Can a Biennial Respect Difference in a Country that Represses Dissidence? On the Havana Biennial

Hamlet Lavastida, Cultura Profiláctica, 2021. The text translates to “the order of combat has been given,” which was said by Cuban president Miguel Díaz-Canel during mass protests in July 2021, when he commanded “revolutionaries” to take to the streets and attack the protesters.

Cuba will host its fifteenth international art biennial in November, with “Shared Horizons” as its theme. According to a statement issued by the organizers in June 2024, the event is envisioned as “an effective network that bets on a coexistence based on respect for differences and the value of other knowledge and forms of existence and resistance far from the dominant model.”1 Originally conceived in the 1980s as a response from the “periphery” to international art events that once excluded the Global South, the Havana Biennial has long served as a springboard to propel Cuban artists into the international arena. However, in the forty years since the Havana Biennial’s inception, most international art events in Europe and North America have become more inclusive of art from non-European contexts, and the situation in Cuba has changed drastically from the times in which it benefitted from Soviet subsidy. In light of this altered landscape, it makes sense to ask what purpose the Havana Biennial might serve at present.

In a 2020 publication about contemporary art biennials, Austrian sociologist Oliver Marchant praised the Cuban exhibition as a paradigmatic “biennial of resistance” that emerged from within an authoritarian regime. However, Marchant’s redemptive reading focused exclusively on the biennial’s early iterations,2 not on its evolution in the post-communist era. In the early years, Havana Biennial organizers leveraged their associations with avowedly leftist artists and critics such as Achille Bonito Oliva and Luis Camnitzer to achieve credibility. Foreign guests poured in to celebrate what was presented to them as a tropical socialist avant-garde freed from the pressures of the capitalist art market. At present, biennial organizers capitalize on ties to collectors and art stars. The alliance with Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco, for example, has paved the way for relationships with prominent Mexican galleries and the ZonaMaco Art Fair, which now features former Havana Art Weekend curator Direlia Lazo as it artistic director. Meanwhile, the Mexican government just gifted a mansion in Mexico City to the Cuban government for a new cultural center directed by the former president of the Cuban Artists and Writers Union Miguel Barnet.

Key international supporters of the Havana Biennial also include several collectors with sizable holdings of Cuban art who have a clear stake in defending cultural events that raise the value of what they own. This focus on cultivating foreign financing of Cuban art began in the 1990s, when support from European foundations waned and state budget allocations plummeted. While the links to the international art market have enabled the Ministry of Culture to maintain its hegemonic control over the arts, the impetus to capitalize on Cuban art has produced some scandalous occurrences, such as the theft of seventy-one artworks from the National Museum of Fine Arts in 2014 and their subsequent appearance for sale in Miami, which led to the ouster of then Minister of Culture Rafael Bernal Alemany.

Evidence of such acts of corruption by Ministry of Culture officials has contributed to the loss of faith in state institutions. So have the appointees to cultural ministry positions in the last ten years because they are widely perceived as ideologically dutiful but inadequate managers lacking in artistic vision. Few Cuban artists can forget the way that the Minister of Culture physically attacked artists outside the ministry headquarters in January 2021; nor is it lost on them that he is rarely permitted to speak in public.3 Cuban curator Solveig Font, who spent several years working for the Cuban Artists and Writers Union before she opened an independent art space in her apartment in 2014, notes that by the time she left her government job, it was an open secret that Cuban artists had lost interest in working with state institutions and that instead they were pursuing possibilities beyond the official circuit of galleries and museums.4 At present, Cuban arts professionals at home and abroad espouse a range of different positions as to whether a Havana biennial in 2024 is beneficial and if so, to whom. There are some who maintain that the biennial is a form of “art washing” that hides the repressive operations of the Cuban state. There are others who argue that the biennial is the most effective means of channeling opportunities and income to needy Cuban artists and that a boycott against it hurts practitioners more than state institutions. And there are still some believers in absolute artistic autonomy who insist that participating in the biennial should carry no political implication whatsoever.

As Cuban and Cuban-American arts professionals with a long history of involvement with Cuban state institutions, we consider that Cuba’s current political and economic crisis constitutes sufficient cause for questioning the implications of staging a biennial on the island. What does it mean for a state entity to propose an art event that champions difference and resistance in a country with over one thousand political prisoners, where opposition movements and critical creative expression are banned, artists are censored, and social media posts against the government can land you in jail? We acknowledge that Cuba is not the only country with political prisoners that seeks to host a biennial; Turkey and China also fall into this category. But Cuba is the only one of these countries that continues to market itself as a radical political experiment aimed at eradicating inequality—even though it is a one-party state with the lowest percentage of Communist Party members of any nominally communist country and does not permit other political parties, which in effect creates an ideological apartheid that criminalizes any political opponent. Art biennials are widely conceived of as forums for experimentation and critical thought; to what extent can this be achieved under the sponsorship of an authoritarian government on the brink of collapse? If the Havana Biennial is a Potemkin village, then what does it mean for Cuban artists to participate? What is the role offered to the foreign guest?

