Against Political Rage: A Vaccine and a Proposal
By Roberto Zurbano, 4/2021

This essay is translated from Contra la rabia política: una vacuna y una propuesta  4/25/2021 Sin permiso

No one expects the vaccine to immunize us against all strains of COVID-19 and their consequences. Let’s take a simple analogy: why not try to reclaim the Cuban political environment more forcefully in the face of the conflicts that erupted last November? The political temperature keeps rising on account of a group of artists who openly confront Cuban cultural policy through critique, performance, and manifestos, questioning the limits of freedom of expression, the legitimacy of independent art, and the very status of independent artists within cultural institutions. In recent years, this confrontation has shifted from the cultural field to that of political dissent, following accusations from one side or the other that create a situation in which some members of what is known as the San Isidro Movement (MSI) end up going in and out of jail on a regular basis.

The radicalization of this conflict pushes the artists into a legal and political dead end(1) and places the Cuban government in a disadvantageous position vis-à-vis the global discourse on human rights, just at the beginning of the new presidency in the United States. Without forgetting the international context and the known pressures on regional geopolitics, Marti's maxim "To govern is to foresee" demands a domestic solution—a solution that is suitable for actors and spectators of a situation that urgently requires in-depth analysis, from the zero point of this escalation to that of no-return, and our understanding of what made the MSI into the antagonist of a drama that hasn’t any possible catharsis or anagnorisis within the Cuban political and constitutional frameworks(2), and, finally, could offer us clarity, solutions and socio-political proposals that would be beneficial for San Isidro and beyond.

Pandemic times unleash hate speech, re-instill dogma, and destroy the possibility of building bridges. They also redefine political boundaries and are in short supply of self-critical analyses that offer ways out of unresolved conflicts, like that of “the San Isidro Affair,” which continues generating controversies and vehement reactions from institutions, the media, and citizens. A will to create a resolution of the clash between the San Isidro Movement and the Ministry of Culture is necessary to reduce the polarization of the conflict, its gestures of violence, and its extreme actions in a country that is already weakened by food shortages and other tensions. At this juncture, it is important to avoid simplifying the different meanings that turn this process into a limit-situation. What is needed is a pragmatic effort to transcend the rage directed at the institutional armor and to reduce mutual accusations, so that a minimum sense of collaboration and collective responsibility can be achieved.

Beyond aesthetics and language, I propose a racialized ideological critique of the conflict. The MSI adopts a contestatory anti-racism— perhaps the kind that is most prickly, least studied, and difficult to understand, even from inside Cuba. It is an anti-racism that bypasses the terminologies and academic poses with which scholars and politicians—who live far from spaces of social marginalization (poverty, unemployment, prostitution, and addiction) and who don’t understand the lives of the Blacks who live there—approach the topic in Cuba. This anti-racism emerges where the government’s institutional programs (educational, health, labor) are insufficient and lead to indifference or rejection. A large Black and mestizo population, along with marginalized Whites, resides in San Isidro, La Cuevita, El Condado, and Altamira. They are rough spaces of survival or transit for our internal migration, as shown in Canción de barrio, Alejandro Ramírez’s documentary about Silvio Rodríguez’s tours through the depths of Cuba.

At the beginning, MSI's demands were not racial, but rather prioritized other artistic and ideological issues. However, carrying out its work in a distinctly Black and mixed-race community with humble roots, the MSI became aware of its own multiracial character and incorporated community concerns into its own critical vision. That is to say, inevitably, its topics become more racialized, as they intervene the neighborhood with poetry, visual arts, hip-hop, performance and political art. Some MSI members come to the San Isidro neighborhood from other cultural projects and community experiences, such as the Rotilla Festival, the Puños Arriba Hip-Hop Festival, and the Omni Zona Franca collective, and others, where they had been treated so questionably by institutions that some were even ostracized. When they manage to form a nucleus in San Isidro, they recover their legitimacy through a very active community dynamic and socio-cultural actions, which defined a platform of highly critical expressiveness, beyond the neighborhood.

