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La confesión
Video by Coco Fusco | Color | 31 min | 2015

La confesión is a reflection on the most significant crisis in the intellectual history of the Cuban Revolution - the public confession by poet Heberto Padilla that he was a counterrevolutionary. Pronounced in April of 1971 before an audience of his peers at the Artists and Writers Union in Havana after the poet had been held for five weeks in Villa Marista prison, Padilla's confession shifted the terms of New Left thought about the role of culture in revolution, and reconfigured the relationship between European intellectuals and third world nationalism. The video is not a dramatic reconstruction of the event: it is a consideration of the ways in which Padilla's performance as a repentant counter-revolutionary reverberates to this day. Fusco concentrates on the documents that form the material residue of the case, including a fragment of the filmed confession that was made public only recently.