Cultural Policy, the Visual Arts, and the Advance of the

Cuban Revolution in the Aftermath of the Gray Years

Doreen Weppler-Grogan

Cuban Studies, Volume 41, 2010, pp. 143-165 (Article)

Published by University of Pittsburgh Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/413143

Access provided by Florida International University (14 Aug 2017 20:38 GMT)
D O R E E N W E P P L E R- G RO G A N

Cultural Policy, the Visual Arts, and the

Advance of the Cuban Revolution in the
Aftermath of the Gray Years

A B S T R AC T
This article examines the impact on the visual arts in Cuba of a period commonly
referred to as the gray years, a period during the 1970s when economic and cultural
practices copied from the Soviet bureaucracy had great weight. It contends that though
Cuba’s cultural space was restricted during the gray years, there were always artists who
created points of resistance, refusing to accept either the stereotypical notions of Cuban
identity that a layer of dogmatists ensconced in major cultural institutions or their
bureaucratic excesses promoted. The article locates this cultural discourse in polemics
that unfolded in the 1960s, when notions of socialist realism were sharply contested, and
it furthermore notes how both periods of debate are providing vital reference points in
contemporary discussions on cultural policy. With the demise of the Soviet Union and
the introduction of the Special Period in the 1990s, artists in Cuba were forced to
contend with new factors that challenged the mode of cultural production on the island,
particularly the growing inroads of the capitalist market. The article explains how
initiatives like the Battle of Ideas, launched in 1999, can help avoid a comparable future
rupture with the Cuba’s cultural policy.

RESUMEN
Este artículo examina el impacto en las artes visuales en Cuba de un período común-
mente conocido como los años grises, un período durante la década de 1970, cuando las
prácticas económicas y culturales copiadas de la burocracia soviética tenían gran peso.
El artículo se sostiene que, aunque el espacio cultural de Cuba se restringió durante los
años grises, es incorrecto concluir que la producción artística fue tan limitada por la
estrecha visión política de una parte de los funcionarios culturales, que se produjo poco
digno de consideración. De hecho, siempre hubo artistas que crearon puntos de resisten-
cia, negándose a aceptar ya sea las nociones estereotipadas de la identidad cubana
promovida por una capa de dogmáticos instalados en las principales instituciones cultu-
rales o sus excesos burocráticos. Se sitúa este discurso cultural en la polémica que se
desarrolló en la década de 1960 cuando se hizo pronunciada oposición a las ideas del
realismo socialista, y además, el artículo nota cómo estos dos períodos de debate propor-
cionan puntos de referencia vitales a las discusiones contemporáneas sobre la política
cultural. Con la desaparición de la Unión Soviética y la introducción del Período Espe-

143
144 : Doreen Weppler-Grogan
cial en la década de 1990, los artistas en Cuba se vieron obligados a enfrentarse a nuevos
factores que cuestionaron el modo de producción cultural en la isla, en particular, las
crecientes incursiones del mercado capitalista. El ensayo explica cómo la Batalla de
Ideas, una importante iniciativa lanzada en 1999, contribuirá a evitar una ruptura futura
comparable, con la política cultural de Cuba.

Introduction
From the inception of the revolution, the Cuban leadership grouped around
Fidel Castro recognized that the defense and advance of the revolution de-
pended fundamentally on the mobilization of the Cuban people. Cultural de-
velopment and, more specifically, artistic production have been viewed equally
consistently as indispensable components of that mobilization. Widespread
debate around cultural policy and the freest conditions of artistic expression are
inevitably entailed in this perspective. The Cuban cultural scholar Graziella
Pogolotti explained at a recent book fair in Havana that the cultural debate has
always been part of a more fundamental question about how socialism will be
built and that the revolution’s cultural policy is part of a broader approach. ‘‘As
Che [Guevara] said, to build socialism, you also have to develop the subject of
that new history—the men and women, and also culture.’’1 In his remarks to
intellectuals at the famous library meetings in 1961, President Fidel Castro also
pointed to the close association between culture and social change when he
explained that the revolution cannot seek ‘‘to stifle art or culture, because one
of the goals and one of the fundamental aims of the revolution is to develop art
and culture, precisely so that art and culture truly become the patrimony of the
people. And just as one wants a better life for the people in the material sense,
so, too, does one want a better life for the people in a spiritual and cultural
sense.’’2
However, it would be naive to suggest that the forging of the revolution’s
cultural policy has been without contradictions. From time to time, departures
from the revolution’s cultural policy have occurred—‘‘aberrations’’ as the
Cuban Minister of Culture Abel Prieto put it in a recent interview.3 But during
those periods when the cultural space for Cuba’s artists has narrowed, a vig-
orous riposte also has been in evidence. This determined resistance to any
encroachments on Cuba’s cultural space would not have been possible without
the mobilizations that have been a feature of the revolution from its earliest
days: the Literacy Campaign in 1961 through the rectification process of the
late 1980s and the Battle of Ideas launched in 1999. These mobilizations not
only have enabled an active process of settling accounts with negative episodes
but, along the way, also have led to political clarifications and deepened the
revolution’s cultural policy.
 Advance of the Cuban Revolution : 145

The Quinquenio Gris: Half a Decade of Gray Years

The most notorious rupture with the revolution’s cultural policies occurred
during the gray years from 1971 to 1976. The lessons of this period—and
others—have for some time been under serious consideration in Cuba, with a
growing recognition that this process is an essential step for advancing the
goals of the revolution. A recent lively engagement with these issues occurred
in the aftermath of the appearance on Cubavisión of Luis Pavón Tamayo in
January 2007. Pavón was presented on television in a laudatory way, including
images of him with Raúl Castro shortly after Castro assumed the presidency.
However, Pavón had served as director of the National Cultural Council (Con-
sejo Nacional de Cultura) from 1971 to 1976, and many Cubans who lived
through that period consider him responsible for implementing repressive pol-
icies against artists and writers who refused to conform to a narrow, formulaic,
and populist dogma that was construed as proletarian culture. Scores of Cubans
began an e-mail campaign to register their disgust with the program, and they
organized meetings with the Ministry of Culture.4 The writers’ and artists’
union, the Unión Nacional de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba (UNEAC) dis-
cussed the matter, and Minister of Culture Abel Prieto presented the Cuban
Communist Party’s view that it had been an error to involve Pavón—and two
other officials from the period—on the program because they were associated
with a period that the political leadership viewed with ‘‘great disapproval’’
when the very tenets of the revolution’s cultural policies were ‘‘set aside.’’ In
effect, the pavonato, as the cultural regime imposed by Pavón is often referred
to, violated the cultural policies that the revolution had implemented in 1961
that guaranteed full freedom of artistic expression to all but open enemies of the
revolution and ‘‘that brought together the cultural work of artists and writers of
all tendencies, of all generations—Catholic, Communist, even non-revolution-
aries who were sincere,’’ as Prieto later explained in an interview.5
The UNEAC itself issued a critical statement about the television program,
and when a meeting it called with 450 invited intellectuals was deemed insuffi-
cient, the magazine Criterios and the Hermanos Sais, an organization of young
artists and writers, held a broader gathering. These discussions continued at a
series of meetings that Criterios organized around a range of cultural disci-
plines that had experienced the repressive measures of the pavónistas, includ-
ing filmmaking, theater, visual arts, and music.6 At the 2008 Havana Book Fair,
the debate continued. It is noteworthy that the sharp exchanges of the early
1960s about the aesthetic of socialist realism—and broader related issues—
helped inform the current review of the experiences of the first half of the
1970s. The presentation of several titles recounting the cultural polemics of the
1960s as well as revisiting (and repudiating) the cultural policy that governed
the short-lived gray years provided the focus at the fair.7 As Ambrosio Fornet
146 : Doreen Weppler-Grogan