Over the past six-decades Cubans have dealt with many hardships, but the deprivations of the last five years are the worst they have ever faced. The scarcity of food and fuel, daily power outages, skyrocketing inflation, the breakdown of the public health and education systems, and the deterioration of infrastructure make for a situation that is far more dire than the Special Period of the 1990s, when Cuba lost its subsidies from the Soviet Union. According to a 2023 study by the Cuban Observatory of Human Rights, 88 percent of the population lives in extreme poverty.5 The population has shrunk by nearly 20 percent since 2022, due for the most part to the largest migratory wave in the country’s history: over a million people have left in the past three years. Whether one blames the shortages of food, fuel, and medicine on bureaucratic mismanagement, the downfall of the tourist industry during the Covid-19 pandemic, or the US embargo, they make daily life an excruciating ordeal for a population that has grown tired of the excuses offered by the state. Those explanations are hard to stomach when evidence emerges daily of the lavish lifestyles enjoyed by a tiny elite of Cubans with ties to the military and its businesses. To imagine air-conditioned tour buses filled with well-fed biennial visitors weaving through neighborhoods that lack electricity and running water, where many get by on one meal a day, gives pause to say the least.

Cuba’s political landscape is equally grim. During a brief period of optimism brought on by the rapprochement between the Obama Administration and the Cuban government in 2015, many Cubans believed that expanded liberties and economic opportunities were imminent. But hardliners within the Cuban government turned policy in the opposite direction, clamping down on independent initiatives just as Trump assumed the presidency and reversed much of the legislation that Obama had put into effect. The emergence of Cuban president Miguel Díaz-Canel in 2018 coincided with the announcement of new laws targeting artists, musician, filmmakers, and independent journalists, all designed to criminalize cultural expression made public without prior authorization from the state. The protests by Cuban artists against these laws that began in 2018, followed by the mass uprising of July 2021, resulted in hundreds of arrests and a wave of forced expulsions from the country. Among Cuba’s more than one thousand political prisoners are sixteen artists. Hundreds of artists, writers, and activists have fled, and many of them are not permitted to return. An updated penal code includes sanctions against any Cuban citizen that criticizes the government on social media: one influencer arrested in 2023 currently faces a possible ten-year sentence for calling for demonstrations on Facebook.6 In June of this year, the Cuban government announced that citizens could be stripped of their nationality for participating in “anti-socialist activity” anywhere in the world.7 The latest regulations for MIPYMES (Cuban private enterprise) prohibit independent cultural businesses such as galleries, concert venues, bookstores, libraries, and theaters.8 How these conditions square with the biennial’s proposed respect for difference is anyone’s guess.

The Havana Biennial is not the only international cultural event to be staged in the context of extreme duress on the island. Whereas the main purpose of art, music, and film festivals was once to present Cuba as a cultural superpower, the objective of attracting foreigners with hard currency now prevails. Lis Cuesta, the wife of President Díaz-Canel, has assumed a leading role in promoting music and culinary events such as the Festival Cuba Sabe held in February 2024 at the Hotel Iberostar, designed exclusively for international guests. In 2023, the Cuban government organized the Santa María Music Fest in the Santa Maria Key, a tourist location virtually inaccessible to locals. Tickets to the music events were marketed together with travel packages that included airfare and hotels owned by the tourist agency Gaviota, which belongs to Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces.

The Havana Biennial stands somewhat apart from these recent cultural tourism ventures due to its longstanding efforts to offer high culture to the general public. However, the organizers have never shied away from using the exhibition to cultivate relationships with collectors and arts professionals that hail from moneyed elites. The gracious welcome extended to potential investors does not entail exemption from surveillance by Cuba’s Ministry of the Interior—as demonstrated by artists Yeny Casanueva and Alejandro González in the Work-Catalogue #1(2009), consisting of actual police records from the 2006 Havana Biennial. Foreign curators and diplomatic officials are all closely monitored. Nonetheless, the Ministry of Culture’s efforts to commercialize Cuban art by strengthening relations with foreign gallerists and collectors is central to its economic survival and its political function as the sole arbiter that determines which island-based artists will be given access to buyers and professional opportunities.

The mercantile turn in Ministry of Culture affairs started with the establishment of the Ludwig Foundation in Cuba in 1995, founded by German art patrons Peter and Irene Ludwig after they became interested in Cuban art and began to amass a major collection. Since 2015, Italian gallery franchise Continua has operated a nonprofit space in Havana whose goal, according to their website, “is to encourage humanity to travel, not just art. We want artists to come to Cuba from around the world to ‘breathe the air.’”9 Among the leading investors in contemporary Cuban art with strong ties to the island are Nivaldo Carbonell, an exiled Cuban millionaire who spearheads Cuba’s Young Art Fund and showcases his collection at his NG Art Gallery in Panama City; Eriberto Bettini, who exhibits officially sanctioned artists Kcho and Manuel Mendive at his gallery in Vincenza, Italy; Jose Sacramento, who promotes the Cuban artists in his private collection from his base in Ilhavo, Portugal; and Luciano Méndez Sánchez, the former director of the Sabadell Bank in Havana who has amassed a Cuban art collection of over three hundred works, many of which he has donated to a museum in Salamanca. American biennial supporters lead the way in organizing tours to bring moneyed visitors to the event, whom, it is hoped, will purchase works while on the island: Cuba VIP Travel’s Art Tours promises on its website to assist visitors with acquisitions, export documentation, US licensing, and shipping.10

