Phenomenon of Cuban Art

Approaching Cuban art implies getting closer to the reality of Cuba, a small island in the Caribbean that Columbus mistook for a continent and called “the most beautiful place on earth”, an archipelago whose history is marked by a mix of Hispanic, African, British and Haitian cultures. This small country, which for many must be exclusively a sun and beach destination, has become a milestone for the South American continent and the entire world.

Cuba was the first in many respects: it was the first country in Latin America to use the railway; it was the first country in America to broadcast television; in the 1950s, Havana was one of the most modern cities in the world, full of cinemas and cultural events. It was also one of the first countries in America to have a social revolution, opposing European and North American domination and creating a system designed for the people, which adopted the ideas of socialism and communism at a time when capitalism was the dominant system.

This small country has maintained socialism even when great powers like the USSR succumbed to capitalist dynamics. With a system that has survived for more than 60 years, with ups and downs, it has been a beacon of health care, sports and culture.

Perhaps my opinion is controversial, but I sincerely believe that Cuban art, one of the most advanced and original in the world, is the result of a unique historical environment. Let's make a very short tour through the history of Cuban art, which, I'm afraid, is only known in Europe by experts or those with a special interest in it.

Cuban fine art did not begin its journey until the 18th century. For several centuries, when Cuba was a Spanish colony, the predominant artistic form there was engraving created mainly by foreigners. Full of a romantic vision, their work reflected their curiosity, which was a real driving force to explore and display a different world. Colonial period artists were particularly interested in images of Havana, which was just beginning to be built.

In 1818, the Academy of Drawing and Painting (later the San Alejandro Academy) directed by the French painter Juan Bautista Vermay was founded. It was the primary aesthetic authority of the time, as well as the leading training centre for artists. The usual main themes of painting were religion, portraits, landscapes, allegorical and genre scenes, and human figures.

The turn of the 19th century was the time of the Neo-colonial Republic, which put Cuba under the power of the American government. It became the time of new ways of doing things, especially in painting. Art began to link itself with the surrounding reality, moving away gradually from the canons imported from Europe and the United States. The themes of artworks also expanded. Although art continued to be associated with academic models, the works began to show originality and a desire for independence.

After 1920, a lot of changes were taking place at the social level, especially the growth of the productive forces, the interference of the United States in the Cuban economy and domestic life. As it often happened in Europe, the historical avant-garde in Cuba was grouped around a nonconforming magazine. Committed to social reality, the magazine called Avance supported the emerging artistic movement.

Looking for new routes for the plastic arts, the young artists illustrated the pages of Avance, and the magazine sponsored their exhibitions. This generation needed to be aware both of what was happening in the international art world and of national issues. They had a common starting point: their need to express what could still be called Cuban in a rather abstract form. That is why it was common for artists of the time to travel to Europe and get in touch with the most avant-garde ideas. However, these ideas were not imported as such; on the contrary, this knowledge was reinterpreted, adapted and returned to an art which became increasingly Cuban each time.

During this period, the works were characterised by an intensity of tropical light, manifested mostly through radical suppression of shadows and half tones, and preferred use of pure colours. Although a deliberate rejection of any kind of nostalgia was all too evident, this universe sought its true sources in the concluded past, such as our colonial architecture. As a result, one of the first groups of avant-garde artists became fascinated with Criollismo, Afro-Cubanism and social issues.

In 1938 the Second National Salon of Painting and Sculpture was held, bringing together an impressive collection of contemporary Cuban art. Several interesting aspects stood out: the rise of new artists, the strong influence of Mexican painting and the consolidation of those who followed the modern ideas that were dominating academic attitudes. Many young people preferred to go to Mexico rather than Europe. Painting with political and social themes lost the drive of previous years and virtually disappeared. Criollismo, interested in rural or peasant themes, turned to other hidden and expressive trends, and avant-garde Afro-Cubanism was swept away with the appearance of Wifredo Lam and Roberto Diago.

Poetics of the two avant-garde generations in Cuba are numerous and varied. They have a common feature of absorbing external influences, but they are always critical of the surrounding reality, and far from academic conformism. Many of these artists continue to be a reference point and a significant influence on contemporary Cuban art.

The artistic panorama formed in Cuba during the 1950s was marked by the rise of new artists who were determined to bring Cuban painting to an international level. But, at the same time, different generations of artists continued their work. They represented the historical continuity of contemporary painting, which since the 1920s had featured national themes. This new generation of artists, which emerged in the early 1950s, sought to promote a language consistent with what was being created around the world under the influence of the two most important post-war cultural centres, Paris and New York. This is how both American Abstract Expressionism and the new current of Concretismo (Concrete Art) developed in Paris and Latin America respectively, reached Cuba with extraordinary speed. It should be made clear, however, that although Cuban art of the time managed to cross borders and create a language in tune with the international context, it was by no means a mere imitation of the original. Our artists were able to wisely adapt to new forms of expression and create art that was connected to our reality and the context of the island. Abstract language is never free from a desire to protect the national; it should be understood as another way of describing, deepening and analysing it.

