Contemporary Art from Cuba:
Irony and Survival on the Utopian Island

(The entire catalogue with three essays in both English and Spanish and with abundant documentation of works of art, biographies of the artists, and an extensive bilbliography can be ordered via our catalog publication page.

Luz Brillante

Marilyn A. Zeitlin
curator of the exhibition

The work in this exhibition is made by artists who grew up in the Revolution. The oldest is 39, born the year before the victory of the Revolution on January 1, 1959, and the youngest is 24.¹ Of course, the references are frequently Cuban. And while it enriches the experience of the work to know some of the cultural and historical references, it would be a mistake to read these works simply as messages about Cuban reality. They are not journalism or propaganda. They are works of art and, for that reason, are multiple in reference and implication, and open-ended.

But for an outsider, the context of the work, contemporary Cuba, is riveting. And Cubans, too, talk politics and speculate on it constantly. Jokes are about politics. Food is political. So are the buses, electricity, gas, and water. While this exhibition is not intended to further any political position, political and historical references and anecdotes are included to offer one more perspective on the works. 

The artists in this exhibition are too young to have taken part in the initial struggle of the Revolution. They missed the years of idealistic sacrifice. They heard about these events throughout their lives, to the point of over-saturation. Those who have children see their offspring learn the names of Che and other heroes by the time that they are two or three. The artists, like many Cubans, are often cynical about or at least weary of the heroes in the school books and pictured in the ubiquitous carteles, whose noble deeds on behalf of the people are reiterated and on the State-run television stations and in Granma, the newspaper named for the boat on which Fidel Castro and his band of guerrillas sailed from Mexico to Cuba in 1956 to begin the battle to overthrow the dictatorship. Like Victory at Sea, documenting the naval battles of World War II played again and again throughout my own American childhood, these episodes are the patriotic mantras of the Revolution. 

The work spans from explicit reference to Cuba--- though always with wider implications--- to work that is both more personal or more universal. Three ideas resound again and again throughout the exhibition: the special condition of being an island; inventando or making do in a place where shortages are virtually normalized; and the rhetoric of history. Most of the work touches on more than one or even all of these tendencies. 

The special condition of being an island:
One day, a big, white yacht pulls into Havana harbor. It docks, and trucks arrive bringing food, beer, a big wedding cake. Then the guests come, and the band, playing salsa music, and finally, the bride and groom. With friends waving good-bye from the quay, the party boat moves off, into the bahia. Once the boat is away from the shore, the groom and his best man reach into the cake and pull out two machine guns, point them at the captain, and order him, "Al norte, capitán." "But I have no fuel, señores." They uncap a beer. It is diesel fuel.²

The story, apocryphal or not, is correct. Its fusion of the sea and a party, creativity and subterfuge are part of the Cuban modus vivendithat extend to the imagery and working methods of some contemporary Cuban artists. Multiple meanings are the rule rather than the exception in Cuba, a place in which everything that is also is a metaphor for an array of other things. Coding in multiple dimensions may be born of Afro-Cuban religion, in which each deity is associated with and worshipped in the guise of a Catholic saint. The pantheon, like that of Mahayana Buddhism or Catholicism, attempts to totalize, each deity associated with a color, a set of attributes, a kind of dish or bowl, and a realm. Or perhaps multiple readings are inhereht in a place with layers of time accumulated on every street, doorway, and building, so that association becomes a means of organizing and retaining experience both of the present and in historic and mythic time. 

The sea is a presence you constantly encounter in Havana. One of the most beautiful streets in the world, the Malecón, sweeps along the edge of Havana, crumbling mansions on one side and the sea on the other. The sea is a source of beauty and pleasure. Just below the wall that serves as the sofa of Havana children dive from coral rocks into the sea that is their front yard. The sea is the way into the world, but it is also the barrier. With its magnificent natural harbor, Havana is strategically placed in the currents of the Caribbean to have made it one of the most valued ports in the Spanish empire, which accounts, in part, for the stubborn resistance of Spain to relinquish "la isla siempre fiel" (the ever-faithful island) from its control. It was one of the most important slave markets in the New World. Slaves formed a labor force brought initially to work the sugar plantations. With the Africans came linguistic, religious, musical, and culinary traditions that have made Afro-Cuban culture a major strand in the fabric of Cuban life. 

Isolation in Cuba is reality and metaphor, a national condition imposed upon it and upon itself. The attempt by the U.S. to quarantine this socialist island in a capitalist sea has created a perverted relationship between the two countries. The U.S. trade embargo of Cuba³ has contributed to privation that in certain moments has had a grotesque impact on Cuban citizens. The United States, through persistent foreign policy pressures, has sought to isolate Cuba economically and politically, engineering its exclusion from the Organization of American States, for example, and threatening reprisals against other countries for trading with Cuba. 

Thirty years of Soviet patronage isolated the island further. Then, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union at the start of this decade, that isolation transmuted into "the special period in a time of peace." From 1990 to 1994, cruel shortages of essential commodities depressed the living standard of Cubans who endured long apagones, black-outs that would sometimes last for eighteen hours because the supply of petroleum, much of which had come from the Soviet Union, decreased precipitately. No fuel, no electricity. The bodegas, the State-run stores, could no longer fill the orders from the libreta, the ration card that is supposed to fulfill Cubans’ basic nutritional needs. 

Sandra Ramos makes prints, paintings, and sculpture that explore the island condition. In early work, she equated her own body with the island, so whatever her work reflects about the island may also be personal. Small, work suitcases the interior of which she paints are like mollusks that, when open, reveal beautiful, secret images of longing. In the series Migraciones II (Migrations II) (swimming under the stars), a deep blue covers the inner surface of a small valise, sea fusing with the night sky. Above, the stars are linked like a navigator’s chart, a tiny American flag at the apex. Below, a couple swims just beyond the wall of the Malecón, deliciously erotic, even among the mines that float around them. 

In the painting Acuarium (Aquarium), the artist draws fish as if one is viewing them through a window in a giant aquarium, each with the face of a friend who has left the island. The painting expresses her loss, but also suggests that the sea is just a fish tank, and one with a window in it. One lives in a fish bowl, however commodious. Beyond these interpretations, she draws a parallel to the idea of a painting as a window into a reality. 

In Auto-reconocimiento del pez I (Self-recognition of the Fish I), Ramos uses a self-portrait as the goddess in The Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli. Her head, hands, and feet are each anchored by a small aquarium. Each is filled with tiny furniture and live fish. She is born of the sea and is becoming part of the sea. Her body is depicted in mirror shapes, so that you, too, are part of her transformation. The tubes of the filtration system are like externalized arteries, as if it is no longer capable of existing without this life-support system. Like the aquarium of the painting, these fish tanks are watery little prisons. Her hands, feet, mind, and senses are captive. The rooms in the tanks are static, yet the live fish swim within the narrow confines of their circumscribed domains. It is inevitable from my perspective not to see this work as having a meaning beyond Cuba, to a feminist context--- the domestic as a limiting comfort zone--- and in an even larger sense, to the idea that we all function within limitations, whether self-imposed or from external circumstance. 

In the collage/drawing Los enigmas de vuelo (The Enigmas of Flight), Ramos turns into a bird, her head an appropriated image that stands for her youthful self. The enigmas of flight are not just the technical, physiological problems of flying. They are the complex factors in making the choice and finding the means to flee or, equally as challenging, to stay. 

Ramos incorporates the themes of making do and of revisiting history in her work. Renowned as an engraver, her etchings in this exhibition portray the young Sandra as a pionera (pioneer) in the school uniform of every Cuban child, with her red skirt, white blouse, and blue scarf. In La lección de la historia (The History Lesson), she obediently listens to her teacher present a discourse on the evils of capitalism. The teacher is Liborio, a mustachioed symbol of the Cuban people from the time of the Republic that spanned the first half of the twentieth century. A strange republic it was, too, with American troops occupying Havana in its earliest years (1899-1909) under the jurisdiction--- never ratified by Cuba, of course--- of the Platt Amendment.⁴ The goals of independence were never realized. Instead, the sugar industry was centralized into even fewer hands, "creating a landless agrarian proletariat of poor whites and mulattoes," economic dependency, and political domination by the United States.⁵ 

Liborio points to a placard with an image of capitalism in the form of an octopus bearing George Washington’s head. On the table before him is a yucca on which the word "history" appears. The image of Liborio and the yucca are appropriated from La Politica Cómica, a satirical periodical of the early years of the Republic. Below the image of Liborio is written, loosely translated, "Something hit us on our heads [la coyuca],/ The poor Cuban people are the Bobos⁶ de la Yuca."⁷ The message is received with skepticism by Sandra. Her classmate, another Bobo, is an image as familiar as Liborio himself, the character originated by Eduardo Abela.⁸ This Bobo takes it all in, a simpleton more than a victim. The lesson takes place in a framework--- literally--- of the American dollar. 

