Omni-Zona Franca, Grupo Uno (founder of the Rap Festival, which brought together the new movement of Cuban protest), up to Tania Bruguera, a real performance legend in Cuba.
It is an entirely homemade disk. We distribute it personally throughout the island and we have also sent it to many people abroad. Here, it has been received in silence by the media, although Norge Espinosa published an article in La Gaceta de Cuba, where he links us to the most important anthologies in Cuban literature. The magazine Esquife has also put the disk up on its website.
The disk received support from the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation and the Spanish Embassy in Cuba, without which we would have never made it. Alamar Express is very original for all of what it contains, the form in which it is articulated, and by presenting poetry in a sort of medium rarely used in Cuba for its spread. We know that the disk is also listened to in small towns that do not even appear on the maps. We have proof of this. But the idea of the disk was never a commercial question; it was rather to reach the Generación Omni and collect the work of a group of artists that had never been anthologized on any prior CD.
Documentaries, bulletins, or web pages
As of now, there are three documentaries that deal with our work: Cuba performances, by Elvira del Puerto, Omni frente al espejo, by Raydel Araoz, and Alamar Express: el hombre nuevo, by Patricia Satora.
We never undertake a new project without having guaranteed its complete realization or its continuity. For example, we are now working on a bulletin called Bistec de red, which will have both printed and digital versions. It will not have a large circulation, but it will be in the same spirit of calm and mystery that characterizes us. Regarding our having a web page, there are already various sites on the Internet that circulate our creations. Some are sites from other people or projects that have shared their space with us, but we also have our own: http://www.alamarexpress.com. Access to the Internet is very complicated and it is a problem to update and maintain the site, which is still very simple and outdated. However, we plan to improve it and upload our videos, photos, and music to it.
One of the latest performances
A short time ago, we made a march walking backwards from the Capitolio to Coppelia as proposed in an alternative event to share vital experiences, organized by the group Gigantería. In a single line of more than 15 people, we also walked through Calle 23 on the yellow strip that separates the two roads. Some people joined us on the way. Near Habana Libre, a police officer stopped us, and when we explained to him that this was an artistic event, he said, “Ah, now I understand. Well then, I am going to tell that to everyone calling me here, saying that this is a counter-revolutionary march!” And he let us continue.
Hip-hop
Hip-hop arrived in Cuba, first in English, copying what came from abroad, but immediately fusing the best of the Cuban musical tradition and thought, and also taking on civil discourse of social criticism and political questioning, which has lead the Cuban cultural authorities to mobilize themselves and quickly create the Cuban Rap Agency. The creation of this entity is born out of politics on the part of official institutions to assume and absorb alternativeness.
At the last Rap Festival organized by Gruop Uno, for example, the police still did not see the rappers as artists, but rather as delinquents. They constantly asked for identity cards and hounded them. René, who is part of the Festival promotion team, spoke with the police and explained things to them. Afterwards, the mood relaxed a little and things continued with fewer problems.
Many people tell us that we are an example of resistance, but the truth is that we are not resisting; although this also is a component of our art, it is not fundamental. Hip-hop, for example, is a rhythm of protest, of resistance, and Omni-ZF has a lot of that as well. In place of resistance, opposition, or rebellion, we prefer to say that we work to open spaces of understanding.
Outside of Alamar and the City of Havana, what other acts have you made, and where?
In Santiago de Cuba, we did one called “Three hours of discourse” at the Caribbean Festival in 2004. There, we made reference to the prisoner of influence, specifically the Cubans, and to the excess of nationalism. We walked papered with newspapers and flags, with a tube that left our mouths and allowed us to “breathe” from a suitcase, also papered. We walked like so to the Parque Serrano where we undressed and danced in a circle of fire to demonstrate that one can break away from influence and artificial respiration.
At the beginning, people watched us out of curiosity, but they slowly became involved in our act so that at the end, when we we put the beggar (another participant) in the suitcase and carried him like a prisoner of information to the Cabildo de Santiago, shouts of sympathy and support were heard from all sides.
