Morro Castle stands sentinel over Havana Bay and yields spectacular views of Cuba's enchanting capital city. Completed in 1630, the austere fortress provides eloquent exhibition spaces for the seventh Havana Bienal, an international art exhibition showcasing third world art.
In one of a series of long, oddly shaped chambers words are stenciled in dark sand on lighter sand covering the stone floor. It's elemental and so fragile, so much at the mercy of the thousands of feet that will tramp through here over the next month. The artist, Willem Boshoof, is South African, and his statement says the writing in the sand pays respect to South Africa's newly recognized official languages — those that survived the European influences that killed so many languages. A gust of wind, a simple stumble could erase these words in an instant.
The sign over the small wooden door set in the castle wall reads Caf' Internet Tercer Mundo (Third World Internet Caf'). This is an art installation by Abel Barroso. The door looks as if it could lead to a dungeon, but when it bursts open, the sounds of laughter and Cuban music spill out. Inside the cave-like room, pretty people are drinking beer, moving to the music — and playing with the art. That's right, playing with the art. Posted on the walls around the room are hand-carved wooden computers, printers, monitors and other technological devices, all powered by handcranks. Estamos Cometados is a movie camera with two films, which are actually tiny handmade flip-books of recycled paper. The moving picture is created by fanning the pages the way you do when you shuffle a deck of cards. One film is called Deja Que Te Coja (Let Me Catch You) and features a mechanical man chasing a naked woman. On the side of a wooden computer, the artist has carved a black slave in a neck manacle chained to a computer and the words Esclavo de me computadoro (a slave to my computer). Mi Novio (My Sweetheart) is an e-mail love letter on a paper screen behind a carved frame of a video monitor. A wooden hand crank literally scrolls the screen so you can read the tender words, I long to meet you and walk with you in a garden … and other expressions of longing for authentic contact.
Cuban artist Esterio Seguro has three rooms for his installations. All feature a life-size painted figure of a man wearing jeans. In the first room, he is lying on his back on top of bamboo birdcages. In the next room, he is in a winged cage, holding a megaphone to his lips in one corner and in another with wires coming out of his mouth and shaping a gigantic inverted bell lined with light bulbs over his head. The doorway to the third room is completely dark, an impenetrable black cave. You can hear only the sound of steady typing. Once you get inside, you see the light over a wall at the far end. Old typewriters are mounted on the wall above the figure of the man lying on a stack of magazines. It's like traveling through a dream — mysterious, portentous, yet filled with meaning, an urgent message about the nature of freedom, ideas and communications, and how the presence or absence of each affects the others. In a place where the walls have ears, communication finds another way.
It's enigmatic, like so much in Havana. Things are going on here. So much communication above, below and beyond the normal means. In a place where it can be dangerous to express certain views openly, art and communication become so much more creative, more metaphoric, more subtle.
This article appears in Apr 19-26, 2001.
