• ARCHIVAL RESCUE

    The archival rescue of the historical memory of independent projects has been a key priority for INSTAR since its founding. The concept of this line of work is based on the necessary reparation of a historiographic lacuna as a result of unfavorable consequences for socio-cultural studies in Cuba. Throughout the last six decades, civil, artistic, and religious initiatives have sought to unify Cubans from the practice of their rights of association as free humans with defined intellectual empathies.

    Cuban researchers and consultants have witnessed the flight of much of our intellectual capital without any power to obtain patrimonial dispensations such as free access. INSTAR’s Archive will be accessible free of charge. Publications, academic and community projects, and other generalized knowledge will share the free and inclusive notion of the projects that conform the memory of independence in Cuba. INSTAR is also committed to the omitted and to the sometimes reclusive (“inxiliados”)—those who create poetry, performance, philosophy, and other artistic forms in semi-silence. We seek to recover and circulate the information of protagonists that have been vaguely alluded to or excluded from the official cultural account, when structuring a collective historical memory that has thus far been veiled, expensive, and emotional as it is discovered.

    The Archive, primarily digital, began with three collections: poetic works, photos, and documents of the Cuban poet of the Generation of the Fifties, Luis Marré (1929–2013), the Archive of the Peña del Júcaro Martiano (2007–2020), and the Archive of Espacio Aglutinador (1994-2020).