Net, Module, Chance: Repairing Cuba

Interventions International Journal of Postcolonial Studies ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/riij20 Net, Module, Chance Repairing Cuba Guillermina De Ferrari To cite this article: Guillermina De Ferrari (2021) Net, Module, Chance, Interventions, 23:4, 544-569, DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2020.1762700 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2020.1762700 Published online: 13 May 2020. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 131 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=riij20 NET, MODULE, CHANCE Repairing Cuba Guillermina De Ferrari Spanish and Portuguese Department, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI, USA ..................Contemporary Cuban art often highlights the widespread practice of repair. Art of repair arts of contingency el paquete semanal moral luck Fixing broken appliances and subdividing houses via DIY construction are frequent real-life responses to economic and social precarity. At the same time, these creative practices constitute political and ethical forms of engagement with crises, inequality, and an uneven access to modernity. I discuss specific objects and practices as a way to explore what repair says about Cuba today, as well as to reflect on how Cuban repair art contributes to a more general understanding of what it means to live in a world at risk. Reynier Leyva Novo “Un día feliz” Ernesto Oroza ................. For a few days, artist Luis Gárciga drove one of those 1950s American cars that operate as private taxis in Havana. These taxis circulate along pre-established routes, packing in as many people along the way as is physically ....................................................................................................... interventions, 2021 Vol. 23, No. 4, 544–569, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2020.1762700 Guillermina De Ferrari gdeferrari@wisc.edu I dedicate this essay to my colleague Tejumola Olaniyan, who passed away recently and worked in the journal for many years. © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group N E T, M O D U L E , C H A N C E Guillermina De Ferrari 1 Cuba has two currencies, CUC (pesos convertibles) and CUP (pesos cubanos). 1 CUC is equivalent to US$1 or 25 CUP. 545 ............................ possible, and the ride usually costs $0.50 CUC or 12 CUP per person.1 Instead of charging a fare, Gárciga asked passengers to answer the question: “Where would you like to get in life?” The responses appear in a 10-minute video entitled Destinos posibles (2009) – which means “Possible Destinations” but also “Possible Fates.” Most reply that they would like to lead a life with fewer sacrifices. A close second is wanting to make a living in the careers they’ve trained for, as earning enough to make ends meet is practically impossible for most professionals. The most spiritual statement comes from a man who desires to transcend the material and conquer death. Yet he later notes that the most important destination is survival, insisting that “Cubans are made for survival.” Fellow passengers encounter each other randomly, but they share more than the confined physical space of the taxi and a similar route: they share the frustration of a life shaped by and around difficult material circumstances. The taxi is a rich metaphor for a national project carried out at the cost of individual dreams. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Bloc, Cubans found themselves under severe economic duress due to the disappearance of trade alliances and subsidies in the early 1990s, in combination with the ongoing US embargo. In 1991 Fidel Castro baptized the crisis that was beginning to take shape with the name “Special Period in Times of Peace.” Cubans suffered indignities inconsistent with modern life, such as living with limited or no water and electricity, and residing in officially uninhabitable buildings. Many endured severe malnutrition. In case of war, the state had prepared itself for dire conditions by publishing a number of manuals with survival tips, including recipes based on unexpected materials, and the creative manufacture of cooking utensils, and even weapons. The handbook Con nuestros propios esfuerzos. Algunas experiencias para enfrentar el Período Especial en Tiempos de Paz [Through our own efforts: tips to confront the Special Period], published in 1992, bears an epigraph from Fidel Castro: “Nothing is Impossible for Those Who Fight.” The Cuban Revolution had already been fought and won; yet decades later, the same heroic language was invoked to manage the hardships of daily life. Cubans have coped with vigilance, acute economic crises, scarcity, and political staleness by constantly changing and adapting. They have developed unexpected ways of forming social bonds, creating art, and even attaining narrow margins of political agency. Dire hunger pushed Cubans to cook using unanticipated ingredients – like making steaks out of grapefruit rind. People resorted to urban farming in makeshift plot gardens and to raising chickens on rooftops and balconies. Lack of fertilizers prompted an improvised version of organic farming, and the country’s sudden opening to tourism without proper infrastructure gave impulse to a sharing economy that anticipates millennial global staples like Airbnb and Uber by over two decades (Atwood 2017; McNamara 2017). However, it is worth noting in ter v enti ons – 2 3:4 ............................ 2 Johan Galtung’s phrase “structural violence” refers to persistent economic and social violence that influences human beings “so that their actual somatic and mental realizations are below their potential realizations” (1969, 168). 546 that terms such as “organic food” and “sharing economy” attribute today’s metropolitan values to Cubans’ desperate strategies retrospectively. More generalized, however, is the other sharing economy. It consists of state employees using their access to state goods for profit. In a place where everything belongs to the state, and most workers are state employees, the individual appropriating and selling goods like flour, meat, or construction materials is a way to make ends meet. I see such small theft and black market activities as forms of what Edouard Glissant calls “detours”; that is, clandestine practices of survival that allow people to circumvent an inhospitable economic system (1997, 68) – a form of “tactical agility” (Boyd and Mitchell 2012, 268). As early as in 1968, in Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s film Memorias del subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment), the protagonist Sergio already observes that “Cubans use all their talent in adapting to the crisis of the moment.” This has become even more true in the post-Soviet years. In the documentary Sin Embargo: Never the Less (Judith Gray 2003) an interviewee ventures an explanation: because one resource Cubans have in abundance is time, they invent almost anything they need out of discarded materials – hence the title of Elzbieta Sklowdowska’s book, Invento, luego resisto (2016). In the documentary a drag queen suggests a comparison by pointing out that all Cuban lives are made of scraps like