‘Imaging the Imaginary: Visual Art in 21st Century Cuban Historical Approaches’

Despite the undercurrent of lively civic engagement in Cuban arts and culture, conspicuously few historical studies in the decades following the Revolution have utilized Cuban art as a way of understanding the multiplicities, contradictions, and issues that are obscured by a lack of access to and within the island. Even for historians working in Cuba, art has, until recently, not been a substantial lens through which to understand Cuba’s history, as there has been lack of scholarly inquiries into Cuban art. As Sujatha Fernandes contends: “most scholars of Cuban politics have not addressed culture and the arts, and when they do, it is generally to point to the damage done to the arts by an ideologically driven cultural bureaucracy.” While mid -20th century Cuban historiography focused heavily on policy, socialist ideology, and US relations, the scholarship since the early part of the 2000s has brought about significant changes in subject matter and approaches. One instance of this shift is the emerging body of work concerned with Cuban art to explore familiar subjects in Cuban culture that have not been previously examined in depth. By considering the ways in which historical revisionism, particularly during the Republican era, has been taken up utilizing images, as well as examining the visual artistic “boom” during the Special Period, and finally, understanding the role of surveillance and camouflage in Cuban art as a useful method of historical inquiry, I will explore the historiographical trend towards visual art and how it has become a way for historians to engage with not only the new Cuba, but as a way of reconciling and exploring the nuances of some of the contradictions in Cuban identity and ideology since and before the Revolution as a response to the continued gaps in materials available to historians.
Re-imaging Historical Revisionism

Since the early 2000s, historians studying Cuba have gradually pulled more graphics into their studies to help explain their arguments and to re-examine historical frameworks. The mere presence of images does not by itself signify a momentous shift but the ways in which images have been used and their prominence in recent historical work is suggestive of a gradual transference in historical approach. Sujatha Fernandes claims that reconsidering the role of art in society and public art interaction and imagery specifically, allows us to see “artistic public spheres as spaces of interaction which are both critical of and shaped by state institutions, local relations of production, and global market forces.” Given the preoccupation of historians in the 20th century with socialist policy and politics, the use of images has begun to revise, or at least reconsider, the historical nuances and complexity of Cuban society and its relationship to state institutions. In a country where the state and the civilian are intertwined in dynamic and contradictory ways, the ability of images to hold simultaneous and opposing ideas and messages has yielded new frameworks for understanding Cuba before the Revolution. Two historians who have used this approach to supplement their work are and Lillian Guerra and Alejandro De La Fuente.

Lillian Guerra’s use of images reveals racial, social, and class distinctions in Cuba’s Republican period in her 2005 book The Myth of José Martí and exemplifies a methodological shift now emblematic of Cuban historiographical approach. Guerra uses images through her text to demonstrate racial and class mixing during a period that has been much discussed in terms of policy and aspirational values, particularly of Cuba’s poet/hero of independence, José Martí. For example, Guerra used an image of mixed racial group of Cuban cigarmakers residing in Florida who formed a Revolutionary Club in support of Martí’s war of independence to illustrate the extent of racialized support for Martí. While race and society have been topics well explored in early Cuban historiography, the trend of using images to re-explore race has provided depth to field of study that had previously relied upon almost solely written, often colonial, records.

Similar to Guerra, Alejandro De La Fuente’s 2001 book A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in the Twentieth Century Cuba uses graphics to illustrate the ways in which images of black identity have been used from pre-Revolutionary times. The use of propaganda cards and posters in the book point to a larger historical role played by images that instructed and challenged Cuban identity during the Republican era. de la Fuente used posters of Communist electoral propaganda to argue, similar to Guerra, the ways in which parties tried to appeal to minoritized groups with promises of racial equality. This visual revisionism marked, and continues to influence, a significant new mode of inquiry into how we understand Cuban culture and racial identity. The reasons for this historiographical shift, however, have curious roots from a time of immense scarcity in Cuba.

