In the exhibit “Detrás del muro: En el medio de la nada” (Behind the Wall: in the Middle of Nothing), included in the 12th Biennale of Havana, one of the most popular installations was without a doubt the work “Resaca” (Undertow/Hangover), Arlés del Río’s imaginary beach. As if it were Paris Plage on the shores of the Seine or Pier 4 Beach at the Brooklyn Bridge beside the East River, from May to June Havana dwellers sprawled out, like the tourists that they weren’t, under palm trees in tight, sand-covered space, next to the Malecón Wall.
Perhaps the most startling detail of the little Havana beach was that the definitively non-tourist public here was not offered the well-known Caribbean with its waves and breeze and sunset. Of course, there were the palm trees, parasols, and comfortable lounge chairs, but placed with their backs to the sea. They were only there so that the public, like Cabrera Infante’s three-trapped tigers, could observe the coming and going of the noisy and gas-belching cars, trucks, buses, and motorcycles. Nevertheless, the gaze might have lingered longer on the fallen colonial buildings just in front of Arlés del Río’s installation.
Havana in ruins as tropical spectacle frightens away whatever possible illusion associated with the little performative beach. The tourist view that generally is expected to be idyllic, relaxing, uncomplicated, could only invite, in this new context, confrontation, problematization about not only the present but also the future. But even the tourists should know that photographing the ruins has become a humdrum gesture, by now out of fashion.
Today, what’s trendy in Havana isn’t the ruins, but the future.
The Havana of the 12th Biennale looked toward the future, as if it were looking to understand history in the making and unmaking right now on the island, taking the fragments of an immediate past whose present reinterpretation, repeated in the most diverse versions through numerous pieces, installations and performances, is not utilized as much to understand the present as to try to imagine–in the form of utopia or dystopia–what is to come. And today upon thinking about the future of Cuba, an inevitable question comes ahead of time: how will life be without the embargo? That is to say, once relations between Cuba and the United States are reestablished and perhaps the economic embargo on the island is abolished.
To grasp the true reach of these recurrent reflections around the history that we will be, it is necessary to have crossed the bay, going beyond the Malecón Wall to enter into the labyrinth of galleries that the Zona Franca show at the Morro-Cabana park formed.
There for example, in Luis E. Camejo’s exhibition “Ruinas” (Ruins), the interpretation of the same sense of history, the relative ideological and sociological value that we award symbols and objects, was treated powerfully, guided; it seemed, by an implicit question: what will we be in the third millennium? Where will this all stop? How will our icons, our spiritual and material culture, all that we had clung to as part of an identity we had supposed or still suppose to be stable, true, and authentic, be? Simulating an archeological exhibition, a series of engravings that reproduced buildings that are currently emblematic of the nation, like the National Library, the Plaza of the Revolution or the Capital building, in ruins, inundated, covered with weeds. Pieces of a Russian matrioshka doll are exhibited behind glass, identified as “Doll (…) belonging to a period of incursions of Slavic tribes on the island at the end of the second millennium.” The past and present become pieces worthy of a museum where one can speculate about the possible interpretations regarding what will become of us in the future.
A certain interpretative synergy could be discovered between this work and “Absolut Revolution-1ro de mayo (An die Freude)” (Absolute Revolution-May 1st [An die Freude])” by Ludmila and Nelson, where Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” marked the rhythm of the workers who sweep the little flags up from the ground at the Plaza of the Revolution, reproduced in a video projected on the floor of the installation. They sweep up the leftovers of the May 1st ceremony; but our perception of this activity is amazing, thanks to Beethoven’s chords. This installation exudes irony, where the grandiosity of “Ode to Joy” mockingly contrasts with the scatological sense of the act of sweeping up the remains of a great party. Only one ceremony or a whole cosmogony.
Lidzie Alvisa’s simple piece “Revolución” also breathes sad irony. On a board, on one side, traced in chalk, is the word “Revolución,” in thick letters. From the other side of the board, the same word, the same typography, but the letters have been built in three-dimensional pieces of acrylic, half-filled with chalk-dust. The suggested reflection points to the content of a word that is so very tried and tested, so fundamental, to Cuban existence since 1959. Is it no more than encapsulated dust, after having been so insistently indoctrinated in all Cuban schools? Alvisa’s proposal also points toward the idea of recycling the concept of revolution.
