HAVANA (AFP).- Performance artist Tania Bruguera, detained for trying to stage an open mic event in Cuba, resigned Monday from the artists' union and returned an award given to her by the communist government.

The 46-year-old artist was detained twice last week along with 50 other dissidents as authorities moved to stop her show in Havana's Revolution Square.

Bruguera had organized the "participatory performance" for Cubans to share hopes and fears for their future and the island's.

But she has said the mass arrests ended up telling a different story.

"The government did the work for me," she told AFP during an interview Thursday. 

"They changed the meaning of the work, giving a lesson in intolerance... All they did was create chaos."

Bruguera, who divides her time between Cuba, the United States and France, now faces charges of holding a "performance aimed at inciting public disorder and resistance to the police."

She said she must remain on the island, because Cuban authorities confiscated her passport.

Monday, she quit the government-approved Union of Cuban Writers and Artists. And she returned to the Americas' only communist government an award she had won in 2002.

In a letter to deputy Culture minister Fernando Rojas, she said she could not "keep a recognition from or be part of cultural institutions which, instead of opening dialogue and a space for analysis...turn people into criminals, judge and put them on trial."




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