El fin de la inocencia (The End of Innocence) shows Sandra, now a young woman, lying down with the enemy. The nubile Sandra is contrasted to a paunchy George Washington. Again, bordered by the cartouches of U.S. currency, her decision parallels that of many young Cuban women, the jineteras⁹ who make a living off foreign men. She succumbs as a woman and an artist. 

The dollar on the street is the bait for dramatic shifts from Revolutionary ideals, including the commitment to eradicate the prostitution that was rampant in the bad old of the Batista dictatorship. This commitment was part of a broader principle to eliminate the inequality between the sexes. This goal was met, to a great extent, with women in positions of power in the government and a law requiring that domestic tasks be shared equally by husband and wife. 

El fin de la inocencia suggests that the hustlers, male and female, are really not so different from the rest of us, who finally, in one way or another, might compromise convictions to survive economically. The choice of the Cuban government in 1993, for example, to legalize the dollar as a unit of exchange on the island¹⁰ was part of a plan of economic recovery from the freefall of the special period. To admit this symbol of capitalism into the commerce of the island is to revise the lesson of history that Liborio worked so hard to teach. 

Also dealing with the implications of sea and island, and also conveying her personal feelings and a wry re-visioning of history, Jacqueline Brito makes paintings and drawings that often incorporate bits of mosaic from tile gleaned from the neighborhood in Centro Habana where she lives. In this neighborhood, many buildings have collapsed, leaving a rich supply of urban archaeological finds. Brito has an entire wall of tile fragments in the entrance to the family house. In the two paintings Adaptaciones (Adaptations), Brito paints in mosaic a foot and a hand, collaging fins onto them. Like Ramos, Brito suggests that this adaptation could have practical application in a water-locked country. 

In ETATIS.SUE.XX ("Made when I was 20 years old"), Brito paints a sailing vessel against a vivid sky. The immediate impression is of a pastiche of a romantic idealization. The palette is lopsided: brown and black, evoking the mood of the romantic painters. But as the ship approaches the lower part of the painting, the pictorial turns into paint, dripping to and off the edge. On a narrative level, the implication is a reinforcement of the fear of the conquistadors and the early sailors that in sailing to the New World, they might sail off the edge of the earth. The ships to which she makes reference are essential to the mechanism of colonialism, with its merchant fleet and lively slave trade. On another level, Brito deconstructs painting itself, dissolving illusion and reference into process, romanticism into modernism and, by unmasking its own logic, undercutsg modernism itself. 

Of course, it still is a painting of a ship at sea, and Brito says that it is, among other things, an expression of loneliness. It is both a cliché and a dissection of the cliché.

Kcho ¹¹ makes sculpture from natural materials and found objects, works that are extremely strong formally and also poignant in the way they demonstrate invention being used as a means of survival. The work can easily be mistaken as elegiac, and that alone. But to interpret the work in such a narrow way is a mistake. La regata (The Regatta) began a series of works in which he uses boats in a metonymy for those who left the island on makeshift rafts: the balseros. But this work is also about subterfuge and desperation beyond the Cuban situation. The works by Kcho in this exhibition are in continuity with this seminal work. 

While migration from the island has been ongoing, at certain moments of crisis the prohibition to leave has been lifted, resulting in concentrations of often desperate departures. The first such concentration occurred shortly after the Revolution, when many Cuban professionals and people of means left, most of them going to Miami to build the second-largest community of Cubans outside the island. Another major exodus occurred in 1980 with the departure of the Marielitos. Following a build-up of people in the Peruvian embassy demanding visas, the situation drew another crowd outside the embassy taunting those who were abandoning the country. In response, the Cuban government announced that it would not prevent departure from Mariel to Florida by boat of anyone who wanted to leave. The estimate is that 28,000 left in this manner.¹²

But in 1994, the loathing and derision cast upon those who left in the 80s was absent. A very different reaction occurred during the special period. The departures, which began earlier, peaked in 1994, when the phenomenon earned the name "crisis of the balseros." Following Castro’s announcement that no boat leaving Cuba would be impeded, an estimated 20,000 Cubans in the first month alone put out on flimsy craft made from inner tubes and whatever materials could be scraped together.¹³  Nowhere are there reliable estimates of the number who died. 

Many artists were moved by the plight of the balseros. Kcho drew on his own experience as an island dweller--- he comes from the smaller Isla de Juventud off the south coast of the main island--- and on the resources of found objects from water-logged quays and abandoned boats. In Para olvidar (In Order to Forget), Kcho makes a richer statement, suggesting multiple meanings. The homemade kayak suggests a reference to "primitive" societies, but at the same time to paddling for the fun of it. The fiber glass shell is like a parchment skin, analogizing the boat with the body. Through the sea of beer bottles, he suggests that escape can take two forms: putting out to sea with a frail hope of survival, or escape through oblivion. 

With the three works in the exhibition from the series Todo cambia (Everything Changes), Kcho continues his homage to the balseros. Seeing them, one thinks of finding these mud-coated vessels, with all that they tell us about the fate of the passengers. He dignifies the lowly through the beauty of form. He has built structures from metal mesh and coated them with a pinkish mud. The mud is the color of flesh. It dries and cracks and falls off the armature. The works are made to deteriorate. They remind us of drowned bodies, bloated and partially consumed, but beyond this specific reference they are about the vulnerability we all suffer. 

Were it not for the elegance of the work, so replete with nostalgia, these works could be criticized as dangerously close to sentimental. It is only when one sees them as possibly the detritus of failed attempts to flee and in the larger context as stand-ins for the body itself that one sees them as tragic monuments. 

Constructing and exploring an inner world, Carlos Estévez finds a parallel universe between the creatures of the natural world and the machines made by human beings. In the series of drawings The Living World, Estévez balances these two worlds. Sometimes the mechanical is dominant; in other examples, the natural is more prominent. In El mundo invisible (The Invisible World) a radar unit is analogized with a bat, both adept at detecting the unseen. 

In this work, Estévez expresses a reverence for and close observation of the things of nature and a fascination with machinal schema. In other works, he examines the marvelous mechanics of the human anatomy, analogizing them to the city or to mechanisms. Estévez lives within steps both from the bay and from El Templete and the Plaza de Armas, the epicenter of the historical city. This location also puts him in the heart of mercantile, military, and tourist Havana. The front door to his house is cheek by jowl with the back door of the recently restored Hotel Santa Isabel.¹⁴Estévez loves the old city, and in fact, The Living World is a reflection of his feeling about old things, especially those that one lives with and touches over many years. He says that these things, inanimate objects, become part of the organism that is each of our lives. For him, the decrepitude of Habana Vieja is not the foreground that he sees. Instead, it is the sense that all the things one sees and handles there are experienced and have been experienced by many people, adding a patina of time and human touch to everything. 

For the 1996 Sexta Bienal de La Habana, Estévez made a remarkable installation, Donde sueño el demiurgo (Where the Demiurge Sleeps).¹⁵ In a room in the Fortaleza de la Cabaña, the military stronghold said to be the largest in the Spanish empire, Estévez made a cell that combined objects that he had made with others that he had gleaned from abandoned or collapsed buildings in the old city. He transplanted an entire makeshift kitchen, including a fogón. This homemade stove burns luz brillante, the Cuban word for kerosene. The stove is dangerous to use, requiring the use of alcohol over an open flame to start the fire. The fumes leave an oily, black stain on the walls, and they are toxic. 

In the hands of Estévez, the fogón and luz brillante convey poverty and improvisation for survival. But they also clearly convey transcendence of the limits of materiality. Luz brillante becomes a brilliant light.

Other elements of the cell augment the sense of an encapsulated life, much like the lives in the suitcases made by Sandra Ramos. This room is the entire home of its occupant. It is also the mind. It has a bed over which hovers a winged figure with a candle burning in its heart cavity. On the adjacent wall are Estévez’s own drawings and things he has saved over the years. On another wall, floor to ceiling, are hand puppets depicting artists, writers, philosophers, and religious leaders from throughout world history. Recognizable are the Buddha, Mahatma Gandhi, and Charlie Chaplin. The objects on all three walls seem like projections from the mind of the absent occupant. Like the human beings implied but not included in Kcho’s mud works, the installation implies and invites human presence. In a fourth corner is the puppet theater and opposite it, an astronomical chart. The works brings together the macrocosm and the personal. 

The demiurge who might inhabit this space is much like Saint Jerome, who sought solitude in the desert, and spending a day in the installation with Estévez, he seemed very much at home there. 

Nothing in this city is simple, so to seek a second reading of any code is to follow a logic that is as embedded in the culture as is santería. Another artist who draws her imagery from such a reading of the city is Yamilys Brito. Like Estévez, but with a subtle tongue-in-cheek humor, Brito finds subtext in the names of the streets of Centro Habana. She demonstrates in her working methods that inventiveness the I see threading its way through much of the work in the exhibition. She uses woodcut and linocut, collaging elements over textured surfaces taken from rubbings. She uses the leather covers of old books, the carved back of a chair, or an alligator skin. These are a kind of camouflage that unifies the pieces with the background texture of Brito’s environment. In Bajo la piel (Under the Skin), the alligator skin is the background. Everyone knows that the alligator is the island, linked by similarity in shape. The images collaged on this surface are inspired by street names which she "deep-reads" for original meanings and for occult implications. For example, Figuras street suggests two opposing figures: the Monument to the Revolution and, waving her lantern above the Havana skyline, the Statue of Liberty. The two are visually joined by red rays of sound waves, both attracted and repelled by one another. 

In another panel, Brito explores the meaning of the street name Mercaderes (Merchants). The name is a reminder that Havana was a major commercial center throughout most of its history. Now, a disembodied hand proffers Havana itself. Many of the images in the piece depict pressure. A hot sun presses down in Gloria (Glory). In Prensa (Press), Brito shows a printing press bearing down on two heads. Under the charm of these images lurks some real anxiety. 

Throughout this visually delightful work are oblique, ingeniously disguised observations and critiques of political and economic realities. The meanings in her work lie under the skin of beautiful and playful art.

Secrets are the subject of the work of Belkis Ayón, another innovative printmaker. Ayón, like many of her colleagues, began to work with found materials as much by necessity as by choice. She builds the printing surface by gluing materials onto cardboard. With palm leaves, seaweed, and cut cardboard, she constructs the image through contrasts of textures. The matrix is often very large. She has recently exceeded the size limitations of the cardboard she can find, so she has begun making images with multiple sheets, as in La Cena (The Dinner, referencing the Last Supper). These collagraphs are then printed in shades of black, often rich as velvet. The scale and the power of the black and white images takes these works over the barrier to monumentality that often limits prints. 

Ayón’s images evoke the mythology of the Abakuá, one of the African religious groups that survive in Cuba nearly intact.¹⁶ Her approach also critiques the role circumscribed for women in that religious tradition. The Abakuá is an all-male secret society. Ayón examines the story of Sikán, a woman who learned the secrets from a fish in the river, and then revealed them. The price for her betrayal was death. The story resonates with Christian iconography, which is no surprise since the Afro-Cuban religions survived by impersonating Christianity. The story, with Sikán as the protagonist, recalls the sacrifice of Christ, but with a woman at the center. 

The Yoruba santería gods correspond to saints of the Christian pantheon. For example, Changó, the god of war, fire, and thunder, is identified with Santa Barbara. The slaves torn from Africa continued to worship their own deities and to practice their own rituals through this subterfuge. It could be said that the Afro-Cuban saved Catholicism in Cuba, taking the religion of the Europeans underground with the African practices during the time that religion was discouraged by the Revolution. 

Ayón chooses not to depict the Abakuá in their exotic costumes and masks, performing their colorful ceremonies. Instead she has created a rich but restrained set of images, pared down to black and white and with selective use of patterns. She eliminates the costumed middle man. Her figures stand not for the mortals who personify the deities but for the deities themselves, and in looking at the work, one feels that the vision is a penetrating one. 

The figures loom large in the composition, with mobility and tension conveyed through the bodies and the arrangement of them. The figures are arrayed so that they peer out of the frame, frontally, to include us. 

Beyond the Cuban references, the work explores the place of women in the sanctums of power, and the burden on those who learn the secrets. It posits a rich parallel world beyond ordinary perception. 

Luís Gómez is perhaps the artist in the exhibition whose work seems closest to that of European and American artists. It is the least explicit in reference to Cuba, or to anywhere else. 
Gómez tells me his daily work schedule in Havana. First, he repairs something in the house. I picture the pile of sand and stones that often graces the entrance of a home on the island, materials for fighting the entropy that hangs like a curtain over all in the country save the newest tourist hotels. After he has shored up one deteriorating part of his home in Cojímar, the small fishing village where Ernest Hemingway kept his boat, Luís tells me, "Then I look for food for my family." He does not mean that he goes shopping. The chosen verb is synonymous with "seek." After he helps his wife make lunch for themselves and their twin daughters, he begins his work day as an artist.

And from this rigorous life comes work of an elegant precision. He attempts to convey through objects and installations the feelings and thoughts in himself that are beyond words. Gómez is engaged in a practice that confronts universal questions about the self and spirituality, about natural forces. His images are pared to simplicity, within which he sometimes lavishes exquisite detail. The installation made for this exhibition, Desierto (Desert), attempts to convey the visionary possibilities of the desert. But rather than using a saturation of light, he has lined a darkened room with a silk curtain painted with reflective beads sprinkled into the paint. Viewers put on hats with lights attached to them, illuminating and discovering the drawing bit by bit as they move through the room. The images are doubled, visible by reflection and by the shadows they cast on the wall. They are put into motion as the light sources move, with the shadows half hidden by the curtain trailing behind the reflective image. Like a huge beaded shawl, the work suggests a kata, the Buddhist scarf used to greet, thank, or bless. 

Gómez is a kind of instinctive Buddhist, seeking to express something quite probably inexpressible, seeking to break through the limitations of art and language and body that bar him from conveying something he can sometimes tap into in himself, some experience that gives at least a momentary glimpse into the nature of being beyond material, intellectual and emotional planes. In this regard, he has as much in common with the American artist Bill Viola, for example, as he does with many of his Cuban colleagues, and with the mystics. 

In discussing how the pressures of life in present-day Cuba create an environment that assists him in discarding the trivial, allowing him a kind of improbable freedom. To observe him move between introspection to intense activity, you could conclude that the act of art-making, not just the conceptualization nor the final product, is his way of letting go, the source of his strength and delight, and his offering. 

Gómez does not allow himself to create a style, and when he feels that the work edges too close to pretension, he undercuts himself. Instead of making recognizable work, he constantly re-creates himself as an artist. He looks back on his influences and his own earlier work, and occasionally debunks it. He was part of a group at the Instituto Superior de Arte, the elite art school where all but two of the artists in this exhibition were trained. There they were awakened to non-European models and cultural sources, directing their interests to their own internal life, to ritual, and to the concept of art-making not as product but as process--- but not physical process so much as psychic process. For Gómez, brought up in a family of santería practitioners, he is an initiate. But his adolescent rebellion was, in part, against this tradition. Yet he never abandoned it; he simply added Western rational analytic thinking to his intellectual bag of tricks. 

Gómez is making a work that in part is a homage to Joseph Beuys. The connections to Gómez’s other work are strong--- investigation into the power of natural forces, a stripped down simplicity of image that lends itself to elegance, religious and ritual association. Yet he tells me that the work "is a kind of a joke." He reminds me that for Beuys, warmth was the source of life. "But for us Cubans, heat is like death." So he both uses and teases the Beuys canon. For Gómez, the trickster in him--- a trace of the orisha Elegguá¹⁷--- prevents him from falling into two traps: that of repeating himself and that of taking himself too seriously. 

Inventando 

Gómez’s untrammeled approach to materials is in keeping with the concept of inventando. On a practical level, it manifests itself in the creation of new solutions to problems. It is a strategy for survival seen everywhere as parts for cars become collectors’ items and the need to make something that is no longer available demands ingenuity on a daily basis. When I recite the travails of trying to manage the technical aspects of the exhibition, with every instance of shipping requiring a different solution, Gómez tells me, "It is good training." "Training for what?" I ask. "For being a Cuban." Los Carpinteros, in a conversation in their studio, tell me that this constant need to solve problems, to make parts to keep a machine functional, to figure out how to get from one place to another, to remain productive and positive in spite of the need to clear hurdles with every step, hones the mind and nurtures creativity that they can apply to their work as artists. 

Inventando here refers to recycling in its highest form: new life for materials, parts, and ideas. In nearly every case, the artists in this exhibition improvise with materials. Yamilys Brito uses 45 RPM records as the backing of round pieces in her installations. Abel Barroso uses cedar panels from old armoires to carve the matrix of his prints. Los Carpinteros make work about the decay of the infrastructure in part as evidence of a deeper decay. Toirac reuses old books and images in his analysis of history and power. Tonel examines old ideas to see if they are still alive. 

At every turn, you see this recycling process at street level in Cuba. A Soviet washing machine, designed with the wash and spin cycles in separate tubs, now houses a stripling tree in the defunct spin side. The fotingos¹⁸ run with parts from automobiles from all over the world: Czechoslovakian windshield wipers in a 1958 Nash convertible are more typical than exceptional. Sometimes parts are cast on the model of the old one. Casting and recasting metal to replace parts serves in a place where replacements are unobtainable. 

The artist-king of inventando is René Francisco. His installation for the Sexta Bienal de La Habana in 1997¹⁹ was a Taller de Reparaciones (Repair Workshop). One entered a cyclone-fence gate to witness an array of inventions that hybridized automobile parts with telephones and other improbable fusions. The room, like the garage of an alchemist, was animated by machines that would suddenly begin to move or emit a ring or a beep. The irrationality made it a palace of pure invention, with function imbedded in the memory through parts re-used. Malfunction liberates the objects from mere utility. 

