Art in the Time of PoliticsIn the Afterglow of Détente at Havana’s Twelfth

BiennialBy Julia Cooke (/people/julia-cooke)

32-MINUTE READ ISSUE: Fall 2015 (/issues/91/4/fall-2015)

A detail from Roberto Fabelo’s La ronda infinita. (Claudio Fuentes)

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One late­May afternoon at a bar in Old Havana, I stood alongside a former policelieutenant named Miguel, who was slowly getting drunk, while the drone of a long andunceasing oration drifted through the open windows. The bar was, like much ofHavana, faded and old­fashioned—not quite ruined and majestic yet, but quaint anddingy—with swinging wooden saloon doors and a bartender in a white shirt and adroopy bow tie. Roadwork was being done on many of the neighborhood’s streets;

machines had chewed a foot­wide 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’show roadwork happens in Cuba. There is, after all, an entire highway in thecountryside that simply stops, dead­ending at jungle because the money ran out.

Across the street and a few houses down, two speakers propped on the sidewalkemitted a voice that bled into the bar. The voice was high and deliberate and spokewith familiar cadence, urgency, and rhetoric: confident enunciation, constant to thepoint 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 wood­and­wicker rocking chair, artist Tania Brugueraread into a microphone from Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Itwas 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 aboutundercover state security agents in attendance. Now, thirty hours into what Bruguerasaid would be 100 straight hours of reading Arendt aloud—she would trade placeswith dozens of volunteers throughout the performance—the room contained two menwith long hair and macramé bags who sat cross­legged against the walls and a womanwho lay on the floor, her head on a pillow. A fan was trained on Bruguera. Two tuKolasoda cans were pushed to the side. Thirty­five people had scrawled their names on asign­up sheet taped up by the door.

Bruguera had received a state license in March to work as a cuentapropista, looselytranslated as a freelance, non­state­affiliated worker—in her case, as a teacher. Thisproject, the Hannah Arendt International Institute for Artivism, was her latest in aseries of works that blended political activism with performance. She timed theproject to coincide with the Twelfth Havana Biennial, a large­scale, government­runexhibit of mainly public art that descends upon the city (in very Cuban fashion) everythree years. Among the people who had read on that first day was Cuban curatorGerardo Mosquera, one of the founders of the Havana Biennial, who parted ways withthe organization in 1989 in protest against censorship. An English copy of the text wason 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 theart 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 fiftyyears—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 100artworks that had never been seen in Cuba were on display, including Willie Cole’sHow Do You Spell America? #2 and photographs by Andy Warhol. Amid them all, aline of reporters with microphones and cameras snaked toward Holly Block, theBronx Museum’s director and exchange organizer, to ask about the show, thesymposia she’d organized, the art magazine that a group of Cuban teens wasproducing, and which the Bronx Museum was funding. The air­conditioning at BellasArtes had been fixed the day before—by Block’s team, which had found and purchasedthe right part in the two days since they had arrived. The AC struggled now to cool aspace filled with so many people. Women fanned themselves with exhibitionmaterials. Cuban artists who now lived in Mexico and New York stood in clusters andmurmured about the heat, how it was affecting their feet and hair.

In what was intended to be a boycott in support of Bruguera, a handful ofinternational artists had discussed withholding their work from the show. Two hadactually gone through with it. Many more artists had decided not only to show theirwork but to fly in and enjoy the festivities. “I was wondering if it was bad that I washere, with the boycott and all,” a Norwegian artist said to a group of us during acocktail party at the Norwegian ambassador’s residence. “I’d bet you can’t find fivepeople here who’ve heard of the boycott at all,” was an English expat’s reply. TheNorwegian decided not to ask around.

By and large, the exhibits at the biennial were dominated less by a sense of theirpolitical context and more by a sense that they were debutante balls in miniature.Proof was in the American presence. Official biennial figures placed the number ofregistered Americans at more than 1,300. How many more were actually therecouldn’t be verified, but anywhere from thirty to 100 people flew in for each of dozensof tours run by the likes of Cool Hunting, the Greenwich Arts Council, and the alumnigroups of Harvard and Smith. Ever since December, when political relations betweenthe US and Cuba had begun to thaw, American collectors and celebrities had beenbooking trips to Cuba, buying artwork, shuttling back and forth in private jets—or, ifthey couldn’t swing the jet, taking the recently launched JFK­to­Havana charter thatran every Tuesday.

