Cuba’s Art Factory aims for industrial-scale hipness
December 29, 2015
Nick Miroff and Sarah L. Voisin, The Washington Post
La Fabrica del Arte Cubano is the place foreign tourists go to see a younger, edgier, emerging Cuba. Or it's the place teenagers who don't have a lot of money can go dancing at 2 a.m. for a $2 cover charge. You can drink mojitos or Red Bull and see an avant-garde play by a Spanish theater troupe, or the work of an Israeli photographer, or "The Rocky Horror Picture Show."
La Fabrica (Cuban Art Factory) can do all that because it is a huge place, with multiple gallery and performance spaces, all housed beneath the roof of a former cooking oil plant near the Almendares river in Havana's Vedado neighborhood.
The idea is borrowed from Brooklyn and Berlin and everywhere else that old warehouse spaces are being repurposed as art galleries or performance venues. But the Factory is 100 percent criollo, all Cuban, in its ownership and operation but especially in the delicate cultural politics of facilitating artistic expression in a tightly controlled society....