her. Another interviewee suggests that large doses of imagination are needed to envision a future in which living well is possible. A certain degree of collective delusion certainly helps. In her article “The illusion of colour,” blogger Yoani Sánchez points to past instances of similar resourcefulness: when she was a child, her family and neighbours painted colour bars on their black-and-white television screens to trick the brain into seeing colour TV. She can’t tell now if her technicolor memories of those 1980s shows originate in that trick or were formed during real colour viewings years later (2013, n.p.). Lives coexist with brokenness in mutually constitutive ways. Everyday practices originate in, respond to, attempt to overcome, absorb or reduce the effect of multilayered precarity so as to reorient the material and libidinal forces that enable a social and personal life. Precarity – structural violence that prevents humans from reaching their full potential2 – is at the root of contemporary art production on the island today. As I have suggested elsewhere, what makes Cuban art distinctive is its marriage of conceptual sophistication with material scarcity (De Ferrari 2007). It often engages with broken real-life situations, showing an implicit and sometimes quite explicit solidarity with the practice of repair. I am interested in exploring what it looks like to try to lead a good life in a broken world – and often succeed at doing so – and how social life and notions of community are reshaped by repair as a creative practice. Repair serves as a model for what it means to make a worthy life in a messy world. I do not believe it magically erases all social ills, or that it N E T, M O D U L E , C H A N C E Guillermina De Ferrari 547 ............................ proceeds without glitches or unintended consequences. But I do believe that repair uncovers the potential for hopeful and fulfilling entanglements. In this essay I will analyze various Cuban art forms, artifacts and practices under the rubric “arts of repair.” Steven J. Jackson defines repair as “the subtle acts of care” for real objects “by which rich and robust lives are sustained against the weight of centrifugal odds” (2014, 222). What I am calling “arts of repair” includes objects and performance art pieces that, either via their functionality or aesthetic merits (or a combination of both), reflect on the social and moral aspects of adaptive creativity. I see in Jackson’s reference to “the centrifugal odds” – a metaphor of dispersion borrowed from physics – an allusion to the way misfortune conspires against moral autonomy. Following Bernard Williams (1981), Claudia Card calls the same phenomenon “moral luck” (1996, 22). In the aftermath of fast and slow disasters, shattered, corrupted or decayed objects and conditions hinder the possibility of human flourishing. And yet the practice of repair has something subtly epic about it. Defeating obstacles in order to make things work implies an act of conquest; it reinstates lost control over the material world that had been lost. By making things work, repair oils the machinery of familial and communal interactions. As a collective practice, it helps heal the social world. Repair shapes one’s surroundings and improves one’s life. This is why the Global South offers the only available models for human survival in a world at risk – a world confronting the effects of climate change, as well as real and looming environmental disasters. What is more, the disarming pragmatism of repair helps question the consumption of products and ideologies alike. Still, there is an eminently political aspect of the arts of repair, which speaks their silent criticism in the palimpsestic quality of reconfigured or reinvented everyday objects that attest in their existence, form, and texture, to the conditions of their creation. In what follows, I will comment on practices, art forms and aesthetic projects that explore today’s Cuba as a repair ecosystem. My selection of works is not exhaustive, and it follows the logic of curating; that is, I select and arrange works in a specific syntax to conceptualize what repair art means and does beyond restoring something to its intended working condition. Understanding, like Dewey, that art “is the impregnation of sensuous material with imaginative values” (in Fesmire 2003, 109), I will discuss a number of artistic objects, collections and performances produced in Cuba that help conceptualize repair in its social, political and ethical aspects. I will engage primarily with the notions of repair advanced by Ernesto Oroza, one of the most sophisticated thinkers of the “broken world.” Like him, I am interested in the resourcefulness involved in making a useful or beautiful object out of discarded materials, and in the ability of these objects to reveal, overcome and even analyze the conditions of their existence. While these pieces and practices have been exhibited in galleries and museums, they may disappoint aesthetic in ter v enti ons – 2 3:4 ............................ 548 Figure 1. Ernesto Oroza. Rikimbili. 2005. Courtesy of the artist. 460X345mm (180 x 180 DPI). expectations. I suggest that these cultural artifacts reveal the intensely performative character of creative quests for a better life. With these aspects in mind, I define repair as a thoughtful praxis, based on a physical and conceptual engagement with materiality that seeks to make an imperfect world, and the lives embedded in it, as good as possible. The 60 percent revolution (Objects) In the 1990s, when gas became acutely scarce and public transportation greatly deteriorated in the context of limited imports, covering the distance between point A and point B required countless material and symbolic detours. The urgent need for transportation facilitated the creation of Frankenstein-like vehicles. Chinese bicycles were turned into mopeds with the help of a small engine – often poached from a fumigator – and a 2-liter Coke bottle for gas tank (Figure 1). These clandestine mopeds circulated on alternate routes to avoid detection by the police, which often also required their drivers to change traffic signs and illegally redirect traffic flows (Oroza 2009, 60). Rikimbilis, as the mopeds are called, are the resourceful answer to a system of scarcity and poor services. In turn, when 1950s American cars break down or get damaged, they are often repaired with parts from Ladas or Nissans. The government has attempted to control the proliferation of cannibalized vehicles with new laws. Article 215 of Law No. 60 stipulates that for any car to be allowed to register – and be used as a taxi – it must retain N E T, M O D U L E , C H A N C E Guillermina De Ferrari 549 ............................ Figure 2. Ernesto Oroza. 60% Car. 2012. Courtesy of the artist. 297x197mm (300 x 300 DPI). 