stated in his speech to the meeting of 450 intellectuals, ‘‘When evoking the
Gray Quinquenium, I feel that we’re plunging headlong into something that not
only deals with the present but also projects us forcefully into the future, even if
only because of what [Spanish philosopher Jorge Ruiz de] Santayana said:
‘Those who don’t know history are condemned to repeat it.’ That danger is
precisely what we’re trying to conjure here.’’8
Yet despite the current consideration of the gray years in Cuba, the wide-
spread consequences of the policies of the period remain little understood in
much of the writings on this period produced outside of the island. Some
authors sympathetic to the revolution simply ignore the repressive measures of
officials who wielded power or consider them isolated actions that bear little
consideration. In contrast, the U.S. art historian David Craven, who has done
some of the most interesting critical writing on Cuban visual art outside the
island, acknowledges the existence of different ideological tendencies within
Cuba and documents occasions of restricted cultural space in Cuba. But his
account would have been far more powerful had he treated each regrettable
episode as part of a continual processes of clarification, rupturas, and so on, out
of which the revolution’s cultural policies are developed and within which a
political trajectory can be traced on the basis of the ideals of José Martí, Che
Guevara, Fidel Castro, Armando Hart, and others.
The more common approach is to treat each repressive measure as the
work of the Cuban leadership en bloc, and doing so has equally serious defi-
ciencies.9 Not only does it totally erase the efforts of those intellectuals and
artists, as well as the role of leaders like Armando Hart Dávalos, minister of
culture since 1976, who have resisted encroachments on the nation’s cultural
space; it also robs the development of cultural policy and practice of its dy-
namic evolution. This is additionally unsatisfactory because as the cultural
conflicts have unfolded, they have revealed how fundamental political issues
are at the heart of these differences. The main problem is that this approach,
which erases the continuity of a cultural policy forged through action and that
views its development outside of the broader sociopolitical conditions, is inca-
pable of explaining how obstacles that have periodically arisen in the cultural
plane have been overcome.
The fact is that throughout the history of the revolution, the precise weight
of these policies and practices have been intimately linked with the revolution’s
political development at that particular conjuncture. So it was that at the start of
the 1970s a combination of factors quite outside the cultural domain allowed
these dogmatic ideas to gain ascendancy for a time in the revolution’s cultural
institutions. Fundamental to Cuba’s circumstances was el bloqueo, the continu-
ing comprehensive embargo levied by the U.S. government since October 1960.
Another key factor in 1970 was the campaign footing adopted by the nation to
harvest 10 million tons of sugar. Despite the enormous efforts invested—‘‘holi-
 Advance of the Cuban Revolution : 147

days were abandoned, Christmas abolished, schedules disrupted’’10 —the ‘‘bat-

tle for sugar’’ failed to reached its goal and disorganized the economy in the
process. Finally, negative international factors, including setbacks in the guer-
rilla campaigns in Latin America and, in particular, the collapse of the Bolivian
campaign and the death of Che Guevara, all provided conditions that led Cuba to
seek increasingly close relations with the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc,
including entry into the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance. These broad
conditions provided fertile ground for the development of a narrow-minded and
rigid approach to cultural production. But these practices were challenged and
reversed when the international conjuncture became more favorable at the end
of the decade. For instance, the advent of workers’ and farmers’ governments in
Nicaragua and Grenada, the decision to send thirty-six thousand troops to fight a
successful war in Angola in the interests of revolutionary internationalism, and
the defeat of the United States in Vietnam all played a powerful role in decreas-
ing the sense of isolation and in turn opened up cultural space on the island.11
The Quinquenio Gris exacted a heavy toll. Through a process known as
parametración, the dogmatists ensconced in the cultural institutions scruti-
nized the religious beliefs, sexual orientation, relations with acquaintances and
colleagues abroad, and other aspects of the personal lives of those engaged in
cultural activity. Under these intrusive guidelines, homosexual artists were
ostracized, influences from cultural pursuits undertaken in capitalist countries
were considered ideologically unsound, and youths were discouraged from
listening to the music of the Beatles.12 It was a time when artistic parameters
‘‘similar to the inauspicious dogma of socialist realism were imposed in more
or less visible fashion,’’ according to the novelist Leonardo Padura.13
At a personal level, the cost is obvious. Many artists and intellectuals were
simply marginalized for often-lengthy periods of their productive lives. Further-
more, the country itself paid a heavy price for the silencing of a whole range of
intellectuals and artists. Visual artists like Antonia Eiríz and Umberto Pena both
simply stopped painting in the 1970s.14 Manuel Mendive continued his work,
but nevertheless was sidelined because he persisted with his own personal
aesthetic. Literary figures like the playwright Antón Arrufat, the writer Pablo
Armando Fernández, and even musicians of the nueva trova movement Silvio
Rodríguez and Pablo Milanés and the renowned pop artist Raúl Martínez Gon-
zález all came up against these dogmatic officials during the 1960s. Sometimes
their work was criticized; in other cases, their sexual orientation or the company
they kept was suspect. The actions taken against them varied. Often artists under
scrutiny were unable to find any space where they could produce their work or
else lacked opportunities to exhibit it; others found that trips abroad were no
longer possible. Also ruled out were teaching and occupying technical or leader-
ship posts in cultural institutions. Yet others like Arrufat received jobs in which
they were unable to pursue their creative interests.15
148 : Doreen Weppler-Grogan

All of these actions constituted a serious blow to the country’s cultural life.
Yet despite the narrowing of cultural space during this period, there were
nevertheless ebbs and flows, never total closure. Obstacles to the production or
exhibition of work even during the harsh Quinquenio Gris were vigorously
‘‘fought, questioned, halted, neutralized.’’16 And very often, those who resisted
were associated with the Casa de las Américas, the Latin American cultural
center, or the Film Institute (Instituto Cubano del Arte é Industria Cinemato-
gráfica, or ICAIC). Both institutions have been viewed as defenders of the
artistic freedoms promoted in Cuba’s cultural policy from the revolution’s
earliest days, and both offered a different approach to artistic creativity based
on the legacy of such heroes of the revolution such as José Martí and Che
Guevara.
Some visual artists resisted and simply refused to paint yet another heroic
picture of a muscular peasant or cows that held world records in milk produc-
tion. It is noteworthy that Manuel Mendive, who ignored the proscriptions, did
some of his best work during this period; a bit later, Flavio Garciandía turned to
photorealism as an alternative, and so on.17 Raúl Martínez González (1927–
1995) was able to develop his personal interests to great effect through adopt-
ing the artistic language of pop art. He was one of several artists who were able
to pursue their artistic vision in a manner in which they did not feel compro-
mised and whose work cultural officials did not find problematic. Martínez
González created some of the most iconic images of the revolution, which have
become widely known as examples of Cuba’s renowned poster art. In works
like Cartel Cubano, circa 1968, his serial portraits—associated with devices
used in Andy Warhol’s pop art, despite the quite different aesthetic involved—
bring together Cuban people of different ages, genders, and ethnic groups
alongside international heroes and Cuba’s revolutionary leaders to form a
cheerful and inclusive vision of the Cuban nation. However, these pop-art
works can be linked with Martínez González’s formal artistic interests in the
graphic arts (as well as his support for the revolution) rather than in any
dogmatic proscription. Similarly, throughout this period, Servando Cabrera
Moreno (1923–1981) continued to explore his fascination with social themes
and, at a formal level, his experimentation with ethnic portraiture and the
portrayal of musculature (that later transformed into erotic art). And again, his
individual interests rather than any cultural formulae guided him. These are
evident in his powerful Peasant Militia (1961) and continued to appear in his
later Youthful Days (1973). Thus, contradictory forces were present even during
the gray years.
The Cuban artist and art historian Antonio Eligio (Tonel) writes of ‘‘the
defining weight of ideological and aesthetic reductionisms during those years’’
and comments on ‘‘the undeniable experience of rejection suffered by several
very worthy artists for many years.’’ He notes how cultural production was
 Advance of the Cuban Revolution : 149

