Art in the Time of Politics: In the Afterglow of Détente at Havana’s Twelfth Biennial

One late-May afternoon at a bar in Old Havana, I stood alongside a former police lieutenant named Miguel, who was slowly getting drunk, while the drone of a long and unceasing oration drifted through the open windows. The bar was, like much of Havana, faded and old-fashioned—not quite ruined and majestic yet, but quaint and dingy—with swinging wooden saloon doors and a bartender in a white shirt and a droopy bow tie. Roadwork was being done on many of the neighborhood’s streets; machines had chewed a foot-wide ditch along Tejadillo Street, just in front of the bar. The men who directed the machines worked according to no discernible schedule, digging and then stopping, leaving thick channels weaving down the block. But that’s how roadwork happens in Cuba. There is, after all, an entire highway in the countryside that simply stops, dead-ending at jungle because the money ran out.

Across the street and a few houses down, two speakers propped on the sidewalk emitted a voice that bled into the bar. The voice was high and deliberate and spoke with familiar cadence, urgency, and rhetoric: confident enunciation, constant to the point of monotone, speech peppered with words like “threat,” “guard,” “paradox,” “conspire.” The speakers flanked an open door and were hooked up to a microphone. Past the open door, sitting in a wood-and-wicker rocking chair, artist Tania Bruguera read into a microphone from

An exhibit at the apartment of artist Carlos Garaicoa. Havana. (leandro feal)

Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). It was about ten degrees hotter inside than on the street and smelled like concrete dust. Earlier in the day, Cuban dissident blogger Yoani Sánchez had tweeted about undercover state security agents in attendance. Now, thirty hours into what Bruguera said would be 100 straight hours of reading Arendt aloud—she would trade places with dozens of volunteers throughout the performance—the room contained two men with long hair and macramé bags who sat cross-legged against the walls and a woman who lay on the floor, her head on a pillow. A fan was trained on Bruguera. Two tuKola soda cans were pushed to the side. Thirty-five people had scrawled their names on a sign-up sheet taped up by the door.

Bruguera had received a state license in March to work as a cuentapropista, loosely translated as a freelance, non-state-affiliated worker—in her case, as a teacher. This project, the Hannah Arendt International Institute for Artivism, was her latest in a series of works that blended political activism with performance. She timed the project to coincide with the Twelfth Havana Biennial, a large-scale, government-run exhibit of mainly public art that descends upon the city (in very Cuban fashion) every three years. Among the people who had read on that first day was Cuban curator Gerardo Mosquera, one of the founders of the Havana Biennial, who parted ways with the organization in 1989 in protest against censorship. An English copy of the text was on hand for international visitors should they want to volunteer.

It was five in the afternoon—sunny, hot. Two blocks up and four blocks over, past the art deco Bacardi building, Wild Noise—an exhibit of works lent by the Bronx Museum, the first art exchange between an American and a Cuban cultural institution in fifty years—was opening at Museo de Arte Universal, the international wing of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana’s most prestigious art museum. More than 100 artworks that had never been seen in Cuba were on display, including Willie Cole’s How Do You Spell America? #2 and photographs by Andy Warhol. Amid them all, a line of reporters with microphones and cameras snaked toward Holly Block, the Bronx Museum’s director and exchange organizer, to ask about the show, the symposia she’d organized, the art magazine that a group of Cuban teens was...