Dissident Spotlight: Carolina Barrero
Carolina Barrero is an art historian whose essays about the artistic philosophy and deep abstract reflection became concrete during the Cuba's 2021 protests.

In an essay on Medium, Carolina Barrero expounded upon the bygone days when mathematicians were also philosophers. She spends time on how widespread the study of Euclidean geometry was for Italian Renaissance artists.
Geometry wasn’t just a science. Barrero notes that Euclidean geometry gave artists the language to “think about form and representation in abstract terms.” Near the end of this section of the essay, Barrero writes:
“Artists’ contemplation of the qualities of beauty and art was intrinsically related to numerical relations. The different parts of a painting or a building were nothing if not related to the whole. Nothing was left alone; to be beautiful and true, a work of art needed to be a world of its own, a harmonic conversation of all the parts.”
Art and the ideas it can express aren’t limited to sacred geometries or larger questions about places in the universe. Art in all its forms can also promote ideas like freedom, democracy, and individual expression.
It’s an idea Barrero would see in modern practice as well as ancient theory.
Cuba’s Fight For Democracy
Fidel Castro may have died in 2016, but Cuba has gotten no closer to democracy in the years since. Castro’s successors, Raul Castro and Miguel Díaz-Canel, continued to use tyrannical methods to stifle freedom of speech and expression.
In 2018, Cuba passed Decree 349. Decree 349 required all artists to have their work — public or private — approved by the Ministry of Culture. The same decree allows the state to shut down exhibitions or performances if they violate other conditions the decree sets.
It enshrines the state’s right to repress artists into law.
In November 2020, a rapper named Denis Solis Gonzalez was arrested on charges of “contempt.” Gonzalez allegedly insulted a police officer, and his arrest set off a fierce resistance to the state’s crackdown on advocates for free expression.
One of those groups was N27, which Carolina Barrero joined.
Arrest and Exile
N27 was a group of journalists, writers, thinkers, artists, and other creatives who opposed Cuba’s crackdown on freedom of expression. It was formed in 2021 in response to Gonzalez’s arrest and others like it.
Barrero joined several of their rallies and was arrested at several of them, too. Her involvement led to harassment from the government, arrest, and house arrest.
A turning point came in January 2022. The Cuban regime threatened to prosecute the mothers of imprisoned protestors unless she stopped protesting and left Cuba.
She fled to Spain, where she still writes. Barrero also speaks in front of global audiences about the broken promises of the Cuban Revolution that brought Castro to power in the first place. Her talks detail the triumphant resistance of ordinary Cubans in the face of overwhelming political and military power.
Barrero ended her Medium essay bemoaning how mathematicians and philosophers have separated themselves into different camps. She ends her essay with this final thought:
“Only in the collision of multiple images of the world, will breakthroughs occur. Eager, more promiscuous minds flooded with metaphor, imagination and meaning will prove more fertile ground for such ideas to grow. For we know, as the late Mary Midgley wrote, that every time an anxious determination to reach a pole of total meaningless in science arises, such ‘efforts always end by expressing, not a vacuum of meaning but a different meaning, a different drama and not necessarily a better one.’”
It’s no wonder that creatives are such potent threats to dictators like Miguel Diaz-Canel.