For this exhibition, Francisco has made a new work in a series using the image of a well (pozo). Made from a tractor tire, some metal parts, and empty toothpaste tubes set in a space with walls covered with drawings, Tubo Sutra demonstrates the creative process on at least two levels. First, the work is made from nothing--- things that are discarded as no longer useful Used up. Second, the toothpaste tubes are shaped into figures performing the act of creation--- a spoof of the Kama Sutra. The work reflects an important aspect of Cuban life, the ubiquity of sexuality. While the Revolution made equality between the sexes law, it did not interfere with the undercurrent of eroticism. Women on the street, regardless of age or body type, dress and walk to display their charms. This is not restricted to the jineteras. Sexual tourism is apparent in the tourist areas, but for most Cubans, it seems, sexuality is one of the few areas in which the Revolution has not attempted to exert its control. It is free, in many senses. This is a marked cultural difference from what we experience in American life, where sexuality is routinely exploited to sell liquor or cars but is hotly [sic] contested when the discussion is of abortion, AIDS, censorship of the arts, or the peccadilloes of public officials. 

Abel Barroso also equates artistic creation with the act of procreation. He has taken the tradition of woodcut prints and turned it into a wholly new form. He carves wood panels that are at once the matrix for a print and a part of a three-dimensional object. Sometimes he takes a ready-made wooden object and carves and prints from it as in the installation The Rush for Free Land. Barroso places a map of Cuba at the end of a room with two lines of rocking horses that are cantering over the terrain toward the map. Like Kcho’s boats in Regata, the objects and their placement tell the entire story. The work, in most cases, exists as three-dimensional object and as print. 

This work echoes the query often voiced by foreigners who see economic opportunity everywhere in Cuba: undeveloped beaches, a populace hungry for goods, people well educated and eager for work. "Why can’t I buy in?" They see exploitation waiting to happen. They want to grab Cuban land, which they think is free because a corporation has not yet built its Latin American headquarters on it. The joint ventures that bring foreign investment to Cuba are a mixed blessing. They inject capital and create jobs, but they also re-invigorate class stratification, a social pattern that the Revolution fought to eliminate. 

Beyond the Cuban interpretation, Barroso’s work is about desire. Sueños no caen solos (Dreams Do Not Drop Out of Thin Air) consists of five small benches carved with images of things that are the object of longing. One shows a buried treasure; another, an artist as a fisherman with a big fish/ collector on the line. Another shows a swimming pool with a sexy woman perched on its edge. Above the benches, on the wall, are other desirable things carved in wood: a credit card, a Walkman. Sticks cut from trees are provided for the climbing. 

This piece, like much of Barroso’s work, has the feeling of a game or toy village. But the meaning sears into the contemporary condition of privation in Cuba. Perhaps no one is starving, but many are hungry, if not for food, then for things and opportunities. Perhaps as revolutionary slogans wear thinner and thinner, bearing a life without a single luxury becomes less a matter of pride and becomes just plain tiresome. When hope promised that sacrifice would bring equality and justice, it was worthwhile. Now, fewer and fewer believe in a future in which the utopian promises will be fulfilled. Will venceremos ²⁰ be in the future tense forever, always just beyond the horizon? 

Barroso addresses this slogan and the price of victory in Vencerometro (Device for Measuring Victory). A furnace with a meter is fed by cutting off pieces from the opposite end of the platform on which it stands. This procedure would press the person feeding the furnace increasingly close to the fire. The piece can be read as implying that the system of fueling the effort of venceremos is consuming resources and bringing the people who strive for it closer and closer to conflagration. Toward what end? Can those who feed it survive the process? The work can be read in terms of any system that, like Saturn, devours its young. 

For the artists of this generation, ethical dilemmas loom large. They watched their teachers, one after another, go into exile. They live in a different time, one in which neither the artists nor Cuban government are so confrontational. Instead, the artists of this generation must face the possibility of success: at home, and in material terms. Regardless of how they regard socialism, they were brought up in an educational system that taught that sacrifice for the collective good was the ideal, and that lust or material wealth, the hallmark of the moral vacuity of capitalism, was succumbing to the enemy. So now, with financial rewards within reach, they calculate and evaluate the price they will pay for that success. 

Barroso’s Sueños no caen solos means several things in the context of this moral dilemma. First, it reflects the adage that our mothers taught us that success does not grow on trees, and if you want it, you had best be prepared to work. Work never frightened a Cuban artist. But the piece also suggests that reaching one’s dreams does not necessarily come without conditions, that is, without some accompanying undesirable by-products. 

The first and most frightening of these is the threat that the artists see to the integrity of the work. This is voiced by nearly all of them. One artist talks of the temptation to make again the same installation that he knows is successful rather than experimenting with a new work in order to be sure of having a successful exhibition in Europe. Others talk of the fear that being away from Cuba will cut them off from the source of their inspiration and from the place and culture that gives their lives meaning. 

Success often means long stints away from the family. The person left behind must fight entropy and find food alone. Meanwhile the artist, even while experiencing homesickness, has the stimulus from access to information, materials, new friends and experiences. But with no market in Cuba, they must travel to support the family. 

Except, perhaps, for the absence of a domestic market for their work, the artists are not harmed by the inverted socio-economic structure in Cuba today in which engineers, doctors, and lawyers work for State salaries. Many leave these professions despite the education that is wasted when they do. At the top are those in touch with the tourist industry, both in legitimate and illegitimate service. Between are people working in the joint ventures. These foreign-owned businesses employ Cubans, paying the government in hard currency, which in turn pays the Cubans in pesos. But the joint ventures, like government jobs, offer lucrative opportunities for participation in the black market. 

The artists live relatively well on this scale. Trained as artists at the expense of the State for as long as twelve years, they survive, legally, doing what they were trained and love to do. The government recognizes their excellence, the positive image of Cuba they present to the larger world, and the hard currency that they bring home. Unlike American artists, who stand a small chance of making a living from their work, these artists live from their work. They travel extensively, often on fellowships, with ongoing relationships in Europe, Canada, and Latin America. The artists in this generation work with little interference from censorship. They have dollars, which gives them spending power where there are things to buy. 

In Cuba, there are shortages, and there are not. Eggs, for example, may not be available in the State-run bodegas, but they can be purchased from vendedoras on the street. The Egg Lady in our neighborhood in Boyeros is a big black matron. I first noticed her because of her dignified gait. She walks, well, as if on eggs. She murmurs the name of the product she is selling as she passes you on the sidewalk, or she may rap on your gate. She then draws eggs from her hair, from between her breasts, from her blouse. 

Why is this sale semi-clandestine? Because she raises chickens on the quiet, on the balcony of her apartment, and does not pay the requisite taxes to be a vendor. 

Another vendor is El Médico del Video, an oblique homage to Manolín, the singer known as El Médico de la Salsa. The video man goes door to door with pirated copies of American movies on video tape taken from the television. The vendor is a doctor, but he cannot survive on a doctor’s pay. 

Food is obtained in three ways in Cuba. The bodega supplies the commodities to which each Cuban is entitled on his ration card--- when these are available. On a typical day in June of 1998, the bodega can fill the allotment for rice and beans and half the allotment for coffee. About six ponds of rice per person per month equals less than half a cup of rice per day. 

If you have dollars, you can shop at the diplo-mercado or one of the new Tiendas Panamericanas throughout Havana. These are similar to American supermarkets, with prices similar if not higher than American prices. If you live on a state salary, you do not do much shopping here. 

The third source is the black market. It does not exist in any place; it is everywhere, and it comes to you. You can buy lobster--- prohibited in Cuba except in the tourist restaurants--- a ham, milk, a computer. I price an IBM basic computer with monitor and printer, and it is $800. If I want different peripherals, it may take a week to locate them. Of course, all of this is contraband, almost certainly stolen from a joint venture. When I ask, facetiously, whether it comes with a warranty, the enterprising vendedor earnestly assures me that it does, for one year. 

It works, this peculiar economy, with one layer above ground, the bodega, where one pays in the national currency; the dollar stores, bridging legitimate and illegitimate since much of what is earned in dollars is illegally begotten; and the black market, in all its intricacy. It is part of La Doble Vida (The Double Life) that Yamilys Brito refers to in her work with that title. It is inventando practiced every day. 

The Rhetoric of History 

The Cuban artists in this exhibition, regardless of what they privately think about the state of their country, are proud to be engaged in the historical process that the Revolution represents. Abel Barroso, in a series of what he calls cuckoo clocks, in progress at this writing, suggests ways out of the economic and moral callejon sin salida (dead-end street). For example, he looks back into Cuban history to see how money was made in the past. He makes a sugar ingenio, the traditional mill run on wood and slavery, with a little mechanized train with cars brimming with black sugar and chopped dollars. Like Jonathan Swift in A Modest Proposal, which recommends as the solution to the Irish problem that Irish babies be eaten, simultaneously alleviating the food shortage and reducing the population, Barroso merrily suggests a return to slavery as a palliative for the Cuban economy. 