60 percent of its original parts. That is why they are called 60 percent vehicles; the other 40 percent is pure imagination (Oroza 2016, n.p.) (Figure 2). These hacked objects bear in themselves the scars of history. They defeat time by perpetuating their use. At the most basic level, they just solve problems and make life easier. Like cars, appliances used in Cuba today were manufactured either in the United States in the 1950s, in a former Soviet country, or in China. When washing machines or fans break, spare parts are almost impossible to find. That doesn’t stop Cubans, who often combine parts of two or more broken appliances to make one fully functioning object, or sometimes rescue the operating parts of a defunct appliance to produce a new machine that performs a new function. The resulting hybrid objects, such as a truck-boat, a TV antenna made out of cafeteria tin trays, or a fan propped on an old phone, bear witness to the capacity of Cubans to adapt while living in a permanent state of crisis (Figure 3) The practice has been described through LéviStrauss’s concept of bricolage (Sklodowska 2016, 368; De Ferrari 2007, 223). Art critic Gerardo Mosquera suggests that appropriation is a form of originality, and that in Cuba the practice helps deconstruct Eurocentric notions of referentiality (in Sklodowska 2016, 368). Ernesto Oroza, a collector and curator of these hybrid objects, has elevated this repair practice to an art form. His collection of makeshift objects defined the Cuban art scene in the 1990s with exhibitions such as Un objeto de cada clase (1995) and Agua con azúcar (1996), a reference to the tactic – widespread at the time – of cheating hunger with sugary water. For the Fourth SaintEtienne International Design Biennial, Oroza reconceptualized his evolving in ter v enti ons – 2 3:4 ............................ 550 Figure 3. Ernesto Oroza. Technological Disobiedience. 2005. Courtesy of the artist. 225x339mm (300x300 DPI). collection under the suggestive title Technological Disobedience (2006). Oroza coined the term “technological disobedience” to describe the sociological implications of the practice, widespread in Cuban households, of reusing, repairing, and transforming technical and technological objects so as to extend their lives and purposes. Before discussing the political and philosophical dimensions of this concept in more depth, I will comment on its implicit rebelliousness as illustrated in Oroza’s installation Spare Parts (2015). N E T, M O D U L E , C H A N C E Guillermina De Ferrari 551 ............................ Figure 4. Ernesto Oroza. Spare Parts (2015) 2017. Photograph by Tonel (Antonio Eligio Fernández). Courtesy of the artist. 390x260mm (300 x 300 DPI). For the Kunst x Kuba exhibition at the Ludwig Foundation (Aachen, 2017– 2018), Oroza replicated the window of an Old Havana shop in Spare Parts (Figure 4): On a shop window on Neptuno Street you find 77 types of different spare parts, some made of aluminum, some of tin, some injected with plastic by machines built to this end in people’s own living rooms and patios in San Miguel de Padrón, among other neighborhoods and provinces. Vulcanized, die-cast, or spun, these parts fit coffeemakers, blenders and ricemakers. They fit the most common brands: Daitron, Hamilton, Magnum, National, Osterizer, Phillips, Vince. On the homemade parts, the names of the corresponding brands have been inscribed the way they sound. This branding makes selling and buying more efficient. (Oroza 2017b, n.p.; my translation) This “wallpaper” represents the display of any shop window in Havana. Each part mimics an original piece that cannot be found in Cuba today. Spare Parts showcases the custom of using the name of the original brand in phonetic spelling to facilitate commerce: a piece to be used in an appliance by the Dutch brand Phillips has the word “Filip” on it. In fact, some pieces may bare two “signatures” at once, such as Filip (the brand) on one side and Nani (the Cuban maker’s signature) on the other. Whereas the first phonetic inscription acknowledges the piece in its condition as a simulacrum, underlining the political gesture of the postcolonial knock-off, the second signature elevates hacking to an art form. in ter v enti ons – 2 3:4 ............................ 552 Of repairing, repurposing, and reinventing, the last tactic is the most disobedient (Oroza 2009, 48). As an installation, the piece invites the spectator to contemplate the outer layers of a vibrant intra-capitalism. These locally fabricated parts fit existing machines and extend their lives and usability in a world in which neither the state nor the market offers a reprieve for broken objects. Ingenuity allows people to replicate an absent world so as not to miss what is missing. The reproduction and reinvention of spare parts acts as an implicit promise of what life could be like under the right conditions, and reduces the gap, intensified by the embargo, between living here and now and buying there or then. The term “technological disobedience,” which first appeared in Oroza’s book Rikimbili: une étude sur la désobéissance technologique et quelques formes de réinvention (2009), is a conceptual gem. Because it echoes “civil disobedience” the term suggests the political power of ad-hoc innovation. Repair is a way to exercise control over one’s life and reclaim individual rights in a place where citizenship is severely constrained. The practice of repair gives Cubans the opportunity to improve external reality and make their lives better. It also suggests the possibility of self-fashioning, of repairing oneself, and even of mending the social world (Mattern 2018). More relevant in a society living under an authoritarian regime, there is a civic lesson in not being afraid of disturbing the apparent wholeness of objects and structures. That is why each hybrid object is “a battlefield” (Oroza 2009, 56). It is a testament not only to necessity but also to potentialities, an invitation to explore the uncharted, to combine the scripted with the unscripted. Reinvention, a space of resistance, is essential to the arts of survival against the odds. Some critics view repair, especially of colonial infrastructure in postcolonial situations, as complicity with capitalism and colonialism (Mattern 2018). By contrast, Oroza sees the practice of repair as aligned with Boris Arvatov’s notion of the “transparent object,” an object that would “not hide the traces of its production” and thereby critique the “capitalist mode of production” (Oroza 2016). The Cuban case amplifies this approach to objects. While Cuban shops and these spare parts participate in global capitalism, they can hardly be said to advance its cause. In fact, they prevent the need for new purchases, keeping the same (or almost the same) appliances alive for decades. They are a grassroots antidote to planned obsolescence. And in this sense, repair is both ideological and ecological. The problem is that resilience, the capacity to recover quickly, may also enable a damaging situation to prolong or repeat itself, therefore inflicting further pain on the population in sociopolitical situations – and to ecosystems and nonhumans in environmental terms. Resilience diminishes the need for radical resistance and the possibility of revolution. But this critique invites the question of what larger entities are being upheld by repair and resilience (Mattern 2018). It is true that improving one’s life a little may help maintain N E T, M O D U L E , C H A N C E Guillermina De Ferrari 553 ............................ the authoritarian system. But in the Cuban context, the opposite is also true. For if the Revolution’s ethical economy demands individual sacrifices for the greater good, who can rightfully demand that Cubans – in the name of resistance – not transport themselves, not fix a fan in the tropical heat, not make their lives better? And what exactly would they resist by refraining from such modest life improvements? The practice of repair cuts both ways. Oroza captures this ambiguity when he describes reinvention as adaptation through inadaptation (2009, 12). Repair is for Oroza a deconstructive and even militant practice. In capitalism, technological objects tend to look complete, almost sacred. By contrast, the practice of repair demands the opening up of appliances and mechanisms often designed to remain closed (2009, 20). Cuban children grow up amid the exposed entrails of objects. The repairer and her household are familiar with the inner workings of objects and less inclined to see the finished product as impenetrable. The constant hacking of objects helps delegitimize the given. It increases one’s sense of control and the confidence in changing things. Oroza, who speaks of the métissage of objects (2009, 5), suggests that repair creates new paternities (12) – inviting us to see in Cuban DIY culture infinite possible deconstructions of the hyper-masculine Revolution. Oroza believes that this practice is subversive, given repaired objects’ demonstrated capacity for disrupting the complex and exclusive logic of industrial production in either capitalist or socialist countries. I believe that part of what makes technological disobedience revolutionary is that it is also ideological disobedience, in more ways than one. Necessity – the extent of which these pieces eloquently expose – requires pragmatism. Doing what is needed to survive often requires embracing actions that are ideologically complex when not outright contradictory. The Cuban context in general is marred by colourful paradoxes, since the first ideological disobedience is the one advanced by the revolutionary government. Post-Soviet Cuba is ideologically contradictory, as it combines a rampant capitalism (albeit one whose forms and rules shift constantly) combined with communist politics (see, for instance, Henken and Ritter 2019). In fact, Ariana Hernández-Reguant coined the term “late socialism” to describe the post-Soviet acceptance of capitalist practices to ensure the survival of the Soviet-style socialist government (2009, 8). If we could determine the exact proportions of capitalism and communism embraced by the state, we would perhaps be talking about a 60 percent Revolution. The magic arts of offline internet (Connectivity) By the time Barack Obama and Raúl Castro announced the supposed thawing of US–Cuba relations in December of 2014, it was estimated that “only 3.4 in ter v enti ons – 2 3:4 ............................ 3 For a broader view on the regime’s continued back-andforth on the issue of internet access and freedom of expression, see “¿Un 349 para la internet en Cuba?” (2019), Semple and Berkeley Cohen (2019), Jiménez Enoa (2020). 554 percent of Cuban households currently have Internet access” (Viveros-Fauné 2015). Most Cubans cannot access the internet in a regular way because of internal censorship and the US embargo, as well as the rarity, slowness, and high cost of internet connections. And then, in 2008, someone created offline internet. Thousands in Havana saw the finale of Game of Thrones only hours after it was shown in the United States. That is possible because of the unique social and cultural phenomenon called el paquete semanal, a flash drive containing films, TV series, and magazines. At first, folders with the pirated entertainment were distributed house to house, downloaded onto personal computers from a hard drive, on a weekly basis. Now, el paquete is sold at neighbourhood stores and circulated in hard drives for US$2, although smaller versions can be bought for less in USB sticks that store up to fifteen thousand files. The content gets renewed every week. El paquete is a repair strategy in a society eager to stay up-to-date on international culture and entertainment. It greatly helps alleviate lack of access to the contemporary world, but it does so in a highly curated way: “It is the internet distilled down to its purest, most consumable, and least interactive form: its content” (García Martínez 2017).3 In an exhibition held at the Queens Museum with the title “17.(Sept) [By WeistSiréPC]TM” (17 September 2017–18 February 2018), curators Julia Weist and Nestor Siré describe el paquete as “a one-terabyte media collection that is aggregated weekly in Cuba and circulated across the country via inperson file sharing” (2017). The star of the exhibition is a computer that can access fifty-two editions of el paquete. This archive, especially created for the exhibition, is a historical document that preserves the otherwise ephemeral content of a whole year. The paradoxical character of el paquete comes through in the following description offered during Siré and Weist’s lecture at The Download in The New Museum: “it depends on the network but lives offline, it is private, but it is not for sale.” It circulates locally but remains “outside many of the conventions of digital art” (2018a). Because the storage devices on which el paquete circulates get erased weekly to make room for the new content, Weist and Siré’s archive serves as a “time capsule” (2018b). Weist and Siré, who met while Weist was doing research in Havana, have complementary backgrounds. Weist has experience working with ephemeral digital archives, bringing a technological and artistic appreciation for this unique phenomenon. Siré, in turn, has historical knowledge about informal distribution circuits because his grandfather has participated in the underground market for books, magazines, music, and film through a variety of platforms since the 1970s. El paquete is a “workaround” for the lack of internet access that circulates in ways similar to those in which physical media once did (García Martínez 2017). Whereas the platform and the content keep changing, the detours and routes reveal the same desire to catch up with a N E T, M O D U L E , C H A N C E Guillermina De Ferrari 4 I disagree with Mattern’s contention that el paquete circulates offline to avoid censorship. Rather, I believe it supports it, as I will explain below. 5 For more on the relationship between reggaetón and el paquete, see Poole (2017). 555 ............................ modernity that keeps leaving Cubans behind. Mattern explicitly sees el paquete as an instance of people filling the voids in a deficient infrastructure through illegal activities. Mattern (2018) describes such activities, including el paquete, as “repair ecologies.”4 Even offline, el paquete intervenes in Cuban culture pretty much in the way social media does in properly connected areas. It includes SecciónArte, a folder of contemporary art that Siré started in 2015. It includes publicity, a genre that had been neglected in the communist economy, and even advertises its own services by posting a chart of publicity fees. Local businesses use it to promote themselves, and it is the best way to reach a wide audience. It even circulates local influencer videos. The folder “video clips” includes local rappers performing their music, as well as “making of” videos about their video clips. It is a main distributor of music videos – it even acts as a première! Its power to confer status among local aspiring celebrities can be measured by the lyrics of a reggaeton song that Yoani Sánchez (2014) hears in a shared cab ride in which the singer mocks a rival by telling him “Sorry brother, but you are not in el paquete.”5 El paquete is necessity elevated to an art form. Its capacity to improve people’s lives is palpable. And, like resilience, it is a double-edged phenomenon. It provides enough connectivity to satiate the curiosity of an eager and well-educated population, but it also makes isolation and censorship palatable. In fact, many believe that the government is the only entity with the technological capabilities and freedom of movement required to carry out this massive project. It makes sense. El paquete offers a wide variety of entertainment, like the web, but without the vast surfing capabilities or individual freedom of a regular internet connection. A government rich in contradictions would find in el paquete semanal an efficient way simultaneously to provide and deny internet access. Further proof: the two things banned from el paquete are pornography and politics – restrictions that are in themselves political. Taking the offline-internet paradox further is Revolico, a Cuban online platform that most closely resembles Craigslist. Revolico was created by expats on a server in Spain, and reaches about ten million users (“revoliqueros”) in Cuba and abroad. Before Revolico, Cubans would buy and sell items through pre-established email groups, and before that, people would buy and sell products through underground personal networks. The new technologies make the black market run more smoothly, and they also make it more visible. Revolico makes the black market mappable through the analytical tools of social and marketing studies. Because internet use is not widespread, the content of Revolico is included in el paquete every week. For a month in 2015, Revolico became a collateral site for the 12th Havana Biennial. This Biennial, officially titled “Between the idea and the experience,” sought to emphasize, like this essay, the connection between artistic conceptualization and daily tasks. The organizers may have gotten more than they in ter v enti ons – 2 3:4 ............................ 6 Electronic communication with Stephanie Noach on 2/19/19, and face-toface meeting with Beatriz Gago in Havana on 4/17/19. See also Noach (2019). 7 Personal conversation. 556 bargained for when a group of artists “infiltrated” parts of Revolico and showed a variety of exhibitions using the site’s regular design in an effort to highlight how modern Cuba has incorporated and digitalized the black market that was a staple in Soviet and post-Soviet Cuba. Using Revolico “as a virtual gallery space,” Beatriz Gago and Stephanie Noach curated an exhibition whose title – Handmade Twitting – makes explicit the political relationship between underground networks and strategies of connectivity. They invited five artists living abroad and on the island to use the natural (and mostly unsuspecting) audience of Revolico to call attention to the space itself, its use and playful potential.6 Users of Revolico encountered the exhibition by accident, and might even have been confused about what they saw, though a strip on the screen noted that the page they had found was part of the Biennial. The exhibition involved a variety of alterations to the regular site, such as changes to the logo design, and extraneous material organized in folders following the same design as el paquete. Among the interventions were Julio César Llópiz’s M.A.n.I (2015) and M.E.R.C.A (2015). The content and packages mimic the apparent sale of drugs (“mani” and “merca” are colloquial names for cocaine and marijuana) in the Restaurant section of Revolico. When visitors clicked on these items, they learned that the packages for sale contained powdered sugar in one case and powdered dry rose petals in another, and that the page was part of the Biennial. Llópiz succeeds in calling attention to similar exchanges that take place in underground circuits. The main objective of Handmade Twitting was to showcase the contrast between commercial exchange, which is the main role of Revolico as a platform, and non-material instances of sharing, such as facilitating creative collaboration with no monetary value. Both rampant commerce and playful art sit rather uncomfortably with the idealist goals of the Socialist Revolution. The name Revolico, a colloquial term for “a mess,” underscores the notion of a Revolution gone astray. Handmade Twitting operated in coordination with the exhibition Sin oficio ni beneficio held in La moderna, a brick-and-mortar gallery space in downtown Havana. While the gallery housed a combination of exhibitions, the central piece was a laptop connected to the web that allowed people to access Revolico online. Spectators were also encouraged to add random words to a collective poem that would appear in Revolico. Gago herself wrote the word “pensamiento” three times on consecutive days. However, she noted that the final poems never included that word.7 Among the possible explanations for this mysterious disappearance, the strongest contender is censorship. Thinking seems to be a radical activity. The most visible piece from Sin oficio ni beneficio in Revolico was an added section entitled Revolico Retombée, featuring short essays by scholars and artists (Oroza 2015). The objective of this section was to comment on the N E T, M O D U L E , C H A N C E Guillermina De Ferrari 557 ............................ Figure 5. Tonel (Antonio Eligio Fernández). “Método para la explicación de la nueva economía.” Sin Oficio ni Beneficio. 2015. 199x194mm (300 x 300 DPI). social, economic and political role of Revolico. The underlying proposition advances notions – best articulated in a different context by Néstor García Canclini (2001) – that commodity consumption is a form of citizenship, especially in places where voting is limited or restricted; that civil society today consists not so much of national or linguistic communities but rather of people who gather around “taste and interpretive pacts in relation to certain commodities” (159); and that one can see in the diversity of taste “the aesthetic foundations for the democratic conception of citizenship” (28). Indeed, historian Adrián López Denos’s (2015) essay “Seamos consumidores” argued Revolico was a virtual space where people can be themselves, outside political slogans and demonstrations. Anthropologist Dmitri Pietro (2015) complained about the opacity of political decision-making, and argued in favour of a direct platform like Revolico for spreading information about the normalization of Cuba–US relations, a much celebrated process that had started six months earlier (“Revolikear la normalización”). The respective titles “Seamos consumidores” (Let’s Be Consumers) and “Revolikear la normalización” (Browsing Normalization) suggest that the simple operation of browsing – buying and selling according to one’s needs and means – is a more transparent form of coexisting with others than that proffered by opaque official communications and coerced political allegiances. On a in ter v enti ons – 2 3:4 ............................ 