Week of January 13, 2005, Issue #482
FRONT
Map of the Cuban art
By SHANNON PHILLIPS Illustration by GRAHAM JOHNSON
The conversation has swung around to politics, and I fish around in my bag for
the minidisc recorder, trying to be discreet as I plug in the microphone and
hit record. I know she sees it, but she doesn’t object; as she says the
words “freedom of the press” in Spanish, Cuban artist Yami Martinez
glances furtively at the recording device, but continues talking without missing
a beat. “The press in this country is not free,” she says. “The
mediums of discussion are not free. TV, radio, newspapers, 100 per cent not
free. Here, no one can say what they want.”
I’m in an artist-owned gallery in Trinidad de Cuba, and have struck up
a conversation with Martinez thanks to my partner’s fluent Spanish. Martinez
makes critical paintings and sculptures—her work focuses on Cuban women,
their invisible labour and invisible pain. Her female figures have no arms or
faces; they’re always accompanied by a frying pan and a coffeemaker, two
ubiquitous symbols of women’s work in a place where the socialist revolution
hasn’t managed to overcome machismo and a male-dominated military and
state apparatus.
Her paintings also use clippings from the state newspaper, the Granma—which
form the textual basis for interpretation. Martinez uses the Granma, the official
newspaper of the Communist party (one of the three written sources of information
that are tolerated in Cuba), as a vehicle of criticism and a way to use revolutionary
symbols critically, in a country where Che Guevara iconography and state billboard
slogans rule the visual landscape.
“The newspaper text is fundamental to the significance of the work, and
it is often inside the frying pan,” Martinez explains. “It is showing
a society that promises women change, but the women are still asking, ‘Where
are the solutions [to problems like family violence and alcoholism]?’
The text reflects what we are told, and the woman is asking, ‘What do
I put inside my frying pan? Am I just going to have this political shit to put
in my frying pan, or is someone going to actually solve what is going on here?’”
Martinez has opened the front room of her house to the tourists who descend
on this small city every day, and makes a tidy living peddling her wares. Trinidad
is a colonial gem about 300 kilometres southeast of Havana—and with one
of Cuba’s best white sand beaches only 12 kilometres away, Martinez’s
gallery on the cobblestone main street sees its share of American-dollar-wielding
rubberneckers.
The way Martinez makes a living, and the kind of art she produces, can be directly
attributed to the post-Soviet era in Cuba. The massive economic depression that
followed the collapse of the Soviet Union necessitated adjustments, among them
the 1995 decision to allow artists to open galleries in their homes. Artists
now earn a better living than most other professions. What followed was a renewed
state emphasis on the arts, and Cuba’s artists have carved out a post-Soviet
aesthetic that is critical, political and multimedia. Artists have been given
much more leeway than writers, journalists or poets, and that permissiveness
spawned works that explored Afro-Cuban heritage and racism, spirituality and
the problem of individuality in a collective society.
Until the 1980s, many Cuban artists left the country for the United States,
Europe or Mexico. Young artists like Martinez, however, are staying in Cuba,
as they can both make a living there and enjoy a certain degree of social status.
In a country where everyone is educated and the government has aggressively
supported culture since the 1959 revolution, Cubans are not the type of folks
that sniff at painters or sculptors as layabouts who need to get real jobs.
The notion that the visual arts are somehow superfluous or airy-fairy does not
figure in the cultural imagination in Cuba, as it often does here at home in
Alberta.
The Cuban government’s support of art stands in marked contrast with what
John Mahon of the Edmonton Arts Council calls “a policy of aggressive
indifference” on the part of the Alberta government towards art. Constantly
having to justify funding for the arts in terms of its economic spinoffs like
jobs and contribution to the GDP has become “kind of tedious,” says
Mahon. “The province is about to release another economic impact study
of the arts. It’s just a given that there are economic benefits. But art
is also good for society and for our spirit, and that’s hard to describe.
One gets perilously close to being dismissed when one makes arguments like that.”
Not so in Cuba. Art school is free, and those who exhibit a talent for it are
encouraged to develop it from the very beginning. “I am very satisfied
with what I have been given by the state,” Martinez says. “There
is more opportunity for artists, more than a doctor or a professor. The fundamental
function of art in society is to criticize—that is, to have a cultural
position against things that are unjust.... I am not this great revolutionary
in that I like what is happening here, no.”
Martinez’s comfortable criticisms of the Castro regime are surprising
in the current political climate. After a period of relative political liberalization,
the first few months of 2003 saw 75 dissidents arrested and sentenced to up
to 28 years in prison, giving the Bush administration even more ammunition in
their global propaganda war against Castro and prompting the European Union
to sever diplomatic ties. It’s difficult to get a straight answer on who
the 75 dissidents are, but the consensus amongst progressive organizations like
Amnesty International is that they were simply writers and political organizers,
not armed insurgents. Amnesty has therefore added them to their list of global
prisoners of conscience.
As the Bush administration has tightened the economic embargo, it has also taken
on a more belligerent policy of funding and supporting anti-Castro groups within
Cuba. Some of the 75 dissidents attended dinners and functions at the U.S. Interests
Office in Havana, and it is likely that some are indeed American lackeys, as
the Cuban government claims. But for others, including poet and journalist Raul
Rivero, it is clear that control over the written word is still not up for discussion,
and its harsh treatment of writers has earned the Cuban government condemnation
from countries and organizations normally sympathetic to it. By the end of 2004,
12 of the 75 dissidents had been released—mostly on medical grounds—and
most of the EU restored diplomatic relations.
Castro’s crackdown, however, has not extended to artists; rather, the
state has taken on an aggressive policy of supporting the arts. “I agree
with many things here and I disagree with many things here,” explains
Martinez. “I am not complaining, because I have never had to fight for
any of my themes [in my art]—women, machismo, aggression against women.
It is true that women have more opportunity now [because of the revolution],
but in the family things are still happening. And I can say whatever I want
about that. It’s difficult, in fact, to fund an artist that doesn’t
say what he wants.” Because of the delicate nature of talking about dissidents
in Cuba, I did not ask Martinez why expression was so severely limited for some
but not for others.
In December 2004, the Bush administration’s top official in Latin America
declared they are pursuing policies that will “liberate Cuba within the
next four years.” This proclamation comes at a time when U.S.-Cuban relations
have scarcely been tenser: President Bush has tightened economic relations in
addition to closing most avenues of travel to Cuba for U.S. citizens. The Americans’
plans for a post-Castro Cuba include a full blueprint for ensuring that “vestiges
of the regime don’t hold on.” Clearly, Cuba’s crossroads is
coming; at 78, Fidel Castro cannot live forever, and the social frictions created
by tourism, a double economy and an extraordinarily odious neighbour are not
sustainable.
State emphasis on the arts is one of the many things that Cuba seems to have
gotten right. Particularly when compared to the rest of Latin America, Cubans
enjoy education, healthcare, arts and culture and sports that are the envy of
other developing or post-colonial societies of the global south. But it’s
unclear whether Cuba is prepared to allow political freedoms as well, as the
domestic political scene shifts and American investors lick their lips at the
prospect of post-Fidel upheavals.
Preserving economic sovereignty will be one challenge, and perhaps taking a
page from artists, who are allowed to sell their works privately, will be one
example the Cuban government can follow. But the country’s policymakers
need to reckon with political freedoms, and in that area, they may want to examine
their experience with artists. Artists have been allowed to ask the difficult
questions, criticize and give voice to topics that are distasteful to the government—and
the country has not fallen apart. In fact, artists are building a post-Soviet
Cuban cultural sensibility that can only strengthen national identity and resolve
through the expected upheaval. V