‘‘directed towards the imposition of Socialist Realism—to some extent ‘trop-

icalised’ and almost never mentioned by its name in that context—as the only
valid method of art and its interpretation in the island.’’18 Yet as the Cuban art
historian Gerardo Mosquera explains, there was—in terms of artistic language
and formal qualities—a significant distance between the forms of artistic ex-
pression deemed acceptable in Cuba and the restrictions imposed in the Soviet
Union, when socialist realism prevailed. In Cuba, when artists’ creative output
was deemed unacceptable during this period, at a purely artistic level, the issue
was not so much the style in which the work was executed, although a radical
expressionism was highly distasteful to the dogmatists. Rather, ‘‘a practice of
culture as ideological propaganda, along with a stereotyped nationalism’’ was
promoted. Furthermore, any work deemed overly influenced by Western artis-
tic practices was undesirable, which consequently curtailed Cuban participa-
tion in international events like the Venice Biennial during this period.19

Antonia Eiríz and Una tribuna

An examination of Antonia Eiríz’s (1929–1995) work, as well as that of several
other artists who produced at different moments in Cuba’s revolutionary pro-
cess, helps chart the contradictory trajectory of Cuba’s cultural policies. The
hostile reception to a work like her Una tribuna para la paz democrática (A
Tribune for Democratic Peace, 1968) is emblematic of the conditions of cul-
tural production in Cuba that became more entrenched in the field of cultural
production during the gray years.
This large canvas—today hanging prominently in the National Museum of
Fine Arts in Havana—was originally the focus of fierce controversy (Figure 1).
The work was submitted to the 1968 national salon and even was considered
(unsuccessfully) for the first prize. Eiríz was initially surprised at the reception
of her work:

When I began to hear remarks that my painting was ‘‘conflictive,’’ I began to believe
them. The Tribune, for example, was criticized very harshly. It was about to be awarded
a prize and then there was no prize due to the criticism. One day I saw all the pictures
together for the first time in many years. I said to myself: This is painting which
expresses the moment in which I am living. And if a painter can do that, then he or she is
a real painter. Thus I absolved myself.20

Regardless of how Eiríz judged her own work in later years, cultural
officials at the time deemed it unacceptable, and her treatment led her to take
the drastic decision to give up painting. It would be ‘‘their loss,’’ not hers, she
reasoned. The work itself is highly dramatic. In Una tribuna, Eiríz depicts the
scene of a public meeting, with the vantage point of the viewer located behind
150 : Doreen Weppler-Grogan

the space allotted to the speakers, facing five microphones, placed on a podium.
But once viewers position themselves as if they were the speaker, they confront
a horrific scene. A red rope, which is attached to the canvas, providing the work
with a third dimension, separates from the podium a crowd of disturbing
skeleton-like figures. The features on the faces vary in definition—some have
blank, grim mouths and others, barely perceptible skulls showing through the
white paint. Attached to the dividing rope are seven leaflets printed with the
unexplained letters PCV, ‘‘por una Paz Democrática,’’ and the image of a star.
As in her other works of the period, such as Anunciación, the palette is pre-
dominantly in somber shades of blacks, browns, and grays. The roughness in
treatment with forceful brushstrokes imparts a similar haunting brutality to the
work. The initial shock of the scene comes from the ghastly miscreants who
form the body of the rally. The imagery on the canvas clashed sharply with the
optimistic and cheerful pop art works by Raúl Martínez González associated
with the heroic period of the revolution that celebrated la lucha and la patria. It
was also incongruous with the euphoric mood of the Salón de Mai that the
Cuban surrealist painter Wifredo Lam had organized just one year earlier,
when almost a hundred artists from around the world traveled to Cuba to work
on pieces they donated to the revolution and participated in the festive produc-
tion of Mural Cuba Colectiva. The response to Eiríz’s work sounded the alarm
that a new mediocrity in artistic standards that began to judge works by their
propagandist qualities was overtaking these early years of cultural pluralism
and artistic exuberance.
But if Eiríz’s work captured a reality that clashed with the preferred aes-
thetic, did it have any artistic merit? After all, she was a classically trained artist
who graduated from the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts in 1957. The
expressionist language Eiríz employed was associated with Francis Bacon, the
Mexican José Luis Cuevas, as well as Francisco Goya (although she never
considered this link accurate), and it was connected to neofigurative trends
evident throughout Latin America in the 1950s and 1960s. The Columbian art
historian Marta Traba portrayed these trends as a ‘‘culture of resistance’’ against
the Americanization of Latin America and the aesthetics of a metropolitan-
based ‘‘internationalism.’’21 The Cuban art historian Graziella Pogolotti com-
mented on a series of tints executed by Eiríz and noted how her caricatures—
‘‘monstruos que han perdido dimensión humana’’ (‘‘monsters that had lost their
human dimension’’)—represented a formal rebellion against the academicians
and conformists. She firmly placed Eiríz in the expressionist tradition and saw
her work as expressing a piercing, heart-rending scream. However, she viewed
her creative output as transitional in character; situating it more broadly, Pogo-
lotti interpreted the etchings as a condemnation of the moral and social misery of
mankind.22 All of these observations about Eiríz’s work establish that a serious
critical approach to her work was undoubtedly warranted.
151
FIGURE 1. Antonia Eiríz, Una tribuna para la paz democrática (A Tribune for Democratic Peace), 1968.
Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana. Photography: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Christine Guest.
152 : Doreen Weppler-Grogan

Yet, in contrast, the official reception to Eiríz’s work at the time was of
severe hostility. For those who directed cultural policy, the use of an expres-
sionist artistic language was discomfiting, but the particular work under con-
sideration was unacceptable on two further grounds. First, because of the sub-
ject matter depicted; second, the artist’s extra-artistic associations were more
than likely suspect. Una tribuna was schematically understood, at least by
some officials, as a statement of opposition to the revolutionary process. An-
tonio José Portuondo, at the time vice president of UNEAC, allegedly con-
demned the work as ‘‘grotesque and defeatist . . . in essence counter revolution-
ary.’’23 Others rejected the depiction of the crowd at a rally as a herd of shocking
miscreants.24 However, did these latter viewers fail to see what Portuondo may
have observed more clearly? That is, in this work, the viewer becomes the
speaker. The view depicted is, hence, through the eyes of the speaker at the
podium, not through the viewer’s own eyes or those of the artist herself. Indeed,
the original and novel idea was that the work would be shown with several
folding chairs arranged in front of it, to seat the viewer awaiting his or her turn
to speak. Once at the podium, the official/viewer perceives the crowd as noth-
ing more than a sea of faceless entities.
Eiríz herself was under scrutiny. Her work’s ‘‘conflictive status,’’ as it was
described to her, may have been reinforced by her association with Lunes, the
literary supplement to Revolución the newspaper of the July 26 Movement.
Staffed by a heterogeneous group of intellectuals who had been ‘‘left behind by
the radicalizing Revolution, unable and unwilling to change,’’25 the supple-
ment’s closure was bound up with the controversial PM affair.26 Eiríz’s connec-
tion with Lunes was probably through Raúl Martínez González, the supple-
ment’s art director from 1960. Her illustrations were used in about a dozen
issues before it was closed. Furthermore, Una tribuna made its appearance in
the aftermath of the Herberto Padilla affair.27 And in his book, Padilla had
included a poem about Eiríz, thereby implicitly associating her with an explo-
sive episode that had developed an international dimension.
When Eiríz decided to stop painting, she did not disengage from the cul-
tural sphere. Indeed, she became deeply involved in another artistic pursuit: she
began to teach children and adults from the Committees for the Defense of the
Revolution (CDRs) to make figures from papier-mâché. In effect, her efforts
developed into a movement of amateur art practitioners that gained national
recognition. As this progressed, the puppets were used in plays, whose theatri-
cal sets, as well as the writing, were done by members of the CDRs. Whatever
acclaim she achieved in this field, this ‘‘painter of tragedy,’’ as the Cuban poet
and essayist Roberto Fernández Retamar described her in 1964, was an ‘‘un-
forgivable casualty’’ of the period,28 one whose work was not rescued until
several decades later from the ignominy to which the anticultural officials had
condemned it. During the 1980s, she received several awards for her work, and
 Advance of the Cuban Revolution : 153