In another of his insidiously appealing cuckoo clocks, Barroso constructs the Hotel Amistad (Friendship Hotel). Circulating past the doorway are a tourist and a sirena (mermaid). Like the sirens that entice Ulysses, Cuba’s sirenas have tempted other men traveling home to change the course of their ship. The amistad of the hotel’s name is another of Barroso’s solutions for Cuba’s economic ills, one already in production. In these new works, Barroso reviews the seven deadly sins of revolutionary history, suggesting wacky proposals, perhaps to underscore the lack of reasonable ones. 

Fernando Rodríguez, too, takes the gap between the idealized truth and experienced reality and makes it the content of his work. The work is amusing, but on another level it is critical, since it vocalizes the gap betwen the goals of the Revolution and the current shortfall in attaining them. He has recently embarked upon a new series of works that reflect upon collective life. He continues to work with his fictive collaborator Francisco de la Cal, a guajiro (peasant) who was struck blind shortly after the triumph of the Revolution. Francisco knows the Revolution as a government made up of the heroes of the Sierra Maestra, selfless, high-minded revolutionaries such as Che Guevara or Camilo Cienfuegos.²¹ In Pa’ Cuba (For Cuba), Francisco leads a trail of donations for Cuba. The cargo, all carved in wood and painted, is a list of all the things that Cubans lack since the beginning of the special period, both necessities and objects of longing. It includes petroleum, condoms, a light bulb, paint brushes, tooth paste, soap, a Walkman, aspirin, Tampax. When the work is shown, members of the audience often add to the cargo with real donations. 

Like Abel Barroso, Rodríguez can articulate much about the Cuban reality because the work is appealingly toy-like. And it is Francisco who is the front man. 

In this exhibition are two drawings and an installation from the series about collective life. For La java ²² colectiva (The Collective Shopping Bag), we see the project drawing and the realized installation. This is a pattern frequently seen among these artists, all of whom draw with skill and imagination. It is a vital part of their training, and functions as a means of visual thinking. In this work, Rodríguez reflects on the situation of obtaining food that is so complex in Cuba. In the ideal Cuba, the Plan Jaba, the government plan to meet the basic nutritional necessities of every Cuban, the jaba would be full. One could say that when socialism came, it was not the riches of Cuba that were collectivized, but its poverty. Rodríguez pays homage to the ideal of sharing the wealth and the food, but also demonstrates the frustrations in realizing such an ideal. 

In the drawing El secreto colectivo (The Collective Secret), Rodríguez goes deeper. The image is of a series of heads linked by a tube through their ears. Everyone knows, but it is still a secret. Can a secret known by everyone still be a secret? The meaning of the work is self-explanatory. It is the meaning of much of the work in this exhibition, as is its strategy of ironic humor. 

The rhetoric of history glorifies sacrifice. "To die for the fatherland/ is to live," from the Cuban national anthem, is the kind of Orwellian double-speak that could induce suicide. In Estadistica from the series Memoria de la postguerra, Tania Bruguera has woven a huge flag from the hair of her friends. Like the works about collective life by Rodríguez, it demonstrates shared sacrifice. How much does one give up to remain part of that collective society? And can one exist outside of it? 

To cut one’s hair recalls mythology of many sorts: Samson’s haircut left him powerless while Joan of Arc’s made a man out of her, and a soldier. Traditionally, to cut her hair is a sacrifice of a woman’s beauty or an act of self-abnegation. Shaving their heads stigmatized women who collaborated with the Germans. In all these cases, hair is related to power, gender identity, and sacrifice. 

The weaving of the hair into the flag unifies many people in sacrifice for their country. Or rather, for a symbol of their country. 

The similarity of the Cuban and U.S. flags is part of the irony of a work by Osvaldo Yero, Sueño de lo americano (Dreaming of Things American). Yero’s earlier work uses the kitsch cast plaster objects such as the plaster fruit that one might see ornamenting a Cuban kitchen, or those later versions made to celebrate patriotism. He used Russian ones during the Soviet era, always twisting the ready-mades slightly. Later he began to parody these objects by casting his own. In this work, against a wallpaper flag with stars and stripes, red, white, and blue, he takes clichés of Cuban and American culture and draws them together. For example, Marilyn Monroe, as Andy Warhol paints her, is dressed as a miliciana (woman soldier). The central portrait, plaster painted silver, resembles Lenin in profile, but in fact is the artist’s self-portrait. Fast food logos from both countries are merged. The work expresses the projection of American things onto Cuban, a longing that is not without a twist, since the objects of longing are trivial, suggesting both that Cubans are seduced by these superficial goodies and that all that the United States has to offer is material, silly, and expendable, at that. But the longing is there, nonetheless, Yero purports. 

This exhibition is of artists currently living and working in Cuba. During the two and one-half years that the curatorial work was in progress, Yero went to Canada on a fellowship and married there. The possibility of making such a move is always present, and the other artists are watching Yero to see how his work evolves outside the island. They will have a chance to do so since this exhibition includes a major work that Yero made in Banff. 

Sea of Tears marks a major departure in Yero’s work. First, it no longer uses the kitsch plaster that is a Cuba-specific reference and one that links his work to popular art. It is consists of 750 porcelain cast hands of Cuban artists. It does not have Yero’s characteristic humor. It is an elegy to those who have left. Like Sandra Ramos’s painting Acuarium (Aquarium), it is both a salute to the artists of Cuba and about loss. In Spanish, one can speak of a mar de (sea of) something to express a large quantity. So in this work, Yero evokes a large quantity of tears. But he also describes the sea as something made from tears, a receptacle for sadness. 

Esterio Segura explores the three sources of his own ethnicity: Spanish, African, and Chinese. The Chinese came to Cuba to replace the diminishing labor force as slavery diminished first through manumission or coartación, two methods by which slaves could buy their freedom, and later, in 1851, with Emancipation. By 1866, over 100,000 Chinese had been imported.²³

Like Osvaldo Yero, Segura mines the kitsch imagery of popular culture. Two works in this exhibition are porcelain figurines that parody the knickknacks from Chinatown anywhere. In Karl Marx Foundation Segura combines a double appropriation, from Chinese popular religion and from the socialist pantheon, hybridizing the Chinese god of happiness and prosperity with the father of socialist ideology. Riding astride a tank, Marx prefigures the recent visit by the Pope to Cuba. Segura offers to revitalize manifestaciones (demonstrations) in Cuba by bringing Marx to the people, this time bringing prosperity. He also cheers up a somewhat discredited Marx by putting him on a carnival float. His efforts turn the dignified thinker into a kind of dour Santa Claus in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.²⁴

Tonel (Antonio Eligio Fernández) crosses high art with popular iconography in his installations, drawings, and paintings. He has studied and written about Chago,²⁵ an artist whose work places him astride the identities of political cartoonist and artist, perhaps somewhere between José Guadalupe Posada²⁶ and R. Crumb.²⁷ Chago fought in the Sierra Maestra (equivalent in revolutionary Cuba to arriving on the Mayflower), working as a map maker, bomb maker, and song writer for the rebel army. Tonel admires Chago, and uses him, to some extent, as a model, of style and content. 

Tonel has lampooned the Cuban situation and Marxist classics in a painting titled Lenin,qué hacer?, translatable as "What is to be done?" the title of a virtually unreadable work by Lenin. Tonel paints a beach with European beach-bunnies. In the background, a bust of Lenin languishes, forgotten in the lunge toward tourism. The work bids a farewell to the Communist ideologue, and comments on tourist apartheid. The exclusion of Cubans from tourist beaches and hotels also bars Lenin, or the ideology that he codified. 

Chago has a central figure, Salomón, who corresponds to the recurrent self-portrait in Tonel’s work. This self-portrait is a familiar figure that guides us through Tonel’s work, someone with whom the viewer can identify. Tonel can be ruthless with this fellow, using him to express sexual anxiety, or vomiting a green effluvium that forms a puddle at his feet in the shape of the island. Sometimes, though, he treats him(self) to an opportunity to fulfill a fantasy, as a stand-in for Marx or as the thinker’s conversational partner. 

Tonel often posits himself in the place of his heroes. In the installation Self-Portrait of an Organic Intellectual(Homage to Gramsci, ²⁸ Tonel entertains the possibility of fulfilling this role himself, with a place among the intelligentsia--- often a term of derision in revolutionary parlance--- and yet still linked with workers. This is a yearning many who work in cultural areas share: to find a cultural practice that breaks through the elitism that so often adheres to the arts, but to do so without restricting creativity. Can there be a people’s art that is still uncompromising? ²⁹ By elevating cartoon to high art and making complex content accessible, Tonel may indeed have found a way to be Gramsci’s organic intellectual. 

Pedro Alvarez is a painter who appropriates and combines images of layers of history, from the colonial period, nineteen-century, 1950s, and Revolutionary eras. The paintings are, on the surface, clever. The anachronistic juxtapositions, nostalgic references, and ingenious congruencies are engaging. But these paintings are much more than clever. The content is about Revolutionary ideals, and sometimes ideals that have roots in earlier efforts to create equality and justice. A frequent subject is the investigation of racism and its persistence. One of the challenges of the Revolution was to eradicate racism and, to a significant extent, that is one of its triumphs. The literacy campaigns of the sixties and seventies (I remember the little jingles on the radio from 1978 that exhorted, "Let us all reach a sixth-grade level") and excellent, free education for all were instrumental in erasing racial barriers in the workplace, politics, and in the social sphere. 

