Foreign interest in Cuba remains dominated by the myth of a revolutionary utopia. That vision of Cuba, however dear it may be to progressive idealists, has caused great harm by confusing the idea of the revolution with the reality of Cubans’ experience. It’s time for foreigners to let it go and remember that Black lives matter in Cuba, too.

Okwui Enwezor is dead. My sincerest condolences to his family and friends. With Okwui, a whole era dies, and beyond that, a world. Okwui was a giant, a trailblazer, and his legacy is more urgent than ever. If anyone helped birth the idea of an art world  (as opposed to a few local cliques), it was Okwui. Okwui’s idea of the world was of an incomplete entity which needed to be changed by being curious, courageous, and cheerful. By becoming more complex, more nuanced, more challenging, by acknowledging more colors, different sounds, unknown beauty in between the trodden stereotypes designed to rule and conquer.

In the spring of 2009, during the 11th Havana Biennial, a recent art school graduate named Hamlet Lavastida stenciled a quote from a famous speech by Fidel Castro on the steps of Galería Habana and called his piece Intellectuals Without Words . The quote reads: The existence of an authority in the cultural sector does not mean that one should worry about abuses by that authority. Who would want, or who would desire for this authority not to exist? If we continue with that line of…

As the revolution and its leaders enter their twilight years, what are the most relevant expressions of transition? How are the relations between the state and culture being reconfigured? Will the polemical and politically volatile divide between culture deemed to be inside or outside the revolution give way to more heterogeneous panorama?
 

On the eve of the restoration of diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States after a half-century standoff, I paid a visit to the Solidarność Museum in Gdansk. The museum’s permanent exhibition is an encyclopedic display of documents, videos, artifacts, and photographs detailing the rise of the independent trade union in the adjacent shipyard, the repressive response of the Soviet and Polish authorities, and the spread of popular resistance that, we are to understand, led to the…

The detention of Cuban artist Tania Bruguera and the Cuban government’s actions to prevent her performance from taking place in Havana’s Revolutionary Plaza have made international news headlines in the past week. Public outrage about the censorship of the performance and concerns about Bruguera’s whereabouts have circulated in social media outside Cuba, but little in depth consideration of the context and implications of the performance has been available in English. The treatment of the…