in 1989, she was awarded the country’s highest distinction in the field of culture
when Cuba’s Council of State bestowed on her the Félix Varela Order.29
Several elements of Eiríz’s story and others like hers are noteworthy and
help us understand why the campaign for rectification and the recent Battle of
Ideas were deemed vital for the survival of the revolution. For many visitors to
the island throughout the years who commented on its culture—such as Eva
Cockcroft, Lucy Lippard, Susan Sontag, Andrew Salkey, and even Jean-Paul
Sartre, often the most outstanding feature they noted about artistic life was the
absence of a dominant socialist realist aesthetic. And indeed it has been. How-
ever, although it has never been possible to impose in Cuba a bureaucratized
system of state-sanctioned propagandist art, and certainly nothing resembling
the type of artistic production that the First Congress of Soviet Writers decreed
in Moscow in 1934, some of its ideological tenets became influential in the
1970s.30 In the broader context, this is not surprising. After all, during this
period, the Soviet-style model of economic planning became more established.
Instead of the budgetary finance system that Che Guevara advanced, the center
of which was the mobilization of the working class and voluntary labor, the
economic accounting system was introduced. This model abjured the involve-
ment of the working class in planning and saw the top-down administration of
the plan as central, and one that, moreover, mimicked the capitalist market. The
Cuban economist Carlos Tablada summarized the system in the following
terms: ‘‘[E]ach production unit constitutes an enterprise . . . relations between
enterprises are very similar to those that exist under capitalism; all transfers of
products between state enterprises are carried out through the mechanism of
buying and selling, with the result that the products of a state enterprise take on
the characteristics of a commodity.’’31
The consequences of this economic model were experienced in other
spheres, including the island’s cultural policy. In 1975, the First Party Congress
adopted a system of economic management and planning for the cultural sec-
tor.32 Economic criteria were applied and accounting goals set. Commissioned
works of art began to be treated as commodities for internal marketing pur-
poses. However, negative side effects soon emerged. President Fidel Castro
recalled in several speeches in later years the damaging impact all these mea-
sures had on the consciousness of the artistic producers. He referred to a certain
‘‘mercantilist’’ attitude that became apparent as social differentiations began to
appear among cultural producers for the first time since the victory of the
revolution.33
As collaboration deepened with the Soviet Union, Soviet instructors ar-
rived at art schools and Cuban artists traveled to Moscow for their training.
Soviet aesthetic and philosophical treatises became more widely available in
Spanish. It is not surprising, therefore, that proponents of socialist realism—
albeit in a ‘‘tropicalized’’ form—again raised their heads. Indeed, several per-
154 : Doreen Weppler-Grogan

sonalities who were leading figures in the cultural apparatus in the 1970s had
been prominent advocates of this aesthetic during the course of an intense
polemical exchange during the 1960s. Although Edith Garcia Buchaca, a for-
mer leader of the Partido Socialista Popular (PSP) and prominent figure in the
National Council of Culture, was no longer influential, her writings undoubt-
edly provided a reference point. In 1961, for instance, she authored a fifty-four-
page pamphlet outlining how artists must be first and foremost politicians
trained ‘‘to adopt the view of the masses,’’ helping workers overcome their petit
bourgeois habits and prejudices, and always ready ‘‘to unmask and denounce
the enemy.’’34 Another former PSP member and cultural official, Mirta Aguirre,
also promoted a socialist realist aesthetic during the 1960s on the grounds that
it was ‘‘a road to consciousness and as a weapon to transform the world . . . a
way of creating that is based on scientific materialism.’’35
Of course, over the years, such views did not go unanswered. Those who
replied, often associated with Casa de las Américas and the Cuban Film In-
stitute, responded in the framework that Che Guevara had codified in his 1968
article in La Mancha. He forcefully argued that the socialist realist aesthetic
mechanically portrayed ‘‘the ideal society, almost without conflicts or contra-
dictions’’; it was a frozen aesthetic that would limit artistic expression.36 Fur-
thermore, Guevara’s view was that future great artists would appear according
‘‘to the degree that the field of culture and the possibilities for expression are
broadened.’’ When the former central leader of the old Moscow-oriented PSP
Blas Roca wrote an editorial in a December 1963 issue of Hoy characterizing
Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita as ‘‘unwholesome entertainment for the work-
ing class,’’ its very next issue carried a reply.37 In his response, the filmmaker
Alfredo Guevara from ICAIC rejected the populist notion that the public could
be fed only ‘‘ideological pap, highly sterilised, and cooked in accordance with
the recipes of socialist realism.’’38

The 1980s and the New Art of Cuba

By the 1980s, the consequences of the adaptation to the Soviet model became
evident at every level of society: economic deterioration, mismanagement of
resources, elements of corruption, excessive bureaucratization of the mecha-
nisms of government, and growing demoralization and demobilization of the
population.39 In Fidel Castro’s words, for several years, Cuba had been depart-
ing from its original revolutionary course and moving toward a system ‘‘worse
than capitalism.’’40 The campaign of rectification, launched in 1986, was de-
signed to put the revolution back on its original course. Politically, the cam-
paign stood in opposition to the policies of perestroika and glasnost, adopted by
the Soviet Union in an effort to rescue its failing economy and, indeed, society.
Central to rectification was the recuperation of Che Guevara’s notion of the
 Advance of the Cuban Revolution : 155

‘‘new man’’ with voluntary labor—revitalized through minibrigades that be-

gan to take on characteristics of a social movement—and other forms of collec-
tive action at its heart. Fidel Castro explained the scope of the campaign in a
speech in 1987:

What are we rectifying? We are rectifying all those things—and there are many—that
strayed from the revolutionary spirit, from revolutionary work, revolutionary virtue,
revolutionary effort, revolutionary responsibility; all those things that strayed from the
spirit of solidarity among people. We’re rectifying all the shoddiness and mediocrity that
is precisely the negation of Che’s ideas, his revolutionary thought, his style, his spirit and
his example.41