Alvarez deconstructs the present by lifting layers of the past to the surface, paying homage both to the high-falutin phrases proclaiming liberty from both the eras of Independence (won in 1898 --- briefly) and Revolution. He juxtaposes the heroic and the maudlin, revealing the devolution of the heroic into mechanical, empty repetition. He conflates the nineteenth-century costumbrista paintings of Victor Landaluze and Federico Miahle with the illustration style of Norman Rockwell, their American kitsch counterpart. He re-draws the caricatures of Americans drinking Coca-Cola, adorable blond Boy Scouts in toy cars, or gas-guzzling cars of the Fifties in compositions with patronizing portrayals of blacks as childlike, sensuous, and, of course, compliant. 

For example, before a background of the Capitolio in Havana, a member of the African secret society of the Abakuá washes the windshield of a fin-laden car. The degradation of this member of the Afro-Cuban all-male secret society, bedecked in his traditional costume, tells us what Alvarez sees as the current level of progress in eradicating racism. Further, it corresponds to a level of contemporary Cuban reality, in which the economy offers jobs that are legal, dignified, and adequately paid to only a small portion of the population. 

Alvarez makes these paintings with a surface that snags the eye. It is never slick. Instead, he problematizes the illustration style, undermining it to keep the work from being about facility. He does not want to please or amuse us too easily, nor to win our praise. 

In High, Low, Left and Right. Homenaje a la revolución francesa (Homage to the French Revolution), Alvarez sequences three panels painted in monochrome red, white, and blue, the colors of the flags of France, Cuba, and the United States, three countries that underwent popular revolutions to overturn oligarchies. The images on each are from popular magazines of the Fifties. They depict modern interiors: a living room, dining room, and bedroom. In the editions of Bohemia, ³⁰ for example, that were published immediately after the victory of the Revolution, capitalist advertisements still survive interleafed with the often gruesome reportage of revolutionary battles and heroism. In the central panel, an image of Liberty from a cigar box lithograph stands, as if floating, surrounded by all that furniture, surprised to find herself in the midst of these bourgeoise trappings. The figure is a dwarf in this setting. After all the sacrifices, the carnage of war, the guillotine, are these the fruits of revolution----any revolution--- in the end? 

The paintings of Alvarez parody the "high" intentions of epic painting and the "low," meaning popular, films such as "Gone With the Wind" (1934) in which happy slaves are devoted to their masters even after emancipation. Toirac suggests the inspiration from Abel Gance’s silent epic "Napoleon" (1927) in reference to High, Low, Left and Right. It is a film that still upholds a notion of heroism, an idea that in our time seems attractive and impossible in anything but the most provisional way. Alvarez duplicates Gance’s wide screen ³¹ and his use of washes of color over black and white. By equating his notion of revolution with that of Gance’s view of the French Revolution, Alvarez creates a strategy to unveil the differential between grand gestures and grandiose promises and the impoverished level of realization. Alvarez’s paintings are anti-epics. 

Discussion of justice and equality are essential concerns after a repressive government is overturned. The moment offers opportunity to entertain propositions of utopia. But what should utopia be? Terry Eagleton, in The Ideology of the Aesthetic, ³² sets up a polarity between the rational, which, if taken to an extreme, becomes repressive, and the pleasures of sensation, which if taken to extreme, become anarchic. If justice and equality are defined too finely, and if violation of them, so narrowly circumscribed, is made punishable, tyranny is simply recast, not abolished. On the other hand, the body and its appetitive drives, if allowed to come to dominate in the name of freedom, would fragment society into an agglomeration of individuals atomized in the pursuit of personal self-indulgence. The former might describe a socialist country like the Soviet Union that, while impelled by ideals of equal distribution of goods, was marred as a utopia by authoritarian tactics in striving to realize those ideals. The latter describes the 1960s in the First World. Freedom was paramount, which led in a quick descent from political and social commitment to orgiastic indulgence: sex, drugs, and rock and roll. 

On another level, if the ideals of revolution do not appear to be fulfillable, then material gratification appears more attractive. It becomes the tangible booby prize. Alvarez’s rooms full of interior decoration are capitalist gratification, and can never fully suffice as substitutes for the elusive utopia. 

The goals of the Revolution were utopian, set in reaction to the seediness, corruption, and violence that preceded it. The Cuba of 1933, in the decade of worldwide chaos, is documented by Walker Evans, ³³ who saw it in its complexity. In 1932, Ernest Hemingway, with whom Evans became friends, had come to Cuba. Hemingway is remembered for his writing, fishing, and drinking. He did the first at the Hotel Ambos Mundos and later at his villa on the outskirts of Havana, his fishing off the shores of Cojímar, and his drinking, it is said, at El Floridita and La Bodeguita del Medio, both of which still exist, though the Floridita in a altered state. With him in came his drinking buddy Joe Russell, the eponymous Joe of Sloppy Joe’s. Carlos Garaicoa, in the installation Sloppy Joe’s Bar, treats the bar and the way of life that circulated through it as if it is archaeological evidence. He documents the original location and elements of the interior and exterior. These photographs are placed in proximity to sculptural replicas of parts of the dive: the bar, mementos, shelves of booze. 

The work, on one hand, suggests the level of degeneracy of the past era of the dictatorship, when this bar was one of many hang-outs that animated Havana night life. ³⁴ Now, with tourism viewed as the strategy for economy salvation, history is revised. You read in guidebooks about Hemingway’s drinking his mojito ³⁵ in La Bodeguita and his daiquiri in El Floridita, suggesting that you, too, can relive that glamorous past by drinking in these establishments. 

Garaicoa aestheticizes the city in ruins. This may be a dangerous approach, even opportunistic. But the city in its present state is beautiful, not unlike Pompeii. Those who live there enjoy a connection with history and intimacy with an architecture of aesthetic importance. Walking through Habana Vieja, once past the glitzy restorations that now house Benetton, a designer bridal shop, ³⁶ expensive florists, and tourist restaurants, one sees the city as Garaicoa, Toirac, Estévez see it: brimming with meaning and alive, in the present reality. The homage that Garaicoa pays is neither sentimental nor patronizing. He makes the rubble visible and reminds us that what is now rubble was once part of the cultural vocabulary and habitable, and that there is such an embarrassment of riches in this city that, even at its most abject, it is worthy of our visual attention, and its inhabitants, of our respect. 

Like Pedro Alvarez, José Angel Toirac uses the strategy of appropriation to raise questions about revisionist history. He is one of the few artists of this generation who routinely addresses the iconography of the Revolution, using this body of images to make work that comments on the uses and abuses of power. Toirac is a master of multiple codes. He uses the stock images of his own world, reinscribing the images as literally as possible, yet altering them irrevocably. He undermines the cliché codified to manipulate public opinion, evoking skepticism from the same image repeated to reinforce orthodoxy. More than just ironic, Toirac’s reiteration leaves that image and the idea or its ideological cargo totally impoverished and discredited. 

Had Toirac been born in the eighteenth century, and in Spain, he might well have been a court painter on the order of Francisco de Goya, another artist who worked with double codings. 

To depict those in supreme power with the a free hand that Goya used in portraits of the royal family of Spain, carefully chronicling their costumes but at the same time ridiculing them in his depictions of their faces, with all their foibles clearly written, requires a brilliant strategy and nerves of steel. Goya’s method was to use the symbols of power and identity, and to place portraits atop these overdressed mannequins that revealed his underlying evaluation of them. 

Toirac examines history in its trajectory toward the past. Revolutions face forward, but in order to move in that direction with maximal support, the past, too, must be conceptualized, forged, and promulgated.

Heroism and other notions are used to create patriotic feeling and to focus power in a small, intense area. Toirac’s work is an analysis of this process. His materials are the newspapers, magazines, books, and television produced by official organs. His work quotes from these sources as literally as possible.

By exposing the images of heroes to a rational light, out of the context of ideology, manipulation of the image becomes conspicuous. Toirac removes them from the context that gives them meaning, making the process of exploitation apparent. Like Alvarez, his treatment of these images renders them anti-epic. 

In an earlier work, Toirac made a painting from an image from Granma that was intended to encourage Cuban children to remain faithful to the principles of the Revolution and to level the gender and racial playing field. The original is a photograph of a young black girl in her pionera uniform with the line of text, "Seremos como Che" (We will all be like Che). In Toirac’s version, he changes the verb from the canonical by substituting for the future indicative the present subjunctive. This change alters the meaning to "Would that we were all like Che." The alteration changes the meaning from an exhortation to emulate Che Guevara to a pointed commentary on the difference between this child and Che, who was male, white, Argentine, middle class, and a doctor. 

