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  • Performance and the Political Police:The Cuban Short Circuit
  • Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo (bio)

Despite its massive parades and rallies, the Cuban Revolution is terrified of public space. During his more than half century in power, Fidel Castro has mandated that, "The street belongs to the Revolutionaries," so that socialist Cuba may legally punish any spontaneous demonstration beyond the bounds of official control.

Galleries and private exhibitions are pressured from all sides. Rebellious music and independent film are censored through control of distribution circuits. Literature that is critical of the state is not published on the island. And more than a few artists have been imprisoned for their works or their behavior, charged with "ideological deviations," causing a "public scandal," or "disrespect." Thus, one generation follows another into exile. That is the story behind the apparent apathy of Cuban artists toward politics.

Nonetheless, performance is deployed as a strategic form of irreverence by young artists and activists. In recent years, art collectives such as Omni-Zona Franca have transformed the scene in their communities with an alternative cultural festival that has survived despite Cuban Ministry of Culture repression, which has included police arrests and forced removal from designated locales.


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Figure 1.

Amistad's One Square Meter of Freedom, Havana, September 2010. (Photo courtesy of Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo)

Today, a number of collectives form the vanguard of this movement. Among them are Demóngeles, Raspadura, Love In, Talento Cubano, Matraka, and Amistad. Amistad—meaning friendship—managed to pull off the first successful independent demonstration in the history of the Revolution when, on 6 November 2009, they walked along 23rd Street in el Vedado district with signs and body-paintings that said "against violence." Their video documentation of the event was as important as the act itself, which was a curious mixture of civic and aesthetic gestures, of provocation and pacifism.

In September 2010, Amistad convened another performance entitled One Square Meter of Freedom at a centrally located park in el Vedado district, Havana. A piece of cardboard served as a symbolic platform where participants were given three minutes to offer their opinions—uncensored—about their dreams and their reality, their fears and hopes, their accomplishments and frustrations on topics that ranged from the domestic economy to the spiritual state of the Cuban nation.

At this event the speakers threw out their ideas such as, "You can't convert an intellectual into a ventriloquist to simply repeat 'Long Live the Revolution' and 'Down with the Blockade,'" because "we want to be, once and for all, part of the future, not the dust of the past." They questioned the thirst of many officials for monetary gain, but also the cultural and military institutions that continue to be obsessed with watching and punishing all forms of civic activity, using students and workers to harass members of civic groups.

There are always uninvited guests at these performances, whether the audience is large or small. They are easily recognized because no one there knows them: they are the State Security agents working undercover, anonymous faces who don't say a word, but record everything while they talk on their cell phones. It is obvious that the Revolutionary State still does not want to give up, not even for a second, not a single square millimeter of its absolute control (the authorities have a paranoid distrust of the rest of society). [End Page 2]

The future of these groups depends upon the solidarity that comes, paradoxically, more from the exiled diaspora than the island itself. Their actors often lack a conceptual long-term program, making them vulnerable to the stage set by government intolerance. It is a molecular movement at risk of dissolution due to pressure from the monolithic machinery of the state and the political police. This would be unfortunate because they have become an attractive alternative for most Cuban people, in contrast to the opposition groups who use the same tired language as the regime's demagogues, simply with the opposite sign. [End Page 3]

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo is a biochemistry graduate of Havana University. He is webmaster for the blogs Lunes...

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