#WORLD #WORLDWIDE #CUBA #ANARCHISM #LIBRARY #News #Journal #Update - (en) #Cuba, polemica cubana: INTERVIEW WITH MARCELO "LIBERATO" SALINAS. ACTIVIST OF THE CRITICAL OBSERVATORY AND THE LIBERTARIAN WORKSHOP OF HAVANA (ca, de, it, fr, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 The  documenta is, along with the Venice Biennale, one of the greatest

manifestations of contemporary art. Since 1955, it has been held every 5 years,
during the summer, and lasts exactly 100 days. It takes place in Kassel, 190 km
north of Frankfurt am Main in Germany. The  documenta presents a panorama of
contemporary artistic creations. For 100 days, Cassel vibrates to the rhythm of
exhibitions, performances and installations by a selection of artists made by the
curators in charge. ---- Our companions Dmitri Prieto and Marcelo "Liberato"
Salinas, the founders of the Critical Observatory and of the libertarian Alfredo
López Workshop in Havana,  received an invitation from the organizers to lead a
debate on the theme "  Revolutions beyond the revolution: political
subjectivities in the Cuba of the 21st century ". It was an opportunity to meet
Marcelo "Liberato" Salinas.

The Critical Observatory has left its mark on the history of social activism in
Cuba over the past 15 years. How was it created?

The Critical Observatory was formed, from 2005, by a group of friends who had
been working for ten years on themes related to socialist ideas in Cuba, on
social movements, and at the level of the neighborhoods of Havana where we lived.
. It was a time when the Cuban state was in a recovery process where it was
starting to open spaces again and it had money again. The state was unaware of
the organizational dynamics that had existed in the 1990s with strong popular
momentum.

At that time, cultural institutions offered budgets for local and territorial
initiatives with very little official interference. It must be said, this was
done in the spirit of the 1990s when the State allowed society to conquer spaces,
it was then that we took advantage of this momentum of the early 2000s. Taking
advantage of this space, we created the Haydée Santamaría Chair, named after a
former guerrilla who played a major role in culture, and the Critical Observatory
network. Initially, it was only an annual forum, then it became a network of
exchanges, dialogues and collective management.

It is a network that brought together different collectives. What were they?

Originally, there was the Haydée Santamaría Chair, the  Trencito (the little
train), which was a management laboratory for solidarity and non-competitive
games between children, the environmental group  Guardabosques (the forest
ranger). There was the  Cofradia de la negritud , the Brotherhood of Negritude,
one of the first projects which in a fairly autonomous way intervened on the
racial question in Cuba, the racial problem of coloniality in Havana, but which
became a reference for the whole country.

We managed to do management work based on assemblies. And in this process, we
created the libertarian Atelier Alfredo López. At the base of this creation, we
find the founders of the Haydée Santamaría Chair and the Critical Observatory. At
a given moment, we perceived the need to make known our anti-authoritarian
principles, our anarchist principles which had animated the associative fabric of
the Critical Observatory in order to make more transparent the forms that we
wanted to give to the constructive and social project. in Cuba.

On July 11, 2021, Cuba experienced a wave of protests, a social explosion that
Cubans had not experienced since 1959. How was this possible, in what political
and social context did it take place?

The beginning of the 2000s in Cuba signifies the re-establishment of the presence
of the Cuban state, of the protagonism of the state in social dynamics after the
decade of the 1990s the state had evaporated, at least its material expressions
the strongest.

The "special period" in the 1990s was defined by Fidel Castro. This period is
special because it was at this time that all the centralized institutions
evaporated, all the vertical institutions that find themselves today without
resources, without capacities to project themselves towards a future for Cuba.
The 1990s were a time of great popular initiatives, with an explosion of urban
agriculture, research into alternatives for transport, food, structural and
social initiatives. The 2000s meant the recovery of all these spaces by the Cuban
state.

A state that has allied itself with Hugo Chávez's Venezuela , with an oil boom
that benefits Cuba. In addition, Cuba offered a set of medical, sanitary and
primary care services that financially benefit the Cuban State. This allowed
Cubans to live in relative prosperity and with the help of Cuban emigration who
had just arrived in the United States and Europe. This emigration contributed to
economic recovery, in the same way that the Cuban tourist project made Cuba an
important tourist place in the Caribbean, just after the Dominican Republic. This
created a bubble, an illusion of economic growth, of economic development that
made people think that the country was going to take off, that we were going
towards a state of abundance.