In preparation, Cuban artists, curators, restaurateurs, and scuba­diving instructorshad ordered business cards from cuentapropista printers by the hundreds, to dole outat parties and openings. For the first time in the history of the biennial, acomprehensive listing of ancillary exhibits had been circulated, a virtual white pages

of artists and spaces: The government­run Centro de Desarrollo de Artes Visuales sentan eighteen­page document, via e­mail, that listed open studios and inaugurations,both state­run and not. In it, eight other openings concurrent with the opening ofWild Noise were included. The rabble, in short, was dizzying, and potentiallyvery profitable.

Bruguera’s Institute for Artivism wasn’t on the Centro de Desarrollo’s list, but thatsurprised exactly no one. Bruguera had been a source of tension in Cuba since herreturn to the country in December, after she flew down from her home in New YorkCity immediately following President Barack Obama’s announcement of imminentrapprochement. She had planned to stage a political performance in the Plaza de laRevolución, but was briefly detained after her arrival, her passport confiscated. A tideof articles in international magazines followed, focusing on the activist half of herartist­activist persona. The Cuban government offered to return her passport if sheagreed to leave the country, the assumption being that she would not be allowed backin. By the time biennial festivities kicked off in May 2015, Bruguera’s passport wasstill in the hands of the Cuban government.

Other artists, too, had been arrested in the months leading up to the biennial, forperformances that highlighted the continued political oppression in what is still,despite the buzz around rapid, real change in Cuba, a country under single­party rule.Danilo Maldonado Machado, a graffiti artist, had been jailed for attempting to stage aperformance that featured two pigs with the names “Fidel” and “Raúl” scrawled ontheir flanks. Performance artist and poet Amaury Pacheco had been held for unclearreasons, as had been a number of prominent dissidents—Yoani Sánchez and herhusband among them—who’d expressed solidarity with Bruguera. But it wasBruguera’s own detainment and harassment that was the darkest smudge on theculturati’s bright excitement for the New Cuba, a place that in the last year or soseemed on the verge of real transformation. To that end, the colossal production thatwas the biennial would exhibit not only art but intent.

Miguel, the ex­lieutenant, would probably not attend any of the biennial’s festivities,he told me from the bar, where we could hear Bruguera’s voice amplified out of twowaist­high speakers outside the door. He was vaguely aware of art exhibits in the cityand thought, in theory, they were great. He was inebriated enough that he struggled toremain upright on his stool, and stared intermittently at me and at the rum—threeCuban pesos, or fifteen cents, per finger—in his thick greenish glass.

“Está bien,” he told me when I asked what he thought of the blare of political speechhe seemed to be doing very well at tuning out. “I say what I want. She does, too. Weshould all say what we want to say. And I,” he added brightly, “am a Communistmilitant. Have been for fourteen years.” He had quit working for the police and wasnow working for himself as a cuentapropista, doing something that he expressed aseither intentionally vague or blurred by drink: distributing items like fruit andsunglasses, he said, but also heavy machinery.

I looked at the bartender, asked what he thought. He raised his eyebrows and wavedhis hand toward the street and the wafting Arendt. “It’s all blah, blah, blah thesedays,” he said. “We need less blah, blah, blah and more action.”

Bruguera’s words echoed across the street: “…will develop a true secret police as thenucleus of its government and power. It seems that official recognition is considered alarger menace…”

From somewhere within the many sandwiched residences along these streets, Cubanstate security was probably listening.

Tobogán, by the art collective Stainless, at the Morro-Cabaña. (Claudio Fuentes)

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Havana in the last twenty years has been a place of selective cognitive dissonances, oftourists eating in elegant backroom restaurants that recall the 1950s while thechildren of the entrepreneurs who have become wealthy off those restaurants, richkids like any others, cut queues on Friday nights with the grandkids of apparatchiks.That these scenes take place in a Communist country in which political dissent is nottolerated but all citizens have free health care, education, and housing, in whichlawyers and chemists earn a flat salary of around $20 a month, generates a sense thatthe dominant narrative does not match the evidence on the ground.

