Communique #3

9.01.2014 .
La Habana, Cuba

Download PDF

These days I have had to answer the same questions again and again. At the beginning this was for mean exercise against amnesia, because in Cuba we have learned pretty well how to forget, out of interest or pain. Today, those questions that focus on the particular events I am going through do not seem to me to be pertinent because curiosity cannot substitute the message that the Platform #YoTambienExijo has raised. What has happened to me is not an isolated or unique case, is the modus operandi of a government with fear.

Many people have asked me if I consider it a failure not having been able to speak at the Revolution Square and make the performance as I conceived it. But the fact that the director of PS1 MoMA (who is a specialist in performance) was there waiting and was so afraid that he changed his plane ticket to leave that same day instead of staying for the holidays as he had planned; the fact that what happened was so extreme that today I know for sure who is who, because all the masks are gone and all the ambiguous attitudes of some intellectuals to please both the officials and the foreigners that come looking for an exotic dissent have had to be defined; the fact that at the Square the State Security agents dressed as civilians could not beat anyone because the activists that were there showed a discipline that said more than a thousand words; the fact that the amount of people that was there was there, because the idea was not to have a Square full of people but just to be there, the idea was to not be afraid; all the above made it a better performance. As an artist, I am satisfied because the work pointed out what they have been trying to hide, that the government is not prepared for what it cannot control.

Today, when el Sexto is still in prison for wanting to make an art work; when Boris González Arenas was expelled from his work place because of his writings which are seen like “lack of reliability”; when Hamlet Labastida has his Cuban passport, the only one he has, invalidated since a few months ago for having made a respectful but questioning comment on a blog; when so many people write to me to tell me the things that have happened to them and their families, I would like to encourage you to make a documented and demonstrable list of the consequences some of youhave suffered for having ever wanted to say or do something that showed your thoughts and were “punished” because it was not what the government wanted to hear. The idea is that never again any Cuban be afraid to think.

Many people have asked me, especially the State Security agents, who is this platform? Today I am finally going to answer that question: Fuenteovejuna, sir.

Tania Bruguera

Spokesperson Platform

#YoTambienExijo

Havana, January 9, 2015