Technology helping lift veil on real Cuba

There are giant cockroaches climbing Havana's National Museum of Art, metal elephants outside the Cuban Capitol building and, in a standing-room-only theater crowd this week, there was Tania Bruguera's public performance art involving spontaneous calls for libertad!

The roaches, like Fidel Castro's bitter monicker for exiles he called gusanos (worms), are an exhibit called Sobrevivientes, survivors. Perhaps these 21st century bugs survived nuclear war -- or lived through 50 years of a regime that has tried and failed to blow up the human spirit. You decide.

The elephants -- like the real ones that never forget who wronged them -- are part of a project called Memory & Memorias during the 10th Havana Biennial, an international art show that gives artists some cover. For now.

But it was Bruguera's use of a white dove -- and two actors, dressed in military fatigues, who put the dove on each speaker for a one-minute Cuban reality check -- that sparks the imagination. Like those who emerged in the 1980s and 1990s after Cuba lost its Soviet sugar daddy, this latest generation of artists presses for the freedom to share their views, even as Raúl Castro continues his brother Fidel's gerontocracy in the name of the New Man's survival.

IMMEDIACY

The difference today is technology. These artists can get their message out with an immediacy others never could. Video of Bruguera's free-for-all, posted by Generación Y blogger Yoani Sánchez on YouTube.com, speaks to the yearning of free souls everywhere. ''Tania gave us the microphones, we who have never been able to deliver our own speeches,'' Sánchez wrote in her blog. ''Rather, we have had to suffer under the hot sun the speechifying of the others. . . .

''A dove rested on our shoulders, probably equally well-trained as that other one fifty years ago,'' she wrote, referring to Fidel Castro's first speech in Havana in 1959 when a dove landed on his shoulder, as if the Holy Spirit were anointing him leader for life. ''However, none of us who spoke considered ourselves chosen, none wanted to stay -- for fifty years -- shouting into the microphones.''

FINDING A WAY

Realize that Sánchez lives in Havana, and does so with independent Cuban journalist Reinaldo Escobar. Her award-winning blog, which started in 2007, lets the world know what is really happening. Few Cubans can read it because the government controls Internet access, but they are an enterprising lot, finding ways to make do.

Just a few hundred miles away, 300 young people will kick off the GenerAcción conference at the University of Miami on Friday. The past six years, the 2,500-member Raices de Esperanza, or Roots of Hope, has held conferences at Duke, Princeton, Georgetown, Harvard, looking to build links with young people on the island.

''The beauty of Raices is that people have very different views and work together for one cause -- that is, empowering Cuban youth for change,'' said Verónica Nur Valdés, a recent graduate born in Miami of Cuban parents. ''I've learned how much hope there is on the island, how much these young people are sacrificing day to day for change.''

Because when the art show ends and the tourists leave, Cuba's new generation will keep exposing the contradictions that have left them poorer but wiser than the cockroaches that surround them.