The Island, the Map, the Travelers: Notes on Recent Developments in Cuban Art

Ours has been defined by Michel Foucault as "above all the epoch of space." ¹ Inspired by this idea, Edward Soja invites us to participate in "a practical theoretical consciousness that sees the lifeworld of being creatively located not only in the making of history but also in the construction of human geographies, the social production of space and the restless formation and reformation of geographical landscapes." ² Soja proposes a "spatialization of the critical imagination," an imagination spread out in space that serves as a counterweight to the possible excesses of merely accumulative history, without disdaining temporal contexts.

In the spirit of Soja's invitation, I would like to rethink recent developments in Cuban art, developments that not only concern space as defined by particular cities (Havana, Miami, Mexico City, New York) but that also, in some way, effect territorializing operations as they attempt to define their own critical maps.

Recent Cuban art, created and located primarily on the island, frequently has been called "new." ³ From an equally historicist point of view one could substitute "of the eighties" for "new." Both labels identify a certain sequence of events, a conjunction of circumstances whose initial location was Havana. We could also say, perhaps once again privileging time over space, that this sequence has been occurring from the end of the seventies to some time (or place) not yet specified in the nineties. In this Cuban "Big Bang" of sorts, the art of the eighties was careful to demarcate its territory, undoing and re-creating frontiers as well as circuits in the process.

Its cartography proposed new contours for the island, destroying the nation's frontiers in favor of a transcultural conglomerate, in order for Latin America and the Third World to have a place—a place that was, moreover, now also the "West" and not the "non-West." ⁴ An ambitious map such as this would have room for, as Gerardo Mosquera put it at the time, "a new international cultural order, a new perspective of universality that would take into account the interests of all peoples, in opposition to a Manhattan, island-made cosmopolitanism." ⁵

Geocultural strategies of indisputable transcendence, such as the Havana Bienal exhibitions, would be employed in working with just such a planisphere, for negotiating spaces such as these. The aerial and maritime routes to navigate Cuban "new art" would have to be drawn. This would occur once the Cuban avant-garde initiated its campaign to conquer always stiff-necked and distant metropolitan centers such as Venice, Paris, New York, and Düsseldorf.

Curiously, once this vast territory was defined as "multicultural," and its capital situated in Havana, Cuban artists began to turn their attention to a smaller and earlier map: that of their own island, the map of Cuba. It became popular to look at the small map at the end of the eighties; paradoxically, it quickly took on the appearance of the latest fashion. To it would be added an often irreverent flirtation with other symbols more or less sacred to the idea of the nation: the flag, the national shield, portraits of heroes and political figures.

The obsession, sincere or feigned, with the elongated contours of the largest Antillean island could be explained in a variety of ways. One would be to focus on the fact that Cuban art at that time entered an intense and problematic dialogue with the revolutionary government. This intimacy, even if motivated by dissent, did not allow art and artists to escape the influence of rampantly nationalistic discourse exuded by the regime. Great geostrategic maps, on which all roads led to Havana, convinced artists that they, too, should undertake some small measure of messianic protagonism. There was nothing strange in this reaction, in a place where one lived in and created...