• COLABORATIONS

    At INSTAR, we believe that what Cuba needs to attain freedoms and a democratic environment is civic education. I have discovered that the only way to evade violence–which is inevitable in this country–during the transition is if we have adequate civic education and if we give citizens the tools to talk among themselves, recognizing their differences without offense. INSTAR is a living organism that reacts, that perspires, that is symbiotic with other organizations, that brings so many things to life. Recently, our focus has been on how to understand the history of dissent in Cuba, a country where the government has used to its advantage the disunity among nonconformists, objecting artists, and people who have tried to create alternative, autonomous projects, social and civic enterprises. One of our missions at the Hannah Arendt International Institute for Artivism is recovering a 40- to 50-year history; communal and artistic projects; censorships that have taken place to create a narrative that conflicts with what we are; and, in doing so, to learn how to better define ourselves, not solely by what we do, but rather in relation to what others have done before.



  • MONDIACULT 2022



    MONDIACULT 2022 | Strengthening cultural policies to promote #ARTISTIC FREEDOM


    Organized by:
    The Governments of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden supported by the Nordic Council of Ministers

    Presentation by:
    Tania Bruguera founder and Director of Instituto Internacional de Artivismo "Hannah Arendt" during the Expert Panel Discussion.

    Venue:
    Los Pinos, Cencalli, first floor.

    Date:
    September 28th 2022, 3 - 4 p.m.




    The UNESCO World Conference on Cultural Policies and Sustainable Development – MONDIACULT 2022 will be convened by UNESCO forty years after the first MONDIACULT to act for culture as a global public good.


    Transcription of the presentation:

    I would like to thank the Nordic circle of ministers, of culture for the invitation to be part of this panel on freedom of expression organized for UNESCO’s event MUNDIACULT 2022. Hearing the ministers of culture who just spoke before me, I felt compelled to introduce them to our minister of culture in Cuba via the following video.

    The Cuban regime representatives (including at the UN) always say that they do not know that artists are in prison, nor about the repression of artists and citizens in Cuba by the state security forces. Their defense is that the activists are lying or paid by foreign agencies.

    What we just saw on this video was the arrival of artists to a pre-arranged meeting to talk with the minister of culture of Cuba. This only happened after around 500 artists and intellectuals stayed for a whole day and until really late at night in front of his office a few months earlier. We had been asking for years to have a meeting to talk about the repression to artists in Cuba, something the minister always denied existed. The area around the ministry of culture was surrounded by police and State security agents. The slap by the minister to take the phone from one artist and journalist that was recording, was the gesture recognized by the police as the order to take the artists into detention. The sound we heard was a secret recording inside the bus when the artists were transported away from the ministry. The minister of culture just looked at it, he did nothing to stop it. Now, at least, he can’t deny violence against artists in Cuba exist.

    After this, artists, activists and civic society organized and requested his resignation by addressing the National Assembly’s petition system. Not only we are still waiting for an answer, but the minister was fiercely defended by the president.

    This is why I said yes to this invitation to speak here at this event titled “Strengthening Cultural Policies to promote Artistic Freedom”, because we have no place to go in Cuba to ask for our rights, because I seek solidarity with the Cubans who are today in prison just for saying the word freedom in the streets, which is their constitutional right under the new constitution. We feel helpless, we have exhausted all legal and peaceful activist ways to be heard with no response from the Cuban regime but violence and repression. I would have preferred not to be here, I want to be at my studio doing my artwork but, I cannot remain indifferent when my colleagues are in prison or, as myself, expelled from the country.

    Artists are supposed to reflect the time they are living in. For that in Cuba youcan be in jail. How can you have culture when in one year more than 250 thousand people flee the country because of fear? Cuba is living a culture of terror. How can we do art or have culture under these conditions? Is art even an option? The moderator asked us before what is needed in the global cultural policies to face these challenges?.

    One can think of spaces like this one where to listen to direct testimonies. But, we need to find a way, were Regimes are not protected if their citizens are vulnerable.

    We need to stop the double censorship. For this, Foreign cooperation agencies and organizations like UNESCO should not only work and support regime’s vetted artists and cultural projects sponsored by the State but also support independent art projects and non-regime cultural spaces.

    Not giving access to these resources limits the opportunity for counter- narratives to exist, resulting in a monolithic idea of culture designed by regimes and not by the artists and the people. It puts artists that already are risking a lot, in order to do an honest artwork or bring a different perspective on culture, in an even more precarious situation. You are not protecting artists at risk nor defending freedom of expression if you are economically supporting solely regime-approved artists. Not supporting these independent projects educates younger artists into a model where the option is to stop defending their ideas on culture and politics because the only result otherwise would be their isolation from everything and everywhere, increasing their fear to be reduced to nothing.

    When you solely collaborate with regimes, you become instruments of censorship.
    The solution to defending difference cannot be that everyone that thinks different becomes an exiled.

    For example, there is the International Fund for Cultural Diversity (IFCD). I encourage them to expend their support into independent artists and civic society specially in countries like Russia, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba where there is a decree like 349, limiting the independence of art, and the 370, condemning people to unpayable fees or to prison for expressing their opinion or show documentation of violations of human rights on social media. Like the one I showed you today. How can we produce freedom of expression if we don’t have any support and protection neither from our regime nor from institutions like UNESCO?

    Independent artists and civic society cannot participate in any of the events sponsored by UNESCO in Cuba. To give you an example, my artwork is in the collection of the National Museum of Cuba but I cannot enter the institution, now imagine us trying to enter a UNESCO event in Cuba … impossible, they wouldn’t even let us leave the house. How can we have culture if it the access is not the same for everyone?

    And in an even more difficult situation are the independent journalists in Cuba. For example, El Toque an independent journalism platform seeing as moderate had in the last 21 days 20 journalists leaving the project because of the pressure and threats of the State security police. How can we have culture if there are no alternatives to State fake news and propaganda materials?

    Many of those journalists have recently graduate from the University. Today the life at Universities in Cuba is unacceptable. Students are expelled for signing a letter of support for a colleague who has been unjustly separated from their studies or for writing things like Socialism yes Repression No. So, now not even the people who are of the same ideological position of the regime can have space to protest, to suggest, so whisper. It is a naturalized practice the expulsion of professors for publishing a paper on an independent magazine or for asking a question in class, even for analyzing the new constitution in a law class. I invite you to visit the website Observatorio de Libertad Academica where they register violation of freedom of expression in academia in Cuba.

    In the meantime, a year ago, a high-ranking military with ties with the secret service in Cuba, “dressed” and vetted by the regime as a legit academic professor is invited to an international academic congress to present the “truth” of what happens in Cuba. Who should be the expert for institutions like UNESCO, the person that creates and institute censorship and violence or the people who receive it? Who has the right to generate culture? Who has an authorized voice in places where the definition of present history is decided?.

    There is an alarming tendency to authoritarianism in the world. None of the dictators, the autocrats, the censors want a record of their doing, art is a way to uncover, to remember.

    The signs are there, we do not need to wait until someone is killed. Let’s defend art made by the people instead of promoting the use of culture as political propaganda by regimes. Because, Art survives any regime.

    They know it, we know it.







  • CAUSE



    Tania Bruguera, in conversation with the Harvard Cuban American Undergraduate Student Association – Students & Alumni / David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard.

  • DOCUMENTA



    Tania Bruguera and the Palestinian agroecologist, Omar Tesdell, from lumbdung of documenta 15

  • GENEVA SUMMIT



    After weeks of silence, due to government authorities cutting off Internet access in an effort to stop her activism, Cuban artist Tania Bruguera manages to break the silence