IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 3 ENGLISH | Page 78

Mirita: It opened my mind. I came from another
world; I had always worked for the State. I didn’t
understand their weirdness, you know, for a guy
to go around wearing a skirt or for people to take
their clothes off on the street… For me, it was the
limit, but I can say it awoke my soul.
Fito: In my case, it was the only chance I had to
realize myself as a person. I didn’t see much for
me to do among the options I had as a young man
in the 1990s (and they weren’t many). I had a personal need that I now understand many young
people also had at that time: a space in which to
create and experiment free of any pre-established
criteria. This was about concerns that didn’t always have to do with art, but rather social life, in
general. But art, as we did it in OMNI, was good
for everything. Your idea would become enriched
by the interaction and relationship with others; we
liked that, because we came from a society in
which everything was solved in a large-scale
manner, even though we still didn’t have a political understanding in this sense.
Vega: Why do you think they threw OMNI out
of the workshop at the Casa Cultura and how
did it affect all of you?
Mirita: I think it was a problem that was blown
out of proportion. They brought police cars, even
ambulances. That is, they were ready to beat us.
They also created confusion among the people
there, on purpose. Later, we found out that they
had invited people their to hurt us and they really
didn’t even know what was going on. The experience made me more uncompromising with those
very same institutions, surer of what I wanted to
do with my life and about what my future work
would be. I understand that those institutions, the
police and even State Security must exist, because
of the way we live, but there also needs to be a
real space free of censorship for each of us. We
all have a right to participate in a process that affects us all.
Fito: The expulsion took place towards the end of
2009, but it had already been two years since
OMNI did not sit well with that workshop. It
didn’t really fit in with the project’s original concept. It had expanded so much that the group’s

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reach was overwhelming with respect to the Municipality’s Cultural Leadership, with which we
practically operated side by side. The same was
true with the Fayad Jamís Gallery, too, which had
always supported us. I think that it was feared that
the edition of the Poesía sin Fin Festival we were
organizing that year threatened to have even more
impact that previous ones. Many people were sick
to death of institutions interfering with independent producers like OMNI, Matraka, etc.1
In addition, I think the expulsion resulted from a
conflict of interests among the local authorities.
OMNI was always very visible with its street performances, our “happenings,” graffiti, all strategies we used fully intentionally, from the very beginning. But this all goes against institutional policies. Just as there were functionaries who didn’t
do what they were supposed to, and were taking
credit for our work, there were also detractors
who saw in us a potential danger. So, when Ailer
and his group’s performance took place at the
Teatro Espontáneo, on December 10, on Human
Rights Day (a date that is demonized in Cuba), the
event was exactly what they needed for a scapegoat. You ask how all this affected me? It made
me focus more on my personal project, which I
had been sacrificing for our collective work.
OMNI was always a fusion of projects; when we
work on individual projects, each one of us continues to personally promote what OMNI was.
For me, there is no loss; only total gain.
Vega: After the expulsion, the news is spread
that OMNI is a counterrevolutionary group.
How did this stigma change your life?
Fito: We always work at the limit, but the limit is
a line. If you take one step outside the line, they
punish you. Our radicalization didn’t wait even
one day to take place: from the very moment they
told us we had to leave we put on our T-shirts and
protested right then and there. In the end, we had
to leave, because we knew that we were bigger
than that workshop; that we belonged to all of
Cuba.
Of course, lots of people who worked for institutions who supported us stopped doing so. But, for
me, the radicalization was not in a political sense,