WORLD WORLDWIDE CUBA News Journal Update - (en) Cuba, 5th Libertarian Spring Conference in Havana: between collapse and persistence (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 On the last weekend of last May, a small group of friends, with whose

friendship we gave intermittent life to the Alfredo López Libertarian
Workshop and the ABRA Social Center, held the 5th Libertarian Spring
Conference, in the middle of a city in sustained chronic collapse of its
transport systems, food, health supplies, meeting spaces, rice or
poetry. All of this in an environment where spiritual exhaustion and the
massive exodus of hundreds of thousands of people are perceived, leaving
gaps that are difficult to fill and exhausted creativity, freeing us
from a redoubled feeling of isolation and of living in a time that no
longer exists. .
In this adverse context, this group of like-minded people believed that
it was still a good time to call a meeting that would be animated by the
good old principles of anti-authoritarianism, the will to cultivate
teamwork, mental independence with respect to mental codes dominant or
the capacity for grassroots initiative without asking for official
permission. Topics that are always timely and with intact validity,
given the persistent paralysis in which the daily life of Cuba takes
place today.
Taking the pulse of the signs of general exhaustion, as well as the
atmosphere of preventive repression and generalized police control that
is perceived these days, against all forms of wild collective
interaction in Cuba, we reached an agreement to organize only three
activities, which distributed by spaces with relative autonomy in the city.
The sessions began in one of the majestic halls of the Loyola Center, an
active and plural cultural space of the Catholic Church in Havana, with
a topic for dialogue called: "Spaces, figures and ideas in Island
Socialism in the 20th century." , borrowing the homonymous name from the
book by the careful researcher José Luis Montesinos. The meeting became
a remembrance of the contribution of women to the history of socialism
in Cuba, in its different tendencies and militancy, a subject that is
barely taken into account, both because of the scarce feminist movement
in Cuba and because of the official narratives. There we commemorate
Emilia Rodríguez, a female leader of the anarchist movement in the
center of the island in the first three decades of the 20th century and
leader of several national meetings of the anarcho-syndicalist movement
in Cuba and rarely remembered, which is part of a broader and more in
process by Montesinos.
Next, the young researcher José Julián Valiño presented his
investigation in progress on the life story of Ofelia Rodríguez, a
Havana woman who, in the midst of the convulsive 1930s of the last
century, from her social activity in defense of women, delved into
socialist perspectives, exerting a pioneering critique of the middle and
upper class feminist movement in Cuba at that time.
Closing the presentations of the space, Mario Castillo shared his
inquiry "Amparo Loy Hierro: psychogeography of a neighborhood communist
militant in 20th-century Havana," an analytical reconstruction of the
life story of a woman who, thanks to the rise of the testimony genre, In
the Cuba of the 60s and 70s, it became possible to delve into the
density of the daily life of a social fighter with a rich life story in
her tragic journey through three Havana neighborhoods, which led her to
her affiliation with the Popular Socialist Party ( Stalinist) Cuban from
the 1930s-40s, his expulsion from that organization and subsequent
marginalization from political life, which offers very valuable material
for understanding the psychosocial impact of Stalinist policies in the
world of popular life.
The dialogue generated by this trio of presentations was very enriching
for several reasons. One of them because it was a collective exercise to
recover the heritage of the history of socialism in Cuba, monopolized by
the Stalinist elite that, from the PCC, exerts a grotesque deformation
and impoverishment of the wealth of the socialist movement in Cuba,
which feeds direct all anti-communism, also barracks, which takes more
defined forms everywhere.
Another reason for the richness of this meeting was that it contributed
to expanding a not exclusively theoretical, conceptual and intellectual
history of socialism in Cuba, which is what is usually done, silencing
the human and everyday dimension of the idea.

On the other hand, we made room for female leadership in the future of
socialist practices in Cuba, an area also habitually monopolized by men.
No less important was an implicit message that remained from this
meeting for the present and the future that the ongoing collapse brings
us: the anarchists who organized this meeting recognize the diversity of
ideas and tendencies within the history of socialism in Cuba and the
world. and we do not practice mutual liquidations of life's wealth for
the sake of any ism, including our own.