Decree 349, a new legal mechanism that appeared on April 20, 2018, constituted a turning point. Forming part of the regulatory matrix of Cuban cultural politics, it was rejected as soon as it appeared, having been approved without any prior discussion with artists. It arrived in the midst of a strained cultural context away from which young social actors continue to migrate (inside or outside the island) in search of cultural fulfillment and freedoms shirked by the decree. For the movement’s members, the 2018 decree meant another level of exclusion, condemning them to a zone of illegality that they weren’t the only ones to refuse. Therefore, they enacted various public actions against that law until on December 12, 2018, after a procession from Avenida del Puerto to La Punta, they carried Our Lady of Charity, the patron saint of Cuba, on their shoulders and, in front of the sea, read the "San Isidro Manifesto,” a ten-point document in which they declared themselves a movement, linking their demands to those of other groups in the cultural field.

Through the Virgen del Cobre, patron saint of Cuba, the MSI proposes a popular ritualization of their demand—to be heard and included—a collective desire previously forged by the SIN349 (without the 349 Decree) movement, which achieved broad solidarity in the cultural arena. From its headquarters on Damas Street, in the San Isidro neighborhood, the MSI makes its demands using a horizontal approach that contrasts with the vertical language of cultural institutions, whose vision of community work doesn’t tend to include political demands or reflect upon popular culture as a space of crisis, characterized by material and ideological deficiencies. Does artivism’s arrival in the neighborhood cause its citizens to recognize its deficiencies as well as socio-cultural potential? Or does it colonize them through a cultural agenda that is foreign to the marginalized neighborhood’s codes? The answer leads us to the ethical conditioning and critical capacity with which artists in the movement dealt with controversial realities, as seen previously in interventions by Arte Calle, Tania Bruguera, René Francisco Rodríguez, and Kcho, defined by their conceptional rigor, along with their political critique.

At this point I wonder if the depoliticization of cultural discourse, the criminalization of dissent, and the sublimation of the market that we are suffering today, operate as a temporary or strategic solution for a new era. I saw how the Cuban hip hop movement dissolved at the beginning of this century, while some of it drifted toward the contestatory rap embraced by the MSI. The strategy of those in power consisted of using reggaeton to shut down rap’s critical and anti-racist discourse. Then came an avalanche of criticism in Miami and Havana media against reggaeton that capitalized on its audiences and profits. Why did they use similar tactics of devaluing popular culture that involved Black protagonism? The answer reveals the complicity with which bureaucrats and political extremists on both shores manipulate the “popular” and the “racial,” turning said artists into subalterns and reproducers of other people’s agenda that excludes them. (I am not hiding the fact that these musicians sometimes publicly evade what they represent and even underestimate the extent to which race and identity defines their artistic work.)

The MSI addresses a legitimate issue in a political arena, despite the predictability of the end results, if we assess its fragility by the asymmetry of the forces that harass it in different political directions. Nevertheless, at the heart of the conflict, the MSI is demanding social justice and a reaffirmation of its cultural legitimacy, over which institutions needlessly haggled. Moreover, the MSI expresses a rage, derived from strong critical experiences and a history of rejections and real necessities, which is hardly channeled in an organized or pragmatic manner. Such rage taxes their bodies as their own discourse and defense, at the same that it converts them into hostages of the left-right, inside-outside, Cuba-United States divide. The awareness of that dichotomy defines the course of the confrontation. Without resolving this paradox, they will not be able to get out of this trap that squeezes them between the side that encourages their dissent and the one that closed the door in their face.

In an effort to reject or welcome the MSI into certain political agendas, much critique of the movement is directed at its possessing an annexationist rhetoric or a scarce nationalist agenda. Facing punishment by Cuba’s institutions, the MSI has responded by expressing its affiliation with the great political enemy of the Revolution (without even considering the blockade/embargo, empty of all political or humanitarian meaning). Thus the MSI demonstrates a political naivety, cultivated out of resentment and a sense of impotence toward those who censure and harass it. Perhaps this was not its original intention, but the MSI’s blind political recklessness places them into the United States’ sophisticated effort to convert any discomfort or political vacuum in Cuba into a possibility of gaining followers for subversion. This takes place through manipulating the MSI's justified anger as its primary rationale and also institutional arrogance (which refuses to recognize its errors), with the support of other forces that expect the MSI to take greater risks than they themselves have ever been willing to take. Does this conjunction irreversibly oblige the MSI to fulfill a task that is disproportionate to its capacity and real possibilities? The answer must be evaluated more realistically by all parties involved in this conflict.