When the police started to act, we had already finished. This is something we have learned: in the midst of the agents’ dilemma – they do not know if this is a spontaneous demonstration or an artistic act – we have already transmitted our message and involved the people in our actions. At the end, the organizers of the Caribbean Festival pointed out to us that the Parque Serrano and City Hall were not suitable places to do that, but we could not turn back time. Therefore, one of our principal recourses is surprise.
We have attended various artistic events throughout the country, among which are the Visoarte Internacional de Cienfuegos (2001), the Jornada de Performances in the same city, also in 2001, the Romerías de Mayo (2003), the Jornada Nacional de la Poesía de Santi Spíritus from 1999 to 2002, at Puente Sur – Encuentro de Performances de Melena del Sur – from 2002 to 2007, at La liebre muerta – Festival de performances de Matanzas in 2004 and 2006, and up to the Biennial Exhibition in Havana where we proposed the city of Alamar as a work of art.
In ten years we have realized more than 300 different acts, always investigating and counting on all the live elements of the space in which we work.
Spirituality
This is a place where we meditate daily and now we are also going to do it in public spaces in the city and throughout the country. Every one of us has our own method of meditation. This is a space for spiritual dialogue, since Cuba is multiple and diverse and this manifests itself a lot in spirituality. We want this space that we have created to multiply, and as a result, we will sow the same love wherever we go.
We recently held a spiritual mass dedicated to poetry. We wanted to contact, get down to the spirit of poetry in a traditional Cuban mass, with various mediums. It was a great experience because we were in the middle of the mass and together with the prayers, Hindu and Buddhist mantras also joined in.
Every year we make a procession to El Rincón, where the sanctuary dedicated to Saint Lazarus is found, carrying a huge “drawing” to ask for the health of the poetry and dedicated to the hidden energy of the people. We leave from Alamar and mount the drawing on a camel, and from the sports city we go to El Rincón on foot with our request on our shoulders.
For us, poetry is the foundation of our creation; it is our road through life; we are essentially poets, beyond the written poem. The pilgrimage is part of the poetry festival “Poetry Without End” that we have held throughout the month of December for the last nine years. In 2007, it was called “Poetry Without End: The Sacred Family,” because after all these years of going, we have arrived at the center, the foundation of society: the Family, the Great Cuban Family, and we want to nourish and illuminate this center through poetry.
Because of this, we like to think that we are a space of dialogue that helps us to feel the nation not through fear, but through love. We try to find a solid basis; we have Buddha here with us as much as Christ and Olofi; even the Taínos are included. And finally, all of the divine beings that have reincarnated once and again to teach us the road to follow.
They were standing there, four employees responsible for cleaning, to guard the primary school bathroom and keep me from taking pictures. I thought of passing by, but they provoked me with their hateful glares. After all, they were just guarding a pile of urine and feces. And that’s exactly what I told them: “You are preventing me from taking photos of the primary school bathroom, you do not feel proud to display these details on the front door? Being service workers, you do not ensure that the toilets the children use during the 8 hours they spend here are clean. Instead of cleaning them until they are spotless, you just try to hide the urine and excrement. ”
The day before, I could no longer stand the dirt, the stench, and the stool-covered toilet the children must use while in school. I went to the Director to address the matter and find a way to resolve it. The first answer I found was worn on the assistant’s face, as if she knew, as if one could deny what even the stench betrays. I had to describe with the same words as before, the state of the bathrooms for which the school is responsible. After saying that parents were responsible, and she then tried to blame the teacher. I said to her that when she was the assistant director (the Director had had to delegate some responsibilities for personal problems) she was responsible for addressing all the details that made possible the optimal performance of the institution.
I think I can claim a solution for the problem of the hygiene of the school. Not to detract from my previous claim, months ago, that my little daughter was to be educated not ideologically imprinted. And if this is not possible, because the class schedule does not permit, at least defend my right as a mother and her right as child to not participate in extracurricular activities with political overtones.