Political and social life was characterised by crime, murder and corruption resulting from a dictatorship that favoured the US government. On the art scene, this time was marked by the coexistence of two trends in the Cuban avant-garde. On the one hand, there was predominantly figurative art, and on the other, a movement that tried to distance itself from this reality and fight against it by making abstraction its aesthetic motto.

These circumstances forced the new artists to make a radical break with the past. This led to the emergence of two groups of abstract artists: Los Once (Eleven) and Diez Pintores Concretos (Ten Concrete Artists).

Eleven was a group of artists who shared a common generation attitude, as they were all born around the 1930s, and an interest in abstraction. They did not develop a consistent aesthetic vision; they had a variety of interests and different poetics, in fact closer to Informalism and Abstract Expressionism in general. If the group had anything in common, it was above all a critical attitude towards social realities and opposition to authorities.

The second of these groups, called Ten Concrete Artists, was gathered around the Color-Luz Gallery with the financial support of Van Dоeusburg. These artists did not belong to the same generation or age. What they had in common was an interest in Concretismo and the creation of a universal language, the exclusion of any elements referring to nature and the construction of a picture from absolutely pure plastic elements — the square, rectangle, circle and other basic geometric forms.

The Cuban revolution of 1959 put an end to the old life of society in all aspects, and art was no exception. The decade of the 1960s was a turbulent period in the history of Cuban culture. It was a controversial time with an atmosphere of insecurity, where artists, writers and architects suffered from instability, censorship and other pressures. Called by Ambrosio Fornet The Fifteen Grey Years (Quinquenio Gris), this period was a stage in our cultural history when everything foreign and alluding to capitalism was rejected in favour of building a new socialist society; but it was also the beginning of an intense theoretical debate of crucial importance for the future development of Cuban art.

Thus, after some discussion, in 1961 Fidel Castro gave his famous Words to the Intellectuals, in which he outlined the cultural policy to be followed at the time:

In the first place, permit me to tell you that the Revolution defends freedom; that the Revolution has brought a very large number of freedoms to this country; that the Revolution cannot be an enemy of freedoms (…) The Revolution cannot attempt to stifle art or culture when the development of art and culture is one of the goals and one of the basic objectives of the Revolution, precisely in order that art and culture will come to be a genuine patrimony of the people. (…) And just as the Revolution is concerned with the development of the conditions and the forces, which permit the satisfaction of all the material needs of the people, so do we also want to develop the conditions, which will permit the satisfaction of all the cultural needs of the people.

So it became clear that the new social process protected art and artists and that it would not impede creative freedom, although many artists and intellectuals did not fully agree with this programme and the way it was implemented. But in this regard, Fidel Castro said:

And the Revolution must have a policy for that part of the people. The Revolution must have an attitude for that part of the intellectuals and writers. The Revolution must understand that reality, and consequently must act in such a way that the entire sector of artists and intellectuals who are not genuinely revolutionary find a place to work and to create within the Revolution and so that their creative spirit will have an opportunity and freedom for expression within the Revolution, even though they are not revolutionary writers or artists. This means that within the Revolution, everything; against the Revolution, nothing…

After this legendary speech, the process of artistic development started by creating institutions that promoted and defended the various art forms; events were organised to promote art and artists, and in 1962 art schools were founded  a task of primary importance in the history of Cuban art, since they were the cradle for most of the creators of the current artistic scene. Art schools encourage interest in creativity and artistic processes from an early age to the university stage, while provincial academies look for hidden talents in the remotest corners of the country. From the very start, Fidel Castro was clear about their intentions for art schools: they were to be the largest institutions on the continent where different generations and artistic views would converge; they were to be a cultural beacon at the regional level.

In its creative effort, the revolution provided art with all the tools it needed to develop, so the art world has always enjoyed certain opportunities to accelerate its growth. Unlike, for example, the countries of the socialist camp, where any deviation from socialist approaches was punished or banned, artistic creation in Cuba was encouraged to accompany the changes proposed by the revolution. The art of the 1960s was therefore characterised by the fusion of generations in action, the recognition of an avant-garde tradition in Cuban art, the influence of social events on selected themes, harmony with the international artistic agenda and, at the same time, disagreement with it, when Neo-Expressionism and Pop Art were adopted as the predominant artistic languages. In a similar way, there was an obvious break with earlier forms of expression, abstraction and especially too-sweet figurativism. Such themes as Cuban, national or identity became unacceptable; there were certain — unwritten — rules for dealing with subjects like heroes, sex, history or the human being.