The MSI introduces the racial question into the political debate in an unexpected way. For forty years, the racial question in Cuba was under socialist silence. Only at the end of the 1980s, a few activists begin to break the silence and show the racial unease on the island, creating disagreements with a power that took decades to realize what in another text I call neo-racism (3). The debate sparked today by the MSI ignores the critical efforts of anti-racist organizations that, emerging in the 1990s, in intellectual and academic circuits, managed to place this topic on the national agenda. They did so within an institutional framework, with limited media, and through negotiations marked by the verticality of Cuban cultural, governmental, and political institutions.

The debate today seeps into all realms (cultural, academic and institutional) and with the media in its favor, focuses on human rights and a systemic critique of the Revolution, in contrast to the previous debate’s hope of being incorporated into a political will that would complete the emancipatory efforts of 1959. The current debate rejects the logic of vertical discourse and its institutional rules. It starts from accusations and denunciations of racial problems from a radical position that is close to (or part of) the United States’ subversive project against Cuba, a fact that does not detract from the legitimacy of its criticisms that tend to coincide with those of the previous debates, despite substantial differences between the two.

The government’s media campaign against the MSI (composed mostly of Blacks who live in this poor neighborhood) began by treating it differently from the way it treated the November 27th Movement (a movement that, having been created in the residential neighborhood of Vedado, is mostly composed of Whites), and while declaring their common matrix, insists upon disassociating the two phenomena. While race may not be the most significant data point, Cuban television criminalized the videos and photos of San Isidro more than it did of those of the November 27th Movement which, from the outset, achieved permanent coverage on social media. Then, youth associations organized a demonstration in Havana’s Trillo Park, whose speakers used racial debates and anti-racist declarations, along with other anti-discriminatory discourses (linked to gender, sexual diversity, etc., all of which are equally novel in this type of event) as part of their communication strategy.

On the other hand, the tendency to racialize this conflict has an advantage and a disadvantage. The advantage consists of the way in which the racial ceases to be a black hole or an old hidden card of the political game and the racial conflict begins to challenge us with its rawness and its complex critical itinerary in the last decades. The disadvantage of racializing the conflict before us is concentrating MSI’s work on its link with the problems of a neighborhood, whose social priorities and racial situation were not originally recognized among the demands of the Movement. It is worth stating that, at the beginning, there was no anti-racist or community dialogue between the neighborhood and the MSI. However that soon changed, since the extent of black poverty has become impossible to deny in Cuba . That said, the decontextualized racial analysis of the conflict reduces MSI’s intentions and scope. However, this process of racialization will grow because it expresses a black hole in Cuban politics of the last decades and will be exploited, by Tyrians and Trojans, as a fact (sometimes opportune and other times opportunistic) of the political debate inside and outside Cuba.

During this case of political insubordination that has ended up generating the MSI , radicalization augmented, as political differences entailed accusations and extreme terms. That axiom whereby the Revolution subordinates Blacks’ political conduct to their gratitude to the Revolutionary process, without its strengthening their racial identity and recognizing the extent of their actual contributions is broken. Racial identity is a political identity in itself, if it finds a mode of political affirmation that— overcoming essentialism and victimization—enables it to recognize itself in the face of a historic choice (left or right), as occurs with other identities such as class and gender, etc. The scarce disquisition on racial subjectivity among Cubans generates superficial or erroneous perspectives on these ideological processes where the racial explains and defines more than a choice.

