On the cover: Elio Rodríguez Valdés, La gran salsa, 1996, soft sculpture, 65″ × 8″

If I had to describe the work of Elio Rodríguez Valdés (aka "El Macho") (b. 1966) with just one word, I think it would be laughter. Or maybe mockery. Should it be sarcasm? Scorn? But all these terms may be fundamentally misleading, for Elio is a trickster who seeks to deceive and confuse. Viewers would be mistaken to identify his amusement with happiness, his laughing with hilarity, however. There is something deeply troubling, even sad, behind Elio's theatrical proposals. As with any other carnival, when you peek behind the veil of sumptuary excesses and thunderous performance, you find hierarchy, injustice, and oppression. At the same time, Elio is not interested in giving us a pamphlet, he does not seek to produce a manual. He rather reflects on how subjects of African descent cope, from the margins, with the racialized economic, social, and urban landscapes that they are forced to inhabit. To convey these experiences, he draws energy and arguments from the enormous reservoir of humanity and good humor that he locates in the barrio of his childhood, his family, his community.

Those communities experienced enormous challenges in the Cuba of the 1990s, when the expansion of the dollar-based tourist economy created winners and losers overnight in Cuban society. Elio's La gran salsa (1996) captures the tensions of the moment beautifully, with references to the problematic insertion of Cuba and of Cubans into global circuits of travel and of gendered and racialized pleasure. To start, salsa refers both to musical and to culinary pleasures, two of the main selling points of the Cuban tourist market. But the sculpture is replete with visual cues about how the consumption of dollar-only products, from Cuban cigars to canned beer, can be secured only by participating in this stew or by dancing to the tune of this salsa, something that in Elio's view probably implies unsavory transactions involving Afro-Cuban culture and bodies. Eternally resourceful, the Eleggua in the sculpture is obviously onboard. Elio even inserts himself in this stew, by placing his own color palette, his own paintbrushes in it, as if he had found something useful to sell.

You can call this laughter if you wish. Me? I am not so sure anymore. I used to laugh with his works; I used to walk with him into the carnival and revel in its mischievous excesses and possibilities. Maybe it is that in these times of Black Lives Matter we have lost the ability to laugh, now that we have developed new sensibilities. Whatever it is, I am now looking at Elio's work at a different moment, after the carnival has ended and folks go home, to their social lives offstage.

Elio has become an internationally known artist who has participated in numerous solo and collective exhibits in Cuba and around the world. His name has become synonymous with Afro-Cuba, and it is impossible to talk about race and art in contemporary Cuba without engaging his work. Whether you laugh or cry is up to you. My guess is that you will do both.