The 1970s, on the contrary, were characterised by a narrow-minded and iron-fisted cultural policy, dictated by leaders and officials “from above”, who clipped the wings of freedom of creativity and knowledge, forcing artists to follow the directives of socialist realism coming from the Soviet Union, and cutting them off almost completely from any communication with the outside world. All these made it impossible for Cuban artists to access and learn from the new trends that were then in vogue in other parts of the world. On the other hand, it was a period when young artists had more places to study, and art schools graduates had better opportunities to exhibit and gain recognition for their work thanks to a growing number of salons, biennials and prizes.

Indeed, it is interesting to observe how Cuban artists of the time were able to take advantage of the conditions imposed by cultural art policy and, within their frame, offer the public their work that was part of Neo-Expressionism and Hyperrealism. At the same time, some managed to preserve their own language, which could not be fitted into either of these two trends. In general, however, the artists turned to themes related to national —Cuban — nature, popular beliefs, the revolutionary process and its most important figures. They had to portray realistically a nation immersed in a state of change, hope and triumph, praising the new regime and its achievements. Despite this, young artists whose work emerged at the time were able to absorb foreign influences and fuse them with Cuban and officially required themes, and thus managed to renew the country's plastic language and respond to the challenges of the times.

In the 1980s, the institutional system of the plastic arts was strengthened; a higher level of art education was introduced with the establishment of the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA), giving rise to new generations of artists and new aesthetic proposals. It was also a time of action and projects of social integration. During this period, important institutes and events in the visual arts emerged, such as the Centre for Visual Arts Development (Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuales), the Wifredo Lam Centre (Centro Wifredo Lam) and the Havana Biennial, the most important visual arts event in Cuba, which has ranked the island among the world's great art capitals. At the political level, a process of correcting the errors in cultural policy took place, reflecting the change in discourse from the preceding decade to a more flexible one, while in the arts a variety of new themes and concepts blossomed. Identity debates continued, with more emphasis on a critical view of art and social issues such as history, heroes, patriotic symbols, sex or morality, and humour was used as the main discursive strategy.

The 1990s began with the so-called Special Period, a time of economic crisis in which emigration was a key factor also affecting art. However, it was a period in which the system of institutions responsible for the promotion of art and artists was further established, and when an important series of exhibitions were held. Moreover, ISA's constant work and its educational projects have ensured the continuity of the national subsystem of art education, a fundamental element for understanding the history of Cuban art. The period was characterised by the consolidation of installation artists, the recovery and relative autonomy of art forms neglected in the 1980s such as engraving, sculpture and photography, the growing development of performance, video and digital art, and the consistent critical tradition, ethics and conceptuality of Cuban art.

In the 21st century, the situation in Cuba has changed, due to a process of rectifying mistakes and improving the economy, but it has also opened up to the world to catch up in various areas of public life. However, it is now immersed in a deep economic, political and social crisis that has led to the worst wave of emigration in our history, along with the COVID-19 pandemic that has affected the entire world. This is why, in contrast to the direct criticism of the art of the 1980s and the complexity of the 1990s, the artworks of the new millennium reflect the uncertainty of the moment and address not only Cuban reality, but also more universal problems.

I would dare say that Cuban visual art has developed a more complex and metaphorical language than at the end of the 20th century, although it is now hidden under a cloak of naivety. Our contemporary art is indirect, it does not give answers to the viewer, it only puts up problems and the viewer solves them himself. An artist creates a text full of elements suggesting multiple meanings, which depend on the knowledge and previous experience of the audience. Behind this naive and empty look, therefore, is a whole investigation of the surrounding world.

Currently, there is a great diversity of different generations with contrasting artistic discourses, that together make up a very specific phenomenon — contemporary Cuban art. This, along with the variety of genres, trends and different elements of historical styles co-existing today, makes Cuban art the fruit of a postmodernist sensibility. Artists in this century do not aim to destroy the principles of previous generations, but rather to reinterpret and mix them to create a new art. Moreover, today they have no interest in attracting the public; on the contrary, the public must be interested and knowledgeable enough to be capable of absorbing the complexity of the ideas that art offers.

What follows from the above is that art is a product of its time and of the historical and social circumstances in which it develops, and it will always respond to the problems of artists as subjects of society at any given moment in history. The utopia of changing the world by means of art, through direct constructive criticism of this reality, is no longer there. The goal now is to make the viewer aware of the need for both change and action in the face of current circumstances. It is no longer engaged art attacking the situation of the country and its government or proposing solutions to specific problems, but rather an intermediary between the individual and reality, responsible for making the individual aware of the need for change and becoming its main actor.