IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 8 ENGLISH | Page 10

Nonardo Perea describes the sharp
decline in a very peculiar artistic field:
the impersonation, which presupposes
to study a character in detail in order to
master his or her gestures, and to perfectly embody him or her. It was actually the case at the time when repression
was harder, but today, despite greater
tolerance by the authorities, most of the
shows runs without the artistic quality
that the public deserves. Perea adds that
the artistic impersonation must deal
with the many shortcomings of the
country, but they are not an obstacle to
give everything on stage in order to be
respected as an artist within such unexplored cultural world. Also too little
explored, but currently in transition, is
the world revealed by José Clemente
Gascon in "The Cultural Marginality or
the Culture of Marginality in the Cuban
Plastic Arts. After long decades of
rejection by the elites of both the high
culture and the State, marginality has
become overnight and attractive and
tolerated subculture thanks to the interest and curiosity of foreign collectors.
The marginal cultural practices, with
their genuine indigenous art forms and
oddities, were disqualified by the status
quo because they continuously express
—within alternative spaces— the irreverence, dissatisfactions, disagreements,
and shortcomings of the so-dubbed
urban peripheries. In the perspective of
Gascon, the peculiarity of these practices consists in that they are artistically
genuine expressions without consent,
approval or approval of the official
culture. Our incursion in the art closes
with the interviews to the graphic artist
Juan Carlos Briñas, by Veronica Vega,
and the writer Lazaro Andres, by
Nonardo Perea. Briñas regrets not having been born "in a country with rights."
After being in serious trouble for his
rejection of the military service and his
work as a cartoonist for the dissident
media Hablemos Press, Briñas went into
exile in Suriname, where he works as a

service employee in a hotel and hopes
to create conditions for working as
illustrator and starting to paint. Meanwhile Lazaro Andres gives the inner
perspective of a creator grappling with
the realities of the Cuban literature,
from the overwhelming mercantilism of
the International Book Fair, with almost
nothing to do with the authors or their
readers, passing through the fact that
many authors, especially the most important, do not reside in Cuba anymore,
until the publication of works that literally do not have much value, but are
rewarded in literary contests. Lazaro
Andres lives in Santa Clara, at the
center of the island, and considers that
although the territorial publishing system makes known many writers within
the country, the runs of printing books
are too short, and the press neither
reviews nor comments the works. With
virtually nonexistent books and critics,
the authors turn invisible. Invisibility is
an evil that afflicts the entire Cuban
society, and historian Manuel Cuesta
Morua warns us that it also happens
with the citizens in the political system.
The author raises that re-modernizing
the State is an urgent task, since the
citizen, along with all their natural
rights, becomes invisible under the
rubble of a triple collapse (institutional,
economic and labor) that prevents to
relocate Cuba in the circuit of the modern States. The institutional communication between the State and its citizens
collapses especially because the only
legal party, the Communist Party, is
acting in its sole discretion even without
adhering to the constitutional rules; the
economic collapse occurs through the
reinvention of a production model
designed to fall into underdevelopment;
and that model provokes the collapse in
the workplaces, because it relies on the
"structurally slave labor" condemned by
the United Nations. Thus, for Cuesta
Morua "re-modernizing the State it is
not only an ethical duty, but also a
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