Toirac works with a kind of intellectual rigor that leaves not a single thread of an idea hanging loose. It is systemic as well as conceptual, and once the system is put into motion, the gears of logic impel it ineluctably. 

He follows this logic in Silencio, silencio. . .escuchemos (139 martíres del MININT)(Silence, silence. . . let’s listen[139 Martyrs of the Ministry of the Interior]). Toirac has worked from Martíres de MININT, a two-volume set of books commemorating a group of officers who died in the line of duty. Forgotten by those who make heroes, they now have their memorial, thanks to Toirac. These are not guerrilla heroes. These are the forgotten or inconsequential. But if they are heroes, Toirac will treat them as such. He has made a series of badges modeled on one genuine one. Each hangs from a ribbon. Each badge has a tiny bell attached to it, the kind of bell used in santería ritual to evoke the orishas. The background from which they hang is painted with Toirac’s hands with text that says, "Silencio, silencio, escuchamos." (Silence, silence, let’s listen.) This quotation from the theme song of a television series about the feats of the MININT. 

Silencio, silencio is, in part, about how those in power package the dead. In a companion set of drawings, Toirac has used actual body bags as the support. The work is about how emotional images, evoking pity and horror, can be used to manipulate popular perception of events, to chisel an event into a statue that encapsulates history to the benefit of those who control it. Those in power can use memorials to divert the thinking about what are the motives of what, in retrospect, is called heroism. This strategy has historical precedent in the Column of Trajan, the Arc de Triomphe, and unequaled in scale, pretension, and vulgarity, El Valle de los Caidos. 

Everyone has a war with which they identify or sympathize, the "just wars" or those in which brothers or friends died. That is why Maya Lin’s Vietnam memorial touches even those who protested vehemently against the war. The faces on the badges Silencio, silencio after all, are those of the dead, and however cynical one may be, it is difficult to dismiss them. 

The work leaves interpretation wide open. One can project onto the faces of the badges whatever association comes to mind. Employing a similar strategy, Christian Boltanski made Les 62 membres du Club Mickey en 1955 (The 62 Mouseketeers in 1955). ³⁷ Boltanski also uses photographs captured from the past, using them in a deadpan way so they can be read in any number of ways. Are these children who were victims of the Nazi extermination camps? Are these hyperactive children? In his series Réserve-Détective³⁸ we wonder, are these victims or perpetrators? In Silencio, silencio, Toirac opens the work to a similar moral ambiguity. 

Toirac does not need to mount a soap box to preach. Instead, he takes an arrow from the quiver of those who create the imagery of manipulation and, instead of shooting it, uses it as a pointer. 

Los Carpinteros are a threesome: Alexander Arrechea, Marco Castillo, and Dagoberto Rodríguez. "Carpinteros" were the skilled slaves brought into the household to make armoires and to do ornamental painting, so the name links them with that past but also to the present-day proletariat. The problematic role of the artist in revolution places the artist between two uncomfortable alternatives: associated with the intelligentsia, which has been at various times victimized for elitism; or seen as artisans, making work that voices the collective aspirations of the revolution, a practice that usually results in formulaic work, both in content and style, and almost always drives the creative artist out of the revolution. 

Los Carpinteros, like Abel Barroso, René Francisco, and others in the exhibition, invent solutions to practical problems. Sometimes the problem may be one as simple as creating a seaworthy vessel from what is around the house. In their exhibition at the Iglesia de San Francisco de Assisi during the Sexta Bienal de La Habana, they showed a huge inverted umbrella, with an outboard motor. Often they address more complex problems, such as the lingering effects of colonialism. In a drawing Nouveaux Voyage aux Isles de l’Amerique, they invent a tool that could be used, retroactively, for surveying. It is in the manner of the documents that are carefully preserved in the Archivos General de Indias in Sevilla, Spain, the city that for much of Cuba’s early history was the repository of wealth from the colony. The watercolor pictures a surveying instrument, to measure land. As if already tasting the profits to be gained from conversion of the land into sugar-producing fields, the instrument is made from a luscious green cane. It also suggests a tripod with the cane as a gun. The device is on rockers. This improvement would allow the surveyor greater latitude in marking out the land, suggesting that graft and greed were early built into the production of this commodity. 

Documents in the Archivos General de Indias record the colonial beginnings of the sugar industry and the slavery requisite to making it profitable. ³⁹ A report to the Crown dated March 17, 1800 ⁴⁰ mentions the cargo of the writer’s ship, "negros esclavos." He mentions that these slaves will be part of a militia, used "jamás en las ciudades, pero nunca en el campo" (always in the cities, never in the countryside--- where uprisings were more likely to occur). He closes his report with thanks to God for blessing his enterprise. 

The relationship of sugar to slavery is not only one in which slaves were essential to the enormously labor-intensive farming, cutting, and processing. Many ingenios were built on the profits of slave trade. The economic cycle was slavery - sugar - slavery, in a spiral that converted human labor into a salable commodity on the world market and simultaneously created a greater market for slaves. As Hugh Thomas points out, Cuba became "not a sugar palace but a sugar prison." ⁴¹

It is revealing to examine a series of docuemtns governing slaves in colonial Cuba. As early as 1796, the reports governing slave treatment were type-set, indicating that they were official and that they were for distribution. Luís de las Casas y de Aragorri, ⁴² Capitán General de la Isla de Cuba, writes in response to recent slave unrest. He promises "perfecta tranquilidad" (perfect tranquillity). Also a landowner and owner of a sugar mill, and therefore of slaves, he is cited as an enlightened leader. ⁴³ He was one of the founders of the Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País, a kind of gentlemen’s club that brought together the wealthy criollos in both intellectual and economic camaraderie. 

Las Casas writes in an expansive mode, referring to the quality of the historic moment "del carácter de novedad que distingue la presente época de todas las antepasadas" (of a novel character that distinguishes the present epoch from all those before). It is the moment of Cuba’s great leap forward into wealth, with Spain distracted from supervision of activities in the colony, and after the exclusivity of the English dominance in the slave trade has ended. 

It takes only one page for the Captain-General to get down to particulars. He specifies that the only blacks permitted to be imported are bozales, those "precedentes de la costa de Africa" (proceeding from the coast of Africa) not purchased from Jamaica, for example, nor that have worked for other foreigners--- who may have taught them bad habits, one supposes. 

Now dispensing with such verbal acknowledgment that God is on their side, Félix Varela, one of Las Casas comrades in La Sociedad, and one of the consulados of his government, speaks on behalf of land owners. Remembered for his nationalist attitude in encouraging separation from Spain, he is associated with forward thinking. So I was surprised to find that he had authored, under the imprimatur of the captaincy-general, a set of rules governing treatment of "esclavos cimarrones"---- runaway slaves. ⁴⁴ Such documents occupied much of the attention of the enlightened governors. 

Los Carpinteros address other discrepancies between high-minded ideals and historical realities; the promises of utopia and the shortfall in realizing it. In Flying Pigeon, two elements interact. On the left is a carved wood relief of a train engine. Cubans will proudly tell you that their railroad is older than that of Spain. It is celebrating its 160th anniversary this year. But they will also tell you not to try to go anywhere on it. It is slow, hot, dirty, and only goes as far as Matanzas in more than seven hours. 
Of course, the railroad was built not for human convenience, but to increase efficiency and revenue in the sugar industry. The cane must be milled within two days after being cut. Prior to the railroad, this meant that the mill and the field had to be in close proximity, or that the cane had to be transported by oxen to the mill. The railroad allowed for greater productivity and more centralized processing. 

On the right is a painting of a black man peddling a bicycle cab. The model for the cyclist is Alex Arrechea, one of the three Carpinteros. He is riding a Flying Pigeon, a brand of Chinese bicycle imported in huge quantities during the special period to compensate for the lack of motorized transportation. It does not fly; nor is it a pigeon. The work shows an inversion of the relationship of human to machine, with human effort propelling the engine. With its exhausted infrastructure, Cuba runs on often cruel extremes of human energy. The work could be read as a commentary on priorities, mismanagement of resources, and semantic manipulation. The train, a symbol of Cuban advancement, is now an absurd cargo. 

The spirit of the work in this exhibition allows for no whimpering. Isolation is overcome. I am always amazed by how knowledgeable Cuban artists are about the world at large. They travel, they read, they absorb information from visitors. The challenge of survival is accepted and met, sometimes with defiance and almost always with dignity. The irony of becomes more complex in a place in which the future and, in particular, the future of the Revolution, is so uncharted. 

In spite of the many trials in contemporary Cuban life, my awareness of the achievement of the Revolution was dramatized in an incident at the museum in Guanabacoa. This small museum documents slave life, with all the grizzly appurtenances for restraint and punishment, and the ritual objects of the Afro-Cuban religion. In a patio is a trapiche, the early vertical device for crushing cane to extract guarapo, the raw juice. It has horizontal wooden bars that, when pushed, engage the wooden rollers. It is apparent from the height that these bars were powered by human beings. As I examine the mechanism in horror, I hear the tinkling sound of a piano playing Beethoven’s "Für Elise," the little song that all who ever studied piano, including myself, remember from their childhood. I follow the sound into the next patio where chairs and a makeshift stage are set up. The assembled audience is watching their children, all in various shades of brown and black, play their first recital.

