Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

162 Rachel Weiss
within the bounds that both factions subscribed to.” De la Nuez, “Al encuentro de los
pasos perdidos,” 69. In Guevara’s view, the three more “liberal” institutions—his own
ICAIC, Casa de las Américas, and the National Ballet—had been able to exempt
themselves from the more hardline, persecutory practices because of the strength of
their leadership (consisting of himself, Haydée Santamaría, and Alicia Alonso). See
Ann Marie Bardach, Cuba ConWdential (New York: Random House, 2002), 263.
140. Lázaro Saavedra, interview with the author, Havana, March 20, 2002.
141. Lázaro Saavedra, interview with the author, Havana, March 20, 2002.
142. Saavedra noted, in an unusually cryptic formulation: “Look, the group that
went to Pilón might have been a homogenous group, but it would be interesting to
investigate some day what the points of contact were among the Wve and what were
the contradictory points.” Interview with the author, Havana, March 20, 2002.
143. “We worked basically with the elements of the place, as much on the audio
level, recordings we had made, things we had heard and written in the exhibition,
and images, photographs—it was based mostly on documentary photographs of the
place, the people, the area, all mounted into a big installation. The people painted,
they put up texts, made things there, they began to paint each other—the young
guys ended up plastered with paint, they made a kind of performance. But the exhibition
was quickly closed. And the secretary of the party there, he didn’t have the
courage to censor the show, he ordered the secretary of the UJC (Union of Young
Communists) to do it, and then later they Wnally called us and told us that the wisest
thing we could do was to abandon the project.” Lázaro Saavedra, interview with
the author, Havana, December 12, 2002.
144. The choice of Pilón was actually the idea of Marcia Leiseca, then the vice
minister of culture, who, according to Saavedra, had a certain emotional attachment
to the town because it had once been the home of Celia Sánchez, companion
to Fidel Castro until her death. The cultural reanimation of Pilón, one of the poorest
and most underdeveloped areas of the island, therefore may have connoted a reanimation
in other terms, harking back to the most hopeful period of the revolution.
145. Lázaro Saavedra, interview with the author, Havana, December 12, 2002.
146. After about a year he resumed his artistic practice and continues to be a
central Wgure in Cuban visual art today.
147. Among other things, little documentation remains of these earlier artists
and works, and younger artists and students have learned the little they know of
them mostly through oral histories—accounts, generally delivered by 1980s protagonists,
that are almost certainly inXected by the nostalgia and sense of loss that
those artists feel for the former moment.
148. Other, smaller-scale phenomena related to the deterioration of conditions
in the country have also encouraged a new collectivism, such as the decline of art
criticism, such that the collective has become, among other things, a forum for dialogue
and critique that is unavailable elsewhere.
149. Zygmunt Bauman, Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1995), 238.
150. José Angel Toirac, interview with the author, Havana, December 22, 2002.
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