Translated by Ariana Hernández Reguant and Susannah Rodríguez Drissi
In Cuba, neither the art revolt of the 80s nor the intellectual essayism of the 90s, with its postmodern civism or its erudite archaeologies, negated power to the degree that one can observe or read among younger writers and artists today. In this essay, I will review the most recent works by writer Jorge Enrique Lage (b. 1979) and artist Reyner Leyva Novo (b. 1983). I would like to believe that my observations could also apply to a good deal of the literature and art produced in 21st century Cuba.
I
In his novel Archivo [Archive] (2015), Jorge Enrique Lage reconstructs a conversation with a State Security agent who insists that literature is no longer of interest to power. This is what the agent tells the writer, that is to say, what the agent wants the writer to think. He gives him a speech about power’s priorities, which one can expect to claim the opposite of what power really wants. After all, the Security State agent is precisely that, an agent, an intermediary between writer and government, like the bureaucrat or the entrepreneur, and not the true subject of power.
What power is interested in, according to the agent, is contemporary art, which produces both money and politics. Literature is “self-fiction,” “autism.” By contrast, the visual arts, and especially political art à la Tania Bruguera, mobilizes a young and dissatisfied public within ephemeral spectacles. But such revolt may very well carry on by other means, leading to street protests. The agent’s reasoning is correct: the experiment of asking random individuals to write for a minute whatever occurs to them about the Cuban government cannot even approximate the political efficacy of Bruguera’s performance “Tatlin’s Whisper,” whether live or as a visual document.
The agent then suggests how the state should proceed before a performance of critical literature. The most intelligent thing, he says, would be to publish those one-minute writings in an official paper, like Juventud Rebelde. Its final impact would be null. “With so many issues dispersed about, those variations are impossible to verify, as some read one thing and others read another; nobody knows exactly what one should or should not read; papers linger in the newsstands and end up in the garbage, others might be used to wrap food, and others to wipe mirrors; the next day new papers show up, punctually, uniformly, without conceptual excentricities anywhere in their pages.” Literature, that is to say, the archive, lives off its constant self-erasure.
II
Archivo deals, precisely, with such an eschatology, taking the official document from journey to garbage, to incineration, to extermination. In a dystopian Cuba, like the one Lage always narrates, characters are models named after reguetón artists who, like Baby Lores, tattoo on themselves Fidel Castro’s personality cult, robotic Caridad del Cobre madonnas, mediums able to locate the ghosts of CIA or G-2 agents, transvestites bent on imposing heterosexuality to themselves, gossipgirls or chivarazzis, meaning a synthesis of chivatas (snitches) and paparazzi, who iPhone in hand snap betrayal or deviance in a shot. These characters represent the decline of a civilization based in denunciation and derision.
Villa Marista, the infamous Cuban prison that stands as a metaphor for the nation, is fitted with a high tech bunker, but also with a group therapy room for Agent Addicts Anonymous, as well as its own literary workshop, where people do not read to spy on and repress others, but to certify the death of a zombie culture. “Men and women trapped in the body of a country,” says Lage, “this really constitutes transexuality.” And he describes such encroachment as the final identification between government and Ministry of Interior (known as MININT), between state and state security. The MININT is thus a Total Ministry, as ministry of the entire country’s interior, as MINCUBA or “Cubainside dot cu,” to which “nothing Cuban escapes it.”
Baby Zombi, the model with a reguetón artist name, a practicing Fidelista, becomes a spy for other living dead in exchange of what he values most, and that is the last talisman he needs to complete his private museum of Castrist greatness in decline: a few locks of hair from the Commander in Chief’s beard. When the MININT officers bring him those very fine white hairs, in a small glass container inside a metallic box, the Fidelist zombie discovers the true pleasure of possessing and being possessed by History.
III
In Archivo, Lage exposes the parody of fidelista fetishism that attempts to challenge the lack of danger in Cuban literature, as well as its involution into a harmless and frivolous document, always edging the political through pedantry or demagoguery. Robotizing the Virgin of Charity or rescuing from the garbage the Reflections of Compañero Fidel, Lage turns his literary project into an act that pulverizes the archives of power. That is equivalent to what contemporary artist Reynier Leyva Novo has been doing in his “Páginas escogidas” [Chosen Pages] (2007-2010), “Revolución una y mil veces” [Revolution One and One Thousand Times] (2011), “Los olores de la guerra” [The Scent of War] (2013) and “El peso de la muerte” [The Weight of Death] (2016), showcased at a Galleria Continua de La Habana’s retrospective, as part of the collective sample titled “Anclados en el territorio” [Anchored in the Territory].