But it seemed that I had had this conversation two months ago with the assistant director and I have also had it with the methodologist of the preschool, since Kindergarten, when I realized that in addition to their patriotic symbols, my little girl was having their government iconography projected onto her innocent and childish feelings — and at that I called them out for trying to engage the children with the political future of the nation at a stage when they should just be learning universal and truly immutable values. Thus I had predisposed the deputy director of the school, who tried to disrespect me and deny the problem.
I thought I’d done nothing more than demand the fulfillment of our rights. Not the rights the State lets me have, but those that my condition as a human being with a conscience, and a mother, demand, because they belong to me and as such are proclaimed in the 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They do not have a relative or subjective value as they say here. They are universal and guarantee peace, security and justice. They belong to us and we must defend them, if they have taken them from us we can’t give them up!
I don’t know if it was because of this antecedent that when I asked for a solution to the problem of the unhealthiness of the bathrooms, the deputy director of the school looked at me with a face full of hatred. Or if, in addition, she wanted to swaddle me with the help of the cleaner and the teacher herself, or if she made the problem worse rather than solving it.
And the next day, when I had the idea of also relating, as part of my blog, this experience in urgent need of a solution — of the bathrooms in the sense of managing the conditions that guarantee the security of the children, and before that of freeing the children consciences of the burden that, on being born in Cuba, they have to continue carrying the ideology of the old generations, which in addition to being old, deforms the thinking and the ethical sense of individual existence — I appeared at the school to take photos to accompany my post.
As they started to tell me it was impossible, the service workers stationed at the doors didn’t allow it and one of the employees came to threaten me.The only good that came out of this is the hope that from now, knowing they are being observed, perhaps they will clean the bathrooms and also deign to recognize our rights with respect to deciding who will be the educators of our children and in what values they will be educated.
The coming of Benedict XVI to Cuba put the country on the move, the repression by the political police towards dissidents, opponents or defenders of human rights was incredible. Those three days were the darkest and most inhumane; detentions beginning days before the arrival of the Pope in Havana surprised many.
Preparations for the Mass in the Plaza of the Revolution were extreme: beggars, and drunks were taken to the Mazorra psychiatric hospital where, according to a source working on the scene, the hospital was filled and many had to sleep on the floor.
The choir which, a week beforehand, was preparing to sing at the Mass in Havana said that they were replaced by another, with the excuse that the other was more professional, and they were paid ten pesos in national currency, not as wages but so they could have some lunch.
Attendance at the Plaza, according to neighbors of the area, was not made up of Catholics but rather of people who were atheists but who had the trust of the government. According to statistics, the 6 or 7 blocks around the square known as “The Tall Buildings of Havana,” has a population of 27,617 according to the local polyclinic; these citizens — many Catholic — were not at the Plaza, it was filled with people who came in the day before, even sleeping in the street.
Benedict XVI said that Cuba should be “the home of all and for all Cubans, where they live in justice and freedom in a climate of peaceful brotherhood,” but he had not the slightest inclination to hold a small dialog with the opposition on the island.
His farewell was overtaken by the rain that momentarily interrupted his brief words before he boarded Alitalia flight 777 for Rome.
The former Polish Pope, John Paul II, referred to the human rights of the political prisoners, but this one did not; the reception of John Paul II was more real, because many Catholics were there, and they weren’t controlled by the government, but it was different this time — the opposition was stronger than now, there were more people than now, there was no Twitter, no Facebook, or Internet access for Cubans with ideas different from the governments’.
They were standing there, four employees responsible for cleaning, to guard the primary school bathroom and keep me from taking pictures. I thought of passing by, but they provoked me with their hateful glares. After all, they were just guarding a pile of urine and feces. And that’s exactly what I told them: “You are preventing me from taking photos of the primary school bathroom, you do not feel proud to display these details on the front door? Being service workers, you do not ensure that the toilets the children use during the 8 hours they spend here are clean. Instead of cleaning them until they are spotless, you just try to hide the urine and excrement. ”
