The Prisons Behind Lisa Sette Gallery (Cuban art)

The Prisons Behind Lisa Sette Gallery: Cuban Art Series #6

by Jerome du Bois

After sentencing Julio Valdés to twenty years in prison, the presiding judges in his trial ordered the burning of the books in his library on the grounds that they were "lacking in usefulness."

We are paid in pesos, but life is lived in dollars. -- Cuban saying.

We are being threatened; they tell us we can't speak out and we better not say anything. But as long as I am alive, while a minute of life remains, I am going to keep on speaking out, nobody is going to stop me. And if they cut out my tongue I'll keep writing, and if they cut off my hands I'll keep writing with my feet; I don't know what I'm going to do, but they aren't going to get away with it. This is the situation we are in, and this is the testimony of: Haydeé Rodríguez. -- Veteran septuagenarian independent Cuban journalist, Santiago de Cuba, January 29, 2004.

In a murderous time
the heart breaks and breaks
and lives by breaking.

--Stanley Kunitz
"The Testing-Tree"
(epigraph to Angels in America)

There are no cockroaches skittering across the polished hardwood floors of the Lisa Sette Gallery in Scottsdale Arizona. No rats patrol the baseboards. No scorpions pose macho in the corners. No biting flies attack your eyes to prevent you from seeing what's right in front of you:

Lisa Sette Gallery supports Fidel Castro.

And most everybody's cool with it, because everybody loves Lisa Sette, the hippest art gallery in Scottsdale for twenty years: Valley art patrons, museum curators, art dealers, local artists, local art critics. But by their silences, by their lack of outrage, none of these people seem to care how many political prisoners go diabetically blind, go into a coma, or go into the final darkness, as a necessary structural precursor for the local Cuban Art boosters' burgeoning business agenda: to make Cuban Art as safe as baseball. Who gives a f*ck about the librarians and the loudmouths? Let 'em suffer! Up with Kché! Long live Cashtro! Cuban art will be the new green diamond!

It's quiet in here, the air is expensively odorless, the squared-away walls shimmer cool as cream with passing windshield reflections. Outside the floor-to-ceiling front window the golden sun falls on trees green as money, on oleanders white as heaven, on the righteous and the unrighteous alike. Inca doves coo, Lexi honk discreetly, and the sidewalks click with the well-high-heeled. At the door chime, an Assistant stepped out from the back gallery -- tall, thin, all in black except for white socks, she looked like an exclamation point; she smiled when she saw no prospect of sale, and stepped back out of sight.

I came here alone, but I brought a headful of Cuban scapegoats with me, because once you know, you know, and there's no getting away from it for anyone with a broken heart. And those who don't have a broken heart nowadays, need one, or they're lost; it's as simple as that. I say again, when you know, you know.

I mentally broke these politicals out of various prisons for the day -- Canaleta, Guanajay, Red Ceramic, Black Mantle, even Kilo 8, where they lost the keys -- for two reasons: First, I wanted their reactions to Cuban artist Abel Barroso's charmingly subversive toylike constructions, as some art blivvey has undoubtedly already described them. Second, I wanted to dramatize their horrifying plight. So I will use some of them, and they will use me, to make our various points.

Whoever's reading this piece, please have no illusions about it. It will not be an art review. Abel Barroso is a bought man, one of Castro's many public puppets, who, in the face of a half-century of brutal dictatorship, makes twinkie-doodle wooden toys and twee-ass paper t-shirts. And the bovine buyers thrill to his counterfeit cachet of subversion, the faux inventando that Cuban artists have been refining for over a decade. Did you know he had to dismantle a wooden dresser to make these constructions? Oh, please. These clowns are among the most coddled whores on the island. What, do you think they smuggle this crap out to the mainland? If that's your image of Cuban Art, as edgy samizdat, you're a sucker and a fool.

What the hell do Abel Barroso's comic-book carvings have to do with life on an island where saying "The Revolution is a failure" in public will land you in a festering hell for the rest of your adult life? The answer is they have nothing to do with such reality, of course, since his work isn't for Cubans, anyway. But its acceptance in the larger world is crucial to the buffing of Castro's image into a benevolent shine. And Lisa Sette, selling Toirac and Barroso and sending Castro his cut, does her dutiful part. Ignorance does not apply here.