Cuban visual artist Hamlet Lavastida, detained for more than two months in Villa Marista, the feared Cuban state security headquarters in Havana, could have written the script about his arbitrary arrest.
Lavastida, who has exhibited his work deconstructing Cuba’s state propaganda and repressive tactics in major international galleries, earlier this year told Hypermedia magazine he found a clear connection between the Stalinist trials and the current repression against independent artists in Cuba.
Cuba “is a police state,” Lavastida told the magazine. Then he got a firsthand experience of what his words mean.
After Lavastida returned to Cuba from Berlin, where he was an artist-in-residence at the cultural center Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Cuban state security agents arrested him on June 26, at the end of mandatory COVID-19 isolation for travelers He meant to stay for a while and then return to Europe to visit his Polish son, but state security had other plans.
Lavastida was labeled a leader of an increasingly vocal artistic movement that staged a public protest last November demanding freedom of expression. From the moment of his detention, he has been under constant interrogation, according to his girlfriend, Katherine Bisquet, a writer and member of the 27N artistic movement.
“Hamlet is imprisoned for many reasons,” Bisquet told the Miami Herald. “As a lesson to all intellectuals in exile who have a desire to come to Cuba to join the civil society; to pressure me and others to leave Cuba and thus deactivate the activists’ groups we have created; out of sheer fear and paranoia; to make him another bargaining chip, in short, for everything that serves them as a demonstration of power and control.”
Bisquet, whom state security agents have kept under house arrest since late May, believes the sort of critical work Lavastida does make him a target. One collage from his latest exhibition in Berlin called “Prophylactic culture” combines images of Cuban political propaganda with references to past and current episodes of repression such as the forced labor camps known as UMAPs in the 1960s and the decree 370 in 2020. The decree punishes sharing on the internet “information contrary to the public interest, morality, good manners and the integrity of the people.”
“Hamlet is an artist who, due to his line of work, has studied the discourse of power with great precision,” Bisquet said. “In other words, Hamlet’s work has served as a mirror, as a reflection of the same trappings of the dictatorship. And this the government does not forgive.”
Amnesty International recently declared Lavastida a prisoner of conscience, along with other people arrested in connection to the spontaneous anti-government protests that erupted across the island on July 11. Other organizations such as Human Rights Watch and PEN International have called for his release.
“PEN International reiterates its call on the Cuban authorities to immediately release artist Hamlet Lavastida. We call on the government to cease its systematic harassment of independent writers, artists, and journalists, and to respect artistic freedom and freedom of expression,” said Romana Cacchioli, executive director of PEN International.
Accusations against Lavastida are murky and keep changing. His arrest happened several weeks before the island-wide protests, but the government wants to accuse him of inciting those demonstrations, too, said Cuban-American artist and writer Coco Fusco.
“State security wants to blame the artists for the entire protests. They want to be able to argue that the artists have led this,” she said. “They have put them [in jail] or under house arrest so they can’t do anything.”
Artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcantara and rapper Maykel Castillo (a.k.a Maykel Osogbo), both prominent San Isidro artistic movement members, are also under detention and were recognized too by Amnesty International as prisoners of conscience.
Fusco said state security agents have accused Lavastida of being handled by Polish intelligence, in order to portray the protests as organized from afar.
“Because he has a son with a Polish woman, they said he was coming back to bring a ‘velvet revolution,’ ” Fusco said. They have made similar accusations against him in the past.
“Agents are interrogating Hamlet every day because they want to break his will to the point to say, ‘Yes, I am a Polish agent.’ This is a torture tactic,” she said.
Aga Grątkiewicz, the Polish mother of his 7-year-old son Leo, denied the accusations.
“I learned from some Cubans in Cuba that state security came up with the idea that I am a chief of the artists’ group and I give them instructions. Although this is quite flattering, for I have never felt so important before, unfortunately, it’s untrue,” she said on Facebook. “My feeling of security has been shattered, and my anonymity, which I appreciate so much, has gone. My son’s emotions are already known to the world too.”
An image of Lavastida’s son holding a sign reading “My dad is a political prisoner in Cuba, give me my dad back” to mark Lavastida’s birthday on Aug. 8 went viral.
Just a few months ago, Lavastida helped Fusco to revisit, in a performance, the “Padilla affair,” an infamous episode of state censorship of Cuban poet Heberto Padilla, who was held in Villa Marista for 36 days in 1971 and then forced to confess publicly that he and his fellow writers were counterrevolutionaries.
The irony that much of Lavastida’s work touches on the government restrictions on artistic freedom is not lost on Fusco. As in the Padilla case, state security agents want to force a confession, she said.
“But this is worse than the Padilla affair,” she said. “Hamlet has been imprisoned for longer, and if he admits to that nonsense, they can put him away for 20 years, just like they did with the dissidents imprisoned during the Black Spring” in 2003, whom Cuban authorities accused of working for the U.S. government.
Through its controlled media, the Cuban government has portrayed members of the artistic movement as “mercenaries” paid by the CIA. Likewise, Cuban authorities have blamed the U.S. for the July 11 protests.
In the meantime, Lavastida is formally accused of “incitement to commit a crime” because he allegedly proposed to stamp banknotes with the logos of the San Isidro and the 27N movements as an artistic action. The idea, discussed in a private Telegram chat, was never carried out, but the accusation stands.
Early in February, Humberto Lopez, a TV anchor who has disparaged dissidents, independent journalists and artists who criticize the government, had shown images of the alleged message exchange, suggesting that Lavastida was under surveillance months before he came back to Cuba.
Cuban authorities have rejected several appeals and a habeas corpus petition on his behalf. Bisquet and Cuban lawyer Eloy Viera Cañive have documented several legal violations in handling his case.
There are signs that Lavastida’s mental health is deteriorating, according to information Bisquet shared with friends and on her Facebook page. He told his mother in a phone call that he needed psychological help. He also asked for migraine pills and a Bible.
“If something were to happen to Hamlet, physically and mentally, the Cuban government is solely responsible,” Bisquet wrote on Facebook. “What they do is totally illegal, typical of corrupt and despotic systems. Freedom for Hamlet Lavastida now!!”
____
