Stalin’s Smile

5.03.2015 .
Havana, Cuba

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And so it is true that Stalin’s smile should offer more fear than his orders.

I preferred it when the instructor called me all the time, her questions gave me an index of where the investigation could go and what her next movement could be. When I saw a car ridiculously following me, at least I knew they were there. Then the abuse being committed was very clear. Now they are submerged in the profound waters of intrigue and in that which can’t be proven first-hand. Do they have all the material they need, so that with manipulated information, they can create a negative opinion about me? Have I already said the right words to be used in the script that they have prepared? Have I ascended into the CR (counter-revolutionary) category or into another that has a different strategy?

Everything is excessively Kafkian and I have refused to believe, it is still hard for me to believe certain things that have happened around me, or experiences involving me that my friends tell me about.

I receive information about certain artist friends and curators that have come to Cuba but can’t communicate with me via cell phone, meanwhile they don’t allow all calls from dissidents and artists to come through my phone (which I can hear perfectly) [they are] from Martí Radio and Miami Herald (all good material to be used against me, but also all part of the performance I am doing).

A friend passes by to visit, and leaves me his Mexican cell phone and a Cuban cell phone that he bought (all through his own inspiration). After this friend visited an artist affiliated with the official government platform, and told that him that he had visited me and then defended me in front of him, the Mexican telephone he gave me magically stopped having service. I find out that the Cuban cell phone account was not in his name because the Cuban that he got it from started calling him desperately, thousands of times, finally sending him a text asking him to please erase his name from the account.

I receive information relaying that a close friend of a person that is part of the [YoTambienExijo] platform, that is located outside of Cuba, is being intimidated by a Cuban guy, who meets up with him in a place that has nothing to do with Cuba or me. Without any relation whatsoever, he mentions my name as a threat and as a guilty sentence. Are they giving trips to security agents for this operation or activating contacts with agents who live abroad?

I hear that a curator friend who lives outside of Cuba talks to a curator that lives in Cuba about my performance and receives a rehearsed response, as if they had given training sessions should a situation like this come up on a trip or with some foreigner (after letting me know that sure enough, the President of the Visual Arts Council Ruben del Valle met with the workers from the Council and the Wilfredo Lam Center, to give them the official version of my case. According to many people present, at the moment that questions could be asked someone wanted to know if they had returned my passport and Ruben del Valle, without offering a response, ended the meeting. A meeting was also held at I.S.A, so I am told. Maybe this is part of the preparations for the Havana Biennial? Or is it to justify apriori my next incarceration to the union? Or is it simply that these are the bases they have created for a state of negative opinion [about my work] and to discredit [my work] amongst intellectuals and fellow practitioners before publicizing [these bases] en masse?

Its not possible that I receive the same information from so many different places, its hard for me to believe that my decision to pacifically listen to someone’s opinion for one minute implies the use of so many resources, that they are in so many places at the same time and working on so many people (it can’t be that they have so much fear or that they’re that vindictive)

I don’t know, the fact is that today the chaos tactic they’re using is that I have information, not first hand, but of something that someone said, its interesting because if you ask me nothing is happening, and to me [it seemed] that the State Security had left me alone and in the hands of a prosecutor. Outside there are currents that can’t be seen but that can be felt, there’s a collective whisper that’s being directed.

Thanks Boris for telling me about Stalin’s smile, it has allowed me to understand the silence of the Security of the State a little better.