IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 7 ENGLISH | Page 99

The installation proposed by a group of
snorkelers (a device one uses to breath in
underwater hunting) in the midst of the
asphyxiating atmosphere that characterizes the moment reveals that one must
find a way out to get oxygen. The Marco
Polo Syndrome has been a known, utilized concert since the installation of
Tropicalia, by Flavio Garciandía: it is
one of the ills from which Cubans suffer,
due to their need to know other places.
Havana and its Carenas port had become
a space for maritime and commercial
relations, a point of encounter for the
Indies Fleet during the colonial period,
due to its geographic position. It is now
much more difficult to leave the island
to know places distant from Cuba’s everyday reality. Yet, Cuban art from Cuba
cannot renounce the themes that really
made it attractive in the eyes of the
world; there is a broad demand for topics
like emigration and displacement. This
was provoked by the Maleconazo and
balsero crisis (1994), when a vessel that
covered the Regla-Casablanca suddenly
became a sort of cruiser capable of
crossing the Florida Straits while engaging in irrational, illegal navigation. These events became a central theme for
diverse circulation circuits, especially in
Europe. They symbolize a dangerous
alternative, an escape route that screams
desperation and the effects of the Special
Period and its survival mechanisms. This
is a memory that survives in certain levels of the population as they face the
deteriorating physical and social environment. Marginalization is a peripheral,
countercultural rhetoric as part of an

alternative identity; it produces a kind of
artistic creation that is demanded by the
international market. “Project Salvation,” by Duvier del Dago, is a collection
of environmental sculptures that in their
intrinsic, generic content refer to freedom, an undesired state or condition.
Symbolically, they represent the
Malecón, as a phenomenon exclusive in
the ideology of Havana dwellers; a connection to the sea, insularity, and the
delirious desire to cross the water at
some point. Its many known misadventures have required life savers, for good
or for bad. “This last idea takes me back
to this project, one in which I’ve wanted
to analyze an object symbolic of coastal
or swimming environments, but putting
it in a Cuban context. One of the goals is
to surprise the viewer, to produce a feeling of strangeness when he or she encounters that supposedly decontextualized object in a space that has symbolically needed “a life jacket.” During the
90s, these migratory incidents became
high demand artistic motifs, some very
difficult to extract from the imaginary,
given the mentality inherited from the
well-known Special Period. This countercultural identity rhetoric on the urban
periphery is nothing like what official
rhetoric has to say about the country’s
officially legitimated image. It also promote s sales in art’s commercial circuit.
The biennale at the coastal town of Casablanca reveals realities from the “Other
Cuba.” It has its “Llega y Pon” [squatter] elements, unknown to many. This
sort of places are also where the problems someone faces—from the everyday

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