Thursday, June 25, 2015

Why Is The Cuban Government Suppressing Havana's Tattoo Artists?

Leo Canosa at work in his studio. (Tod Seelie/Gothamist)
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Nobody knows what spurred the tattoo crackdown. The internet is virtually nonexistent in Cuban homes, and even making phone calls is expensive. Granma, the party's official newspaper, is a hollow PR vessel far from resembling anything like a balanced news source.

Stanching the flow of information is a convenient tactic for keeping people from organizing, or moreover, digging deeper into the pesky questions of "why?"—a query you can pose in Cuba over and over and receive only a resigned shrug. This shrug, as I learned within a few days of my arrival, is most Cubans' blanket response to queries regarding the motives of the government.

“Nobody knows. Not even the inspectors know—if you ask them, they don’t know," Che told me. To ask "why" in Cuba is futile, but I did, anyway, repeatedly, with multiple people. "I don't know," was the refrain I heard each time. "Nobody knows." (Read full report at Gothamist)

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