558 more playful note, the “Classes” section of Revolico included Tonel’s fantastic diagrams for explaining the madness of the Cuban economy through impossible pie charts with percentages that exceed 100 percent (Figure 5). Access was the structural basis of this exhibition. Handmade Twitting, a title that highlights the dynamic combination of analog and virtual cultures in which Cubans live, could be accessed several ways. Obviously, via the internet, mostly outside Cuba, and through a computer in the state-owned gallery La Moderna. As in the old days, it was also distributed via email using curator Magaly García Espinosa’s list, and in two hundred memory sticks. Unexpectedly, there was one glitch in the distribution process: the exhibition was supposed to be included with the regular Revolico offering in el paquete semanal for the duration of the Biennial. In the end, however, the exhibition didn’t make it to el paquete; Revolico in its entirety was pulled out at the last minute because the exhibition was considered political, and it remained “banned” for the entire month. This is the moment described in Pablo Rodríguez’s essay “Se formó tremendo revolico señores!” (2016, All hell broke loose!) on Elvia Rosa Castro’s blog “Señor Corchea.” Before it was posted on Señor Corchea, Rodríguez’s text was surreptitiously posted on Revolico, illustrating once more the constant back-and-forth between artists and the government. The measure of life (Housing) A growing city needs additional housing. The usual methods are either building upwards or sprawling so as to create more units for more people. This is not the case in Cuba, where there is little private construction outside the tourist industry, and the state has hardly built anything in decades. In a construction market that has remained paralyzed since the 1950s, Cubans satisfy their needs for room by building inside their houses, breaking up the vertical space, mostly by creating “barbacoas.” “A barbacoa is a platform or a mezzanine constructed in the interior of an already existing space,” usually using wood though any material will do. Patricio del Real and Joseph Scarpaci call barbacoas “a new frontier” (2011, 63). Other forms of clandestine architecture include subdividing houses and building on the roof. Families build profusely and secretly, with total disregard for what the building needs, because what matters is what people need: “You look at a house and know that there is no longer love among its inhabitants: there are now two doors where there used to be only one” (Oroza 2017a, my translation) (Figure 6). The city reveals the real entanglements of its dwellers through altered facades or in the illegal sharing of phone lines. Oroza (2017a) claims the urban landscape’s evident informal connections for rerouting water and electricity show more N E T, M O D U L E , C H A N C E Guillermina De Ferrari 559 ............................ Figure 6. Ernesto Oroza. Architecture of Necessity. 2012. Courtesy of the artist. 238x158mm (300 x 300 DPI). about social relations than the civil registry. Sometimes people build and transform their houses fully aware that the authorities will stop construction, counting on using the unfinished structure nonetheless. For, as Oroza (2017a) points out, “what is a finished stairway” when you can still climb up and down? Oroza reflects on such creative urban developments with the exhibitions Moral Modulor I and II, each of which consists of eighty colour-slide photographs showing residential facades in Havana. But the slides have been cut in half and the tops and bottoms reassembled at random so as to create nonexistent but perfectly possible Havana houses. Displayed in a light box, the images don’t hide the fictionality of their manufacture; on the contrary, the empty space between the two halves that make each “slide” emphasizes the mix-and-match technique. The artistic process takes up the logic of hacking and reinventing, revealing aesthetically the many ways in which Cubans transform their houses to fit their needs. But Oroza’s images go further: they insist on chance as an organizing factor, underscoring the fact that much of the city in its current state reflects the way people accommodate needs and life-changing events as they come (Oroza 2014). As he points out, “The pragmatism and astuteness applied to avoid poverty and the legal cleverness brought to bear on spaces and materials convert each home into a manifesto: a Statement of Necessity” (20) (Figure 7). in ter v enti ons – 2 3:4 ............................ 560 Figure 7. Ernesto Oroza. Moral Modulor (from Architecture of Necessity: 2012-2013). 80 slides, cut and rematched, 2013. 135x149mm (300 x 300 DPI). With the title Moral Modulor, Oroza appropriates Le Corbusier’s thinking and adapts it to the randomness of Cuban design. The French architect devised the Modulor, a stylized male human figure – a man-with-armupraised, 2.20 m. in height – as a gauge of architectural proportions (Le Corbusier 1954). In turn, Oroza suggests that Havana’s architecture, improvised, inward and clandestine, attests to the real needs of the city’s inhabitants. Oroza adds “Moral” to emphasize that the true scale of Cuban improvised architecture is dictated by life: The Moral Modulor, unlike the “Corbusierean” Modulor, is a human being at the same time as a measuring tool. He embodies the human potential to understand urgency and inscribe it in space. He adds, to the order established by human dimensions, the moral dimension that necessity recovers. Urgency provides for the individual a foundational alibi. Every sexual or physiological impulse, every birth and even death, will provoke the appearance of new walls, columns, stairways, new windows or plumbing and electrical systems. (Oroza 2014) N E T, M O D U L E , C H A N C E Guillermina De Ferrari 561 ............................ Following their needs, the inhabitants alter their houses and redesign Havana, transforming it “under a new order: The Moral Modulor” (Oroza 2014, 18). If life is the measure of Cuban (reparative) architecture, construction may also be the measure of life – especially in the negative. The frustrated desire for construction is the theme of Luis Gárciga’s Mi familia quiere un cambio (My family wants a change) shown in Kunst x Kuba at the Ludwig Foundation in Aachen in 2018. In this two-minute video, Gárciga interviews a family, perhaps his own, as they negotiate the distance between the house they actually live in and the future house that they have built in their heads, but cannot build in real life. From the viewer’s perspective, the video gives the impression that changing structures in Cuba is almost impossible, and that there is something “disobedient” about even stating the desire to change your surroundings. In Florian Borchmeyer’s documentary Un nuevo arte de hacer ruinas (2006), Antonio José Ponte suggests that Cuban housing is in poor condition by design, as it psychologically corners citizens into political inaction: “If you cannot even fix your own house, how could you possibly aspire to fix the kingdom?” Indeed, “My