The topic "Figures of Revolt" refers to aesthetic strategies and cultural and media practices of revolt and resistance against the artistic, social, environmental, and political status quo in Cuban culture, including diasporic, comparative, transnational, and transregional perspectives. It will be treated from different angles, from cultural analysis to a focus on a specific kind of archives. This session on figures of revolt in Cuban culture aims at proposing new approaches to specific subjects which have not been addressed before in a comprehensive light. Each speaker (4) will have 15 minutes. This will allow to have 15 minutes of unstructured discussion.

Through the analysis of short stories in the anthology Toda esa gente solitaria. Cuentos cubanos sobre el sida (Zayón Jomolca and Fajardo Atanes, 1997), and of the music careers of early 90s punk bands VIH, Desperdicio, and Eskoria, Carmen Torre Pérez will examine some of the ways in which HIV is used as a tool for rebellion. First, in the context of a socialist regime that required healthy bodies to work for its survival, the frikis were parasitizing the State—many of them had actually self-injected the virus, and when they got sick they could not work and lived in state-sponsored AIDS hospitals. Second, they developed strategies for social activism that were (relatively) independent from government institutions, using their experiences with AIDS to raise awareness about the illness and act against the marginalization and harassment of HIV-positive people.

Andy Alfonso will examine a group of “cyberarchives” that essays to shed some light on an episode of reticence in the history of the Revolution: the UMAP. The analysis will center on texts that deal with the death of certain “inmates,” while focusing on the processes of mourning, erasure, and reparation that ensue thereafter. Not only Alfonso intends to analyze the medium of publication, along with the dialogues that arise via comments and hyperlinks. He also seeks to explore the aesthetic strategies—ekphrasis, interviews, photographs...—used in response to what he calls “the press of counterinsurgency,” that is, official organs bent on obscuring or relativizing the “truth.” Insofar as they pry open social conversations, epistemic boxes, and classified information, these cyberarchives could be conceived of as revoltosos, in other words, strident, unruly, disorderly.

Candice Amich explores how the poetry of Juan Carlos Flores (1962-2016) operates in a post-Soviet space of revolutionary failure – as a different kind of utopian potential. She argues that Flores, in his unfinished trilogy, Poetical Resurrection of Alamar, performs a planetary poetics. Flores' deep commitment to place is revelatory of a key planetary dynamic: the simultaneity of a site-specific and global (or planetary) outlook. In order to examine this dynamic, Amich offers a close reading of Flores’ poem “El buzo” (The diver), connecting the figure of the dumpster diver to the poet who refuses to perform the “new man” of the model city.

Taking the figures of disease, contagion and revolt as starting points, Dayron Carrillo-Morell's presentation proposes a critical approach to the new wave of political “artivism” in Cuba, taking into account Agamben's ideas about contagion and on the frictions between the body and the law, which explore corporality as a space for (bio) political action; but, also, as a distinctive mark between the individual and the collectiv.