In Focus: Cuba

“Afro-” and “-Cuban”: A Possible Nation?

Are black Cubans perceived – by themselves and others – as Afro-Cuban? How do the island’s artists confront this question? A walk through the unfinished history of the relationship between the visual arts and Afro identity in Cuba, written by Yasser Socarrás for Contemporary And (C&) América Latina.

José Bedia Valdés, El señor de la noche, 1992. Museo de Arte de Honolulu.

Wilfredo Lam, La jungla, 1943. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Belkis Ayón, Sin título (Figura negra que carga una blanca), 1996, detail.

Juan Roberto Diago, Paisaje I, 1995. Courtesy of the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art, Harvard University.

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by Yasser Socarrás

Fri 9 Mar, 2018

In a country where the idea of a nation weighs down on the shoulders like a heavy cross, where multiple identities, traversed on many occasions, crystalize into an obtuse binarism, the question arises as to whether a sense of belonging to an African diaspora exists among black women and men in Cuba. Do we feel Afro-Cuban and/or are we perceived as such?

To think of this diaspora as a symbolic space of provision for and (re)invention of identities is one possible way to go. However, this has proven difficult, seeing as a critical approach to these topics has been postponed, or in many cases even silenced, based on a very clear political discourse on the subject.

Thus, it is, at the very least, conflicting to use terms such as “Afro-Cuban”, “black culture” or “African diaspora”. In the following, I would like to make a brief outline of the ways in which this is reflected in Cuban visual arts.

Now, the first thing one should be aware of is: traditionally, any attempt at approaching the racial problematic in Cuba is faced with an alleged “national homogeneity” as a contrasting element. To a large extent, the persistence of this phenomenon is due to the fact that in 1962, Fidel Castro declared the problem of race and discrimination as resolved. One of the consequences of this was that any questioning or criticism was perceived as a counterrevolutionary act, as a dividing agent among the Cuban people.

This was no exclusive phenomenon in the social and political realm. It was further reflected in the artistic expressions in Cuba. In the specific case of visual arts, there existed historically cultural approaches to Afro-Cuban culture from folkloristic perspectives, or others where, to avoid conflict, the idea of a black identity was dissolved into a Cuban identity.

In the colonial period, between the seventeenth and nineteenth century, there are works of art which portray the “black world” of the island. Blacks and mestizos are depicted in marketplaces, town squares and factories, where they worked either as slaves or as paid laborers. Quotidian works of this type, including both paintings and engravings, were created primarily by Europeans visiting the island, some even based on travel accounts.

With regard to contemporary visual arts in Cuba, there is a group of artists whose work revolves to a large extent around the Afro-Cuban world, either from a perspective which deeply explores religions, rituals, myths and legends with nearly ethnographic precision, or, as a way of constant self-(re)invention as black individuals, Cubans and artists.

Wilfredo Lam, La jungla, 1943. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

From the twenties and thirties onward, figures appear in the Cuban artistic avantgarde such as Wifredo Lam (1902-1982). His work covers various aesthetic movements such as primitivism, surrealism and cubism. However, one recurring element underlies his work: a treatment of the Afro-Cuban myths and legends, in which the representation of the Orishas serves as a forceful manifestation of poetry and social criticism. An illustrative example is the piece La jungla (The Jungle, 1943) currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

In his text “Syncretism, Postmodernism and Culture of Resistance”, Osvaldo Sanchez argues that “the importance of the mythical, the cosmogonenic and the ritual in Cuban art from the eighties can be derived from an urgency to establish spiritual archetypes, and to acquire models of better coherency between the ethos and the ethnic in the social life”. It is precisely in alignment with this idea that an artist like José Bedia (born 1959) develops his work. Bedia is one of the leading figures in the so-called New Cuban Art Movement, a focal point within Cuban visual arts throughout the eighties and, above all, a new way of assuming art and its social role on the island.

Bedia’s work is influenced by his own religious practise: the artist was initiated into the Palo Monte religion, which, along with the Ochá or the Santería religion as well as the secret Abakuá Society, exclusive to male members, make up the three cults of African origin most widespread in the Caribbean. Thus, dances and songs stemming from the Palo rituals are recurrent motives in Bedia’s work. But his oeuvre, as reflected in his most recent production, also extends to other spiritualities such as Mesoamerican cultures.

In 2010, Alejandro de la Fuente and Elio Rodriguez got together under the name “Queloides”, a group of twelve Cuban visual artists whose work examines the topic of race, African religion as well as the historic legacy of the enslaved communities.
This joint exposition was preceded by three exhibitions held in Havanna in the late nineties: Queloides (1997, Casa de África), Neither musicians nor athletes (Ni músicos ni deportistas, 1999, Centro Provincial de Artes Plásticas y Diseño) y Queloides II (1999, CDAV). For the first time, these exhibitions focused on the discussion of the racial problem in Cuban visual arts.

Belkis Ayón, Sin título (Figura negra que carga una blanca), 1996, detail.

In these exhibitions, artists from various generations dissected the Cuban reality. Among them is Belkis Ayón, who in her short life (1967-1999) developed an oeuvre which is indispensable when talking about Cuban visual arts. Part of her artistic creation revolves around Princess Sikán, a character from Abakuan legend, who narrates the story of a violation of a secret by a woman. This character and her knowledge of the Abakuan environment serve Ayón as a vehicle for questioning reality.

The artist is more interested in confronting daily life, departing from this semblance, than pretending that her work could be a truthful documentation of this universe. She revisits the legends of African origin and questions the division between high and low culture, and does so at moments where new ways of making art are reconsidered in the country.

Another member of the Queloides was Juan Roberto Diago (born 1971). He uses the quotidian as material for his art, taking advantage of everyday paraphenilia, rendering them symbolic, thus turning this act into one of cultural resistance. His work entails forms of expression from installations to graffiti and is centered around blackness and the black universe, people from the neighborhood and marginalized people. He questions the place where the legendary African history is found in Cuban society and how society percieves it.

Amidst this unfinished process, the exhibition Without Masks: Contemporary Afro-Cuban Art arrived in Havanna, with works from forty artists in highly diverse formats, conversations and conferences. Just like the “Queloides” project, “Without Masks” reveals the persistence of racism and racial discrimination in Cuba. In today’s Cuba, said racism resurges in the shape of “keloids”, scar tissue from lesions or traumatic wounds. The keloids that these artists confront us with are an attempt to contribute to the process of reinvention of the nation: where the prefix “Afro-” does not exclude being “Cuban” and where pluralism and a multiplicity of identities can coexist in harmony.

Yasser Socarrás is a filmmaker and researcher. He studied at the University of Arts (ISA) in Cuba and is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in social anthropology at the Federal University Santa Catarina in Brazil. He is a member of the Center for Studies on Identities and Interethnic Relations (NUER) at the same university.

Translated from the Spanish by Zarifa Mohamad Petersen