Where is Mella?
2017
After several years of restoration, the old Manzana de Gómez became the first 5-star plus Hotel of the island. And although it is owned by the Cuban state chain Gaviota, its administration lies in the hands of the Swiss Kempinski. Days before the opening of its commercial gallery, it was possible to see that the bust of the student leader Julio
Antonio Mella (1903-1929) was removed; it had been located in that place since 1965.
For this reason, on April 22, the opening date, Luis Manuel transformed into a living statue that represented the figure who was the founder of the first Marxist-Leninist Party of Cuba, asked the audience from a poster: Where was Mella? On May 6, the official newspaper Juventud Rebelde tried to answer the question by appealing to the alleged bad aesthetics of the work but ignoring any type of political connotation in the disappearance; what sparked a wave of comments and debates on the web. In the absence of a coherent response from the country's authorities, the artist, along with the art historian Yanelys Nuñez Leyva, published an open letter addressed to the Cuban President, Raúl Castro, the Director of Gaviota, the President of the University Student Federation and the Historian of the City Eusebio Leal.
Related articles
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Open letter Where is Mella?
By Yanelys Nuñez Leyva and Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara
This open letter was sent to: President Raúl Castro Ruz, the Director of the Gaviota hotel company, the President of the Federation of University Students of the University of Havana and Eusebio Leal Splengler, Historian of the City. [Text in Spanish]
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Remote dialogue
By Ciro Bianchi Ross
Among the comments that readers made to the page Neither forgotten nor dead, dedicated to Julio Antonio Mella, last Sunday 7, there are two that the writer wants to highlight in a special way: that of Ricardo Luis Hernández Otero, a researcher at the Institute of Literature and Linguistics, and that of my very dear friend Jorge Domingo, also a researcher at the same center and author, among other books, of a very useful Atlas of Spanish emigration in Cuba, and of a no less useful bio-bibliographical dictionary of Spanish writers in Cuba ( century XX), with editions in Seville and Havana. [Text in Spanish]
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The artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara asks for an official response on the removal of the statue of Mella
By Waldo Fernández Cuenca
'What was eliminated was not a decorative object,' he says in a letter sent to Raúl Castro. It was 'a symbol, a national icon'.… [Text in Spanish]
