Hamlet Lavastida Cordoví is a Cuban artist and activist born in Havana, Cuba, in 1983. He trained at the San Alejandro Academy of Arts and the Higher Institute of Art.
Lavastida belongs to a generation of Cuban artists whose work is censored on the island for violating the norms set by official cultural institutions. His political and social art draws from revolutionary iconography, ambiguous discourse filled with euphemisms, historiographical reconstruction, repressive techniques, the failed economic or social policies promoted by the Communist Party of Cuba, and everything that allows him to deconstruct and dismantle the Cuban totalitarian regime.
He has a long career and a well-established body of work, recognized especially abroad, where he has participated in several artist residencies: Trinidad and Tobago (2006), Warsaw, Poland (2012), Colombia (2018), and Germany (2020).
Her work has been exhibited at the Łaźnia Contemporary Art Center in Gdańsk, Poland; at Links Hall in Chicago, United States; at The 8th Floor in New York, USA; at the Wifredo Lam Center in Havana; at the Pontevedra Museum in Galicia, Spain; in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and at the Nippon International Performance Art Festival in Tokyo, Japan, among other venues.
In 2018, he participated in Animas, with Carlos Garaicoa, in Madrid, Spain, and also in Bienal 00, in San Isidro and Damas, in Havana.
In 2015, he presented his exhibition Iconocracy: Image of Power and Power of Images in Contemporary Cuban Photography at the Atlantic Center of Modern Art in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and at the Basque Museum-Center of Contemporary Art in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain.
In 2020, he inaugurated the exhibition Prophylactic Culture in Berlin at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien gallery. There, where the young creator had an art scholarship, he was astonished by the events of November 27, 2020.
On February 8, 2021, during his segment on the Cuban television news, the host Humberto López displayed and read a chat from Lavastida in which he proposed to mark with allegorical stamps the San Isidro Movement (MSI) and 27N the highest denomination bills in circulation on the island. Subsequently, Hamlet himself stated that it was a completely private Telegram chat where he suggested marking the bills as a form of civil disobedience, but that this idea was never discussed and was ultimately discarded.
For this reason, and under the charge of "incitement to commit crimes," Lavastida was detained on June 26, 2021, while undergoing mandatory quarantine after returning to Havana from Germany four days earlier. The statement issued by the Ministry of the Interior a few days after his arrest adds to the previouscharges of having incited and called for "repeatedly" carrying out "acts of civil disobedience in public spaces" through the use of social media and "direct influence over other counter-revolutionary elements." It also points to the "carrying out of actions similar to those that have occurred in Eastern European countries, with a provocative intent."
The artist was transferred to Villa Marista, the headquarters of the State Security Department, an institution known for having a prison specialized in the detention of political prisoners. There, he was stripped of his name and assigned the number 2239. He was subjected to long and distressing interrogations. Lavastida acknowledges that he experienced hallucinations during the three months he spent there and that after requesting psychological help, he was only permitted one meeting with a specialist. He has also noted that he managed to make a phone call after requesting it up to seven times and that during that entire period, he was taken out to get some sun only 4 times.
On July 20, 2021, a photo was published of Lavastida's son who lives in Poland, in which he requested, through a message, the release of his father. The photo went viral and led various campaigns demanding the release of the artist who had committed no crime and was never afforded the right to a lawyer.
On September 25, he was released from prison and forced to leave Cuba along with his partner, the poet and activist Katherine Bisquet. After efforts by Polish diplomats in Havana, the couple arrived in Warsaw on September 27, 2021.
Following their arrival in Poland, Bisquet explained that exile was imposed on both of them as a condition for Hamlet's release. The activist published a heartbreaking text on her social media on September 26 in which she shares details of what they experienced during those 90 days of imprisonment and how the process of leaving the country unfolded. She recounts that Lavastida was taken to the airport from a protocol house where he had been isolated since September 20 and whose location he does not know, as he arrived from Villa Marista with his head between his legs. Bisquet herself has explained in her text that the process by which they were released and exiled was referred to by more than one agent as "political rationality."
En la liberación de Hamlet también estuvo implicada la activista y artista Tania Bruguera a quien la Seguridad del Estado propuso conseguir un billete de avión con tal de que abandonara la isla. A cambio, Bruguera extendió una lista de varias personas que deberían ser liberadas. En la lista figuraba Lavastida. A pesar de que el gobierno no aceptó liberar a todos, la activista marchó del país a la vez que Hamlet y Bisquet.