Because the approach to rectification is often to revisit the so-called great

economic debate of the 1960s, its cultural dimension is often neglected.42 How-
ever, among visual artists, the break with the formulaic proscriptions of the
cultural dogmatists registered as early as the strident Volumen Uno exhibition in
1980, composed of work made by the first generation of young artists who had
benefited from the vast system of art education implemented by the revolution
and who refused to continue producing empty, tired, stereotypical representa-
tions of cultural identity. The Cuban art historian Osvaldo Sánchez recounted
how while the ‘‘guardians of the state’s aesthetics’’ were ‘‘red with rage,’’ the
exhibition registered a watershed as thousands of viewers flocked to see the
artwork. ‘‘It wasn’t just a simple exhibition but the calling card of a generation
that emerged, almost by surprise, with a sacrilegious smile and which couldn’t
be limited to those few ‘young iconoclasts.’ ’’43 From the time of the exhibition,
during the 1980s, a ‘‘tenuous current of renovation and expansion that would
reconnect it with the tumultuous vitality of the 60s’’ marked the visual arts.44
Innovation in the artistic languages employed, clashes with cultural authorities,
polemical exchanges, and further clarification of the revolution’s cultural policy
peppered the period. And indeed this process has continued since the 1980s.
Ambrosio Fornet, the foremost literary critic in Cuba who has authored one of
the most thorough condemnations of the gray years (and indeed the term Quin-
quenio Gris is attributed to him) explains that, today, any cultural differences
that emerge are handled in a manner quite different from the actions taken by the
pavónistas. Indeed, as cited earlier, the official response to the opposition to the
Cubavisión television program that lauded Pavón (entailing a government min-
ister meeting with UNEAC, the organization of broader forums to discuss the
subject, and so on) confirms this judgment. Obviously, cultural tensions have not
disappeared. Conflicts of opinion are part and parcel of everyday life. However,
Fornet insists, in contrast to the methods of the pavónistas, that mutual respect
and a shared authentic interest in Cuba’s cultural development are integral to the
development of a living culture.45
156 : Doreen Weppler-Grogan

Juan Francisco Elso and Por América

The work of Juan Francisco Elso (1956–1988) and in particular his work Por
América (For the Americas), clearly demonstrated that a new period had ar-
rived in Cuba’s cultural policy. Elso died of cancer at thirty-two years of age,
after spending only a decade of his life as an artist. His initial fascination with
the Indo-American people in his early work provided a bridge toward his
eventual immersion in Afro-Cuban culture, a vital and active component of
Cuba’s national culture. It was also an established theme in Cuban painting
especially through the work of Wifredo Lam, Cuba’s foremost modernist artist
with an international reputation. However, Elso’s sculptures registered a spir-
itual engagement with his subject that was not present in Lam’s work. Elso
came to share with two other artists from equally modest backgrounds, José
Bedia (b. 1959) and Richard Brey (b. 1955), a deep identification with the
beliefs, visual forms, and rituals of Afro-Cuban culture, including those of
santería.46 Elso became initiated into santería, although he was not from an
Afro-Cuban background. At a personal level, he did not see that this conflicted
with his socialist views; indeed, he drew analogies at an ethical level between
the two ways of viewing the world by insisting that the goal of both was the
improvement of humanity.
His Por América (1986) is a less-than-human sized statue of Cuba’s na-
tional hero, José Martí (Figure 2). It resembles the wooden effigies of saints
found in colonial churches throughout Latin America. The statue has a number
of darts embedded in the body, and others have presumably missed their target
and lie at the feet of Martí. The darts bring to mind the canonical iconography
of Saint Sebastian, and there are some parallels. Just as Sebastian was a military
martyr, Martí was a soldier (in the wars of independence from Spain). Further-
more, however hard the Roman archers tried to execute Sebastian with their
arrows, they were unsuccessful. It is not difficult to conclude that, similarly, the
ideals and goals of Martí live on in his work. In addition, unlike the usual
depictions of Saint Sebastian tied to a stake by the Romans and helplessly
facing the arrows of the soldiers, the drawn sword Elso has put in Martí’s hand
also demonstrates his power.47 Finally, just as Saint Sebastian brought sight to
the blind and hearing to the deaf once they embraced his (Christian) beliefs,
Martí is identified as opening the eyes and minds of the Cuban people with his
pro-independence beliefs. The fleur-de-lis-shaped darts are painted in two dif-
ferent colors: red to signify blood drawn and green to stand for the ‘‘sprouts of a
fertile rebirth.’’48 The three-quarter-size figure is dressed in rags; the statue
appears roughly hewn; the paintwork is chipped and splashed with mud. It
contrasts with the often-elaborate and polished effigies of saints on display in
liturgical spaces of Christianity, well out of reach of the congregation. The
work was intended for exhibition with a group of three other sculptures ad-
 Advance of the Cuban Revolution : 157

dressing the theme of renewal that Elso was working on in his final months.
The three pieces—a skull, a heart, and a hand—formed a series entitled La
transparencia de Dios (The Transparencies of God ), and Por América was
meant to signify the attitude that guided the project of re-creating the world, the
subject that the series addressed.
Por América is a complex work, but there are several elements that locate
it firmly within the generation of the 1980s. For one, a closer examination
indicates that it simply would not have been acceptable in the previous restric-
tive period of artistic production. Although the choice of a national hero for its
subject would not have been controversial, the formal treatment of the subject
indicates that the work sustains a matrix of readings beyond the obvious politi-
cal statement associated with Martí. And it is here that problems would have
arisen. This is because, on deeper examination, the work not only is inspired by
African religious myths and symbols but also actually incorporates elements of
associated rituals and practices. Elso executed the work after he became aware
that he was dying, and with that knowledge, he decided to blend his own blood
into the materials he used in his artwork. Furthermore, as a love pact, he
encased inside the statue memorabilia relating to his partner, the Mexican artist
Magali Lara. These aspects, specifically the inclusion of a cavity for the me-
mentos inside the effigy, can be associated with certain African relics, ‘‘or
receptacles of African or Afro Cuban power,’’ ‘‘hidden symbolic-ritual ele-
ments that constitute the key to their power.’’49 Viewers familiar with santería
rituals would associate the presence of the cavity with pots in which religious
practitioners deposit wood, earth, stones, leaves, and so on, in the belief that
they represent deities whose sacred powers would take root in these conditions.
The American curator and art historian Judith Bettelheim explains that the
nganga, ‘‘a receptacle . . . usually a clay container, a gourd, or a tripod iron
cauldron, which is kept in the backyard, in a cellar, or in the monte under a
tree,’’ is the ‘‘central icon’’ of the African religions still practiced in Cuba.50
On a more formal level, although the rough or ‘‘primitive’’ finish on the
work is obviously intentional, it is also highly deceptive. According to Mos-
quera, ‘‘the discourse of the materials’’ can be associated with ‘‘the creation of
an artwork structured through a process of syncretic combination of the sacra-
lised and the symbolic.’’51 As is evident with the use of the cavity, each step of
the construction has precise symbolic meaning in the aesthetic of the artist. No
material is used that does not have some symbolic significance. The process of
art making itself thus can be understood to evoke the rituals of a religious
ceremony. However, insofar as the sculpture can be associated with the carved
saints present in the Christian religion, it also registers the syncretic character
of santería that has evolved in Cuba whereby elements of Christianity have
combined with the rituals and practice of African religions. And finally, the
roughly hewn character of the work marks its distance from the fine finishes
158
FIGURE 2. Juan Francisco Elso, Por América (For the Americas), 1986.
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Photography: Lee Stalsworth.
 Advance of the Cuban Revolution : 159