Another way of interpreting this conflict is to think of Cuban anti-racism, mistreated by the powers that be up until yesterday, as a heterogeneous political field. Its plurality, previously silenced and unimaginable, places us before a range of ways of being anti-racist in Cuba, which are redefining the framework of insular politics. Various anti-racist trends point to ideological targets that garner different responses to the increasingly sophisticated racisms that resurface or are born on the island. First, there is the presence of a long-standing pro-independence anti-racism, recovered in the 1990s through activism that, despite some resistance, puts the issue on the national agenda, though it avoids a radical and maroon vision. Second, a dissident anti-racism that MSI approximates and renews is linked to the anti-racism of the opposition created at the end of the eighties by several black leaders who begin to become visible in the opposition’s parties and groups that, in previous decades, rejected anti-racist agendas. The third anti-racism was recently and publicly adopted by the government, with the November 2019 announcement of a National Program Against Racism and Racial Discrimination, led by the President of the Republic. Its spokespersons frequently appear on television. And, finally there is a fourth, right-wing anti-racism that, pervasive in Florida’s media and television, incorporates insular racism almost as if it were a novelty in the Miami and Cuban-American political discourses, despite it being a version of old Miami Cuban racism, manipulated however it wishes, by way of Trumpist rhetoric and social media.

Racial issues were quickly instrumentalized, subordinated to the systemic critique contained in the second and fourth anti-racist discourses that are now broadening their demographic bases of political opposition, both inside and outside the island. In so doing, they achieve something perverse: they subvert the U.S. racial equation, applying their readings to the Cuban racial situation and equating both Black experiences, above any differences. In the face of such instrumentalization, it is only possible to respond using racial politics on the island that point out three crucial errors: 1) the evasion of the political significance of anti-racism to critical leftist thought; 2) underestimating the extent to which Cuban anti-racist and pro-independence activism still defends the Revolution’s libertarian assumptions, and; 3) preventing any ideological critique of right-wing anti-racism and Black capitalism, particularly during Obama's visit. Resolving such strategic errors do not figure into Cuba’s new political-governmental agenda.

Taking advantage of the Cuban state's caution, U.S. experts on subversion against the island's government shifted the anti-racist debate to Miami and its media, a battleground that shrewdly deploys short- and medium-term tactics, including the fast appropriation of anti-discrimination discourse, conspicuous by its absence during the Trump era. At this point, it’s also worth asking whether this sophisticated Miami and Cuban-American media operation, focused on the racial situation in Cuba today, will also impact the perspectives of the considerable number of African-Americans who are allies of the Cuban Revolution.

Careers of rising stars in the cultural industry are determined by the media market. In Miami, it’s run by Cuban-American politics that make promises and give budgets to those who confront the Cuban government. From this side, we see Cuban families rejecting the image on television of Luis Manuel Otero groping the flag, of the young rapper Dennis Solis in a pro-Trump verbal rampage with which he tries to stop a policeman at his door, and the photos of Maykel Osorbo with his mouth sewn shut with wire. On the other side, thanks to Etecsa, our state’s telephone monopoly , we’ve seen the very well-promoted video for the song “Patria y Vida,” which turns Gente de Zona, Yotuel, and Descemer Bueno into new anti-racist subjects (despite their never having dealt with the topic beforehand) and media heroes, whose recent rupture with the Cuban government unites them in a viscerally critical song. Two MSI rappers from Havana also appear in the video—Maykel Osorbo and Funky Style, who through technology were able to circumvent confinement and censorship. All of them lead the way for other well-known musicians on the island, such as El Micha, Yulien Oviedo, Aldo, and Silvito el Libre, who aspire to participate in the cultural market of this historically racist city, by offering these Black Cuban musicians a sense of racial harmony and an opportunity—albeit one that may carry with it certain conditions—to position themselves in the Miami entertainment market, despite the city’s hostility toward Black Americans and Caribbeans.