The Artistic Resurgence of the Special Period
Public art, propaganda, and other visual symbols have long been used in Cuba to reinforce a unified Revolutionary national identity but it is only within the last decade or two that serious analysis of Cuban visual art has emerged by historians. One possible explanation for this resurgence in interest could be attributed to the Special Period, where a lack of materials brought about a period of intense creativity both economically and artistically for Cuban artists, who could flourish in a world of emigration, crackdown, and surveillance. As Hernandez-Reguant argues of the artistic boom during the Special Period: “subjectivities and identities—often identified with a multicultural sort of postindustrial capitalism—found expression and visibility during this period, even as the state apparatus sought to maintain the nation united in a common culture.” It was under this shift in the tactics of the Cuban state to unite and homogenize Cuban cultural expression that historical research was able to catch up to the effects of the Special Period and the current post-Fidel Cuban world.

Where historians faltered, artists flourished. In keeping with Cuba’s trajectory of internationalist efforts, the Wifredo Lam Center of Contemporary Art in Havana established the Havana Biennial in 1984, a project to bring together artists from Latin America and the Caribbean, but also other foreign artists. The uptake of historians to seriously examine the position of these kinds of artistic projects and their relationship to Cuban State and culture has taken some decades to catch up with the engagement from Cuban artists with these themes. Using the Havana Biennial as an example of this engagement from artists is the 2012 documentary “The Wrinkles of the City,” where French artist JR and Cuban American artist José Parlá collaborated on a series of large-scale mural installations where they photographed, and chronicled senior citizens they met walking on the streets of Havana about their experience living through the Cuban revolution. In the documentary, Parlá ruminates from the back of a taxi on Cuban interaction with art: “they put art on such a high level you can also see that they’re very careful about how the art is having an effect on the masses.” At the same time, Cuban’s engagement with art, although considered in some ways part of civic duty, also demonstrates an innate suspicion of the purpose and meaning of art projects undertaken. Why this exploration of the intimacies of art, civics, and State is so prominent among artists, particularly during and following the Special Period is perhaps explained by the mass exodus (and persecution) of artists succeeding the collapse of the Soviet Union.

As the prominent Cuban artist Antonio Eligio Fernández (popularly known as “Tonel”) points out, the vacuum created by many prominent artists leaving Cuba following the collapse of the Soviet Union allowed for an emerging generation of young artists to ironically have a level playing field during a time of deep economic and racial stratification. Through the use of museums, galleries, the art Biennial and more, the State sought control while it concurrently offered opportunities to new artists. The censorship and imprisonment of artists during the 1990s artistic “boom” demonstrate the importance of visual art in Cuba, both to the State and to the civilian identity. This artistic boom was of course in some ways created by the State as a way of closely monitoring possible voices of dissent within the country, all while being able to invite outsiders in as a further touting of Cuba’s commitment to internationalism.

Understanding Surveillance and Camouflage as Historical Evidence
As historians and those in other disciplines have attempted to participate in a more nuanced conversation about state surveillance in Cuba, visual art has become a useful tool for historians to move beyond convenient and tired metaphors. As Rachel Price points out in Planet/Cuba, the oft-cited panopticon symbol has been applied to Cuban culture before but is now being challenged or recrafted by Cuban artists, replacing it with a more nuanced understanding that surveillance is often done in areas of leisure and recreation. One artist who has engaged with this pervasiveness of surveillance is Tania Bruguera. Bruguera has received attention by historians and other scholars for her use of iconic Cuban imagery such as the much-lauded dove landing on Fidel Castro’s shoulder during a speech in 1959, to reconstruct and perform powerful visual performance art pieces that engage Cuban citizens as the locus of importance, asking them to take to a podium to speak about whatever they would like for 60 seconds, while having a dove placed on their shoulder. This performance and the subsequent re-mountings have had Burguera censured and rebuked by the Wifredo Lam Center of Contemporary Art. Bruguera’s sister concluded that “the art critics are working as police and the police as art critics in this case.” Bruguera insisted on her innocence of message but the intervention demonstrates the levels to which the State is willing to interfere. Artists like Bruguera offer a glimpse for historians of a liminal space not often afforded to Cuban historians of the ways in which ordinary Cuban people subvert and transgress with the materials available to them. The State response to such artists, however, remains one of mistrust and censorship, which historians must be mindful of in their renewed approaches for there is precarity in artists choosing to hide meanings in their art work.