associated with high art, thus bringing the work more closely to the artisan or
even the amateur carver.
The choice of the subject matter for this work indicates that it transcends a
purely spiritual reading. José Martí was identified above all as the revolution-
ary leader who fought (and died) for Cuban independence from Spain. An
intellectual and national hero, Martí insisted in his many writings that a clear
sense of national identity was a decisive ideological element in overcoming
colonial domination. By combining Afro-Cuban themes with a national hero
and associating both with Christian iconography—thus placing that hero’s
message for a united and independent nation centrally within the series of
sculptures—Elso enhances the complexity of his exposition on the nature of
Cuban identity. His is an inclusive vision of identity, and it is one that registers
the ‘‘Afro-Latino’’ nature of the Cuban people, as Fidel Castro put it. The
distance between the Martí that Elso presents and the formulaic bronze memo-
rial sculptures so favored by the art officials of the gray years could not be
greater. Indeed, at almost every level, this work clashes with the didactic,
heroic art deemed appropriate during the gray years: including its Christian
iconography, its incorporation of santería rituals, the choice of materials, and
perhaps even the hero’s less-than-human proportions.
The many layers of meanings captured in Elso’s Por América cannot be
mechanically related to the political realities of the time. It is, after all, a work
of art, not a political statement. Nevertheless, its resonance with viewers may
stem from the way Elso has captured many of the often-contradictory elements
of the historical quest for a national identity that—as his choice of Martí as a
vehicle for his artistic message suggests—will be forged through the crucible
of struggle. After all, it is traces of the artist himself found in the memorabilia
that is placed in the cavity of the statue (seen as the source of power)—possibly
suggesting that mankind itself holds the key to the future. Yet the work’s
dynamic quality, its complex character, and the multiple readings it offers all
constituted an anathema to those who in earlier years judged artistic expression
in terms of its success as political propaganda in Cuba. And it is vital to avoid
any notion that cultural clashes seen during the gray years have disappeared
totally. Indeed, in the wake of the departure of many of the 1980s artists from
the island, sporadic eruptions between cultural officials and artists have oc-
curred. Yet today, each specific incident has been surrounded by lively discus-
sions and debate that have served to further clarify the approach to artistic
expression encapsulated in the Cuba’s cultural policy. It can be said, therefore,
that one thing that the response to the Pavón affair clarified is that, far from
championing the revolution’s cultural policy, the gray years actually consti-
tuted its negation.
160 : Doreen Weppler-Grogan

Battle of Ideas
With the demise of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s and its disastrous
consequences for the physical well-being and standard of living of the Cuban
people, the rectification campaign was abruptly ended. At a time when many
artists were more preoccupied with finding the means to feed themselves than
with pursuing their artistic interests, efforts were made to preserve the revolu-
tion’s cultural gains. Yet Minister of Culture Abel Prieto recalls how—even in
the worst moments after the ‘‘special period in the time of peace’’ was declared
in 1990, ‘‘including those many moments of uncertainty’’—Armando Hart
(minister of culture at the time) insisted on collectively discussing and analyz-
ing the revolution’s cultural policies. It is well known that throughout this
period when Cuba’s gross domestic product declined almost overnight by 35
percent, not a single school (or hospital) closed.52 However, the measures the
government was forced to take to obtain hard currency—from foreign invest-
ment on the island to the development of the tourist industry and even the
circulation of the U.S. dollar—combined with steps taken by the U.S. govern-
ment to tighten the economic blockade of Cuba had severe consequences.
Prostitution, corruption, and increasing inequalities began to undermine the
social cohesion of the revolutionary process. At a cultural level, a whole new
set of economic parameters and ethical considerations arose for artistic practi-
tioners as ‘‘art tourism’’ arrived on the scene and Cuba’s artworks became some
of the most desirable on the international market.53
Nevertheless, despite a virtual torrent of predictions in the Western press
and other publications that the end of the revolution was in sight, that has not
occurred. The key to its survival cannot be comprehended without a clear
understanding of the Battle of Ideas, launched in 1999 by President Fidel
Castro as part of the mobilizations demanding that Washington return the child
Elián González to his country. Many observers of this immense campaigning
effort view it as yet another ‘‘confusing,’’ ‘‘unintelligible’’ phase of the Cuban
Revolution.54 Widely varying interpretations have been conjectured.55 In es-
sence, the batalla is a political response, with the cultural policy of the revolu-
tion at its center, to deepen the participation of Cuban people—particularly a
new generation of youths—in the revolutionary process. Its goal is to broaden
the cultural opportunities on the island and to address the social inequalities
that deepened with Cuba’s exposure to the capitalist market. Otto Rivero, a
leader of the campaign and first secretary of the Union of Communist Youth
explains its role in countering the so-called culture war that right-wing Ameri-
can politicians relaunched during the 1990s: the ideological drive ‘‘that pro-
motes capitalism and its individualist ‘dog-eat-dog’ values.’’56 Translated prac-
tically, this has entailed literally hundreds of national and local projects—from
training young social workers and deploying them in community initiatives to
 Advance of the Cuban Revolution : 161

establishing hundreds of video clubs that host lectures, debates, art shows, and
musical performances; campaigning for computers in every school; planning
fifteen new schools over ten years to train thirty thousand art instructors; ex-
panding book production so that every family can have an inexpensive boxed
set of twenty-five Cuban and world classics; and so on. The Battle of Ideas’
scope and commitment to raising the cultural level of the Cuban people will be
instrumental in deepening the nation’s social cohesion and reknitting the links
with the original cultural goals of the revolution, embodied in initiatives like
the Literacy Campaign.
In many ways, a 1992 work by the Cuban artist Alexis Leyva Machado,
known as Kcho, one of the most established Cuban artists in the international
art market and an elected representative in the island’s National Assembly,
evokes the challenges posed in Cuba today. Titled A los ojos de la historia (To
the Eyes of History), the work is of a spiral tower that is associated with the
(unrealizable) model to house the Third International made in 1919–1920 by
the Russian constructivist Vladimir Tatlin.57 Tatlin’s building was to be twice
the height of the Empire State Building; executed in glass and iron; and con-
structed so that an iron framework would support three rotating shapes made of
glass. These forms—a cylinder, a square, and a cone—would each accom-
modate different institutions and offices of the revolution. In sharp contrast,
Kcho’s frail assemblage is made from twigs, twine, and driftwood. In fact,
neither tower would be a viable structure if actually constructed, but Kcho has
humorously refashioned his into a drip coffee maker. A used coffee filter placed
at its summit not only serves as a statement of national identity (in a country
where the nation has been forged through the coffee and sugar industries) but
also transforms the tower into a useful object. Although Kcho eschews any
political interpretations of his work, he has referred to the tower as a ‘‘utopian
socialist symbol that doesn’t work.’’58 Some have interpreted the work as rec-
ognition of the frailty of the socialist vision. However, they have missed the
fact (have they not?) that, with some ingenuity and in the spirit of improvisa-
tion of the 1990s, the artist has taken the symbol and given it a new lease of life
as a more functional, hence superior, object. In this reading, the goal remains;
the sense of frailty of the work evokes the inroads of the capitalist market in
Cuba, but the challenge lies in the renewal of the tower-goal.
As mobilizations like the Battle of Ideas continue to expand and deepen, as
lessons of past periods are learned and opposition mounts ‘‘to the methods and
Stalinist ideology that generated them,’’ in the words of writer Reynaldo Gon-
zález, this will provide the best basis for cultural advances and will immeasura-
bly strengthen the cultural policies of the revolution.59 As Cuba’s Minister of
Culture Abel Prieto concluded after the recent discussions and analysis of the
nature of the errors and what harm they had caused, today ‘‘we have a stronger
unity in relation to our cultural policies.’’60
162 : Doreen Weppler-Grogan