Not all foreigners attracted by the Havana Biennial come with the intent of buying art; many visitors seek to partake of the myth of the Cuban Revolution through social engagement. Whereas such engagement once meant joining volunteer brigades to cut sugar cane or harvest coffee, Cuba now offers opportunities for foreign artists to participate in state-orchestrated social work designed to address perceived societal ills. The 2024 biennial features a call for proposals for two-week residencies at Punto Naranjo in San Antonio de los Baños, in which foreign artists are invited to develop projects using art for such goals as lowering hypertension and alcohol consumption, appealing to senior citizens and children, and promoting proper garbage disposal. The venture is a collaboration with Proyecto Sociocultural Cabildo Quisicuaba, a government-sponsored initiative aimed at the reintegration of poor Afro-Cubans. At the same time, the Cuban authorities restrict foreigners’ access to Afro-Cuban dissidents such as Manuel Cuesta Morúa who regularly address the same problems.

Some Black Cubans experienced a rise in their standard of living during the first three decades of the Cuban Revolution. Since the 1990s however, the increasing reliance on tourist enterprises where Black workers are not welcome, coupled with the growing dependence on family remittances, which benefit white Cubans almost exclusively, has contributed to the immiseration of the Afro-Cuban population, which in turn has engendered mass discontent. The vast majority of Cubans that took to the streets in July 2021 to demand freedom were young and Black, and hundreds of them remain in prison. The biennial’s call to use art as therapeutic intervention echoes recent trends in the US and Europe, but in this context, it speaks to an effort made by the Cuban state to foreground its own vision of anti-racist intervention over and above the independent efforts by Cuban citizens to address structural racism and other social inequities in Cuba—efforts that have been banned by the state.

Ministry of Culture officials and the counterintelligence wing of Cuban state security that oversee them are well aware that the display of “artistic autonomy” is key for attracting international art-world cognoscenti, and they have demonstrated adeptness over the years in promoting their own version of “independent” exhibitions and venues while simultaneously escalating efforts to censor projects considered to be politically controversial. Havana Biennials in recent years included venues outside state-run museums and galleries: among the most successful endeavors was the “Detrás del Muro” outdoor exhibition along Havana’s Malecon, curated by the late Juanito Delgado. There is an important difference however between state-sanctioned projects executed outside state venues, and artist-initiated exhibits and events staged in private homes.

Cuban artists began to challenge the state’s monopoly on exhibition venues and curatorial decisions in the 1990s, organizing exhibitions and performances in their homes and in temporarily occupied spaces. A pioneer in this endeavor is Sandra Ceballos, who founded Espacio Aglutinador in 1994 in her small apartment to circumvent state censors. She continued to mount exhibitions featuring marginalized and controversial artists until recently, when new legislation made it too risky. Other artists have set up exhibits in their homes and studios on an ad hoc basis. In 2018, in response to the Ministry of Culture’s postponement the Havana Biennial that had been slated for that year, members of the San Isidro Movement organized their own independent art biennial, which outraged Ministry of Culture officials and led to multiple attempts to shut it down and threaten participants. INSTAR (The Hannah Arendt Artivism Institute), the nonprofit cultural organization founded by Tania Bruguera in 2015, was subjected to increasing levels of threats and harassment, leading to the eventual closure of its physical space and a shift toward online activities and foreign exhibitions, including its memorable contribution to Documenta in 2022.

Despite the Havana Biennial’s purported respect for difference, Cuban artists Lázaro and César Saavedra’s performance that was slated for presentation at the Ciervo Encantado theater in July was just censored by the National Council of Theater Arts.11 And while the majority of the Cuban artists that spearheaded protests against state repression of independent cultural endeavors have been forced into exile, rapper Maykel Osorbo, the winner of two Grammy awards, continues to serve a nine-year sentence in the maximum security Kilo 8 prison in Pinar del Rio, while the Prince Claus Impact Award–winning performance artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara serves his five-year sentence in the maximum security prison of Guanajay. It is difficult for us as arts professionals whose lives and careers have been deeply affected by the machinations of the Cuban state in the sphere of culture, whose families have endured multiple forms of hardship, from material deprivation, repression, and imprisonment to exile, to not perceive the intentions behind the 2024 Havana Biennial as a cynical effort to orchestrate a simulation of creative autonomy and social commitment. The talents of young artists remaining on the island notwithstanding, the Ministry of Culture persists in its efforts to seduce foreign capital by trafficking in the myths of a long-dead revolution. With its showcasing of social practice projects situated in San Antonio de los Baños, where the largest protest in Cuban history began just three years ago, the 2024 Havana Biennial is being designed to deflect international attention away from our country’s persistent human rights abuses and its sustained effort to eradicate critical voices in Cuban culture. We do not seek to prevent the Cuban government from doing so, only to let the rest of the world know the truth that lies behind its mask.