The San Isidro artists in Cuba will carry their fearlessness into 2021
Dec. 31, 2020 will be epic, the end of a year, like few others, to be forgotten and buried. As the Waterford Crystal Ball is lowered in Times Square, accompanied by a fireworks show, more than a billion people will watch from around the globe.
Two years ago, I was in New York as 2018 became 2019. I called family and friends from Manhattan, where I was born, filled with pride and grateful to be alive. Within 15 minutes, I received a call from a friend in Miami reminding me that the Cuban Revolution had just turned 60 years old. In 1959, Fulgencio Batista had just left the country, and Fidel Castro was days away from entering Havana.
The call was a bittersweet reminder that, while I stood on top of the world in Times Square, members of the Communist Party were still in Cuba celebrating a victory that would deny Cubans freedom of expression, freedom of religion, the right to assembly and the right to bear arms, precious civil liberties that I and so many other Americans enjoy.
For the past two years, the artists of the San Isidro Movement in Cuba — named after an impoverished former red-light neighborhood in Havana — have been challenging the government’s oppressive tactics: punishing musicians, artists and writers whose freedom of expression is at the crux of creativity. They have been beaten and arrested for acts as simple as carrying signs reading “Libertad.”
So oppressive is the Cuban police state that, de
spite food shortages, it would not allow someone to have a hunger strike, because it could potentially bring international attention to the reality that Cuba does not have the successful social systems it publicizes.
The artists of San Isidro are tired of hearing elitist academics and journalists promulgate narratives blaming “Imperialism” for the oppressive state that exists in Cuba. To affirm the obvious: Cuba continues to promote a lie, and artists on the island are exposing it by confronting a police state and demanding the right to self-expression.
Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, the principal organizer behind the San Isidro Movement reminds me of Hunter S. Thompson; his performances have both embraced and questioned nationalism and the symbols of patriotism by incorporating the Cuban and American flags into his artistic practice.
His performances may seem derivative to some Westerners, but they acquire a radical dimension in the particular context in which they are executed. This makes them threatening in the eyes of Cuban officials.
Omara Ruiz Urquiloa is also an integral member of the San Isidro Movement; her courage is matched by her intellect, as she has faced down authorities and been beaten and imprisoned for expressing herself. Urquiloqa also is a historian, and her analysis of social systems make her, too, a threat to the government.
The San Isidro Movement is asking for help, support and acknowledgment from the same foreign journalists and intellectuals who promote the rhetoric that reinforced the oppression under which these artists live. An ongoing fallacy maintains the favorable idiosyncratic characterization of socialist states such as Cuba and Venezuela, fostered by academics and art world elitists who visit those countries and are taken in by smoke and mirrors. In fact, Cuba does not have an admirable medical or educational system, and imperialism is not to blame; a lack of common sense is.
So complex are the politics in Cuba that some protesters cynically have embraced pro-Trumpism to antagonize the police. Even artists with a Marxist education sometimes embrace North American politics as a shield against the rhetoric of anti-imperialism that is a mantra of the same authorities denying artists freedom of speech.
The situation is rich in irony, exemplified by those Cuban artists who have benefited professionally and financially over the past few decades and been celebrated by museums, galleries and auction houses around the globe, while maintaining tolerable — if not acceptable — relationships with the same Cuban government that now oppresses their San Isidro colleagues.
Google “San Isidro Cuba” and you will find video links on YouTube and 14ymedio.com that will remain until they are removed for potentially posing a threat to the Cuban state’s narrative. This is the world we live in today, footnotes are being erased, not just content, but sources.
This New Year’s Eve will be unique. I will welcome 2021 for the potential it represents, for the fearlessness of certain Cuban artists and because Nadie nos