“The art crowd from New York, L.A., San Francisco, New Orleans, and the rest of the planet, has descended like locusts for the seventh Havana Bienal. Drooling over disintegrating facades and tail-finned vehicular carapaces, they’re oblivious to local anxieties of grinding to an irreplaceable halt. Amid palms, surf, deprivations, and faded billboards in praise of Socialismo, the permanent revolution has become an eternal fiesta. The people party and clean their wounds with antifreeze on this entropic island that seems both more spirited and more hopeless than any Soviet satellite state ever was. You get the feeling that they humor Fidel’s oppressions as if he were their dotty uncle. But in the artworld, a weird delusion of normalcy holds sway.” – Village Voice