Cuban artist Hamlet Lavastida spent 89 days in a Havana prison accused, without trial or evidence, of inciting a crime. After weeks of torture and after having become an international symbol of opposition to the Cuban regime, they offered him and the writer Katherine Bisquet, his partner, a solution to the confinement: if they agreed to leave the country, the prison door would open . And here nothing has happened. A similar proposal arrived several times at the home of fellow artist Tania Bruguera, under house arrest, with the same charges. Another similar one did to Carolina Barrero. The list of artists to whom the Díaz-Canel government proposes freedom in exchange for exile is long in what seems like a modus operandi to try to silence dissent, with a special focus on artists. State Security has persecuted them with greater intensity since the beginning of the year when this group became the visible face of an opposition that took to the streets in the historic protests against the Government on July 11.
Lavastida and Bisquet accepted the proposal and last September they left the country. They now reside in Warsaw. “My departure was the bargaining chip for their liberation”, Bisquet wrote on his social networks. “Several people close to Hamlet, both family and friends, were subjected to the same pressure and attempts at blackmail.” Soon after, already in Europe, the artist confirmed this version in an interview for the independent Cuban media The sneeze. “They not only pressured Katherine, Carolina Barrero as well: that I could speak to anyone, and convince them of that,” Lavastida said.
Once they agreed to leave the country, the regime extended a red carpet for them to carry out the procedures with the relevant institutions. Once the visa is obtained, “they point you to the path of exile,” Lavastida explained in The sneeze. “Five cars take you and your partner to the airport, with a motorcycle behind, and more than 20 officers; when you do not enter the airport through the normal door, but through the back, where the presidents and ministers enter. Your bags weigh four times what is allowed, and they let you pass ”. In addition, they allowed him to go out with several of his works, the same ones in which his criticism of Fidel Castro appeared and that he had previously been vetoed. “That’s what it’s about, you feel like a VIP,” reflected the author.
The artist Tania Bruguera found herself in a similar situation, one of the most critical voices in the last decade among Cuban artists and who also decided to leave the country recently after spending almost nine months in house arrest (time in which the Government cut her internet connection to keep her isolated). At the end of August, she left the island and now works at Harvard, in Massachusetts, a job offer that she had received months before, although she hesitated to accept when the regime began to try to convince her to leave the island.
“The Government of Cuba, through State Security agents, told me four times about leaving or telling me that I was going to lose my career,” Bruguera tells El PAÍS. “The last time they told me: ‘If it’s because of money problems, don’t worry, we make everything easier for you,” he remembers. The same advantages that they offered Lavastida and Bisquet. But she refused to grant them that way out so easily. “Every time they told me, I answered that I was not interested in going out, I even suspended several exhibitions outside the country,” he adds.
The art historian Carolina Barrero, under house arrest since the beginning of June (it is the second time that she has been in this circumstance, in total it adds up to more than 100 days), is a victim of what has been established as a pattern of harassment by the State. She is accused of instigation to commit a crime but has never received an official document with the charge. Under his house, he has a WhatsApp call to a number that is not his, there is a team of members of the police and State Security stationed day and night. Can’t leave home. They have to bring him food. Alone, with permission, I go to the corner store to buy water and cigarettes and always accompanied by an agent. It is on these short walks that they suggest that you leave. Like Bruguera, he refuses. “On one occasion they gave me 10 days to leave the island,” he recalls without losing his strength in his voice. To persuade her, she has even received a visit from the mother of a friend: “She told me it was the best for me, she spoke to me like a mother.” Another form of emotional blackmail.
Barrero has had to change phone lines three times. He has moved to his father’s house because the woman who rented his house “was tired of the military presence.” She spends her days reading, “in one thing and the other, always busy,” she says in reference to her work as an activist because she doesn’t have a formal job that generates income. He lives off the savings he gathered in Spain, where he spent eight years before returning to Cuba in November 2020 when he became involved in the San Isidro Movement. And at this point in the talk, she remembers that she is a Spanish citizen and has not received any kind of assistance from the embassy.
In the case of Bruguera, aware of the international reaction that caused his arrest and that of other artists, he tried to negotiate: he wrote a list to state agents with the names of 70 arbitrarily detained, such as Lavastida or the artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara , as well as other lesser known people who were also arrested on July 11. The government agreed to release Lavastida and some more from that list, and dropped the charges against Bruguera in the Prosecutor’s Office so that he could leave. One more example that, instead of being a judicial process with guarantees, the Government uses the accusations as an instigation to commit a crime or attack State Security (the two that weighed against Bruguera) in an arbitrary way and as a form of pressure. “Normally these types of negotiations are between states. I think it is the first time that civil society has been able to remove some prisoners in this way, ”says Bruguera from the United States.
Abraham Jiménez, an independent journalist in Cuba, explains that the offers to leave the country for Lavastida or Bruguera are similar to those of the so-called black spring. In 2003, the government of Fidel Castro arrested 75 Cuban activists, imprisoned them on absurd charges, but in 2010 agreed, after negotiating with the Catholic Church and the Spanish embassy, that several of them would be released if they went to Spain. In the eighties, Castillo recalls, something similar happened after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the socialist camp. “When the pot is boiling, the government releases a little pressure and asks them to leave,” Jiménez sums up.
They have not been banned from entering their country, but it is not guaranteed either. “Hamlet was not told that he was exiled, but one of the Security agents warned him that if he continues with his active political life [en referencia a su trabajo artístico crítico con la Revolución] I would be personally waiting for you at the airport to return you to Villa Marista [la prisión en la que estuvo encerrado]. You never know if you are banned until you get to the airport ”, explains Marco A. Castillo, a Cuban artist living in Mexico who led the protests in the last edition of ARCO for the release of Lavastida. “The island is not the property of the Regime, leaving Cuba does not mean going into exile or just coming back on vacation,” Barrero adds, “we have to have a rush to leave means to participate in public life again.”
The Havana Art Biennial
“We are going to boycott the biennial as long as they do not release all the prisoners of July 11,” says Bruguera. Together with a group of artists, they promote a boycott of one of the oldest and most important cultural events in the country that will take place at the end of November, and which is usually attended by curators, artists or merchants from all over the world. “I don’t mess with Cuban artists, who will act as their conscience dictates, but we ask foreigners not to participate because it would legitimize a dictatorship that is putting so many people in jail,” says Bruguera. “We have all started at that biennial”, Castillo accompanies, “we have nothing against it, it is a great opportunity for Cuban artists, but we need to make this call for attention”.
The Cuban NGO Cubalex tries to build a registry with the legal history of 1,116 people detained during the July protests, of which 561 are still incarcerated according to the information they have been able to collect. “The State does not give information to the families of the detainees,” Laritza Diversent, one of the activists who tries to trace the detainees, tells El PAÍS.
The campaign to free them all has already begun on the networks. The artists share images of their face with the slogan No to the Biennial, Lavastida himself has participated from Warsaw. The demand is that they release the hundreds of detainees, all of them nameless, and without charge. Otherwise, the boycott will not be lifted. There is a little more than a month left to know if this initiative is a powerful letter that artists have in hand to negotiate with the Cuban Government, or if the latter is tired of releasing pressure from the pot.