2nd meeting

The second day of the event was spent on one of the delicious rooftops
of Old Havana, which offered us the panorama of the contrast between the
supposedly glittering gold of the dome of the Havana Capitol on the near
horizon and the misery of the thousands of settlements informal
buildings that surround it, hidden in the heights of the majestic
neoclassical, Art nouveau, Art deco and eclectic buildings that surround
this imposing monument of the tropical authoritarianism of the 20th
century Cuban republic.
Traversed by that visuality and enveloped by the freshness of the Havana
spring trade wind, a small but lively group of friends began the meeting
that we named "Alternative and anti-authoritarian pedagogical
experiences", with the audiovisual Planting seeds, the homonymous name
of a pedagogical experience with children between 5-6 years old in a
school on the southern periphery of Havana, which in eight meetings had
as its theme the interrelated issues of the regeneration of a space of
land and the various forms of reproduction and dispersal of plants
present in the territory. Issues that, through non-competitive and
dialogical games, we relate to the ways in which humans interact,
placing mutual aid and collaboration in this space as a form of
relationship that is always present and silenced.
(Un)Drawing the school was the other audiovisual material that was
presented in the space, a work carried out by Arliz Plasencia, Lena
Castillo and Mery Cartaya. Three generations of women, mother,
granddaughter and grandmother who think and seek alternatives to the
moral dilemmas generated by the clash between the insistent vocation of
the smallest of women for drawing and free experimentation with color
and, on the other hand, compulsory school instruction, with its burden
of standardization and depersonalization from the earliest ages. An
audiovisual that gave rise to a lively dialogue that allowed Leonardo
Romero Negrín, a Physics teacher, and Aixa Negrín, his mother, a
Literature teacher for thirty years, to intervene in the space with
their teaching experiences in Cuban secondary education.
Leonardo presented us with his searches for methods to interconnect
physics with semantics, hermeneutics and the socio-political debates
that are taking place in Cuba today and in which adolescents and young
people often participate in an uncritical and passive way, against which
It is proposed to reverse this attitude, activating the capacity for
analysis and own positioning in students from the teaching of Physics.
For her part, Aixa Negrín shared with us her experiences in the
evaluation of exams to enter Cuban universities and the forms of
intellectual and political regimentation that underlies the evaluative
logic of these exams. On the other hand, the veteran professor also
addressed the problems of the literature programs, their biases and
silences regarding the work of great Cuban literary creators who, due to
their divergences with the prevailing government regime in Cuba, are not
included in the systems teaching. The meeting concluded with a
recollection of moments in our lives as students, teachers who have
marked us and what characteristics in common allowed us to identify them.

3rd meeting

The last day of the 5th libertarian day of 2023 ended in the same place
as the 4th day of 2019: in the El Trencito space, a veteran laboratory
for non-competitive and supportive games, located near the Almendares
river, a space where They have trained several generations of children
for almost twenty years and it is already a pedagogical reference in the
countercultural environment of the city of Havana.

For this occasion, we coordinated with the young musicians Jonathan
Formell and Simón Ibáñez, empathized with anti-authoritarian
perspectives of creating and projecting, so that they organized a
collective musical creation session with the children, integrated into
the dynamics of non-competitive games that the two have developed.
generations of entertainers of El Trencito. The experience was arduous
and full of challenges to overcome, due to all the competitive and
non-collaborative habits internalized from the earliest ages, which take
their toll at all times.
Derived from this, the importance of an organizing direction aware of
its provisional nature was perceived in these situations, which can give
way to forms of decentralized coordination of that preliminary
direction. In the experiment, it was possible to perceive that if this
organizing direction does not assume its provisionality, this leads to
endorsing the collective dependence on that initial guiding focus, as
supposed.

the only way to act together.
Against this notion of provisionality of all organizational management,
a very generalized and assumed common sense rises up, which maintains
that permanent centralized management in all spheres of social life is a
triumph of comfort, well-being, and collective tranquility. , for which
the dominant educational systems seek to suppress individual
responsibility and promote submission to various forms of authority and,
at the same time, competition among equals, the perfect environment to
reduce the idea of democracy to freely choosing who will exercise the
centralized management of our stocks, as consumers of programs
representing our passivity.
In the midst of these chains of authoritarian notions, spaces like El
Trencito reveal all their psychosocial importance, as a place for
prefiguring alternative forms of social interaction, something so
significant, especially in childhood, since experiences like these can
become guiding compasses when As we enter adulthood, we receive all the
barrage of the authoritarian logic of the predominant institutions,
without having previous referents to distort these mass dynamics.
A closing picnic was also planned for the end of the 5th day, a moment
where we conceived to present the material Anarchism and prisons by the
Venezuelan compa Rafael Montes de Oca and available on the web, a very
useful material to think about anti-prison activism in Cuba. where
around 1,000 people are currently serving long prison sentences, just
for exercising their right and duty to protest, given the appalling
living conditions in Cuba today, while another hundred are "regulated",
according to the language police, prevented from leaving Cuba, under
conditions of control and direct surveillance, as is the case of the
brave professor and historian Alina Barbara López, who was able to
attend the first meeting of the 5th Conference "Spaces, figures and
ideas in the Socialism of Island in the 20th century".
Nor was it possible to exchange with colleagues outside of Cuba, from
Argentina, Germany, Spain, the United States, with whom we had
coordinated a contribution to the closing space, due to the very dynamic
that was generated at the end of the activity in El Trencito, where
people came together very diverse, with very unequal age ranges and with
few references in common, beyond coincidentally coinciding in that space.
Despite these issues that remained pending, in the midst of the
grassroots organizational setback that we are experiencing in Cuba once
again and the militarized collapse and under surveillance that prevails
throughout the country, the desire for insubordination and the
anti-authoritarian imagination once again opened spaces for the
anarchic, communizing and fraternal event, a small but persistent task
of wild sociability, a narrow but warm terrain to keep fertilized the
seeds of other and greater libertarian springs.

https://tierranuevacuba.medium.com/5tas-jornadas-primavera-libertaria-de-la-habana-entre-el-colapso-y-la-persistencia-df7afc848fb5
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