For most American visitors, there are the ways in which Cuba does not match itsnative propaganda and the ways in which it does not match American cliché. A get­together of well­dressed artists drinking Rioja and watching an art film that has justbeen shown at Cannes will challenge one accepted narrative, but not the other. Music,too: During the biennial’s first few days, a woman told me with genuine confusion that

she wished her Cuban taxi drivers would stop playing American music for her benefit,wishing they would turn off Carly Rae Jepsen and the Black Eyed Peas and play theirown music.

Certain realms challenge both narratives. The elegant backroom restaurantsthemselves are one. The contemporary art scene is another.

The arts have been a priority of the Cuban revolution from the beginning. Shortlyafter seizing power, Fidel Castro converted the golf course where United Fruitexecutives and American diplomats had swung clubs into an art school. Laws passedthroughout the 1960s and ’70s required a quota of Cuban music on the radio andpromoted Cuban art in galleries and museums. Art by Cuba’s most famous painter,Wifredo Lam, whose murky cubist canvases and charcoal drawings hung on the wallsof the country’s elite, was donated to Bellas Artes in the name of the revolution, to bedisplayed at little to no cost to the public—or was reassigned to hang above themantles at “protocol homes” designated for generals and dignitaries.

If the expansiveness of art has been at odds with the constraints of a single­partypolitical system—art is, as Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas put it, a “dissident force,because a dictatorship is itself unaesthetic, grotesque”—it has also been in line withthe goals of an educated, idealistic populace. The Havana Biennial was founded in1984, before the global vogue for biennials and art fairs and general seizures of excessthat have become common in the art world—even the common recognition of theterm “art world”—in the years since. It also anticipated the global vogue for“discovering” unknown art from outside of the US and Europe. When Holly Blockwent to her first Havana Biennial, in 1994, with a group of twenty­three BronxMuseum staffers, she saw work by artists not just from Cuba but also from SouthAfrica, the Philippines, and Algeria. “None of that work was shown in New York,” shetold me later.

Throughout the post­USSR economic depression, art’s visibility and utility to therevolution—economic and propagandistic—granted it a degree of immunity. Curatorsoften organized shows, represented artists, and brokered sales, and many politicalartists were intimidated rather than thrown in jail—or at least jailed with lessfrequency than other dissidents or independent journalists. Now, postdétente, art hadtranscended immunity and become a diplomatic and commercial force. And it wasn’tjust artists and curators who stood to gain from the art­world spotlight hovering overHavana. Gallerists, producers, collectors, entrepreneurs, corporations, and

combinations of the above all had a stake in the business of the biennial. Cubanexpatriates and canny Americans both saw it as an opportunity to get in, as if to a clubor party, before the complete evaporation of the embargo, to enter on the ground floorof future US–Cuba business opportunities. They also simply wanted to participate inhistory, to witness the epilogue of the Cold War as it was being written.

But if the line between art and commerce was blurred at the biennial, so, too, was theline between art and activism, and between activism and commerce. Parties teemedwith “projects” and “collaborations,” with talk of “platforms” and their maximization.I met women from New York who were in town to work on “a cultural activism projectwe’d rather not discuss in detail yet.” I met the restaurateur behind Williamsburg’sCubana Social restaurant, who also sought collaborations. The Italian GalleriaContinua, which represents Cuban artists Carlos Garaicoa and José Yaque as well as ahandful of international artists who’d been invited to stage large­scale performancesof their work, had procured funds from Louis Vuitton to stage projects in a defunctChinatown movie theater and throughout Havana. Its director was optimistic that theCuban government and LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton would continue tocollaborate to bring great works of art to the Havana public using the gallery’s artistsand platform.

On Friday afternoon, the biennial’s second official day, I hired a private driver and hisLada to take me to as many events as possible. These included private openings at thestudios or homes of Cuban artists and collectors and inaugurations of government­run biennial shows. All day we crisscrossed not only with the usual vintage cars andcollective taxis but also with the blue­and­white Transtur buses that trawled thestreets—descending the hill from the Morro­Cabaña complex or lining up outside thewarren of Old Havana’s bay­side streets, often pulling through intersections three ata time.

In Miramar, I stepped out of the Lada and into a group of tourists—the crisply tailoredand sweaty­suited alike—that slowly made its way out of a bus and toward an exhibitat an apartment recently purchased by conceptual artist Carlos Garaicoa, who divideshis time between Spain and Cuba.

Few Cubans would have deemed it a party—Cuban parties involve dancing—but therewas a DJ, who’d set up on one end of Garaicoa’s wide, fourth­floor balcony while abartender prepared mojitos on the other. In order to approach the bar, guests

sidestepped an installation, a tapestry rug that was a perfect reproduction of thepolished gravel sidewalks of Vedado—down to the cracks, splotches of gum, gapswhere the metal seams between slabs had begun to separate from the stone, and thegouges that had collected clumps of black dirt. It was so realistic against the slightlypaler floor that some people accidentally walked across it, adding smudges and heelmarks to the work’s experiential impasto, though not without a few sideways glancesand chastising remarks: “Watch it! That’s art!”

Throughout the apartment’s four rooms, one could see a combination of Garaicoa’swork and the work of younger artists who participated in a studio program he runs inMadrid, which he hopes to duplicate in Miramar. As I walked through the rooms, Ioverheard various plans for acquiring the work on display. (“Are you buying thispiece?” asked one American. “I love it. Yes, absolutely,” replied another. “And at theseprices!” chimed in a third.) There was also plenty of commentary on the white T­shirtsworn by Garaicoa’s staff (“I like the T­shirts, artists for artists”; “I really, really needone of those T­shirts”; “Can I buy a T­shirt?”).

If there is one phrase that is often overheard during introductions at art events inHavana, it is that someone lives “between X and Havana”—be it Mexico City orMadrid or Miami or New York. Ever since the nineties, when Cuba began to open tothe globalizing world, this balancing act between isolated Cuba and the exterior worldhas afforded these artists a certain cultural and political cachet. But in recent years,especially in the lead­up to the biennial, many of those same artists have recommittedthemselves to Cuba. Once it was the international city that mattered; now reputationsare gilded by the commitment shown through the purchase of property or the creationof artistic programming. The reasons artists spend so much time abroad vary—thedifficulty in finding materials for complex artworks; political repression; the lack ofnative, noninstitutional infrastructure such as gallerists, grants, and collectors. Thereasons for the more recent homecomings have been varied, too.

An exhibit at the apartment of artist Carlos Garaicoa. Havana. (Leandro Feal)

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Artists Marco Castillo and Dago Rodríguez, who make up the conceptual­art duo LosCarpinteros, recently bought a house in Nuevo Vedado to use as a studio, whichmeant that they could spend more time working in Havana and fabricate their

elaborate, witty architectural sculptures in Cuba once again. On Friday evening, theyinaugurated the first of what they anticipated would be many collaborative exhibits inthe larger rooms of the house, which had been built for and inhabited by one of FidelCastro’s doctors.

In the main room, two enormous armoires, the edges of their pressed­wood framesfraying, hung suspended from their corners, wrapped in one red and one black cable,both winched to the wall. The dangerous­looking assemblages seemed to sway,threatening to careen into each other. Mexican artist Jose Dávila had commandeeredthe armoires after Castillo and Rodríguez had removed them from the living room tomake space. They’d also ripped out two seven­foot windows in order to expand thewall space. The windows now hung on the patio, their frames a crusty mottle of brownand white, crooked screws and ominous twisted nails protruding from the interiorface, balanced around a chunk of a concrete column. They hinged outward from thebottom connected by a butterfly of red cable.

