OCTOBER - Recherche en IA spécialisée au MIT

OCTOBER

COCO FUSCO

The Occupy movement succeeded in forcing the issue of economic
inequality into mainstream public debate in the U.S. on the eve of a presiden-
tial-campaign year. That in itself is an admirable achievement. Occupy won
broad sympathy and quickly forged alliances with other interest groups because
it focused on a widely shared dilemma—a rarity in an era of sectarian politics.

Occupy also claimed kinship with protesters of the Arab Spring. Although
both movements are led by young, media-savvy adults and involve the collective
takeover of public space, there are important distinctions in the political cultures
from which they’ve emerged. Young adults in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and beyond
contend with high rates of unemployment, but the focus of their protests has
been on dislodging the intransigent leadership of their governments. Occupy
challenged the legitimacy of Wall Street financiers who operate beyond the law
with impunity, while their counterparts in the Middle East rose up against corrupt
authoritarian regimes that use nationalist rhetoric and aristocratic lineage to
avoid sharing power and resources.

There are many others in the world subject to similar conditions who have
pas (yet) taken their grievances to the streets, but not for want of political frustra-
tion. I invited two of Cuba’s leading dissident bloggers, Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo
and Yoani Sánchez, to join me on these pages so that they can share what Occupy
means for activists in a country where, to this day, the plazas that could serve as
stages for political action remain empty.

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Paradoxically, in populist revolutions like Cuba’s, despite the media hype
about “the great masses of the people” who listen to and comply with the
Maximum Leader, the streets remain boringly devoid of spontaneous expressions
of popular will.

To occupy space in hard-line socialism is considered a threat to national
security. Par conséquent, the city does not belong to the citizens, who are accustomed
historically to simulate a certain unanimous happiness before despotic power. Le
New Man was born apathetic, and thus reality is paralyzed and—again paradoxi-
cally—the community performs and is controlled as the private property of the
political police.

Peaceful takeover of the heart of the capitalist world to publicly demand a
more human social order in front of repressive forces engenders some hope and a
lot of humiliation for Cubans. Occupy Wall Street has been a double lesson for
nondemocratic countries like Cuba.

Hope, because no matter how high the economic indicators may be for a

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Questionnaire: Fusco

highly developed nation such as the USA, it is obvious that no established elite
should hold the hunger for justice of the majority hostage. Humiliation, because
in five decades of status quo under the island’s Communist Party, the true voice of
the Cuban people has never known how to express itself with the same moral
urgency in the face of the contradictions of our own system.

The utopia of the proletariat, as in all imposed paradises, maintains its revolu-
tionary rhetoric in Cuba to cover its ultraconservative order. Occupying or simply
being preoccupied with the actual Revolution today constitutes the worst crime.

Yoani Sánchez

We Cubans occupy our beds, the stairs of our homes, the bit of table that
lies before us, the chair in front of the TV, the empty refrigerator, and the half-
open shutters through which we look outside. All that and more before we take
to the streets and public squares. We talk about sex as if we were crying at a
demonstration, we dive into the black market as an expression of protest, et
we get into rafts to cross the Florida Straits as our most daring gesture. We com-
plain to ourselves in silence, uttering our dissent in a whisper out of fear that
the sharp ears of the political police can hear us. Instead of obstructing side-
walks and streets, we hurl symbolic stones each day at the state by redirecting
public resources and being unproductive. We don’t rehearse impassioned slo-
gans to chant at rallies, but we are skilled at apathy and masking our thoughts.
Our most rebellious actions consist of practicing double standards and evading
excessive ideological propaganda.

The terrain we have occupied is not visible, it is not outside a bank nor is it
in front of a stock exchange where numbers enrich some and drag others into
misère. Non. We have barely taken possession of the territory between our skin
and bones; the diminutive esplanade that conforms to our fears and the depop-
ulated parks where all the paranoia and mistrust that we have been inoculated
with since childhood reside. For that irritation to break out and materialize in a
multitude that makes its demands on a street corner—to achieve that, the occu-
pier hiding under his own skin must free himself of the policeman with whom
he shares a body.

COCO FUSCO is a New York–based artist and writer.