Luis Manuel Otero and the hunger strike as a recourse
Painting as a form of protest would create a second confinement and, worse still, two oppressions. Why should the artist say what his body is already expressing for him?
In late March, agents of the Cuban political police went to the maximum-security prison of Guanajay, west of Havana, and during a cell inspection threatened to kill the artist Luis Manuel Otero, who responded with an eight-day hunger strike. Accompanied by Javier Reboso, head of prisons for the province of Artemisa the State Security officers also confiscated address books with telephone numbers belonging to two political prisoners there, Jorge Ayala and Daniel Alfaro, and searched even the toilets in their cells. But in the case of Otero — the leader of the San Isidro Movement who was arbitrarily sentenced to five years in prison — the discussion with the guards escalated when the artist asked them if they planned to fight the Americans with four AKMs (the Soviet assault rifle), and they replied that they didn’t, but that just one would be enough to kill him.
With few other options left, for the umpteenth time in the last six years, Otero stopped eating. It was a way of drawing attention to the threat and protecting himself from execution or some other reprisal, at least as far as that might be possible. There is something mechanical about this procedure, and that is where its cruelty lies. Hunger strikes can be counted, as can their duration, the abuses, the years in prison, perhaps even the magnitude of the resistance, but what cannot be measured is the suffering or the mortification of the flesh. If, as Sarduy says, all repetition is prayer, the recurrence of hunger strikes is a prayer that implores us to look, to acknowledge, to engage. Despite having taken on the appearance of a technical response, the hunger strike still retains a kind of effectiveness, or at least the scant power available to someone trapped in such circumstances.
Of course, turning a victim’s body into a shell that begins to behave like a machine is how totalitarianism neutralizes dissent. Since time works in favor of the prison system, which does not wear down, an important part of protecting political prisoners lies in ensuring that collective awareness — the attention of others — does not accept the dehumanization that comes with routine. This is difficult, especially in a country that produces more prisoners than food, where one inmate’s file is quickly replaced by another, and where the idea of individual hunger doesn’t seem so far removed from collective deprivation. After receiving attention initially, a considerable number of these prisoners are left only with the support of their families, a few friends, and often not even their names become known, despite the efforts of human rights organizations and non-governmental media outlets.
This is not the case for Luis Manuel Otero, who is perhaps the best-known Cuban political prisoner both on and off the island. Even so, maintaining his presence among the free, where he belongs, requires tireless work. Activists and curators like Yanelys Núñez, from Madrid, and Claudia Genlui, from Miami, keep circulating the strictly conceptual works that Otero has created from prison over the years. Another colleague, the curator and academic Anamely Ramos, collaborated with him on a striking installation, remarkable for its devotional tone. On February 19, dozens of statuettes of various saints from the Cuban syncretic pantheon appeared on a street in the town of Párraga, on the southern outskirts of Havana. Among the deities were Saint Lazarus, Our Lady of Regla, Saint Barbara, and Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre.
Yet the most crucial dimension of the matter still remains: the prisoner himself and his inner struggle, the prison as a virus injected into him or as a private reality — which is, ultimately, what this is all about. Otero is three months away from his release. Despite holding him all this time, State Security has been unable to prevent his sentence from also being measured in more than 4,000 canvases painted over five years. What reaches the outside world are ideas that become works, gestures, interpretations — laborious constructions of meaning. Inside, however, the prisoner fortifies himself through an intensified material practice, a proliferation of images and specific series without which, he has said, he cannot endure.
In a sense, he has generated within the prison a body of work he must carry out with him. The prison has given him something; not everything has been in vain. That, if one can put it this way, is a victory: he has managed to conceive a language stripped of the same freedom that has been taken from him, yet not bound to a literal transcription of what has happened to him.
“My paintings,” Otero said in an interview, “have no direct or aggressive political connotations. They don’t say ‘Down with Fidel!’ or anything like that. There are about 20 series. They’re like my own experiences and the energies that have surrounded me here, transferred to cardboard.”
Even though people haven’t seen them yet, that’s precisely why it can be assumed that the paintings escape the dictates of the ideological machine, the reproduction of its rhetoric. To paint as a form of protest would be to create a second imprisonment and, worse still, two oppressions. Why should the artist say what his body is already expressing for him? What function does the body serve, then, if it can’t come between the jailer and the art, if it doesn’t mitigate the impact of that overwhelming force on sensibility?
When the imprisoned artist offers his body — the only thing he has at hand — he preserves what he was imprisoned for, which is precisely what confinement sought to destroy by incarcerating him. Yet prison not only fails to destroy it; the artist actually intensifies it. This, of course, can only be achieved if the artist does not resort to painting “Down with Fidel!” or give in to any other form of tautology. The prisoner’s body functions as a hinge between his freedoms and his constraints, but by treating it as something indeterminate, by using it as what it is not, its deterioration accelerates amid the swings between violence and neurosis.
To express himself, the political prisoner must intensify his punishment, making himself heard outside by inflicting on himself a suffering that further radicalizes what has already been imposed on him. Tragically, suffering bodies speak through supplication. The political prisoner protects himself by harming himself; he becomes visible when he undergoes martyrdom.
None of this is art in itself, but it is his shield. Of course, a death threat cannot be countered with a line, a color, or a drawing. A hunger strike is exactly what it is — not a political statement, nor a sign of the artist’s lack of imagination. What is exhausted, what is finite, are the resources for resistance, not necessarily the one who resists. We are speaking of a Black, self-taught artist in conflict with a system that, in Goethe’s words, “let the poor become the guilty.”
Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition