“In the ‘90s, we couldn’t sell anything at home. My father and grandfather were the only ones making some money. The prices went up and there wasn’t anything to buy or eat. I remember that when my sister was born, there were power outages everywhere. We had no electricity for 8 to 16 hours a day. My sister was born in June, during the hottest weather. I remember that at night, we had to take turns to fan her because she couldn’t sleep, poor girl.”
(…)
"I always associate this season with my sister. I constantly felt like I needed to keep her safe. But it was challenging to protect her from everything.“
(…)
“When you love someone, you try to provide everything for them, or at least you wish you could, but it wasn’t possible. If I compare her toys with the number of toys I had, she had nothing, she played with cooking pots and spoons and whatever else there was at home. It’s the small things that hurt, especially when you’re older and you realize how difficult everything was. I remember how my mom had to cook on coal because we had no electricity. It might sound nice in Czechia, during summer barbecues, but not when it’s a necessity and your hands, clothes and pots are black. And you have no other choice… I recall that she also had to boil her diapers on coal. And thank God we had coal. Then soap ran out. I remember that one laundry soap something like Czech brand 'Jelen' cost up to 120 Cuban pesos. That’s almost like 120 CZK.”
„Mi invento para Cuba sería una máquina que borrara todo eso. No todo lo malo, pero que borrara todas las heridas que hay históricas en la gente. Y que en caso de que Cuba cambiara hoy, tomaría muchísimos años en recuperarse. [My invention for Cuba would be a machine that erases all of this. Not all the bad things, but one that frees people from the historical wounds they carry. Because if Cuba were to change today, it would take many, many years to heal.] The pain people bear inside… I would invent a machine capable of healing those psychological wounds that people have to live with… Sometimes I still see it in the Czech population, how communism lingers in people, their behaviour, persisting even thirty years and more later. And the Czechs have experienced a much shorter communism than the Cubans. So, if I do the math, even if a change were to happen in Cuba right now as we speak, it would take more than thirty or forty years of generations of pain. If I invented such a machine, I'd be perfectly happy. Because I know no other solution for now. It will take time, and that hurts the most about it. I would invent the machine so that Cuba could recover quickly without the injuries and the pain. The Cuban people are... we're smart, we're hardworking, and with the right conditions, we would be able to get this country back on its feet and make it a beautiful country. And that's the kind of country I would like to return to."
"The house where my grandmother lived was adorned only with portraits of the key heroes and personalities of the Cuban Revolution. We had huge portraits of Fidel Castro, Raúl Castro, Camilo Cienfuegos, Che Guevara... They served as decoration. On one occasion, during a family gathering, my cousin thought it would be a good joke to hide a picture of Camilo Cienfuegos under the bed. When my grandmother noticed the painting was missing, she pulled out a machete and began shouting that the painting needed to reappear immediately. That's how devoted she was. These were the last years of her life. She remained faithful until her death. With a machete in her hand. In fact, it's a typical depiction of a village fighter in the Cuban fields."
“I have a small story about what it’s like when you experience capitalism, something very different to what you’ve been accustomed to your whole life. It happened twice. First, when I needed captions for my exhibition. The exhibition took place at the National Gallery in Prague, there was a copy center very close to it. I needed to print the captions. How easy, fast, cheap, and accessible! A thing, that makes your work easier and smoother! So, I went there, printed it, and as I was leaving the place, a crisis hits me. How can something be so easy, accessible, and fast? Because I think that in Cuba, everyone who has lived there at least a few years as an adult or somehow worked there, there is this feeling, perhaps in some way genetically coded, that everything is complicated. To achieve anything, you have to try really hard. Like getting food. Or using public transport. Or obtaining materials for your work. To build something. To fix something. Everything requires a lot of effort, physically and mentally. That was the first crisis, when everything was so simple there [in Prague]. It’s just symbolic, nothing particular. For some people, it might be meaningless. But for me, it meant I was at the street confused, looking around, not understanding what just happened or what I was supposed to do with it.
And a second thing, a bit more materialistic. I got swept away by another existential crisis on a different day during my stay in Prague, probably from all the experiences and everything I have been surrounded with those days. I remember buying a carton of juice. I drank one liter of it, and the crisis was gone. And I realized, that having certain 'simple' things accessible is important, especially for mental health, for a good state of mind. Those are the two things that just clicked for me back in 2011.
But it didn’t move the needle. It had no real effect on me. I didn’t consider emigration; I was rather excited to return home and share everything I had learned, everything I had seen, all the contacts I made at the Prague Quadriennale. I imagined I’d show them a new way to do stuff, something interesting. That I would shift the reality, the theatre, the scenography in my country. But even though I tried my best after returning to Cuba, it didn’t make any waves, nothing changed. After all this experience I had. No one cared what happened in Czechia and why it happened. This important festival that meant so much for me in that moment. This career peak of a scenography curator, and nobody even batted an eye. That was when I realized nothing is going to change in my career. And that just seemed off and I started to realize something was wrong. But I came back to Cuba and stayed, didn’t even consider the emigration at that time. The next 4 years, I lived off the vivid memories of what I experienced at the Prague Quadrenniale.”
Geanny García Delgado was born the 2 nd of December 1984 in Cuba, in a town called Güines,
approximately 50 kilometers from Havana. His grandmother, a leading figure in the neighborhood
Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, ruled the household with an iron fist, in line with the
principles of the Cuban Revolution. Between 1988 and 1995 Geanny attended an elementary school
named “Héroes de Girón” (Heroes of the Girón, named after a beach, where the Bay of Pigs invasion,
sponsored by USA, happened). Between 1995 and 1998 he continued with the so-called high school
ESBU (Escuela Secundaria Básica Urbana Juan Borrel). He completed his studies in 2001 at the
selective rural boarding school IPVC (Instituto Preuniversitario Vocacional in Melena del Sur) and
after that, completed a year of mandatory military service. In 2002, his dream came true, and he
began to study scenography at The University of Arts in Havana. After graduation, he started working
at the Raúl Oliva Gallery under the mentorship of Jesús Ruiz, where he remained until his emigration
to the Czech Republic. In 2011, he was selected as the exhibition curator for the national Cuban
delegation to the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space, where he presented his
work on generations of Cuban scenographers. His time in Prague was a turning point for him. Despite
all his success and effort, upon returning to Cuba, nothing in his professional life changed. That’s
when he decided to prepare his last Cuban exhibition for the next Quadrennial in 2015. He called it
the “Zone of Danger,” and after its realization he emigrated to the Czech Republic. Now he lives in a
Czech city called Chrudim and works in a local Puppetry Museum. He speaks perfect Czech, as he
found his “safe zone” in the country, calling Prague the “Havana number 2.”
