The Other Network: The Havana Biennale and the Global South

Since 1984 the Havana Biennale has been known as “the Tri-continental art event,” presenting artists from Latin America, Africa, and Asia, as well as artist living in the Northern Diasporas. It has also intensely debated the nature of contemporary art from a Third World/Global South perspective. The Biennale is a product of Cuba’s cultural policy since the Revolution of 1959. The Wifredo Lam Center, created in 1983, has organized the Biennial since its inception. This article proposes that at the heart of the Biennale has been an alternative cosmopolitanism as a sort of decolonial move (that became an existential internationalism), embraced by a group of local cultural agents, critics, philosophers, and art historians, and supported by a network of peers around the world. It examines the role Armando Hart Dávalos, Minister of Culture of Cuba (1976–1997), a key figure in the development of a solid cultural policy that put the Havana Biennale as a cultural project based on an explicit “Third World” consciousness. It explores the role of critics and curators Gerardo Mosquera, Nelson Herrera Ysla, and Llilian Llanes, director of the Lam Center and of the Biennale (1983–1999), who shaped the event in structural and conceptual terms. Finally, it examines how Third World Art has become Global. Using primary material, interviews, and field work research, the article focuses on the conceptual, contextual, and historical structure that supports the Biennale. Using the Havana Biennale as a case study, it is possible to reveal one side of the sociopolitical and intellectual debates taking place in the conformation of what is today called global art. In addition, the article recognizes the potentiality of alternative thinking and cultural subjectivity in the Global South.