NOTES
1. M. Koppel and B. O’Shaughnessey, ‘‘Broad Discussions on Culture, Politics Mark Havana
Book Fair,’’ Militant 72, no. 13 (2008), http://www.themilitant.com/2008/7213/721350.html.
2. Fidel Castro Ruz, ‘‘Words to the Intellectuals,’’ June 30, 1961, http://archives.econ.utah
.edu/archives/marxism.
3. Abel Prieto, Cuban minister of culture, interview by Arturo García Hernández, March 14,
2007, http://www.embacu.cubaminrex.cu.
4. The furor around the Pavón incident was headlined flamboyantly in the Miami Herald as
‘‘the first sign of internal dissent since Fidel Castro ceded power,’’ implying that Pavón’s presence
on television was a government-inspired event signaling the opening of a new repressive period
under Raúl Castro’s leadership. See Frances Robels, ‘‘In Cuba Dissent by Invitation Only,’’ Miami
Herald, February 3, 2007. Prieto expressed concern at the ‘‘very aggressive reaction from Miami’’
when a digital magazine, financed by the right-wing National Endowment for Democracy, associ-
ated ‘‘what was a mistake, with Fidel’s health and with Raúl’s performance as interim president of
Cuba—as if this had something to do with the function of our institutionalized culture.’’ See Dalia
Acosta, ‘‘CULTURE-CUBA: Exorcising the Ghosts of the Past,’’ Inter Press Service, http://ipsnews
.net/news.asp?idnews=36701.
5. Prieto interview.
6. In fact, discussion at the meetings covered a wide range of issues, including homophobia,
racial discrimination, the state of the Cuban media, limitations on critical expression, and other
matters.
7. Recent publications dealing with this theme include Graziella Pogolotti, Polémicas cultur-
ales de los 60 (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubana, 2006); Alberto Abreu Arcia, Los juegos de la
escritura o la (re)escritura de la historia (Havana: Premio Casa de las Américas, 2007). See also
the compilation of the talks on these themes organized by the journal Criterios: Desiderio Navarro,
ed., La política cultural del período revolucionario: Memoria y reflexión (January 2007), http://
www.criterios.es, especially the contribution by Ambrosio Fornet. See also I. Anneris, L. García,
and A. S. Fernández, ‘‘Los intelectuales y las esfera pública en Cuba: El debate sobre políticas
culturales,’’ Temas 56 (October–December 2008): 44–55; Martagloria Morales Garza, ‘‘Los de-
bates de la década de los 60 en Cuba,’’ Temas 55 (July–September 2008): 91–101.
8. Fornet sent the text of his speech to the Miami Herald, which printed this excerpt in its
February 3, 2007, edition. The original is available at http://www.criterios.es/pdf/fornetquinque
niogris.pdf.
9. For instance, Julie Bunck’s work, Fidel Castro, on revolutionary culture in Cuba reveals no
ideological differentiation on the island whatsoever. Indeed, every development in cultural policy,
from the gray years to rectification, is attributed to one of three interchangeable agencies—the
government, the party or Fidel Castro—without any notion of debate or contestations in the
revolution’s institutions. See Julie Marie Bunck, Fidel Castro and the Quest for a Revolutionary
Culture in Cuba (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994). Leslie Bethell,
Cuba: A Short History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), sees the 1970s as a time
when every Cuban politician ‘‘followed these PSP preferences quite consistently because they
were persuaded of the wisdom of their arguments.’’
10. Richard Gott, Cuba: A New History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 241.
11. Fidel Castro often referred to these countries, alongside Cuba, as the three giants.
12. The codification of this dogmatic stance was accomplished in the Declaration of the First
National Congress for Education and Culture in 1971, which restricted the rights of homosexuals,
portrayed art as a ‘‘weapon of the struggle,’’ and so on. A translation is available in Scott Johnson,
The Case of the Cuban Poet Herberto Padilla (New York: Gordon Press, 1971).
13. Leonardo Padura Fuentes, ‘‘Living and Creating in Cuba: Risks and Challenges,’’ in A
 Advance of the Cuban Revolution : 163

Contemporary Cuban Reader, Reinventing the Revolution, ed. P. Brenner, M. R. Jiménez, J. M.

Kirk, and W. M. Leogrande (Plymouth, U.K.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), 349.
14. According to Camnitzer, who has published the major work available in English on
Cuban art in the 1980s, Pena rejects any ‘‘false myths of martyrdom’’ that imply that he stopped
painting in the 1970s because he was not allowed to exhibit because of the shocking erotic elements
in his compositions. Instead, personal considerations were involved. See Luis Camnitzer, New Art
of Cuba, 2nd ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 85.
15. ‘‘I lost my job and was sent to work in a library basement for nine years tying parcels of
books with rope . . . [and] was not allowed to publish for 14 years,’’ Arrufat was quoted as saying in
a January 16, 2007, interview with a Caribbean news agency, http://www.caribbeannetnews.com/
cgi-script/csArticles/articles/000051/005155.htm.
16. Domingo Amuchastegui, ‘‘Ni quinquenio gris ni decenio negro . . . ,’’ http://www.walter
lippman.com/docs1433.html.
17. Antonio (Tonel) Eligio, ‘‘Cuban Art: A Key to the Gulf and How to Use It,’’ in No Man Is
An Island: Young Cuban Art, ed. Seppälä Marketta (Pori, Finland: Pori Art Museum, 1990), 67–77
(exhibition catalog).
18. Antonio (Tonel) Eligio, ‘‘70, 80, 90 . . . Perhaps 100 Impressions of Art in Cuba,’’ in Cuba
siglo XX: Modernidad y sincretismo, ed. M. Lluisa and A. B. Zaya (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria:
Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, 1996), 413–22 (exhibition catalog).
19. Gerardo Mosquera, ‘‘The New Cuban Art,’’ in Postmodernism and the Post Socialist
Condition, ed. Aleš Erjavec (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), 208–46.
20. Giulio V. Blanc, ‘‘Antonia Eiríz, una apreciación,’’ Art Nexus (July–September 1994): 45.
21. Alejandro Anreus, ‘‘The Road to Dystopia: The Paintings of Antonia Eiríz,’’ Art Journal
63, no. 3 (2004): 4–17, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4134487.
22. Graziella Pogolotti, ‘‘Artes plásticas: Nuevo rostro en la tradición,’’ CUBA, January 1969, 88.
23. From an interview with Padilla in the early 1980s by Alejandro Anreus, quoted in Anreus,
‘‘Road to Dystopia.’’ Although Anreus labeled Portuondo ‘‘a leading defender of socialist realism’’
at the time, Camnitzer notes that Portuondo’s essays on aesthetics have commanded respect in
Cuba. See Camnitzer, New Art, 354–55.
24. Mosquera points to an ultraradical perspective evident at the time among Latin American
left-wing art critics who also were critical of her work. He characterizes them as promoting
positions related to the original Proletkult movement in the Soviet Union. See Mosquera’s article in
the July 1985 issue of El caimán barbudo, in Camnitzer, New Art, 363n65.
25. Antoni Kapcia, ‘‘Culture and Ideology in Post-Revolutionary Cuba,’’ Red Letters 15
(1983): 13.
26. The decision by the Commission for the Study and Classification of Films that the film
Pasado meridiano, or PM—produced in 1961 by two Cuban filmmakers, Orlando Jiménez and
Sabá Cabrera—should not be shown sparked a controversy on both artistic and political levels. For
details of the controversy, see Michael Chanan, The Cuban Image, Cinema and Cultural Politics in
Cuba (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 133.
27. The poet Herberto Padilla was arrested in 1971 on unspecified charges, sparking an
international protest that prominent hitherto supporters of the revolution around the world got
caught up in. The author issued a public self-criticism, written in the style of the Moscow trial
confessions of the 1930s.
28. Camnitzer, New Art, 26.
29. Nathalie Bondil, Cuba: Art and History from 1868 to Today (exhibition catalog) (Mon-
treal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 2008), 370. Eiríz spent the final years of her life in the United
States and died in Miami in 1995.
30. In any event, it should be noted that these developments occurred in a post-Khrushchev era,
when, by the 1960s, the severe-style school—with a more personal interpretation of the communist
164 : Doreen Weppler-Grogan

