Identidades in English No 4, December 2014 | Page 66

Cruz Varela, where echoes of the Criterio Alternativo project were fading. While poets and plastic artists created and passionately debated at the Casa de Cultura workshop, Christian leader Oswaldo Payá presented the Varela Project (2002), and the Black Spring’s repression (2003) was lurking. The nascent multidisciplinary group was defended by the very same functionaries who had seen other movements - like the Arte Nativa, El Quijote, and the massive Peña “La Bicicleta,” which had filled the Special Period with music, dance, literature, and even a crafts fair - die out. The group refused to go back to mediocrity and tediousness. After a decade of intensive work and incredible negotiation with institutions, OMNI began to be the target of censorship. Yoani Sánchez took an interest in their work: perhaps, in fact, because the performance planned by one of the group’s members for the International Day of Human Rights, right in the middle of the 2009 Poesía sin Fin festival, became the perfect excuse for an already unfettered blow. The Rotilla Festival already had impressive international support. A concert tour of electronic music paid for and filmed by a German TV channel became the film “Dance floor, caballero,” and was successfully presented throughout European circuits. It even had the support of the AHS and was, in fact, the most impactful alternative event in Cuba. It is possible that the idea to emerge from a space whose initial position “was not directly critical or polemical, but was too open to the vanguard’s underground movement” was so simple that even while Los Aldeanos were untouched, OMNI was stigmatized.6 The irony? That Los Aldeanos’s contesting rhetoric was quite moderate in Miami but became extremely aggressive by the time they got to the Rotilla Festival, which should have provided an excellent pretext for the censors to attack. Was this a coincidental or prefabricated pretext? Who knows?” 66 The Present The kind of “disbanding” that dissolved Paideia was the most frequently used strategy after a frustrated attempt to expand not only the alternative movement but the entire population’s way of thinking. The “La Torre de Letras” project still exists, but upon migrating the Instituto Cubano del Libro to the tallest building on Obispo Street, it was assigned a meager loft on the ninth floor of a structure with no elevator, and in which maybe 20 people fit quite tightly. When “Torre” has its anniversary celebration every January 6th, invitees are strewn throughout outer hallways, from which it is nearly impossible to see or hear the presentations. After years of silence, Alamar made two attempts to revive Rap: the “Festival de la Moña,” took place twice but suffered due to enormous organizational errors, and an ocassional “Festival de Invierno,” which casted uneven talent casted and suffered from almost zero promotion. Poesía sin Fin takes place, but at a modest level and at private homes, some of which have suffered assaults by organized repudiation rallies. The members of OmniZonaFranca are prohibited from organizing shows, not only in official institutions but even in public spaces. The reasons for their expulsion from the Casa de Cultura spread around through rumors that they collaborated with the CIA, were linked to the Damas de Blanco, were involved with child pornography at their workshop, and have been seen exchanging thousands of dollars at currency exchanges. As Luis Eligio responded to the following question: “In your opinion, are there different criteria for initiating censorship against an alternative project? That is, are the reasons for which officialdom took over the Rotilla Festival the same that caused the intervention in the Rap Festival, or why Omni was prohibited from putting on its “Poesía sin Fin” festival in 2009?” His reply: “I believe that all this has to do with what brought about the creation of the UMAPs [Military Units for Production], and the so-called Quinquenio Gris [Grey Lustrum], which has not ended. What there has been is only