Other features of the tropical modernist house were reflected in art or had beensimilarly requisitioned for it: In a Los Carpinteros piece, a twelve­foot row of books byLeon Trotsky, Karl Marx, and other leftist thinkers, left behind by the doctor, wasbored through with a hole like a bullet’s path. Watercolors of the Soviet­styleapartment blocks constructed by the hundreds in Cuba to quell housing shortagesincluded phrases written across closed jalousie blinds along the building facades:conmigo tienes que gozar, a line from a Los Van Van song; another, el pueblo seequivoca, a line from a Fidel Castro speech. Castillo and Rodríguez hoped to buildreal­life sculptural models of the cheekily modified housing blocks soon. In the future,Castillo told me, he and Rodríguez wanted to convert the house into not only a studioand exhibition space—particularly for artists who haven’t shown in Cuba before—butalso a library with privately donated art books. “Sometimes it’s not easy to get books,literature,” he said. “Information is always a privilege.”

Back on Tejadillo Street, the sign­up sheet that had been posted on the wall of theBruguera exhibit, which suggested that interested visitors note their names, homecities, e­mail addresses, and telephone numbers, now held fifty­four names—visitorshailing from Rio de Janeiro, Havana, New York. Initially, Bruguera had intended thelist to be only for those who volunteered to read into the microphone. Once sherealized that the list was a sort of protection for her—“I could say internationalcurators, Cuban artists, even the director of the biennial, were here,” she told me later—she and her faithful encouraged everyone who stopped in to sign up.

A cluster of people stood on the street as a young woman sat in the rocking chair,pitched over the Arendt tome, reading. Bruguera wasn’t there, and this reader did notsound anything like Fidel: Her speech was salted with slowly pronounced words andexclamations, “¡Oye, escucha esto!” (“Hey, listen to this!”).

On Saturday afternoon, in the heat of 4 p.m., a crowd gathered in what was left of theshade at the Plaza de la Catedral to witness Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto’sThird Paradise, a project that involved pot lids of varying colors and sizes resting atopcymbal stands of varying heights, arranged in three circles in the center of the plaza.(Pistoletto had installed similar circles atop the glass pyramid of the Louvre, in theplazas of Milan, and here in Havana back in December, using boats that circled oneanother in the ocean.) A firm wind blew in off the sea, occasionally tossing a lid ontothe ground. A drone wavered back and forth as onlookers pointed into the air andtook pictures of it. Finally, staffers with walkie­talkies cleared people out of the way tomake room for Pistoletto and a group of ebullient rumberos, a herd of young Cubansinvolved in the performance. After proceding into the square, the rumberos beganplaying the improvised cymbals, their rhythmic riffs echoing off nearby buildings.

Just a few blocks over, in the Plaza de Armas, artist Nikhil Chopra had locked himselfin a small metal cage, about ten by ten feet, where he intended to paint for nearly sixtyhours straight. By the second day of his self­imposed imprisonment, his eyes wereshot through with pink the color of the paint he used to compose bright, lyricalrepresentations of the buildings around him on a white sail­like canvas. Once eachwork was finished, he hung it against one side of the cage, eventually closing himselfin. He wore white lace tights, a white dress, oxfords with low heels. A jar with pencilssat alongside a bottle of water, a bag with flashlights, a flask, a cup of coffee, a platewith seven bananas, and a rolled­up foam mattress. At one point, a boy in a dusty redNike jersey began to lean against the cage, sticking his thin arms between the bars andclasping his forearms. He did this for a while, on different sides of the cage, staring atChopra the whole time. When he finally left Chopra, I asked the boy what he thoughtof the performance, and he responded with a stream of questions: Where is he from?Who put him there? How long will he stay there for? How do you talk to him? Whatlanguage do people from India speak? Does he have water? What happens when itruns out? He headed toward the Plaza de la Catedral, where kids his age and youngerwere banging away at Pistoletto’s cymbals.

Halfway across the city, in what was once a bicycle factory, visitors sought shelterfrom the sun in the broken shadows of what remained of the roof. Twenty years ago,the bicycles that were used during an extended fuel shortage were assembled in thisfactory; today, bicycles are derided by those who consider them a symbol of an era ofhunger and indignity. The factory had been converted into an experience of sonic,spatial, and temporal disorientation by a group of artists selected by two curators andartist Wilfredo Prieto, who used to live between Havana and New York and is nowbased in Havana. Eventually, artist Shimabuku’s broken pipes dripping water on tincans of different sizes did develop a son­like rhythm, but then lost it; bits of silverjewelry that Tatiana Mesa had haphazardly stuck into a deteriorated brick wallsnatched your attention, but then lost it, too. The oddly magical acoustics of the spacemuffled the noise from the street outside, where cars accelerated up the off­rampfrom a tunnel and often backfired while doing it. More than three steps out of thefactory and the traffic won out. But inside, somehow, it was silent, resulting in a sortof sensory intermission, a momentary suspension of reality.

