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Performing Revolution 125
problems in Cuban society had a different poetics, maybe no more striking
in their imagery but often more resonant. One such work was Easy Shopping,
done in response to the government’s establishment of casas de oro that
bought back gold and silver heirlooms from citizens, under disadvantageous
terms, in an attempt to generate hard currency revenues. 67 In Arte Calle’s
view this amounted to the return of Hernán Cortés (“the Spaniards come
with their little mirrors, the Indians hand over the gold”), and their antineocolonial
resistance consisted of painting their bodies gold and silver and
walking through Old Havana’s streets with signs that read “Sígannos, somos
de oro, venga con nosotros” (“Follow us, we are made of gold, come with us”)
until, having attracted a substantial crowd that followed them to the edge of
the bay, they threw themselves into the Wlthy, oil-slicked waters. It was,
according to Glexis Novoa, “like an act of suicide. For ethics.” 68 SigniWcantly,
with this beautiful, tragic image and with their later guerrilla murals
(one, painted in the same spot where an earlier mural of theirs had been
painted out by State Security, said simply “Revenge”), Arte Calle fulWlled its
promise of taking up positions in the city, whether in obscure corners or right
in the middle of things, using the city not as backdrop but as battleground.
Arte Calle’s nocturnal, guerrilla actions fed avid rumor circuits
throughout Havana. “When, for example, we made the mural that said ‘Art
is just a few steps from the cemetery’ in front of the Colón Cemetery in
Havana,” says Aldito Menéndez, “the rumor that spread was that a group of
youngsters had painted a poster on a tomb in the graveyard that said ‘Freedom
has been buried by the Revolution.’ Or, when we abbreviated our group
name in signing a mural as ‘AC,’ people would interpret it as ‘Abajo Castro’
(‘Down with Castro’). Our works functioned as collective texts with
multiple meanings, and in our inscriptions people saw reXected their own
obsessions with the suffocating reality in which they lived.” 69
While for the other groups questions of individualism and authorship
were mostly nonissues, Arte Calle was explicitly critical of “egotism
and individualism,” which they considered “fatal to artistic labor.” 70 By 1987,
having become known as an artistic entity, the group felt they were betraying
the original idea “of taking art to the street and that the artist merge
somehow with the people and that it be an art for the people.” 71 Their solution
to this dilemma of “success” was to dissolve into Arte Calle Tachado
(“crossed out”), cancelling the identity that the group had become. 72 Nonetheless
as a group they organized one more project, the exhibition “Nueve
alquimistas y un ciego” (Nine Alchemists and a Blind Man), 73 which sought
to put into crisis the concept of art legitimated by institutions. Ariel Serrano’s
contribution, Dónde estás caballero gallardo, hecho historia o hecho tierra? (Che
Guevara) (Where are you gallant knight, made history or made earth? [Che