In this vein, Rachel Price has argued that surveillance is a helpful and practical device for understanding historical approaches but also must be viewed within the bounds of its own limitations, as artistic reckoning with surveillance is at this point possibly also considered by some artists as overused to the point of being banal. Nevertheless, surveillance remains an important lens through which historians can approach post-Revolutionary history, even as it remains a potential ideological blind spot that overstates its importance and denies or obscures more nuanced understandings of how Cubans interact with the State. This much is certain: surveillance is often explored by Cuban artists and cannot be overlooked without denying the sense of paranoia and over-reach that has permeated post-Revolutionary society. Indeed, whether an artist or any Cuban believes they are under surveillance or not, the notion is so ever present that real or imagined, surveillance exists temporally, a notion that drives home the transgressions and risks that Cuban artists undertake when producing their work.

The art of Adonis Flores and the following interest in surveillance has presented another source of inquiry into the multiplicity and visual contradictions of identity that can be perhaps applied elsewhere to examine Cuban history. Flores’ work is centered on the use of camouflage and layering of queer imagery overtop of military uniforms and symbols, in ways that “highlighted the destructive effect of collective experience on individual identities” For Flores, the State and the interwoven military can be criticized with the use of carefully placed overlapping imagery, such as parading around the streets of Havana in military fatigues painted with delicate white flowers. His work in public spaces carries a certain absurdist element which allows him to, occasionally, fly below the radar of State censors. As Elvia Castro argues of this layering of imagery: “Adonis thus transformed himself into a kind of panoptic sentinel scrutinizing insignificant urban actions.” In this way, we may explore the methods that Cuban artists such as Flores and Bruguera camouflage meanings, or hide things in plain sight, something that serves both as a metaphor and literal example for how we may read seemingly obscured spaces, texts, and identities as historians of Cuba.

The upward trend of use of visual art as a way to re-read and reconsider existing Cuban historical studies, as well as excavate relatively new fields of study, has led to nothing short of a watershed of new approaches to Cuban history in the 21st century. Using visuals as an historical source the revisionism of the Republican period has yielded depth to understanding the intimacies between racialized minorities and the State. The sudden surge of visual artists during the Special Period has been examined to understand the role of the State in creating and censoring art, and finally, using the art from the Special Period to better understand the role of surveillance and camouflage in Cuban art has become a new and productive method of historical inquiry. While the use of visual art is a way in to pursue illumination of blank spots in Cuban history, there are limitations to what can be read only through art. Yet the historiographical use of camouflage and hidden-in-plain-sight as metaphorical tools for ways in which historians may examine new methods of historical inquiry, may continue to yield stimulating new information. One example of how this could be applied is the lack of recent historical study of Cuban education, particularly changes made to educational models during the Special Period. Where there continues to be gaps in historical sources, what methods and mediums can provide a way in for history that may be “camouflaged,” on the periphery, or hiding in plain sight? If historians continue to mine productive modes that have been demonstrated to have intimate connections to the Cuban State and citizenship, such as visual art, the ability to better understand the subaltern, untold, and obscured can only move forward in a productive and nuanced way. The limits to the ways in which visual art can be read historically may well rely upon the fact that its creation and existence is just as scrutinized by the State as any other aspect of Cuban life. But the methods in which Cuban art has been censored, curated, and invested in, can still tell us more about how the State and civil society intersect and clash.

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