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Performing Revolution 159
And I believe that that helped them to develop a strategy.” Interview with the
author, Havana, March 18, 2002.
115. This would have been basically a reprise of an earlier installation work by
Aldito Menéndez, who had scrawled the same phrase on a canvas and then placed
a collection plate in front of it, asking for donations to complete the revolutionary
project.
116. Ernesto Leal explains it thus: “There was a newspaper called Novedades de
Moscú (‘News from Moscow’) and we bought it every time it came out, because there
was a lot of information about Perestroika and discussions about how they were
handling it, the process—and that inXuenced us a lot. Besides, we didn’t want to
know how to change the society into a kind of capitalism or something like that,
but how to make a type of socialism that was real and radical.” Interview with the
author, Havana, March 18, 2002.
117. According to Novoa, he and Carlos Cárdenas ultimately decided to withdraw
from the group “because the mindset was very positivist. One had to be there,
one has to say something that causes one to reXect . . . the thing was not to lose the
space of Power. That’s what Abdel Hernández said, that was the thing that was inducing,
managing all the artists—he was the intermediary between the Central
Committee and us. Originally we wanted to make it ‘Reviva la Revolu . . .’ without
ending the word. And that turned out to be too strong for the Central Committee
(in this particular case we were ‘handled’ directly by Dr. Massábala), because it was
as though the Revolution were dead, and we were going to recuperate it, revive it.
But it was very strong at that moment and we had to ‘edit’ it, and say nothing really.
And well, that’s the way those things went.” Interview with the author, Miami,
December 30, 2002.
118. Changing the Rules of the Game is the title of a book by Armando Hart, the
Cuban minister of culture from the time of the ministry’s founding in 1976 and
through the 1980s. The text (which is the transcript of an interview with Luis Báez)
outlines Hart’s general policies that were seen, at least initially, as liberal and favorable
to the development of a free-thinking, contestatory art as compatible with the
revolution.
119. Alejandro Aguilera, interview with the author, Atlanta, March 8, 2003.
120. While there were apparently two “teams”—the Red team (Rafael López,
Glexis Novoa, Iván de la Nuez, Alejandro Frometa, Lázaro Saavedra, Rene Francisco
Rodríguez, Pedro Vizcaíno, José Angel Toirac, Juan Pablo Ballester, Gerardo Mosquera,
Llopiz, Flavio Garciandía, Silveira, David Palacios, Adriano Buergo, Azcano)
and the Blue team (Nilo Castillo, Aldito Menéndez, Tonel, Ponjuán, Luis Gómez,
Abdel Hernández, Hubert Moreno, Ermy Taño, Carlos Rodríguez Cárdenas, Erick
Gómez, Victor Manuel, Alejandro Aguilera, Tomás Esson, Nicolás Lara, Pedro
Alvarez, Alejandro López, Robaldo Rodríguez, Rubén Mendoza, Ángel Alonso)—
most accounts of the game stress that anyone who wanted to play did, such that the
fact of there being two “teams” did not actually mean very much: it was more like
everyone playing together. The game was played to the accompaniment of rockers
Zeus and Takson and meanwhile a game between members of State Security coincidentally
went on in the next Weld over.
121. Lázaro Saavedra, interview with the author, Havana, March 20, 2002.
122. Rubén Torres Llorca, “Oral History Interview with Rubén Torres Llorca,
Miami, Florida, January 31, 1998, Interviewer: Juan Martínez,” Smithsonian Archives
of American Art, http://artarchives.si.edu/oralhist/torres98.htm.