More from the Whistling Dixie series…

So why don’t I swim back home?

Because despite insults like this one…which was hurled at me by an ignorant racist in Miami Beach when I was still too intimidated to speak out against hate speech… I can read Hannah Arendt all I want and at the top of my voice without fear or persecution.

Here, I may have been insulted by more than one low-life, but I can breathe free here.

Not so back in Cuba.

Cuban artist Tania Bruguera was jailed by state security agents after staging a group reading of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) at her Havana home, where she’s been held in house arrest for months.

Carolina A. Miranda of The Los Angeles Times‘s reports that the concurrent Havana Biennial is up and running as usual…no boycotts. Why?

I have a theory. Because even though Bruguera’s an internationally recognized artist, she’s female, and not worth all that much. Oh and she’s hispanic too, so again, not as economically valuable. She’s just a spic-chic so yeah, art business as usual.

Some bigotries are more obvious than others. You know?