IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 4 ENGLISH | Page 66

Cruz Varela, where echoes of the Criterio Alternativo project were fading. While poets and plastic artists created and passionately debated at the
Casa de Cultura workshop, Christian leader Oswaldo Payá presented the Varela Project (2002),
and the Black Spring’s repression (2003) was
lurking.
The nascent multidisciplinary group was defended by the very same functionaries who had
seen other movements - like the Arte Nativa, El
Quijote, and the massive Peña “La Bicicleta,”
which had filled the Special Period with music,
dance, literature, and even a crafts fair - die out.
The group refused to go back to mediocrity and
tediousness.
After a decade of intensive work and incredible
negotiation with institutions, OMNI began to be
the target of censorship.
Yoani Sánchez took an interest in their work: perhaps, in fact, because the performance planned by
one of the group’s members for the International
Day of Human Rights, right in the middle of the
2009 Poesía sin Fin festival, became the perfect
excuse for an already unfettered blow.
The Rotilla Festival already had impressive international support.
A concert tour of electronic music paid for and
filmed by a German TV channel became the film
“Dance floor, caballero,” and was successfully
presented throughout European circuits.
It even had the support of the AHS and was, in
fact, the most impactful alternative event in Cuba.
It is possible that the idea to emerge from a space
whose initial position “was not directly critical or
polemical, but was too open to the vanguard’s underground movement” was so simple that even
while Los Aldeanos were untouched, OMNI was
stigmatized.6
The irony? That Los Aldeanos’s contesting rhetoric was quite moderate in Miami but became extremely aggressive by the time they got to the
Rotilla Festival, which should have provided an
excellent pretext for the censors to attack.
Was this a coincidental or prefabricated pretext?
Who knows?”

66

The Present
The kind of “disbanding” that dissolved Paideia
was the most frequently used strategy after a frustrated attempt to expand not only the alternative
movement but the entire population’s way of
thinking. The “La Torre de Letras” project still
exists, but upon migrating the Instituto Cubano
del Libro to the tallest building on Obispo Street,
it was assigned a meager loft on the ninth floor of
a structure with no elevator, and in which maybe
20 people fit quite tightly. When “Torre” has its
anniversary celebration every January 6th, invitees are strewn throughout outer hallways, from
which it is nearly impossible to see or hear the
presentations.
After years of silence, Alamar made two attempts
to revive Rap: the “Festival de la Moña,” took
place twice but suffered due to enormous organizational errors, and an ocassional “Festival de
Invierno,” which casted uneven talent casted and
suffered from almost zero promotion. Poesía sin
Fin takes place, but at a modest level and at private homes, some of which have suffered assaults
by organized repudiation rallies. The members of
OmniZonaFranca are prohibited from organizing
shows, not only in official institutions but even in
public spaces. The reasons for their expulsion
from the Casa de Cultura spread around through
rumors that they collaborated with the CIA, were
linked to the Damas de Blanco, were involved
with child pornography at their workshop, and
have been seen exchanging thousands of dollars
at currency exchanges. As Luis Eligio responded
to the following question: “In your opinion, are
there different criteria for initiating censorship
against an alternative project? That is, are the reasons for which officialdom took over the Rotilla
Festival the same that caused the intervention in
the Rap Festival, or why Omni was prohibited
from putting on its “Poesía sin Fin” festival in
2009?” His reply: “I believe that all this has to do
with what brought about the creation of the
UMAPs [Military Units for Production], and the
so-called Quinquenio Gris [Grey Lustrum],
which has not ended. What there has been is only