With the help of a local node administrator of SNET in Havana, Ernesto Oroza intervened this network with a piece titled “Si despierta un pájaro intercambian sus cabezas los jugadores” –which roughly translates into “if a bird wakes up, the players exchange their heads.” It is a quote from the poem Cielos del Sabbat (1960) by Cuban Writer and poet José Lezama Lima, written using the exquisite corpse method. The artist inserted a link to his project in SNET’s opening page. For a week, it directed users to another page where they could join an exquisite corpse poem game. Players were prompted to come up with one or two words that would add to the poem. This random and anonymous process was not only reflective of the nature of the network but also of the experience of collectiveness in Cuba. On the other hand, in a context where collective statements are only issued by official institutions, the piece symbolically became an alternative platform for freedom of expression.

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An antecedent of Oroza’s idea is The World’s First Collaborative Sentence (1994), a piece by American artist Douglas Davis who, amazed by the incipient possibilities of the Internet of the time, thought to engage people from all around the world in what came to be a very long, international sentence. In this sense, “Si despierta un pájaro...” brings the Cubans’ intranet experience very close to that in America and other developed countries twenty years ago while, at the same time, it is a comment on the dynamics of those places that fall out of the speedy highways of the World Wide Web today. The resulting poem was physically brought to the States and printed fragments of it are given away in the gallery for people in Miami to take home in a process inverse to that of the “mulas” –mules– who, surpassing the regulations of the two countries, manage enter goods from Miami to the Island; another piece of alternative creativity of the Cubans.