family wants a change” is really about the desire to control your place in a political project that admits no change. One then lives in a long present tense in which the past is not really past and the future is very slow to come. A drawn-out “in the meantime” makes the temporary feel permanent, and turns crisis into a mode of life. In the documentary Sin Embargo: Never the Less, a sculptor who salvages and reuses traditional materials like wood and metal admits that his artistic process is limited by the circumstances of the Special Period. Sitting next to a bucket of rusted nails, he vents: “I am 33 years old. I have been building my house since I was 13. Time has passed and that [the passing of time] has marked me” (my translation). The construction of the sentence is more suggestive in Spanish due to an awkward attempt at detachment – word by word: “there is time gone there, and that fact has marked me, do you understand?” If the first “there” in the literal translation seeks to make his prolonged frustration impersonal, the second “there” points to the experience of living in Cuba and, more generally, the human cost of making a life “against the weight of centrifugal odds.” Repair takes time – time that abounds in Cuba. However, when repairing a life takes a lifetime, the cost of repair is unused life. What breaks when something breaks? For each one of the objects that needs to be overhauled, something more valuable than the object itself is lost. What breaks when something breaks – when everything breaks – is the illusion of moral autonomy that makes the human human. One derives dignity by believing that one’s choices are not governed in ter v enti ons – 2 3:4 ............................ 562 by external circumstances (Žižek 2003, 157), even though everyone’s life involves “the synergy between choice and fortune,” in Margaret Walker’s words (1993, 242). With their unusual intensity, Cuban misfortunes expose this human condition eloquently. And yet, luck reveals itself in its particularities. What is broken in the political fantasy that we call “the Cuban Revolution” is an impossible social contract that, in the name of everyone, serves almost no one. The fragility of goodness, to use Martha Nussbaum’s phrase, may sometimes require a redefinition of the good. The moral elasticity of the revolutionary polis is articulated in Carlos Manuel Alvarez’s nonfiction essay “Fidel the Butcher” as well as in his 2018 novel Los caídos. The essay tells the story of a beloved neighbourhood butcher called Fidel. He steals from the government in conformity with an implicit etiquette requiring that nobody steal too much, so that the system continues to work, the business remains open and those who benefit illegally keep their jobs. In other words, the system requires new forms of ethical engagement governed by moderation and strategic solidarity – sometimes under pressure, as Los caídos also suggests. Blackmail is an ingredient in the staying power of a broken social contract: Alvarez points out that “socialized corruption,” a fraud of 100,000 dollars a day in the form of small theft and resale of state resources, is the price that the Revolution must pay in order to stay put (2019). It is barely ironic that Fidel the butcher is first admonished and later recruited as an informant – although unsuccessfully – by State Security. Fidel draws a line at betrayal: he refuses to work for the state that failed to catch his son’s murderers. Using repair to expose, not mend, brokenness animates Adrián Melis’s video Night Watch (2005–2006). Melis made the piece after realizing that the (state) carpentry he uses has a tendency to “lose” goods that are resold to people like him. The video documents him buying planks of wood from the night guard, which he then uses to build that same night guard a little booth. He places the booth at the entrance “in a zone suitable for surveying and preventing thefts and actions similar in nature to the one I accomplished in order to create this watch-post.” The way Night Watch closes a loop is ironic but also telling: the stolen goods can, and often do, serve a legitimate purpose, even if obtained in clandestine ways. This is the other sharing economy. A little moral brokenness goes a long way in counteracting structural violence. For what is really broken when survival is broken? I will venture dignity, time, and an operational amount of moral freedom. Arts of contingency (Moral art) I propose to see repair as an extension of moral luck consisting of an ethics of small practical actions with a subtle but potentially large impact. I build this N E T, M O D U L E , C H A N C E Guillermina De Ferrari 563 ............................ claim in part following Steven Fesmire and Mark Coeckelberg. Fesmire defines “the moral artist” not by the product she creates but by the enlightened adaptability of the creative process. He sees in art in general – in the artist’s imagination that allows her to make the most of available materials against “circumstantial pressures” (2003, 117) – a metaphor for the development of intelligent habits necessary for moral deliberation. Art production and aesthetic appreciation provide “a truly moral education” that prepares a human being to work out a life of uncertainties with a profound understanding that “situations [don’t] come prepackaged with one and only one right solution” (121). In turn, Mark Coeckelberg takes Fesmire’s “moral artist” to the terrain of craftsmanship. He views the physical engagement with and material reshaping of a hostile environment an exercise of moral craftsmanship (2014, 55). I find in the physical engagement with that which is broken or insufficient, the traces of life urgencies that Oroza describes in Moral Modulor. Indeed, building on “moral luck,” Oroza’s “moral modulor,” Fesmire’s “moral artist,” and Coeckelberg’s “moral craftsmanship,” I see Cuban repair ecologies as part of the “arts of contingency,” by which I mean a thoughtful praxes of living well that requires engaging morally and physically with a world that is broken. Arts of contingency reflects upon living a life and creating art from the perspective of impure agency, to paraphrase Margaret Walker. Repair in particular improves the world and demystifies power; it attests to the human capacity to adapt by changing one’s surroundings, but also by being changed by them. Even though political results are yet to be seen, I believe Cuban repair art offers a model for thinking about the intricate moral deliberation and education involved in pursuing the good life in hostile conditions. Censorship is still rampant, yet plenty of moral artists explore ways to envision new forms of life governed by less intimidating futures. Necessity and contingency (History) So far, I have used contingency as a synonym for the accidental. Philosophers, however, define contingency as the absence of necessity: reality didn’t have to be like this; it could have been otherwise. Speculation about possible fates animates Reynier Leyva Novo’s series Un día feliz (A happy day) (2016) The concept is simple. It consists of digitally manipulating well-known photographs of Fidel Castro – one of the most photographed political leaders in the world – masterfully editing him out and then restoring the scene so as to give the impression that there was nobody there in the first place. It is an act of erasure that speculates about alternative histories. Un día feliz appeared in two galleries during the XIII Havana Biennial, one curated by Jorge Peré at in ter v enti ons – 2 3:4 ............................ 