Since the end of the Cuban Revolution, art has become one of the most lucrative and highly regulated industries in the country. While the average Cuban doctor is expected to make between $30-50 per month, a Cuban artist is capable of creating multiple streams of income with both private higher-end buyers and daily sales to tourists. Some artists such as Los Carpinteros, Tania Bruguera, and ballet dancer Carlos Acosta even had enough talent to bring their art to an international scale. This opportunity brought them a wider audience and more opportunities to gain income, but it also allowed them to experience places and cultures different from their socialist home.
Plenty of artists want to leave Cuba before getting a chance to visit a new place. Cuban musician Raul Paz is one of countless artists that left to try their luck in other countries. While many artists never returned to Cuba, Paz's generation was one of the first to go back in significant numbers. Paz noted the novelty of it, even titling his album Havanization after his generation of artists. However, there were several reasons that Paz and the generations before him decided to leave in the first place, a major one being censorship in their home country.
Throughout Fidel Castro's time as dictator, Cuba became a highly censored country in which free speech was often suppressed. Artists who wanted to express new ideas freely found themselves prosecuted and even jailed for promoting anti-socialist ideals. Over time, artists like the aforementioned Tania Bruguera developed a conscious political subtext within their work. Bruguera is emphatic in her opposition to Cuban government censoring its people, but others like Wilfredo Lam managed to expertly weave themes of political unrest into their pieces. From musicians and dancers to filmmakers and painters, censorship policies are widely disliked due to their potential legal repercussions and limits on income.
As of 2018, Degree 349 has dictated a list of prohibited subject matter for artists, further limiting an already highly censored country. The list was generated as a means of preventing anti-Revolution content being created, but also includes pornography and violence, which are historically common themes in art around the world. Anyone who violates one of these restrictions risks losing their home, right to be self-employed, or fined among other consequences. For the many artists who were already upset by the political intervention of their work, Degree 349 has been the final straw. Several took to social media in protest of the new legislation and faced tapped cell phones, travel restrictions, and art confiscation to discourage increased organization. Undeterred, Cuban artists formally protested in July of 2018, which resulted in several arrests and police brutality against some of the creatives. Since then, artists have continued to organize in an attempt to reach the 10,000 people, the required amount to have Degree 349 repealed. People all over Cuba are done being silenced.
Questions:
1. The Cuban Government placed restrictions on art in the name of preserving civil respect for the Revolution. Would you say that these policies have been successful in terms of their original goal?
2. What are some examples of censorship that exist or are proposed in the United States today? How do we handle them similarly or differently than Cuban artists have?
Works Cited:
Art in a changing Cuba. PDF Free Download. (n.d.). Retrieved January 2, 2023, from https://docplayer.net/36498590-Art-in-a-changing-cuba.html
Cuba: The Art of Change (Part 1). YouTube. (2016, April 1). Retrieved January 2, 2023, from https://youtu.be/nN7rVEhqTrk
Public Broadcasting Service. (2006, September 13). Frontline/World. PBS. Retrieved January 2, 2023, from https://www.pbs.org/video/frontlineworld-cuba-the-art-revolution/
Weber, J. (2018, August 15). As criminalization of the arts intensifies in Cuba, activists organize. Hyperallergic. Retrieved January 2, 2023, from https://hyperallergic.com/453423/cuba-decree-349-censorship-arts/
Wifredo Lam: Tateshots. YouTube. (2016, August 4). Retrieved January 2, 2023, from https://youtu.be/VchFg7qYRX4
This was a great post with a lot of detail in it.
ReplyDeleteI would say that these policies have been a failure. The purpose was to boost public perception of the revolution and draw away from any sort of criticism of the government. However, it resulted in artists, fleeing the country, protesting, and even sneaking subliminal messages into their works. These policies seem to be disliked by these artists and allow for potential criticism of the country to exist.
The US tends to censor works that are sexually inappropriate and sometimes works that may be offensive. A lot of this censorship is done through companies or groups of people asking for a work of art to be removed rather than explicit government action. An artist who makes something that is seen as too vulgar isn't going to be thrown in a prison like in Cuba if their work of art protests the government. The government rarely intervenes in imposing censorship of art as it is often protected under the first amendment.
This post does an excellent job elaborating and expanding on the success of Cuban artists despite the governments censorship of art to further project the socialist image and retain civil respect. These efforts from the government have only amplified artists creativity, they are forced to work around limitations, making more unique pieces that have a deep rooted message. With that said, I do believe that these government policies have been a failure, backfiring for the most part and boosting the publics interaction with art.
ReplyDeleteInteresting remarks on censorship. A common theme in communist nations. The censorship often plays a major role in media, art, expression, politics, etc.
ReplyDeleteHello! Great post! I really like your question - "Would you say that these policies have been successful in terms of their original goal?". I do not think the policies worked because artists found a way to still make the art saying the message they wanted to put in an abstract way.
ReplyDeleteCensorship in Cuba is such a difficult issue. I also wrote on the difficulties that artists face living in Cuba and when I was writing about the same issue. In the reading about the Decree 349 they mentioned how the government knows that culture is important when opposing the government. That is why they restrict them so much and indeed when the musicians where not able to sing what they wanted regarding explicit content the way the government dealt with that was extreme but in the US YouTube censorship is in ways similar when a song is very explicit or a movie is very explicit they eliminate it. So the way they deal with these problems are very different but the justifications are the same.
ReplyDeleteI also thought of how the US deals with censorship and this problem reminded me of Jordan Peterson's argument against Canada's laws regarding hate speech and if calling someone with the wrong pronoun is not a form of hate speech and he says that the west is facing issues with free speech and he decided to leave Canada due to these laws. His conservative views reminded me that in the US you can say whatever you want but you can't hurt anybody and this goes all the way back to John Stuart Mill and individualistic rights when he said "The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins."