IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 7 ENGLISH | Page 95

Cuban Art on Stage:
“The President Steals but Offers
Opportunities”
José Clemente Gascón Martínez
Plastic artist and art critic
Havana, Cuba
fter the reestablishment of relations between the United States
and Cuba on December 17th,
2015, which seemed impossible given
the daily quota of mutual hatred, some
thought a new dawn would offer hope.
Yet, practice, or reality, took care of
showing that, as always, the invitees
would eat the cake, while ordinary Cubans got to watch the friend-enemy party
from the fence, without even getting a
piece. Thus, in Zona Franca, an exhibit
space in the Twelfth Biennale of Havana
in the Morro-Cabaña Complex (which
was once a place in which people were
designated by the officialdom to promote and commercialize), one now sees
a great variety of Cuban artists that the
institution invited somehow to fill the
gallery’s nooks and crannies. At all bi-

A

ennales, it has always been the case that
a few selected or invited works exhibited
for it were connected to the institution’s
promotional interests, or that their work
was excellent given the event’s central
theme. This time, the Morro-Cabaña
complex, like Zona Franca, would be the
site at which there would be a flirtation
with the market: a zone ready to sell and
promote Cuban art when the cruise ships
started coming to Havana, at the very
same site at which the English disembarked in 1762, to return to the intense
economic fever that swept the nation
during the British occupation. The zone
enjoys tax benefits, payment exemptions, and importation rights to attract
money and get out of the bind via the
Cuban art market.

Free Zone. Poster

95