The symbolic war deployed in the midst of the pandemic spewed hate speech, consisting of continuous action and reaction, created a predictable battle on both sides, although a greater deployment of initiatives, media, and voices, supported by diverse sponsorship covering various sectors and interests, appears to have come from Florida. The scope of digital communication on the island is growing, but on this side, there is little initiative and a reiteration of formulas, and a failure to incorporate anti-racist actors or accept a critical left that is eager to enter the fray, but is also fearful and untrained. This poor strategy ignores the Constitution and dusts off tactics used during the Pavonato (4), the Aldanato (5), and those oppressive tactics that followed. Knowledge and communication strategies available to the public sphere on island are handled vertically and selectively. All of this makes it difficult to develop an insular media strategy open to a renewed anti-racist discourse—now supported by the government—implementing ideas and images worthy of the participation of the Black population in a battle that goes beyond demands related to race and shows the Cuban desire for a society with all and for the good of all.

Will Black and popular intellectuality be able to evaluate, from its own life experience, the link that unites or separates us from the MSI? Will it know how to recover the political meaning of the racial and distinguish it from how it gets manipulated? Does it make sense to accompany or reject the MSI without critiquing its political undertaking and future consequences? If we turn existential anguish into political anguish, won’t we repressing our desires as revolutionary subjects, be burying our heads in the sand and be denying the beauty of struggles to come? Shouldn’t we turn subalternity into insurgency and collective creation? Transform political rage into critical and responsible participation? Interrogate the country to come?

It is urgent to disarm this malaise that hijacks the strength of our maroon heritage and break the dark triangle that undermines the libertarian dream by squeezing it on its three sides. Here I shall describe its three side, made invisible by a lack of criticism and debate on our 21st century racism. The very pain of racial discrimination itself, of the political misuse of racial issues and of a latent racism that is also political and elitist and that lurks behind the correctness, the new businesses, and the protection of the new Cuban rich’s private property, connected beyond the island to a mostly white and conservative patrimony.

No racial debate is about skin color, but rather is about how power excludes or incorporates a racial group, recognizes its practices as a natural part of social dynamics, and shares its political meanings in social and economic redistribution. If racial consciousness shapes collective actions in this new epoch, such consciousness must be shared not only among Black people, but activated beyond, in dignity and justice for all. The new racial codes (self-identity, political meanings, historical demands, affirmative action, racial politics, modes of representation, etc.) were inserted in the cultural war since the last century. Why not incorporate and appropriate them as a emancipatory and political critical tools?

Those who deny racism in socialist Cuba are to be blamed for its existence. They created one more conflict, where we could build respect and social emancipation, beyond skin color, religion, and ideology. Racism was hidden by a conservative mindset, which is now shared by extremists from the left and right, old and new monied classes on one or another side of Cubanity. The abandoned issue has become both the spoils of war and the Trojan horse in the vernacular stopover (Havana-Miami) of the Cuba-USA dispute.

What is the cost of channeling the recklessness with which the MSI resists an institutional machinery that pushes its members toward a politically irreversible and dangerous limit or abyss? Do the women and who form part of the movement possess infinite resilience? What political and civic apparatuses are there to support those growing demands, renewing or exhausting the forces that single them out? How many times have institutions and the MSI approached one another? Are there actors, organizations, or spaces willing to conciliate? What resources for conflict mediation are brandished? Does the government dismiss or rethink the role of the MSI as part of the subversion against Cuba? How is the phenomenon understood within Cuban law, international law, or in the framework of human rights? Is there a humanitarian or political way out? Do we continue observing the MSI without speaking directly to its members, offering them a truce, a reason, or an ultimatum?

Let's think a little bit about this from the perspective of the neighborhood—the marginal San Isidro neighborhood. Will it still be forgotten after these forces come upon it? Possibly not. The stigma attached to MSI will not put an end to the joy and resistance of San Isidro’s popular culture, but it could confuse or continue to delay the realization of human betterment that one of San Isidro’s most famous neighbors—José Martí, born on Paula Street, now called Leonor Pérez—dreamed up. The conflict must be open to a solution for the future of the neighborhood and its denizens, through a new way of designing and instrumenting policies that take into consideration culture and that includes the Constitutionally-supported demands of those who are involved in the conflict. Thus, they will not have to give up their major objectives, and there will be room for them in the future. Nobody has asked me; but, above any naivety and skepticism, here is my proposal:

