ABSTRACT
I offer this text as a reflection on the performances that I did in Cuba. I would like to distinguish between culture and politics here, and separate what I consider to be artistic creation from ideology. It is clear to me that Marxism as a totalizing vision of the world and of culture is obsolete. Having been educated according to this philosophical tendency “by official decree,” I now see Marxism as one of the many European discourses that has been used to colonize the rest of the world. Despite this, what is specifically Cuban has survived. In the final analysis, is it not a way of looking at things, a way of feeling and a particular way of organizing the world that makes us Cuban? Those who think that Cubanness disappears when one leaves Cuba are mistaken-the best of Cuban culture has always been produced in exile. Cuban culture defines itself by absence, by lack, by nostalgia. Even the author José Lézama Lima invented the term “internal exile” to define how one does not physically leave the country but instead makes creation the route of an adventure away from home.