The irony persists right up to the moment of the reconciliations between the United States and Cuba after the December 17, 2014 accords in Michel Mirabel’s show, “Carrera de relevo” (Relay Race). Likewise, causticity dominates two shows that could be interpreted in a parallel manner: the provocative recreations about the construction and propaganda-making of history and ideology offered by Duvier del Dago in his watercolor series “History Belongs to the One Telling It” and Joel Jover’s piece “Generación del Titanic” (The Titanic Generation), whose irony comes from its very title and subtitle. “They said to a generation who bet on embarking on a space ship: It was the safest, the biggest, the most comfortable, the fastest and that it would never ever sink for any reason…” In all of the pieces that make up the series “Generación del Titanic,” crucial or very symbolic occurrences in the history of the Cuban revolution are recreated. Large figures, only contours, allow the historic reference to be established—the cadaver of Che Guevara carrying the hammer and sickle, for example, or the already iconic publicity campaign for the RINA soaps, where the popular announcer Consuelito Vidal would open a window as she would say “one has to have faith…everything arrives,” which has been interpreted as a cry for hope among Cubans, first in 1958 before the coming of the revolution, then with the passage of the years, as a hope for other changes within the insular society. .But the inside of these figures that are immediately recognizable by the national spectator has been filled with a collage of small photos of anonymous Cubans: the people, the masses. The true protagonists or the victims of the chimera (the boat that supposedly would never sink)?
It is surely the collective installation “La llegada al fracaso” (Arrival at Failure)–a group of works made by Carlos Aguiar, Luis Gómez, Antonio Gómez Margolles, Ernesto Leal, Leslie Rodríguez, Carlos González, Yusnier Mentado, Pável Méndez, Héctor Remedios and Walter Velázquez, that is the most impressive in that series of works that obliges us to reflect upon the future history of Cuba. Within “La llegada al fracaso,” we don’t know if we are attending the after-party of some celebration whose lack of restraint is announced by the empty cardboard boxes crammed in at the back of the room and crushed beer cans thrown on the floor or abandoned leftovers, a stampede, a lament, the end of something whose exact nature we don’t understand but about which we know something certain: it is the end. At the same time, a future is being invented in which uncertainty reigns. That uncertainty is the feeling emitted by the diverse objects, all of which are old, smelly and strewn on the exhibition’s floor: folders that contain cutouts of newspapers and magazines, children’s books, maps, ancient photos, all kinds of random documents and objects that allude to Cuban socialism. Nor is there in this work any certainty about the precise nature of the end. What the end is no one knows, but a premonition is felt. The installation provokes the sensorial anticipation of what a great shipwreck would be. “A general fateful feeling,” according to the Zona Franca catalogue.” In the room’s center, nevertheless, a curious piece armed with pencils recalls the date of the 22nd of December of 1962. That is the date in which Cuba was declared a territory free of illiteracy.
Despite all this persistent deconstruction of history, the present seems to be evaded in almost all of the works. The present as action could have been Tania Bruguera’s performance in the Plaza of the Revolution, “Susurro de Tatlin 6” (Tatlin’s Whisper #6). But that would have meant an action in the here and now. The here and now is, instead, that same uncertainty;, at least for the Cubans who don’t decide, not on one or the other side of that enigmatic table before which, with unpredictable periodicity, representatives from the governments of Cuba and the United States meet to negotiate, make pacts, reconcile, and make amends.
Featured image: “Resaca” (Hang Over), Arlés del Río.
-Odette Casamayor-Cisneros
(Trans. Jacqueline Loss)
Cuban-born scholar and writer Odette Casamayor-Cisneros is Associate Professor at the University of Connecticut, and currently holds the 2015 Wilbur Marvin Visiting Scholarship at the Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of the book Utopia, distopía e ingravidez: reconfiguraciones cosmológicas en la narrativa post-soviética cubana (Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2013).
Note: All the photos by the author.