564 Figure 8. Reynier Leyva Novo. Un día feliz series. 2016a. Courtesy of the artist. 580x580mm. El Oficio gallery and a small selection at El Apartamento. Peré’s arrangement gathered photographs corresponding to Castro’s speeches. In several images the viewer can see the podium, the mics, the wires, a 1970s phone for nuclear emergencies, and the crowds (Leyva Novo 2016a) (Figure 8). Press photographers are lurking anxiously near the area of the microphone, their impressive camera lenses targeting an empty podium. There is no speaker in Revolution Square that day. It appears that thousands of anonymous spectators are attending an event in which nothing is happening. And they may very well have done just that, as very few of the promises of the early Revolution were kept. One of the most iconic images of young Fidel Castro is a photograph that captures the moment when a white dove landed on the leader’s shoulder during a speech, adding to the religious aura that his figure used to inspire. In Un día feliz the dove is seen mid-air, perched on nothing, slightly more out of place than in the real photograph, thus exposing the theatrical nature of both original and edited versions. These photographs are wellknown, and the absence speaks loudly. What such images ultimately suggest is an exercise in speculation: what would have happened if there N E T, M O D U L E , C H A N C E Guillermina De Ferrari 565 ............................ Figure 9. Reynier Leyva Novo. Un día feliz series. 2016b. Courtesy of the artist. 580x830mm. had been no speech that day? If the leader had been someone else? If the mic had been open for the public to say whatever they wanted for a whole minute – echoing Tania Bruguera’s 2014 versions of Susurro de Tatlin (Tatlin’s Whisper), a performance piece that put her and many intellectuals in jail (more on this below). The most eloquent in the series are those images that shun the political weight of the Cold War in favour of the everyday. On display at El apartamento is a colour image showing a day at the beach with a distinct 1970s patina (Leyva Novo 2016b) (Figure 9). It is a sunny day, children play and women sunbathe in a long stretch of golden sun. The image exudes run-ofthe-mill joy. It is indeed a happy day. The referent is Lee Lockwood’s “Fidel Castro Meets Young Scubadivers in Varadero, 28 August 1964,” in which a young Fidel in his green uniform dominates the left side of the photograph (Dunne 2016). Novo’s re-creation imagines a life of readily available small pleasures, a world in which there was no dictatorship, no Special Period, and no embargo. Similarly, other images of the everyday include an unmanned domino game, potentially expressing the strategies of another mastermind; a dog loyally guarding another human’s sleep; or a rocking chair that would have assuaged somebody else’s worries. Following the simple notion of “what if,” a speculative exercise of counterfactual imagination, Novo’s images make us think: what would Cubans’ lives have been like if only the leader had taken a day off? Or had never been there in the first place? Of course, it is not guaranteed that a life without Fidel Castro would necessarily in ter v enti ons – 2 3 :4 ............................ 566 have been happier. Un día feliz is a thesis on contingency: it points out that Cuban life didn’t have to be this way. History could have been otherwise. When repair breaks (Coda) It is important to admit that “repair is not always heroic or directed to noble ends” (Jackson 2014, 233). Repair is virtuous because of the practical wisdom involved in learning to live in the world as it is. But where there is virtue, there may also be what Alasdair MacIntyre calls a simulacrum of virtue (2007, 149–150). I have suggested elsewhere that the Cuban social contract is broken (De Ferrari 2014). The pact intended to provide health, housing services and job security in exchange for obedience, but proved unsustainable. The insincerity of this pact taints the actions of the revolutionary state. The government is forced to adapt creatively to problems, many of them of its own making. For instance, el paquete – if current theories are correct – would be an example of the state trying to mend some of the damage it inflicts by taking its own detours. In a 2019 poster, Oroza plays with the spelling of the words ruptura (breaking) and reparación (mending) to conclude finally that “ruptura es reparación.” I can think of at least one instance in which “reparación” is in fact “ruptura”; and it involves Tania Bruguera. One could add to the list of Cuban contradictions the fact that the false polis of the busy public square, where there are plenty of speeches but nothing gets debated, has sucked the air out of the public sphere. Tania Bruguera tried to remedy this by placing an open mic in Revolutionary Square on December 30, 2014. The piece El susurro de Tatlin #6 (Tatlin’s Whisper #6) had been done before at the Centro Cultural Wifredo Lam during the 2009 Havana Biennial, and was allowed to proceed in 2014 as long as it took place behind closed doors. By planning the event at the centre of public political activity – the stage for Fidel Castro’s historical (and historically long) speeches – Bruguera was testing the government’s commitment to a democratic opening, as the “normalization” that Raúl Castro and Barack Obama had jointly announced two weeks earlier seemed to suggest. The government’s reaction to Bruguera only managed to expose more quickly what everyone would soon see: that this new dawn in Cuban politics did not change anything. Bruguera was arrested for planning to stage Tatlin’s Whisper at the square. A few high-profile potential spectators were also arrested when leaving their houses – though none had yet committed any crime. Bruguera was released from prison and sent home, her passport confiscated, for an unspecified amount of time. N E T, M O D U L E , C H A N C E Guillermina De Ferrari 567 ............................ While under house arrest, Bruguera organized a live reading of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. Many local artists and intellectuals volunteered to read. In order to share the experience with a wider public, Bruguera opened her Habana Vieja house to the street – not uncommon in a city where the line between home and sidewalk is rarely clear – by placing loudspeakers right outside. The ongoing restoration office of Old Havana had already fixed her street, yet it discovered an urgent need to return and operate jackhammers in that precise area, drowning out the readers’ voices. Irony of ironies: the government of a broken country broke something that didn’t need repair in order to rupture any attempt to jumpstart civil society. The scene of repair is staged and utterly misleading: jackhammers, noise, workers, even hard hats, are put in place to pretend to fix what is not broken. 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