A group of Cuban artists and curators have called for a boycott of the forthcoming Havana Biennial in protest of the jailing and persecution of Cuban artists by the island’s government.
Tania Bruguera, Coco Fusco and Hamlet Lavastida are among those who have signed an open letter.
‘We say NO to the Havana Biennial because Cuban artists have been in prison for months, because dozens of arts professionals are under house arrest, because over a thousand of our fellow citizens were arrested during the mass protests that took place on July 11. Of those arrested at the protests, more than five hundred Cubans are still in jail, and among them are several minors.’
Lavastida was released in September after spending three months in detention at Havana’s notorious Villa Marista, a high-security prison.
The biennial is scheduled to open 12 November with the title Futuro y Contemporaneidad (Future and Contemporaneity) under the directorship of Nelson Ramirez de Arellano, an artist and director of the Fototeca de Cuba. The exhibition is due to spread over six months, and a recent press release suggests the show will concentrate on Cuban artists chosen through an open call.
In July, Bruguera told the Oslo Freedom Forum that the biennial is ‘another piece of propaganda’. The artist was placed under house arrest in July, leaving the country for America in August.
She has been arrested several times previously by Cuban police. In 2015 she was arrested for staging a 100-hour-long public reading of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), coinciding with the opening of that year’s Biennial. In December 2014 Bruguera was detained and had her passport confiscated after she tried to stage a performance about free speech in the city’s Revolution Square.
In 2018 the Cuban government introduced Decree 349, a law which enables stringent restrictions to be made on the arts. Since then those providing ‘artistic services’ must register with the state and allow their work to be inspected on demand. A new cadre of inspectors who have unilateral authority to deem art legal or not was introduced while the definition of ‘impermissible content’ for audiovisual works was also made vaguer.
Artist Sam Durant and curators Helen Molesworth, Claire Bishop and Luis Pérez-Oramas are among the international names to have vowed not to participate, attend or support the exhibition.
‘We have sent letters, issued petitions, expressed our outrage in print and online. We have made protest art and music. We have fasted in public. We have prayed in churches. We have asked for a dialogue with the Minister of Culture and other government leaders. Our friends abroad have marched and pressured their politicians. The European Parliament and the United Nations have condemned the arrest and harassment of Cubans that have sought to express their creativity and political will without violence.
‘And yet, our colleagues and our fellow citizens remain in detention. They continue to be harassed, to have their telecommunications cut, to have their movements surveyed, and their families threatened.
‘The same institutions and the same functionary that organize the Havana Biennial are the one that have refused to listen to us and have condoned and participated in the violence perpetrated against Cuban cultural workers that seek greater autonomy for Cuban culture and civil rights for our citizenry.
‘The problems that we face are not reducible to an isolated case of censorship. We are contending with a systemic effort by the Cuban government to silence those who think differently. The life of people in the cultural field is at risk.’
