Tania Bruguera

Reuters/Havana

More than 500 artists wrote to Cuban President Raul Castro yesterday calling for the release of a colleague who was detained for a third time in three days in a crackdown that has tested a new detente with the United States.

Cuban performance artist Tania Bruguera was detained again on Thursday after going to a Havana prison to demand that fellow opponents of the government be released, dissidents said. She had planned an open microphone event earlier this week that the communist government called a “political provocation.”

The dissidents, who have limited public support on the Caribbean island, are denounced by the Cuban authorities as in the pay of the US.

In their open letter to Castro, artists from around the world said they were “profoundly troubled” by Cuba’s reaction to Bruguera’s event, which never took place.

Bruguera, who divides her time between the island and art projects mostly in Europe and the US, told Reuters after her first arrest that her passport had been confiscated by Cuban officials.

“We firmly believe her detention, and the withdrawal of her Cuban passport, are inappropriate responses to a work of art that simply sought to open space for public discussion,” the artists’ letter said.

Cuban officials do not typically comment on police activity such as the detention of dissidents.

Brief detentions are Cuba’s standard response to opposition street protests, but they have taken on greater significance just two weeks after Castro and US President Barack Obama announced on December 17 that they would restore diplomatic ties, potentially bringing an end to more than five decades of hostility.

Obama’s policy shift has drawn some opposition inside the US from critics who argue the Cuban government now has less incentive to improve its human rights record. A high- level US State Department official is expected to lead a visit to Havana later this month for detailed talks on how to restore diplomatic ties.

Castro has applauded Obama for Washington’s stance, but has said that Cuba will not change its one-party political system. 

Earlier Bruguera said the government crackdown may actually have helped her make her point.

Bruguera had organised the “participatory performance” for Cubans to share hopes and fears for their future and that of the communist island.

But, she said, the mass arrests ended up telling a different story. “The government did the work for me,” she said. 

“They changed the meaning of the work, giving a lesson in intolerance ... All they did was create chaos.”