Luis Eligio Omni

“We resisted. We said we could lay down our lives there. We said that we were building on the generation of the 50s, the generation of people who did not believe in communism, the generation that had fought for the re-establishment of the 1940 constitution, and that if they want to stop us, they die there with us. This made them really scared. We tried to use phones. At that time, we were just starting to use them. The connections had been cut. But one phone was working. I think they let it work to enable spying and eavesdropping on us. But nevertheless, we decided to use it. The only person who was not currently on the same place with us was a woman who took care of our social networks. We called her and described her the situation here and what was our attitude towards it. She wrote a press release which immediately ran on the American station CNN. It reached out to Cubans living in exile in the United States and overall to Cuban writers, as she had sent it to all email addresses. Suddenly we began to receive answers from intellectuals and writers. They emailed us, expressing support. They talked about the regime committing injustice and coveyed their unconditional support to the Omni Zona Franca art group. The next day, writers until then associated with the regime gathered in our homes, which were crowded to the ceiling, (the video of it is on YouTube). Prominent artists connected to official Cuban institutions read Poems by Reinald Arenas directly at our home. 'And we will continue to search for our homeland.....' there were a large number of people sitting on the stairs in front of the houses and listening to what was going on inside. And suddenly rapid deployment units appeared. The authorities organized a lynch against us. Some of us went out on the street. Their leader shouted, 'This is a counter-revolution!' And I don't know what else… After we took the floor, people started chanting, 'Let them speak! Let them speak! ' We had great support. 'This is the Poesía Sin Fin festival. They just had kicked us out of our workshop and what you could see was an attempt to deceive you. ' And all those people, I swear, all began to chant: 'Poesía Sin Fin! Poesía Sin Fin! ' The same people who were brought there to lynch us stood up against them and chanted our name.”

"By the time I joined the Omni Zona Franca art group, I had already written about ten thousand poems. I had actually written another four thousand a bit earlier, but my aunt tossed it into the trash when I was in the dormitory. The Omni Zona Franca were initially two different groups. The first associated writers and the second one sculptors. Both were founded under the supervision of a poet named Juan Carlos Flores. He was a security guard at the Fayad Jamís Gallery - a revolutionary architecture storefront, located in the Havana suburb of Alamar. It was supposed to be a jewel but turned out to be a cluster of enormous concrete buildings, one higher than the other, rectangular blocks of flats thoroughly inspired by the housing estates from the socialist Eastern Bloc. Supporters of the Cuban Revolution from all corners of the island moved in there. The Fayad Jamís Gallery had provided some space for alternative art projects before the Omni Zona Franca was founded. Members of the Omni group started their sculpture workshop there, in the same building where the Regime House of Culture was. It was considered a separate unit dedicated to more progressive and solid projects. Juan Carlos worked there as a security guard and earned 118 pesos per month (around 5 euros). He was a frisky man, a quirky character. At first glance, he looked like an alcoholic from a bar on the corner. But as you started a conversation with him, you knew for sure that an astonishingly sophisticated person was standing in front of you. He was an expert, intellectual, poet, art connoisseur. Just open one of his collections of poems. Uf… that's an incredible material. It was perfectly clear that we were in the presence of a truly exceptional person with a great sense of civic engagement and ethics. Juan Carlos Flores was a genius.”

"My mother took care of an elderly lady who had a huge house on the place where the streets of Neptuno and Escobar converged. The lady's family came from high society, and in the pre-revolution period, they had been respected doctors. There was absolutely nothing behind the door of the house which could in any way refer to the time after the victory of the Cuban Revolution. Not a post-revolutionary newspaper, not a single postage stamp, not even new soap. Nothing. My mother used to go there until the end of the old woman's days, and I went there always when returning from the school dormitory. When the woman died, she bequeathed her house to us, and we moved there immediately. Every time I got there, it was like travelling through time. It worked like a time machine. I could go crazy with joy when school was over, and I went there. It was a perfect, beautifully preserved interior, ancient doors, preserved stained glass, beautiful walls. Handcrafted details were on the ceiling. The rooms were separated by glass portals and there was a huge beautiful library full of books, an old radio and television from the fifties. Everything was perfectly functional as if no one had even touched it yet. It was something incredible. There were old towels in the bathroom and soap racks from the fifties on the shelves. Palmolive. Not a single thing was from the post-revolutionary era. Not a single one. Furthermore, before the lady died, she had signed papers stating that the house would belong to us. I was right there, saw it with my own eyes. She was completely sane. She just bequeathed the house to my mother. But the street custodians decided to kick us out of the house. They called the police on us. It caused a great fuss in the whole neighbourhood. Just imagine, the cops were trying to get my mother out of our house. At that moment, my mother took cans of lamp kerosene and poured us all over. Then she poured it on herself, stood in front of the officers, and said,” So whoever wants to get us out of here, he can try.” For me, it was an exemplary expression of a civic attitude. But in those days, I hadn’t perceived it that way yet. Although, I was fascinated for sure.”

"I was a very bad student. They considered me a total outcast. In the end, I didn't have to go to the reformatory, since that place is destined for even worse trouble makers than I was, although it was to a large extent due to the fact that my mother secretly supplied the school with various missing items, such as pencils and papers. Knowing this, you can build a picture of the state of Cuban education. There was no way the school principal was able to meet the needs of pupils through official institutions. My mother always brought these things to him after she had stolen them from the storeroom at work. Because at that time, she was working as a warehouse manager, that’s when we were the most financially secure in my entire childhood. As I have already mentioned, my childhood was a constant struggle with shortages and poverty. In the warehouse were these school necessities, and my mother was stealing them and bringing them to school. The headmaster, of course, was not rather asking where she had got it all from. He always just thanked her.”

"I often felt very lonely. My mother began working for the army and was constantly called into duty. Through our street were passing dilapidated old buses powered by Soviet diesel, which have made a hell of a noise … I was so annoyed. Our whole house was trembling, moreover, I had ringing in my ears for a few minutes after each bus had driven through. That noise has become a link to my mother and her sister. By all the saints ... we lived with the whole extended family. Although there was just a tiny living room, kitchen, small bathroom and the upstairs alike, there were times when the flat was being shared by up to thirteen people. As a consequence of such a limited space, quarrels were practically a daily occurrence. Moreover, I remember that my relatives were often awake overnight. I once talked about it with my mother, she explained that they truly hadn't slept all night. Look, she and my aunt both worked in the military. One was anxious to get a wristwatch, and the other one longed for an alarm clock. Unfortunately, we didn't have any clock at home for several years, so they had to stay up, wait for a bus to pass through. The bus had had a certain schedule, that's how they always figured out what time it was. Of course, not always has the bus passed. Sometimes it didn't drive by at all. In such cases, they had to run out the door and wait for someone who knew the time to walk past them. There was neither radio nor television at our place. More importantly, there wasn't even a refrigerator. We lived in the filthy crappy flat, and I remember those times we couldn't even afford dinner.”