A graduate of the Cátedra Arte de Conducta, founded by Tania Bruguera in the 90s, Leyva Novo has turned the official history archive into his work’s central theme. The artist aestheticizes the first pages of the journal Granma, where the image of Fidel Castro invariably appears under the heading, “El hombre en Revolución” [Man in Revolution], in order to subvert the message. Castro’s face within the fidelista cult seeks to disseminate loyalty to both ideology and government, but once isolated graphically, on the wall of a gallery or museum, that obstinate face on the first page of Granma becomes yet another testimony to what critic Iván de la Nuez call “iconocracy,” which refers to a process of construction and critique, coping and, ultimately, digestion.
“Revolución una y mil veces” is a piece that consists of a red book in hard paste, where the phrase “Revolución” [Revolution] is repeated a thousand times. The basic concept of Cuba’s official ideology appears in the artist’s aesthetic as the mechanical reiteration of a word. To do, to defend, to live or to dream—any infinitive is valid, in this case. Revolution is nothing more than pronouncing the word “Revolution,” abandoning all pretense of meaning. The concept of “Revolution,” then, is reduced to a phoneme, and the phoneme, in turn, is reduced to a text. The emptied, deserted archive of a word repeated a thousand times is the archive of power.
IV
In Leyva Novo’s work, the power of the archive is presented as the appropriation of milestones and symbols from the State’s national history. Such iconic confiscation is as foundational to Cuban socialism as is the nationalization of foreign and domestic capital in the 60s. Socialist property also began when the new State said: “La historia, toda la historia de Cuba es mía” [History, all of Cuban history is mine]. Hatuey, the cimarrones, Agramonte, Martí and Maceo, the independence wars of the nineteenth century, and the revolutions of the twentieth century. All of Cuba’s wars and deaths converted into a measurable burden, into barbells one gram to a kilogram in weight, and cast from brass bullets.
Contrasting the return to a sensorial experience of history against the nationalization of the land, Leyva Novo offers up the following: photographs of the battlefields of Mal Tiempo and Peralejo; the weapons used by the opposing armies; the exact aroma of war; José Martí, Antonio Maceo and Máximo Gómez’s perfumes. The hegemonic tale of Cuba’s national history takes on the form of an object subjected to public contact, turning the past’s plot into something easily manipulated, no longer exclusively by the Party, or State, or the State’s security’s sole voice and reading, but by the citizenry.
Leyva Novo’s aesthetic is political, but not because it negotiates with power, as it may do largely in the art and literature of the island, but because it unequivocally assumes the citizenization of history. History as a common good—that is to say, as property misappropriated by the power that is retrieved and made available to the community—is the claim articulated in those pieces. And, as in Jorge Enrique Lage’s novels, such pieces have been placed in the ideal site of enunciation. A site that no longer yields to questioning, but to challenge.
V
Reynier Leyva Novo has poured the ashes of the 27 volumes of the Complete Works of José Martí into two glass urns. Had he chosen any other edition for the burning, one could speak of the Archive’s incineration, but the volumes he tosses into the fire are those published in 1975 by the Book Institute’s Editora de Ciencias Sociales. This was also the year of the First Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba and, therefore, of the definitive integration of Cuba’s totalitarian elite. The title of the piece “No me guardes si me muero” [Do not me save if I die] might allude to the wish José Martí expressed to his literary executor Gonzalo de Quesada “to not put his papers in order, nor turn them into literature; all is dead; and there’s nothing therein worthy of publication, neither in prose nor in verse; there’re mere notes.”
Leyva Novo has sought to be precise in his message. In the title, he clarifies that what has been burned are the Complete Works of Martí, plus the last two volumes, which contain the “guide” and the “index” of the State’s 1975 edition. It is in these last two volumes that the meta-narrative of the nation is concentrated, as is the marrow of a writing claimed as promise and figure of power. The artist intends for the viewer to see, in the white ashes, the spreading of cellulose pulp that has given life to José Martí’s revered text. The nation’s soul lies in the government’s ashtray: a text, perhaps the sole text that has been constitutionally incorporated into Cuba’s State ideology.
Seeing the archive’s ashes implies that the spectator, or better said, the citizen-turned-spectator in Reynier Leyva Novo’s work, will experience the last mutation of the official history. In other words, a metamorphosis that exists prior to the nothingness that will inevitably prevail over the totalizing and prolonged appropriation of a nation’s past. A literary workshop in Villa Marista and the work of José Martí, both in ashes, are perfect metaphors for the ancient State’s symbolic collapse. The same ancient state that birthed, from the vantage point of the symbol, the substance of its legitimacy.
Featured image courtesy of Lisa Sette Gallery. Reyneir Leyva Novo, Revolucion: Una y Mil Veces, 2011, book. (closed: 11″ x 8 1/8″ x 3 1/8″, open: 9 3/8″ x 14 7/8″ x 2 1/2″. Edition of 5, 2 AP)