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Article Excerpt
In 1967 the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, then living in Europe, invited more than one hundred friends, artists, and writers, including Karel Appel, Willem de Kooning, Alexander Calder, Asger Jorn, Rene Magritte, Hans Arp, Roberto Matta, Antoni Tapies, Victor Vasarely, Pierre Soulages, and many others, to Havana to participate in an event of solidarity with the Cuban Revolution. On the night of July 17, 1967, the artists created Salon de Mayo Mural, a mural rarely seen since its inception. At Lam's suggestion, canvases were attached to a wooden grid, a spiral was drawn on the surface, and the form was divided into approximately one hundred areas for painting. The center space was saved for Lam, and field 26 (in honor of July 26--a historic date for the Cuban Revolution) was saved for Fidel Castro. The participating artists, writers, and poets created symbols, images, and cartoons, wrote poems, or simply proclaimed in bold color, "Vira La Revolucion."
The glory days of the Cuban Revolution were short-lived, however, and Cubans often refer to the ensuing decade of the 1970s as their dark days. In particular, they call the years 1971-76 the "Quinquenio Gris" (Five Gray Years), in light of the suppression of free speech during the period. As revised in 1976, the Cuban Constitution emphasized Marxist-Leninist ideals and stated that it "deems that artistic creation is free as long as artistic content does not express views contrary to the Revolution." (1) Exhibitions were closed, art was censored, and artists lost teaching jobs because of their artwork at various times during the next thirty years. The very same intellectuals who had supported Lam's mural now came to condemn the Cuban government for its censorship of artists, believing that all forms of censorship are unacceptable.
The US reactions to Cuba have at times seemed counterintuitive, and since the revolution in 1959, relations between Cuba and the United States have been at best wary; policies have vacillated from prohibitive to encouraging. The United States broke diplomatic relations with its island neighbor soon after the revolution, declaring that travel by American citizens was against the national security interests of the United States. On September 4, 1961, Congress enacted the Foreign Assistance Act, authorizing a total embargo on all trade between the two countries, and imposed strict travel restrictions on Cuba, even for scholarly purposes. (2) By the time of Lam's mural, Cuba had begun to seem less of a hemispheric threat, and the US government moved toward normalizing relations between the two countries. US senators visited Cuba secretly, and during the Nixon administration (1969-74) the treasury department issued specific licenses for financial transactions involving the importation of Cuban publications, posters, recordings, and visual media by universities and libraries for research purposes. (3) In 1977 President Jimmy Carter allowed the passport travel restrictions to lapse, and the treasury department began to issue general licenses that enabled some individuals to travel and trade relatively freely. The US and Cuban governments exchanged interests sections, and Congress passed an amendment to no longer exclude individuals from getting US visas because of their political ideologies. Some twenty years after the embargo began, it seemed as if things would begin to take a natural course of dissolution--and that Americans might directly bear witness to any continuing censorship of the arts in Cuba.
But in April 1982 President Ronald Reagan reinstated a general prohibition on expenditures for travel in Cuba, which for all intents and purposes restricted American travel to and in Cuba. The Reagan administration established categories for a general license for those gathering news or making documentary films, engaged in professional research, or visiting relatives. In July 1982 participants were limited to those who were full-time researchers engaged in topics specifically related to Cuba. Reagan's Proclamation 5377 of October 4, 1985, denied entry into the United States to any employee of the government of Cuba. Inasmuch as all Cuban academics and teachers work for the government, and galleries and museums are primarily owned by the government, this order precluded most art professionals in Cuba from entering the United States and severely limited intellectual exchange between the two countries.
Cuba had created a ministry of culture in 1976, which organized exhibitions and worked with artists and then, despite the US sanctions, in the 1980s threw open its cultural doors to the world by inaugurating the Havana Bienal, a showcase for new artists from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The first Bienal de La Habana (May-June 1984) was organized in the spirit of Lam's Cuba Collectiva and included approximately eight hundred artists. By the second Bienal, word had gotten out. Five thousand people attended on opening night alone; approximately three hundred thousand people visited the exhibition. (4) This Bienal (November-December 1986) included 690 artists from 57 countries and was accompanied by meetings, conferences, and workshops. As a result of this exposure, a number of artists were invited to exhibit internationally (Ricardo Rodriguez Brey, for example, was invited to Documenta in Kassel, Germany). The Cuban government supported these exchanges to allow the world to see the level of cultural and intellectual sophistication in Cuba. Created in mixed-media assemblage, La Familia Revolucionaria (1984) by Leandro Soto and Playitas Granma (1988) by Alejandro Aguilera spoke to the facade of the established society versus the aspirations of the common Cuban. The artists of these first Bienals--such as Tomas Sanchez, Jose Bedia, Soto, and Aguilera--came of age after the Cuban Revolution and considered their role to be witnesses of the best and worst of their society. Filled with ironic metaphors, the artworks were not triumphal images heralding the revolution, but works that spoke out about their world at that moment, enticing the viewer to dig beneath the surface of the image, read the text, and understand elements of the parody. Rendered in a naturalistic style, the images at first appear supportive of a society of which they are in fact sometimes critical.
At the same moment, some in the Cuban community of Miami--certainly not all--believed that art made by artists who had not renounced Castro should not be sold in Miami. This faction was supported by some of the most powerful Cubans in Miami, such as Jorge Mas Canosa. In early 1988 the (now-defunct) Cuban Museum of Arts and Culture, on Calle Ocho in Miami's Little Havana, planned its second art auction to raise funds for the museum, and decided to include art created by Cubans who had left Cuba together with those who had stayed. Similarly "controversial" art had been exhibited in the previous museum charity auction; but this time a package was sent anonymously on April 15, 1988, to various media outlets with a list of the art that would be shown and artists whom those objecting to the auction deemed to be "communist sympathizers." The museum's board called a meeting to decide whether the controversial art should be eliminated. The vote was 19-18 to keep the art...
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