Cuba-US Relations by Bora Lee

I. Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba by Coco Fusco

"Scandalous Speaking Bodies"

Performance as an ideal medium for political resistance

Performance is cheap and portable. It is imperceptible to authorities before its actualization,

thus making is an ideal means for intervening in unexpected places

Conduct as currency

performance art resisting the social construction of the body & the codes of public conduct

Foucault's biopower: techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations.

Corporeal expression vs. state authority.

"the arts are no less of an ideological minefield than any other aspect of Cuban social reality because the state is still a hegemonic institutional force that presides over cultural production and controls the information that circulates inside the country about Cuban art"

"the deployment of formalist aesthetic appraisals has been a strategy for rationalizing the exclusion of socially critical art from the official cultural landscape: mere activism lacking artistic value"

Questions

- All Cuban artists/intellectuals make the choice between allying with state interests and functioning outside hegemonic structures. The government enables advanced art education yet censors artists severely. How do they choose? Is it always a binary? Do American artists make similar choices? We function within the art market that is in direct proportion to economic inequality (the primary donors of the US art scene are the very enablers of the growing disparity, and we artists the very beneficiaries) What choices do American artists face? How do they differ/align with Cuban artists?

- Different forms of surveillance. Civilians, Big Data, Social Media, State authority.... How are we to grapple?

II. A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn

• The Democrat - Republican, liberal-conservative agreement to prevent or overthrow revoluationary governments whenever possible wheather Communist, Socialist, or anti-United Fruit - became most evident in 1961 in Cuba. That little island 90 miles from Florida had gone through a revolution in 1959 by a rebel force led by Fidel Castro, in which the American-backed dictator, Fulgencio Batista, was overthrown. The revolution was a direct threat to American business interests. FDR’s Good Neighbor Policy had repealed the Platt Amendment (which permitted American intervention in Cuba),  but the United States skill kept a naval base in Cuba at Guantanamo, and US business interestes still dominated the Cuban economy. American ranches, oil refiniers, 40 percent of the sugar industry, and 50 percent of the public railways.
• Castro moved to set up a nationwide system of education, of housing, of land distribution to landless peasatns after overthrowing the Batista government. The government confiscated over a million acres of land from three American companies, including United Fruit.
• In 1960, President Eisenhower secretly authorized the CIA to arm and train anti-Castro Cuban exiles in Guatemala for a future invasino of Cuba aka The Bay of Pigs
• The success of the liberal-conservative coalition in creating a national anti-Communist consensus was shwon by how certain important news pubications cooperated with the Kennedy administration in deceiving the American public on the Cuban invasion.
• The military budget was taking half of the national budget, but the public was accepting this.
• The country was on a permanent war economy which had big pockets of povery,

II. The Seventies: Under Control?

• The CIA had been involved in assassination plots against Castro of Cuba and other heads of state. It had introduced African swine fever virus into Cuba in 1971, bringing disease and then slaughter to 500,000 pigs. A CIA operatie told a reporter he delivered the virus from an army base in the Canal Zone to anti-Castro Cubans.

Questions

- Do Cubans feel a sense of pride/triumph from resisting U.S intervention?

- What's up with the pig imagery?

- How do contemporary Cubans feel about the current regime growing more susceptible to capitalism?

- The radical artists of Cuba mocked the government's welcoming of Rauschenberg (the US resistant regime providing wide access to art institutions to an American artist and its colonizing implications)... How do we not fall into that trap?

- What experimental performance art tropes are there in Cuba. How does their vision align with CalArts' pedagogy?