Here’s my comments on the first edition of the Prestas Documentary Film Festival, which is much more than a documentary film festival. It’s the beginning of the blueprint of a feminist network and protection for the LGBTIQ community.
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I’ve been watching the alternative artistic movement in Cuba for many years now, I have seen how groups and projects have sprung up and have managed to stick around up until an undetermined point dictated by the invisible force that reigns supreme: “cultural policy”.
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Artists who have suffered arrests for demanding a dialogue with the Minister of Culture remain in their campaign against Decree 349, which takes effect on Friday and criminalizes any and all types of independent art in Cuba.
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A part of the group “Cuban Artists against Decree-Law 349” had organized to meet at Yanelys’ house at 2 PM on November 22nd, to go and meditate in a public space for art and freedom of expression. I felt that something wasn’t quite right. “It must be nerves,” I thought…
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Filling sheets of paper with pseudoacademic definitions could be an alternative for filling a space but the truth is that an artist is independent when they are free to create and exhibit or perform their work wherever they like.
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A specter is terrifying Cuba, it’s the ghost of independent art. The Communist State and its pack of ferocious hounds have joined forces against this ghost, as if the world’s eyes weren’t always watching Cuba, or as if art were something unconnected to the human condition.
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A lawyer told me, very seriously, that Decree-Law 349 is one of the measures that has been conceived to respond to demands of including regulation in the new Constitution, which guarantees that Cuban women’s rights are respected. Her remark left me speechless.
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On the evening of October 23rd, after a month and a half of waiting, news finally came from ETECSA (Cuba’s state-owned telecommunications company) about my stolen credit in September. The response made me extremely angry but it didn’t surprise me.
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Word has it (and I don’t know whether this is true or not) that at the meeting known as “Words to the Intellectuals” (1961) when Fidel outlined the limits of artistic creation in socialist Cuba with disguised and obvious threats, playwright Virgilio Pinera asked to have the floor and just uttered these words: “I’m afraid”.
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Far from providing a good service, the Etecsa telecommunications company, which has a monoply in all of Cuba, only seems interested in milking Cubans for as much money as possible.
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