Above and below: Nikhil Chopra’s The Black Pearl, performed at Havana’s Plaza de Armas. (Paola Martinez Fiterre andAlejandro Mesa Crespo)

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Curators and artists were hard at work at new “exhibition spaces”—in the Cuba ofcreatively interpreted and capriciously enforced cuentapropista licenses, a private artgallery’s legality is murky. At El Apartamento, a Cuban art­production team called F5waited for American collectors and curators to look at the work they’d assembled fromlocal artists. All three twentysomething members of F5 had quit their jobs at the samestate­run gallery in the last month; the opportunities were greater elsewhere, like atthis new venture. They had led curators from the Getty through the show the previousday; Block’s Bronx Museum tour group had visited, too. All works were for sale, all forless than $20,000. At another space a few blocks away called Cristo Salvador, Danishand Cuban artists scrambled to finish politically inclined artworks made of, amongother materials, Havana Club rum bottles and snipped­out headlines from the statepropaganda rag, Granma, which they’d produced in the two weeks since the Daneshad arrived. When someone ran out of something—paint or oil or canvas—it took aday and dozens of phone calls to figure out where to procure it, the Cuban artist who’d

organized the show told me. This pleased him. He wanted his Danish friends tounderstand the logistical challenges and creative opportunities of Havana. The showwould open on Monday.

At the Morro­Cabaña, across the choppy bay, at one of the biennial’s official exhibits,there was sun and wind and too much art. The vaulted old jail cells that had heldCuban independence fighters under the rule of the Spanish, then capitalist dissidentsin the early years of the revolution, was now filled with art organized in no evidentmanner, or at least no immediately evident manner, and no one working there knewwhere anything was. Even here, deals were being made: I watched one man in safaripants kneel on the ground to write a dollar sign and a number on the back of abusiness card on a bench, and then slide the card into the pocket next to his knee.

In more instances than not, the work itself took a backseat to the experience of it,turning even static works of art into “social practice.” The experience was one ofoverload, a slam at the required shift in pace between the buoyant rabble and achilling painting, or the conceptual art piece that snags a sensation and unfurls. Themagic of the 2015 Havana Biennial was one of long­shut doors flung open and rolesexuberantly melded, chances taken in the open that would not have happened adecade ago, politically charged exhibits and actions, potential, participation, collectiveundertakings, porosity.

But just under the surface, it was also a confrontation with what had not changed,what was still resolute. The Cuban DJ at a cocktail party was tired, he told me as wesipped rum and waited for a famous guest to arrive, because he had been up early togo to the market, because the good stuff was always gone if he got there late, and therewasn’t much on state­run grocery­store shelves. Items have always disappeared fromshops at strange intervals, but the in­home restaurateurs had developed anastonishingly effective network of buyers who swooped into fruit markets andsupermarkets long before residents could, leaving little for anyone else. The stateappeared no closer to legalizing a wholesale marketplace for business owners thanwhen Fidel was in power. And tourism alone had not had the desired impact: A taxidriver named Jorge told me that though, yes, there were certainly a lot of Americansaround, and though Americans spent a lot of money, it hadn’t been as he’d hoped,enough to push the country forward on a tide of American money. Another taxi driverwho wouldn’t give me his name told me that he couldn’t find new clothes to buy forhis seven­year­old daughter as a birthday gift, not anywhere.

On Tejadillo Street, a small crowd, including a handful of Cuban artists whose workwas exhibited at the Morro­Cabaña complex, gathered outside the site of Bruguera’sperformance.Across the street, in a kitschy souvenir shop, I saw a one­eyed manplaying chess. I left the group and walked toward the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes,where the biennial’s main museum—four exhibits by Cuban artists Wilfredo Prieto,Gustavo Pérez Monzón, Alexandre Arrechea, and Tomás Sánchez—was about to open.

Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Third Paradise at Fototeca de Cuba (left) and Havana’s Plaza de la Catedral (right). (LorenzoFiaschi) Courtesy of the artist and Galleria Continua, San Gimignano / Beijing / Les Moulins / Havana

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Inside the museum, I watched children jumping in and out of a waterless fountain,people chatting as they waited to order beer or cola at the museum café, artists andcurators milling with what Buena Vista Social Club film producer Rosa Bosch wouldlater describe to Vanity Fair as “the largest concentration of Cuban politicalheavyweights at an ostensibly non­political event.” The rooms were crowded enoughthat actually viewing Arrechea’s or Pérez Monzón’s work was difficult. In the

courtyard, Prieto’s light, meditative installations confounded children and those notinclined toward conceptual art: a metal safe encased in a cardboard box, or UncertainFuture, a crystal ball that sat on the ground surrounded by viewers, reflecting upside­down legs and an expanse of sky.

Outside, Bruguera stood amid a cluster of people at the entrance to Bellas Artes, infront of the Granma, the sixty­foot boat that Fidel Castro and Che Guevara stuffedwith eighty other revolutionaries and steered over from Mexico to Cuba in 1956 to tryto overthrow Fulgencio Batista’s regime. As Bruguera approached the entrance, fivepolicemen standing guard denied her access. Holly Block appeared on her way out ofthe show, and Bruguera asked Block to advocate for her, to help her get into themuseum. Block walked back up the steps and spoke with the museum subdirector,who told her that Bruguera had announced on Tejadillo Street that she would readThe Origins of Totalitarianism to the opening­night crowd, which was why she wouldnot be allowed inside. She was welcome to come see the show at any other time—liketomorrow, he suggested.

By the next round of private parties, which would last until five in the morning,hearsay about Bruguera was self­correcting and spreading. Questions were asked:Had her intent been to incite confrontation? Would a large cultural institution in NewYork or London allow an artist to stage a political performance at an openingreception? Among what had not changed in Cuba was the fact that things were not asthey appeared. Blame was quickly but murkily apportioned, politics isolated. Motivesremained unclear. The various agendas—artistic, commercial, dissident,governmental—swam together and collided, and gossip charted the space amongthem all.

Still, the dancing continued. At a deteriorated Vedado mansion that Prieto recentlybought—a house that has long been admired by young and arty Cubans, a house thatmany refer to as their dream house—wooden scaffolding held up the moldings whilewaiters served aged rum in plastic cups from behind a long bar of two­by­fours. Acluster of young Cubans complained outside of the house’s iron gates as a bouncer inan official biennial lanyard granted immediate access to a foreigner who quietly said,“I’m a friend of Wilfredo’s.”

Throughout the biennial, politics hung like a scrim behind the art. Some artists openlymined the particularity of Cuban hypocrisy and absurdity, using references bothsubtle and not: a large­scale painting by Alejandro Campins, with abandoned militaryforts facing off across a ten­foot expanse of abstraction; Los Carpinteros miningFidel’s phrases for exterior décor. Whether an artist intended for a work to be politicalwas irrelevant, because most artworks in Havana in the summer of 2015 were politicalby default: Jose Dávila’s delicately balanced armoires, threatening to careen into eachother yet frozen in place; Chopra’s cage and the shoe marks on Garaicoa’s rug; a danceparty staged on the steps of Bellas Artes by an artist who casually orchestrated thehundreds of revelers to turn their backs on the Granma all at once. Whether suchartwork needed to identify itself as activism in order to activate something wasthe question.

Blue Cube-Immersion by Rachel Valdés Camejo, on Havana’s Malecón. (Claudio Fuentes)

(https://www.vqronline.org/sites/default/files/story­images/_mg_6877.jpg)

Bruguera later told me that she had no intention to stage any sort of politicalperformance at the Bellas Artes opening. Another artist, whom she did not name, hadplanned a piece in protest of Danilo Maldonado Machado’s continued detainment,

and she thought state security had heard about a planned performance and assumedthat she’d be the performer in question. Either that or it was a campaign “to isolateme and eliminate me, as if I never existed,” she said. She didn’t see a dissonancebetween her roles as artist and activist. Even so, she had come, over the course of thebiennial, to represent something, though whether it was what she had set out torepresent was unclear.