Unfortunately, the Covid, the pandemic and the blockade reinforced by Donald
Trump's administration have weakened this economic and social recovery. This has
led us, in the 2020-2021, towards a process of reduction of investments by the
Cuban State, with a development of social precariousness and the limitations that
the popular sectors have always experienced came to the fore. And this led the
Cuban state to face the crisis in another form, not as in the 90s, but in a
territorial way with territorial power cuts. This meant that the small towns
suffered very directly from the cuts, unlike the capitals of Havana, Matanzas,
Villa Clara, Camaguey, Santiago de Cuba, which did not suffer as much as the
small towns. During this time,

This meant that in July 2021, the territories that were bearing the crisis the
hardest were the small towns on the outskirts of the capitals, towns like
Manzanillo, San Antonio de los Baños, de la Guinera south of Havana where is
concentrated all the problem of the abandonment of the populations and the
inadequacy of the system to face the crisis. To this, it should be added that
during the last 20 years, emigration has increased with the displacement of
populations from the eastern region to the western region. It has also been
reinforced with the emigration of the population from the small towns to the big
towns and above all there has been a process of concentration in the big towns of
unemployed inhabitants, without official registration in the territory. A
situation very similar to that of African and Asian emigrants in Europe. It is a
population that comes from the eastern region called the Palestinos
(Palestinians). This has a terrible connotation that denotes the great
territorial differences between the West and the East of Cuba. These differences
have been very visible over the past two years. They already existed, but today
people are taking to the streets.

Everything that made Cuban society evolve in the 90s, with the choice to develop
green agriculture, food self-management spaces, transport autonomy, territorial
and local infrastructure, all of this has been destroyed. by the Cuban state in
the 2000s . All of this was destroyed, abandoned, so that Cuban society was once
again dependent on the Cuban state, centralized and controlled by the army and
the political police.

The repression of the movement was violent, we are talking about 1,800 arrests in
connection with this July 11th. What is the situation today in terms of human rights?

July 11, 2021 in Cuba brought to the fore the issue of the prison machine in
Cuba, a very powerful prison and police apparatus. The statistics that exist show
that Cuba is among the 10 countries in the world with the largest criminal
population, with a strong presence of Afro-descendants and with a strong presence
of people who come from the eastern region of the country. July 11, 2021 made it
possible to understand the role of this police, repressive and prison apparatus
in an explicit way. It already existed before, but at this moment, it was even
more explicit. In addition, this apparatus became more visible for families who
had no connection with this prison apparatus or had distant ties. And also for a
very young population which does not have much of a presence in the prison world,
but which does exist.

On July 11, 2021, clues were visible showing the drop in the age of
incarceration. It is about the imprisonment of children who are 15, 16 to 17
years old with extremely harsh prison sentences for having exercised their right
to expression. This generated a very important movement of repulsion, a rejection
of this repressive face of the Cuban state. It existed before, but it has become
more visible today and it is much more difficult to legitimize this state.
Because the protests were peaceful. At the beginning of the demonstrations, in
San Antonio de los Baños, they were absolutely peaceful. The cities where there
was the most violence were the cities of Cardenas, Matanzas and the village of La
Guinera in southern Havana. But it is a violence that really has not had such
proportions to provoke a reaction from such a violent and organized repressive
apparatus in Cuba. Today, the events of July 11 have generated a whole
anti-prison movement in Cuba which is in the process of being organized.

Then, last summer, there was the explosion of oil tanks in Matanzas, these are
completely separate events, but they contributed to a criticism of compulsory
military service in Cuba. This service has been presented by the state as active
military service, but it is actually compulsory military service by law, with
well-defined prison terms for those who object. It is a service that opposes any
form of sovereignty of individuals and their families. It showed us its harmful
character today in Matanzas with these explosions, because those who died during
the explosions were mostly young people called without technical training to
intervene against fires of such magnitude and such proportion.

These are facts that have nothing to do with each other, but which together have
contributed to a very important awareness in Cuba about the harmful nature of
military service, the prison system and the legal system in Cuba. It's a terrible
but very interesting moment.

What type of organization can arise today in workplaces, in neighborhoods,
communities. Do you think libertarian ideas in today's situation could create an
alternative to totalitarianism and address people's problems politically?

Cuban society today is putting on the agenda the question of self-organization,
horizontality, the question of mutual support. I think these are necessary
proposals today in Cuba in all work spaces, in community spaces, coexistence and
political spaces. Because we are in a critical situation, in a very significant
and extreme material precariousness.

As a group, we are very involved in the action which consists in offering meals
to the inhabitants of the neighborhoods on Sundays, in offering help to the
inhabitants in physical suffering by providing them with medicines which are very
rare in Cuba. We are working on all of this, at the territorial level, in our
immediate environment.

We are here to bear witness to what we have done until today, to avoid new
dictatorships, neo-liberalisms, market coups, all the expressions of a new
authoritarianism that is reorganizing itself in the country. I consider that the
actions we have carried out are valid, they start from proposals, they have a
methodology, principles that are validated by the history of the international
anarchist movement, by the history of the Cuban labor movement of 70 at 80 years
old. Despite the repression, despite the defeats, we maintain principles,
organizational structures that are very effective during the times of crisis that
we are experiencing in Cuba.

Interview by Mireille Mercier and Daniel Pinós

http://www.polemicacubana.fr/?p=16599
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