Endnotes

1. See Tonel’s essay for an explanation of the reasons that these artists are in a position of such prominence at such an early age.
2. This story circulates in Havana in various versions.  It is documented that the ferries that ply between the port and Regla and Casablanca across the bay were hijacked during the 1994 crisis.  This particular story may actually have some basis. One version places it in the early 60s, and in Varadero, where there are many party boats.
3. Initiated in October 1960 and variously revised and interpreted, it is still in effect.
4. On February 25, 1901, Senator Orville H. Platt introduced an amendment to Congress that sharply delimited Cuba’s autonomy.  It stipulated that Cuba could make no treaty with any other foreign  power; that it could not assume any public debt; and that the United States could intervene for” the preservation of Cuban independence.  It went on to assert that all that might be done by the United States in Cuba during the military occupation was lawful.  It gave the United States the right to quarantine the island in the name of health, made law the obligation of Cuba to lease or sell land for military purposes, which is how it is possible for the United States to maintain a naval base in Guantánamo Bay.  The final indignity was that the amendment stated that the Isle of Pines (now Isla de Juventud) off the south coast of the main island would no longer be considered Cuban territory.  “The Platt mentality” undermined the ability of Cuba to self-govern well into the chaotic  Thirties.  Coinciding with World War II. Fulgencio Batista was elected president.  In 1952, he took power by coup d’etat, ruling as a dictator until the victory of the Revolution. Jaime Suchlicki, Cuba:  From Columbus to Castro and Beyond, Washington, DC, 1997, pp. 81-82 and passim.
5. Ibid., p.88. 
6. Fool or dummy.
7. Historia de Cuba, Havana, 1968, p. 540.
8. Eduardo Abela (1891-1965) was the creator in 1936 of the Estudio Libre, which was intended to be anti- academic.  It brought to Cuba some of the ideas of the European avant-garde, but more important,  it upheld the notion of a “national art in the context of the utmost creative freedom.”  The Estudio,  which was regarded as radical at the time, was financed initially by the Ministry of Education.  It  soon lost its funding, so Abela funded it from his own pocket for the short duration of its  existence of less than one year.  Luis Camnitzer, New Art of Cuba, Austin, Texas, 1994, p. 155.
9. Jinetero or jinetera translate literally as jockey.  They are trying to survive as prostitutes, selling  contraband cigars, or any other commodity or service that the tourist economy demands. 
10. Announced in Castro’s 26 de julio speech in 1993.  This date is the anniversary of the attack by Castro  and other revolutionaries on the Moncada Army Barracks near Santiago de Cuba in 1953, a date  referenced as a milestone in revolutionary history. Castro and others were imprisoned.  In his trial  a few months later, Castro gave his famous speech, “History Will Absolve Me.”
11. A personal spelling of cacho, which means a piece or a bit, and often used as a nickname for little boys,  his real name is Alexis Leyva Machado.  See Alma Ruíz, Kcho:  Todo cambia, Los Angeles,  1997, the catalogue of the exhibition that Ruíz curated for the Museum of Contemporary Art in  Los Angeles.
12. Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, The Situation of Human Rights in Cuba, seventh report, Washington, DC, 1983, pp. 95-99.
13. Alma Guillermoprieto, “Love and Misery in Cuba” in The New York Review of Books, vol. XLV, no. 5, March 26,1998, p. 12.
14. Over-restored, some might say.  The designation of Habana Vieja as a UNESCO World Heritage site has  brought funding to rescue colonial period buildings.  Under the supervision of Eusebio Leal, the  historian of the city, this effort translates immediately into tourist revenue.  The actual functioning  of these buildings as the homes of habaneros is another matter.  Another point of contention is  that the focus on colonial-period architecture to the exclusion of all else overlooks the need to save  treasures of later periods and in less tourist-oriented neighborhoods.  For two views, see Rosa  Lowinger, “Old Havana Reborn” in Preservation, Sept./ Oct. 1997, pp. 40-51, and Paul  Goldberger, “Bringing Back Havana” in The New Yorker, Jan. 26, 1998, pp. 50-61.  Also see  discussion of the work of José A. Toirac in this text.
15. Sexta Bienal de La Habana:  El Individuo y su Memoria, Havana, 1996, p. 141, and illustrated and  mentioned in Rubén de la Nuez, “Recurso de la memoria:  la soportable gravedad de la nada” in  ARTECUBANO, vol. 1, 1998, pp. 55 & 57.
16. See Gerardo Mosquera, “Elegguá at the (Post?)modern Crossroads:  The Presence of Africa in the Visual   Art of Cuba” in Arturo Lindsay,  Santería Aesthetics in Contemporary  Latin  American Art.   Washington:  1996, pp. 225-258.
17. The orishas are the deities of Afro-Cuban religion, and Elegguá is the guardian of the door, crossroads,  and the special protector of children.  He is visible to us as a strange little round head made of  coarse clay into which is pressed small conch shells for eyes, nose, and mouth.  Elegguá is  unpredictable, so propitiating him is dicey. 
18. Jalopies.  The etymology comes from the advertising campaign of Ford when it began to market cars in Cuba.  Its slogan was, “Foot it and go.”  Now it signifies any old car.
19. It is not documented in the catalogue for the Bienal but is mentioned and illustrated in Nuez, op. cit., pp.  56-58.
20. “We shall be victorious!” a slogan first voiced in the heady days of the triumph of the Revolution and associated  with Che Guevara. 
21. Camilo Cienfuegos, head of the guerrilla army, disappeared inexplicably in an airplane coming from  Camagüey on October 28, 1959.  Che, an Argentine who fought with Castro from the beginning,  was hunted down and assassinated in Bolivia, where he was attempting to reproduce the guerrilla  victory of Cuba, on October 9, 1967.  Ever the romantic, ideal revolutionary, Che is of  transcendental importance in Cuba and the embodiment of revolutionary commitment for people  all over the world who have been involved in anti-imperialist initiatives.  His last known words,  allegedly, were, “Tell them to shoot straight.”  Robert Quirk,  Fidel Castro, New York, 1993, pp.   271-72 and 582.
22. Intentionally misspelled to reveal Francisco’s level of schooling.
23. Hugh Thomas, Cuba, or the Pursuit of Freedom, New York, 1994, p. 241.
24. This annual event takes place in New York City.  A major department store sponsors it to inaugurate the  Christmas shopping frenzy.
25. Santiago Armada (1937-).  Antonio Eligio Fernández, “Brillo de Chago: ‘Salomón’ compartido” in  ARTECUBANO, vol. 1, 1998, pp. 13-19.  Tonel and Chago had a joint exhibition in 1982. 
26. José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913) was a Mexican printmaker and satirist who attacked with humor the political machinations of the overly long reign of Porfirio Díaz.
27. Noted American  underground cartoonist of the 1960s and 70s.
28. Gramsci, one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party, wrote extensively on culture. Antonio  Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, Cambridge, Mass., 1985.
29. Gramsci wades into this question, querying whether the proletariat has its own world view.  Ibid., pp.  16-46.
30. Bohemia:  Edición de la libertad, historia de la Revolución, nos. 2-5, Jan. 11-Feb. 1, 1959.
31. Part way through the film, the screen suddenly expands from normal format to a panoramic breadth.
32. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Oxford, 1990.
33. Walker Evans, Havana 1933, New York, 1989. 
34. This lowlife is documented in the Cuban classic Tres Triste Tigres by the writer Guillermo Cabrera  Infante, who went into exile in 1965. 
35. A Cuban cocktail of rum, ice, a little sugar, yerba buena or mint, and club soda.
36. When I ask who could possibly afford to shop there, I am told that it is for the jineteras who are  marrying foreign men.
37. Sixty-two photographs, tin frames, glass, 1972.  Christian Boltanski:  Lessons of Darkness, Chicago,  1988, p. 57 and passim.
38. Photographs, shelves, clip-on lamps, 1987.  Ibid., pp. 15-47.
39. Sugar has been the most important crop in Cuba since the eighteenth century.  But many of the  documents apply as well to the cultivation of coffee, tobacco, and indigo.
40. Ministerio de Educación y Cultura.  Archivo General de Indias.  AGS/SECRETARIA-GUERRA, 6865,  exp. 24.00010. No. 113.
41. Hugh Thomas, Cuba or the Pursuit of Freedom, New York, 1998, p. 74. 
42. Ministerio de Educación y Cultura.  Archivo General de Indias.  AGS/SECRETARIA-GUERRA, 6865,  exp. 24.00010. No. 116. 
43. Suchlicki, op. cit., pp. 54-60.
44. Ministerio de Educación y Cultura.  Archivo General de Indias.  AGS/SECRETARIA-GUERRA, 6865,  exp. 24.00010. No. 118.

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