Navigating Scarcity, Race and Religion in Cuban Photography

From the vantage point of the 20th century—with decades of research demonstrating that racism and sexism operate in ways that are systematic, institutionalized, and long-lasting—the declaration seems absurd. These are not issues that can be solved by decree. But in Cuba, the pronouncement became an important component of the revolutionary myth, and questioning it became treasonous. Cuban artists’ responses to such censorship represent one of the cornerstones of a recently inaugurated exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography.

The phrase “navigating the waves” is a metaphor for how artists in Cuba have had to elude censors, cope with generalized poverty and lack of photographic materials, and somehow, still manage to create. Covering the period from 1959 to the present, the exhibition gathers the many clever and at times obfuscatory means by which Cuban photographers have asserted their freedom while facing overwhelming constraint. It is a notable show not only for displaying the MFAH’s stellar Cuban photography collection, but because of its clear-eyed examination of photography’s course in a country where circumstances are so unlike the globalized, interconnected world of seemingly endless online imagery.

The challenge of alluding to racism without betraying the Revolutionary government is an important theme throughout the show, with disquieting works by Juan Carlos Alom and René Peña capturing the issue most poignantly. Most of Alom’s inky and mysterious tableaux are from his series El libro oscuro (The Dark Book) of the 1990s, known as the “Special Period”—when Cuba’s economy took a nosedive after support from the collapsed Soviet Union dried up. Faced with severe shortages of photographic material, Alom rationed, using expired film and X-ray chemicals to develop his negatives. Old photographic materials tend to be less sensitive to light, resulting in the crepuscular quality of The Dark Book, which he conceived as a compendium of made-up Afro-Cuban myths. In La mitad del mundo (The Middle of the World), a single leg with a legcuff at the ankle emerges from a circle of sand, darkness stretching towards the corners of the image. Is the rest of the body buried below, or are we witness to a dismemberment? Is this the sand of a beach, or the bottom of the sea? The only clear allusions are to the horrors of the Middle Passage and to enslavement, abolished in Cuba in 1886.

To help appease a population facing desperate poverty, the Special Period brought with it a loosening of government strictures, including religious prohibitions. As Afro-Cuban devotional practices like Santería became more widely acceptable, René Peña found a source of inspiration. In his series Ritos (Rites), he used his own body to construct allusions to priestly rituals and religious offerings like chicken sacrifices (Ritos I). As he told the curators, “At that time [1992], the government decided to give people small chickens to be fed at home, to eat later […] This element, a chicken, is something often used in Afro-Cuban religion, but at the same time, it was part of the government religion.”*

Perhaps the show’s greatest strength is that not all works on view go against the grain. Alom’s and Peña’s allusive photographs appear in context with the photographic tradition of the Revolution, which produced such iconic images as Alberto Korda’s portrait of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Guerrillero heróico (Heroic Guerrilla Fighter), before it took on a new life as propaganda. Those earlier photographs in the gallery often feel full of hope for a new order, one which included racial equality as a shared goal. Iván Cañas’s series of portraits of a racially diverse group of veterans in Los veteranos, and Pedro Beruvides’s series Los centenarios (The Centenarians) of Black seniors’ closely-cropped faces bespeak both awareness and idealism.

Undoubtedly, the Special Period is at the crux of the show. A time of immense social change, it also heralded the moment when Cuban photographers started to attract sustained international attention, particularly after Houston’s FotoFest in 1994, which organized the landmark exhibition The New Generation: Contemporary Cuban Photography from the Island at the Menil Collection. The MFAH’s early Cuban holdings also date from FotoFest, but these expanded significantly with the acquisition of the Madeline P. Plonsker Collection in 2022—from which much of the show is pulled—and a recent donation of nearly 300 works by the family of Iván Cañas. With this compact show, the curators—Malcolm Daniel and Raquel Carrera—continue a tradition of championing Cuban photography and Afro-Latin artists in the Texan city.

Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography, continues at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, U.S.A., until August 3, 2025

Mari Carmen Barrios Giordano is a writer, researcher and curator from Mexico. She writes art criticism and essays for ARTnews, Revista Cubo Blanco, Literal Magazine and La Tempestad. She studied history & international relations at Stanford University and art history at the UNAM, specializing in Latin American photography and contemporary art. IG: @mcbg_barrios

* Malcolm Daniel & Raquel Carrera, Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography (Texas: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2024), 22.