ideal, stressing its roots in peasant life—had become dominant. Nevertheless, the structure of the art
world Stalin imposed—the academy, the unions, and the Ministry of Culture—remained intact.
Efforts to exhibit unofficial art were repressed. In 1974, KGB agents posing as workmen bulldozed
an open-air Moscow exhibition. But even if unofficial art gained ground in later years, many of
Stalin’s art structures survived during the 1980s. Craven recounts several episodes during the 1960s
when Fidel Castro responded to Soviet officials and delegations who still adhered to the socialist
realist aesthetic. On one occasion, Castro declared to his visitors that the enemies of the revolution
were ‘‘capitalists and imperialists, not abstract art.’’ See David Craven, Art and Revolution in Latin
America, 1910–1990, 2nd ed. (London: Yale University Press, 2006), 75.
31. Carlos Tablada, Che Guevara: Economics and Politics in the Transition to Socialism
(Sydney: Pathfinder/Pacific and Asia, 1987), 46.
32. Pamela Maria Smorkaloff, Readers and Writers in Cuba: A Social History of Print
Culture, 1830s–1990s (New York: Garland Publishing, 1997), 119.
33. In a 1986 speech, he recounted reports of painters mainly employed by the state who were
not ‘‘Picasso or Michelangelo’’ with incomes of one hundred thousand or two hundred thousand
pesos. See Granma Weekly Review, August 21, 1986.
34. Stephen Gregory, ‘‘Literary-Political Debate and the Development of Cultural Policy in
Cuba during the 1960s,’’ in Cuba: Thirty Years of Revolution, ed. R. H. Ireland and S. R. Niblo
(Melbourne: Institute of Latin America Studies, La Trobe University, 1990), 31–52.
35. Mirta Aguirre, ‘‘Apuntes sobre la literature y el arte,’’ Cuba Socialista 3, no. 26 (1963):
62–81.
36. Che Guevara, Socialism and Man in Cuba, 2nd ed. (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1989),
16–18.
37. Both Hoy (paper of the old Moscow-oriented Communist Party, the PSP) and Revolución
(paper of the July 26 Movement) continued to publish until Granma appeared in 1965 as the paper
of the new Communist Party, the Communist Party of Cuba.
38. Chanan, Cuban Image, 179.
39. Rafael Hernández, Looking at Cuba: Essays on Culture and Civil Society (Gainesville:
University Press of Florida, 2003), 99.
40. Fidel Ruz Castro, ‘‘Important Problems for the Whole of Revolutionary Thought,’’ New
International 6 (1987): 217.
41. Fidel Ruz Castro, ‘‘Che’s Ideas Are Absolutely Relevant Today,’’ October 8, 1987, in
Socialism and Man in Cuba, 3rd ed., ed. Mary Alice Waters (New York: Pathfinder Press, 2009),
23–53.
42. The great debate of 1963–1964 centered on the revolution’s economic policy, with the
participation of economists from around the world. Two major approaches were presented, and
although Guevara’s ideas gained the most support, they were never fully implemented. Guevara
stressed the centrality of the role of political participation and revolutionary consciousness as
necessary for the economic organization of society and the building of socialism.
43. Osvaldo Sánchez, ‘‘Children of Utopia,’’ in No Man Is An Island: Young Cuban Art, ed.
Seppälä Marketta (Pori, Finland: Pori Art Museum, 1990), 57–59 (exhibition catalog).
44. Antonio (Tonel) Eligio, ‘‘Tree of Many Beaches: Cuban Art in Motion (1980s–1990s),’’
in Contemporary Art from Cuba, ed. Marilyn A. Zeitlin (New York: Arizona State University Art
Museum and Delano Greenidge Editions, 1999), 39–52.
45. He states: ‘‘No es que desaparecieron definitivamente las tensiones, esos conflictos de
opinión o de intereses que nunca dejan de aflorar en una cultura viva—recuerdo que todavía en
1991 nos enfrascamos en uno de ellos—, sino que las relaciones fueron siempre de respeto mutuo y
de auténtico interés por el normal desarrollo de nuestra cultura, http://www.criterios.es/pdf/fornet
quinqueniogris.pdf.
46. The rituals and beliefs of santería first arrived in Cuba with slavery in the sixteenth
 Advance of the Cuban Revolution : 165

century. The Cuban ethnologist Fernando Ortiz noted how the imposition of Christianity drove
religious observances into a private sphere, whereas publicly its adherents were forced to follow
the rituals of the Catholic Church, hence its syncretic character.
47. On a formal level, the obligatory contrapposto stance of the depictions of the saint does
not extend to Elso’s presentation of Martí.
48. Camnitzer, New Art, 56.
49. Gerardo Mosquera, ‘‘Juan Francisco Elso: Sacralisation and the ‘Other’ Post Modernity
in New Cuban Art,’’ Third Text (Winter 1997–98): 83–84.
50. Judith Bettleheim, ‘‘Palo Monte Mayombe and Its Influence on Cuban Contemporary
Art,’’ African Arts 34, no. 2 (2001): 36.
51. Mosquera, ‘‘Juan Francisco Elso,’’ 82.
52. Juan Antonio Blanco, director of the Félix Varela Centre in Havana, explained: ‘‘The
figures are dramatic. In 1989 we imported about 13 million tons of oil from the Soviet Union; in
1992 we could only import 6 million tons. In 1989 we imported about $8.4 billion worth of goods;
by 1992 our import capacity plunged to $2.2 billion.’’ Those figures combined with the lowest
sugar harvest in thirty years. Benjamin Medea, Cuba: Talking about Revolution: Conversations
with Juan Antonio Blanco, 2nd ed. (Melbourne: Ocean, 1997), 33.
53. A Wall Street Journal article noted the skyrocketing prices of Cuban art. The work of
Cuban artist Tomás Sánchez, for instance, was double the asking price it had fetched five years
earlier—with pieces at $700,000—according to his dealer at Manhattan’s Marlborough Gallery.
The sales would surge, the article optimistically posited, if U.S. trade and travel restrictions were
loosened with Barack Obama’s presidential victory. It reported that a prominent American collector
like Howard Farber was already adding to his collection three works a month from Havana, paying
anything from $7,500 to $140,000. Farber made several million dollars in recent years from sales
of his collection of new art from China. Kelly Crow, ‘‘The Cuban Art Revolution,’’ Wall Street
Journal, March 22, 2008, http://www.crematafineart.com/news%20archive/CubanArtRevolution
.pdf.
54. For instance, in his interesting analysis of the historical referent points of the campaign
and his search for continuity, Kapcia locates the battle of ideas in one of many ‘‘bewildering’’
phases of the revolution. See Antoni Kapcia, ‘‘Batalla de ideas: Old Ideology in New Clothes?’’ in
Changing Cuba/Changing World, ed. Mauricio A. Font (New York: Bildner Center for Western
Hemisphere Studies, 2008).
55. Font outlines the various interpretations of the Battle of Ideas, ranging from it being a political
operation of the state to maintain ‘‘the historic bureaucracy’’ in power to it being a counteroffensive to
the imperialist ideological drive, a mechanism to transform evident demoralization among youths, and
even a ‘‘spectacle’’ irrelevant to the lives of Cuban people. Mauricio A. Font, ‘‘Cuba and Castro:
Beyond the ‘Battle of Ideas,’ ’’ in Font, Changing Cuba/Changing World, 44–46.
56. The so-called culture war was initially associated with Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, but in
the 1990s, Patrick Buchanan spearheaded a campaign with which politicians in both major parties
began to identify as they shifted to the right.
57. A good description of Tatlin’s tower is found in Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in
Art, 1863–1922, 2nd ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986), 225–28.
58. Kcho, ‘‘Crossings’’ (Ottawa, Canada: National Gallery of Art, 1998), 139–40, http://
www.germainekoh.com/content/press/kohecrossingsekcho.pdf.
59. Prieto interview.
60. Ibid.