The art cascaded on. The Malecón was closed to traffic for the opening of Behind theWall, public art installations that would dot the seawall for the duration of thebiennial. Hundreds of people in the street were shrouded in the fine salt mist of anafternoon that threatened to rain for hours but held off. Spanish artist CarlosNicanor’s yellow brick road, made of chunks of wood stitched together, led from theHermanos Ameijeiras hospital—the city’s premier surgical hospital, which used to bea bank, where gold is rumored to remain in a vault—to the seawall, and then over theseawall and into the ocean, toward Miami. Just past the yellow brick road, Cubanreggaeton blared from a DJ station above Brooklyn artist Duke Riley’s synthetic ice­skating rink. Eight­year­old skaters culled from the city’s youth in­line­skatingleagues struggled to coordinate themselves with a photographer who was trying to getjust the right shot of the girls gliding in front of Riley, who leaned against the rink’srail with his tattooed arms crossed. The rink was small, and there was barely enoughspace for the spandex­clad girls to pick up speed before they bounced against the wallon the opposite side, and they couldn’t seem to cross at the right angle in front ofRiley to get the right photo. The photographer sent them back and forth, again andagain. Their arms flailed, and they giggled as their legs stuck on the faux ice, overwhich the photographer, with no skates on, simply walked.

Then other skaters who’d lined up were let onto the “ice,” and the dancing picked up.Cubans and foreigners mingled on the Malecón until nightfall. Sometime in the lateafternoon, in the maze of Old Havana, Bruguera was detained on Tejadillo Street andthen released.

In a few days, Rihanna and Annie Leibovitz would touch down for a photo shoot. Iwould glimpse Miguel, the ex­police lieutenant cuentapropista, on his bar stool onemore time. Restaurants would continue to buzz with American tourists. Artists wouldshow the work that hadn’t already sold to these latecomers, now that they had time tospend in their studios, attending to tourists.

Julia Cooke (/people/julia-cooke)

Julia Cooke is the author of The Other Side of Paradise: Life in the NewCuba (Seal, 2014). Her essays and articles have appeared in Condé NastTraveler, the New York Times, A Public Space,Salon, Guernica,andSaveur, and have been anthologized in Best American Travel Writing2014 and Best Women’s Travel Writing. She has received fellowshipsfrom the Norman Mailer Center and Columbia University and teacheswriting at the New School.

In July, Bruguera would be appointed the City of New York’s artist­in­residence forthe Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs, MoMA would announce the acquisition of itsfirst Bruguera piece, and the Cuban government would return her passport. Apartfrom the passport, she clarified to me, all of these developments had been in theworks before she’d set foot on Cuban soil. It had recently been announced that she’dbe a Yale World Fellow. As the fellowship’s programming got underway, Brugueraheard that graffiti artist Danilo Maldonado Machado would be released from jail, andwith that—one of the conditions, she said, of her departure—she would return to theUS. (As of press time, Bruguera had begun her work at Yale, but Maldonado had yet tobe released.)

In fall 2016, Wild Noise/Ruido Salvaje: Artwork from El Museo Nacional de BellasArtes—ninety­plus works from the collection of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes—will come to New York. By then, Los Carpinteros hope to have installed their library,Garaicoa to have hosted at least one resident artist, Prieto to have renovated hisVedado mansion so that he can invite international artists for symposia. PerhapsCristo Salvador and El Apartamento will be legal galleries and a cuentapropistalicense will offer plausible cover for F5’s ventures. There may be new hotels, newarchitectural plans for spaces like the bicycle factory, too.

On Sunday night, though, at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Prieto’s UncertainFuture sat on the ground, no longer reflecting upside­down crowds as it had done theday before, at the opening. With the museum closed and everyone at the Malecón, itreflected the art, the walls, the empty space.

ISSUE: Fall 2015 Volume 91 # 4 (/issues/91/4/fall­2015)

PUBLISHED: October 5, 2015

UPDATED: September 22, 2015