‘The Biennial whitewashes the situation in Cuba’
The imprisonment of rapper Denis Solis has led artists to boycott Havana’s festival.
Like many rap singers, Denis Solis is an anti-establishment figure who is no great fan of the cops. So when a policeman knocked on his door last year without a warrant, he filmed the officer on his mobile phone and called him a “coward in uniform”.
This, however, was Cuba, where being a rebel carries rather more risk than it does in the West: Solis was later sentenced to eight months in prison for “contempt of authority”. But the footage of the run-in, which he posted on Facebook, went viral: in six decades of Communist rule, such acts of open defiance are rare.
Nor did the matter end there. Solis belongs to Cuba’s San Isidro Movement, a dissident artists’ collective based in a run-down quarter of Havana old town. Following his imprisonment last November, they protested in their hundreds for his release, with many ending up behind bars themselves.
For Cuba’s new president, Miguel Diaz-Canel – an apparatchik who took over from Fidel Castro’s brother Raul in 2018 – the whole thing is just a US-backed “imperial reality show”. Like it or not, though, the show is the talk of the town – not least at the Havana Biennial, a governmentbacked arts festival that opens today.
Founded in 1984, the three-month
‘We need political as well as artistic rights – not just freedom for art exhibitions’
long Biennial is designed to promote artworks from the developing world, styling itself as a platform for artists ignored by the West. This year, though, the San Isidros are urging a boycott of it – derailing an event that normally burnishes Cuba’s image for revolutionary idealism.
Already, hundreds of artists worldwide have signed an open letter accusing the festival organisers of condoning “violence perpetrated against Cuban cultural workers”. Several prominent participants, meanwhile, have pulled out.
“We have tried everything through dialogue with the government to make them stop political violence and stop censoring and imprisoning artists,” says Tania Bruguera, a Cuban installation artist currently based in New York. “The boycott is a strategy when you have no more options.”
Bruguera, 53, is known in Britain for her 2008 work Tatlin’s Whisper, which featured mounted police corralling visitors in the Tate Modern’s vast Turbine Hall. She is also familiar with the rather more restricted environments of Cuban jail cells, having been arrested during the protests over the past year.
“The Biennial is a big event which helps to whitewash the political situation, where people who are inclined to defend the Cuban revolution can enjoy mojitos,” she added. “It’s always been a bubble, where nobody’s ever actually in contact with the Cuban people.”
The protests that began last year are the biggest in Cuba since the early 1990s, when the Soviet Union’s collapse ended the aid that had kept Cuba’s state-run economy afloat. The regime has survived partly by introducing market reforms – but also by maintaining its repression of critics.
However, Solis is not an easy hero to embrace. In his film of the stand-off with the policeman, he also calls the officer a “faggot”, and declares support for Donald Trump, who reimposed sanctions eased during the Obama years. Such comments have made it hard for human rights activists to treat him as a martyr, and easy for regime supporters to denounce him as a US stooge.
Nonetheless, the wider protests sparked by his detention have gone well beyond the usual red lines. The Cuban regime’s attitude to the arts can be largely summed up by a speech Castro gave to the island’s intellectuals in 1961, when he set out their creative parameters. “Within the revolution, everything; against the revolution, nothing,” he said.
“Without political rights, artistic rights don’t mean much,” says Bruguera. “I don’t just want freedom for art exhibitions.” The protests have also chimed with wider public discontent over food and medical shortages caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Last July, that led to thousands rallying in cities nationwide, some shouting “down with dictatorship”.
“These protests really are unprecedented in Cuba in the last 20 years, as they’re linking bread-and-butter issues like healthcare, food and jobs to the issues of freedom and democracy,” says Dr Christopher Sabatini, a Cuba analyst at London’s Chatham House think tank. “That strikes at the heart of what the revolution’s about.”
Another factor is greater web access, a legacy from the era of President Obama, who loosened tech sanctions on Havana in the hope of exposing Cubans “to different points of view”. That has helped protesters to mobilise and share videos, despite officials often cutting off social media access.
The government, however, has been mobilising its own supporters through so-called repudios – real-life trollings, where mobs of loyalists gather to hurl abuse at regime critics.
“I had five repudios this year – they’re done by paramilitaries dressed as civilians, who claim to be just your neighbours defending the revolution,” says Bruguera. “It’s horrible – you can get 20 people around you, screaming at the tops of their voices and sometimes getting very violent.”
The government has also organised its own pro-Biennial counter-petition, saying that more than 600 signatories worldwide have endorsed its “antihegemonic” character and that at least 300 artists will still be attending.
However, several prominent guests have already pulled out of the Biennial, including the Spanish performance artist Abel Azcona, while signatories to the open letter include the Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović and the Serpentine Gallery’s director, Hans Ulrich Obrist.
Cuba’s top film director, Ernesto Daranas, whose work is often selected as Cuba’s entries for the Oscars, has also questioned the government’s insistence that the protests are the work of US meddling. “Putting every criticism in that same bucket is now isolating [Cuba’s government] from reality,” he said last year.
True, an artists’ revolt is some way off a popular revolución. Cuba’s security forces remain firmly in control, with police flooding Havana this week to head off further protests. There have also been more arrests and repudios, while around 650 people detained in July’s unrest remain in jail, according to human rights groups.
But given the regime’s past courting of artists worldwide – Castro was adored by Jean-Paul Sartre, for example – the boycott deprives the government of much of its “moral authority”, says Dr Sabatini. “A lot of intellectuals support the Cuban ideal, even if they wouldn’t want to live there themselves,” he said. “So if they too are now coming out against the regime, it removes one of the last remaining symbols of the support for the government.”