“If I can't dance, what good’s your revolution to me?” is the title of this first essay within the framework of the research project The narrative intention: exploring spaces of the Cuban social narrative in the post-revolutionary period (1970-2023). It was one of the catchphrases of Damas 955, headquarters of the San Isidro Movement (Movimiento San Isidro, MSI) during the 2021 protests in Cuba. The San Isidro Movement is the epicentre of a rhizomatic group of actors who are today mobilizing and enacting the desire and need for social change in contemporary Cuba. Because of its particular disruptive nature, San Isidro language operates as an intensifier of existing contradictions while opening a map which brings together activisms, attempts at dialogue, a change in female presence, the deployment of publishers outside the institutional framework, the flight of filmmakers to independent productions, a new style of journalism, the emergence of cultural magazines, fast-tempo popular music, critical—embodied—visions of socialism, resistance and the agency of independent spaces. In this network of actors and factors in motion, in conversation with Yanelis Núñez, Denis Solís and Carlos Manuel Álvarez, this essay explores the links, implications, lines of flight and possibilities arising from the construction of the social story, narration and discursivity in the conjunction of art and social movement in post-revolutionary Cuba. 

Carlos Manuel Álvarez was born in Matanzas, Cuba, in 1989. He studied Journalism at the University of Havana. In 2016 he founded the independent Cuban magazine El Estornudo, and his texts and opinion columns are regularly published in El País, The New York Times, The Washington Post and Internationale. In 2017 he was selected by the Hay Festival for the Bogotá 39 list, which brings together the 39 best Latin American writers under forty years of age, and in the same year he published his first collection of journalistic accounts, The Tribe: Portraits of Cuba (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2022). In 2021 he received the Don Quijote Prize for Journalism (part of the Rey de España awards) and was selected by the magazine Granta among The Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists. He has published the novels The Fallen (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2019) and Falsa guerra (Fake War, Sexto Piso, 2021). In 2022 he obtained the Anagrama/UANL Sergio Gonzalez Rodriguez Chronicle Award for the book Los intrusos (The Intruders), an extensive account of the San Isidro lock-in, a civic protest that occurred in Havana in November 2020 and changed the political and emotional map of the island. In 2023 he obtained the 2023 Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe et du Tout-Monde for the French translation of his novel Los caídos (The Fallen). His books have been translated into several languages, including English, French and Italian. 

Yanelys Núñez Leyva was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1989. She is an art historian, human rights activist and founding member of the San Isidro Movement. She is co-founder, with the artist and political prisoner Luis Manuel Otero, of the Museum of Dissidence in Cuba, a cultural platform that recontextualizes the concept of “dissidence”, affirming the current need for political diversity on the island. She has given workshops to present her tools of cultural production and civic resistance at conferences in the United States, Argentina, Chile, England and the Czech Republic, among others. She currently forms part of the Alas Tensas Gender Observatory.

Denis Solís González was born in Havana, Cuba, in June 1988. He is an activist rapper and a member of the San Isidro Movement. He is a former political prisoner and currently lives in exile in Germany.