To turn the San Isidro Movement into a socio-cultural center in the neighborhood, governed by a board of local artists, activists, and professionals who cooperatively manage the neighborhood’s whole transformation. Priority should be given to housing repair and construction; jobs should be generated; the function and scope of neighborhoods institutions should be reconsidered; a museum on the history of the neighborhood and Blacks in Cuba, launched; and, economists, historians, architects, and artists should be called upon to do the decolonizing community work that recognizes the neighborhood’s identities, abilities, and needs. Sponsored by public and private institutions, it would be an important social laboratory and a challenge to the traditional forms of urban management. In a certain way, it would be different from the monumentality and processes of selection carried out by the projects that the Office of the Historian of the City of Havana (OHCH) administers. This isn’t much, but other proposals, approaches, and solutions, worthy of the very difficult challenge, should also be considered.

We are experiencing a fragmentation of critical thinking on the island that does not correspond to its diversity and growth in recent decades, nor to the public use of its emancipatory potential (where criticism is also propositional). Deprived of recognition, such thought tries to be a useful and responsible social exercise, that of participating in authentic debates on internal and external dangers, as well as in the construction of new scenarios faced by the future of this nation. Today it’s the MSI, but tomorrow another difficult situation will oblige us to move beyond anger and get involved in proposals and conflicts that belong to us.

In Cayo Hueso, Centro Habana, Abril 2021.


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1. On November 9, the young rapper, Denis Solis, was arrested and charged with contempt of court and sentenced, 72 hours later, to eight months in prison. The members of the MSI, after several legal and artistic demands for his release, began a hunger strike on November 18. On the night of November 26, after a brief digital blackout in the city, the police intervened at the MSI headquarters to put an end the strike, hospitalizing some members and preventing others from leaving their homes. They have since been accused in the official media of being part of a "soft coup" instigated by the U.S. government.

2. On November 27, 2020, in front of the Ministry of Culture, these frameworks were challenged by the demands of almost 300, mostly young, people, who, after 15 hours of asking be heard, finally succeeded in that a small group of them participated in a discussion with an initial set of demands. This collective action, as unprecedented as the MSI, is known as the Movimiento 27 de Noviembre (M27N), but it is not the subject of these pages.

3. I describe this neo-racism as "a phenomenon that is made up of gestures, phrases, jokes, criticisms, and comments that devalue the racial (Black) condition of persons, groups, projects, works and institutions, whether Cuban or not. This description would not be complete or novel if we were to ignore the social and political environment in which the racist acts take place today in Cuba: a country that carried out a democratic-popular Revolution, that offered opportunity and rights for all its citizens, that built a socialist society with an emancipatory ideal accompanied by justice, national dignity, and human solidarity. A country with an internationalist tradition that supported the independence struggles of several Third World countries, particularly in Africa, where it is impossible to speak of the end of apartheid in South Africa without recognizing Cuba’s troops in Angola, a high percentage of which were Blacks and mestizos. Moreover, it’s the same anti-imperialist country whose ideological assumptions are declared, in essence, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and humanitarian, but where racist jokes continue to be accepted, shared, and celebrated even by some Black subjects.” See Roberto Zurbano: "Cuba: Doce dificultades para enfrentar al (neo) racismo o doce razones para abrir el (otro) debate" in Revista Universidad de La Habana, number 273, pp. 266-277.

4. Luis Pavón (1930-2013) was a political commissioner known for exercising censorship in Cuba during the 1970s. Although this act should not be identified using one individual’s name, Pavón carried out extensive censorship openly and under a pseudonym within the military magazine Verde Olivo. That period of intense censorship is referred to with as the “Quinquenio Gris” (The Gray Quinquennium) or, when remembering the uncertain era of Luis Pavón, as the pavonato.

5. Carlos Aldana: Ideological Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party with immense power. He turned out to be a lover of Soviet glasnost. He was responsible for big decisions in the world of culture, even more than the Minister of Culture. He established another era of censorship and ideological terror in the late 1980s where he repeated the same errors of the Gray Quinquennium.