Dr. Isabel Brava, 35, a neurosurgeon from Holguín, earns 5,600 pesos a month – about US$8. After working 12-hour days in a hospital with no antibiotics and a broken biopsy machine, she returns home to put her one-year-old son to bed before doing a nightshift as a Lada taxi-driver. “Whenever you think it can’t get worse, it does,” she lamented. “We are on the way to becoming Haiti.”
Cuba has suffered mass emigration, mostly of its educated, young and prosperous citizens. They have moved to the US, Mexico, Spain, Serbia and – since Trump and Rubio tightened the US border – to Guyana and Brazil. And yet, in the face of economic and social collapse, most Cubans remain resilient. The most uplifting word in Cuba today is the antonym of “apagón” (blackout): “alumbrón” (illumination). It describes the redemptive moments when electricity returns. It is also the intangible energy driving the island’s artists, who keep creating things.
Andy Mendosa/Cemí
“In Cuba,” the critic Gerardo Mosquera once observed, “artists grow like weeds.” Liatna Rodríguez, 40, who runs a contemporary art space in Centro Habana called Cemí – named after a Taíno totem and a character in José Lezama Lima’s novel, Paradiso – told me last week: “This is the most perverse moment in our history. Precariousness is now the dominant medium. There is no option. You have to produce.” The younger artists she exhibits, like the recently graduated Darena Pedroso in a show aptly called “A Punto de Caer” (About to Fall), are exploring creative forms rather than confronting the system. “It isn’t self-censorship, it’s not even anger any more. It’s weariness, it’s an embracing of alienation.”