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cal or ideological commitment to a certain system, or even to any form of indoctrination: it is a way to keep their free and independent status. A poetics of despair is a model for reflection about an unsalvageable reality, one from which people have distanced their selves and to which they cannot return once they are hurt. On the other hand, one also sees a form of introspection, a selfexamination and avoidance of collective dialog, of the majority’s rhetoric. In this nihilist context, the individual is increasingly concerned about his or her life and everydayness in an individualized struggle for survival. What one sees in the plastic arts is the emergence of the Geishas series, by Rocío García (1955), with its feminine poetics. The subtleties of the facial expressions and social re-contextualization of their characters treat the feminine condition with irony, with profound lineal and chromatic austerity. Their antecedents can be found in an earlier imagining of “girls” who are shown to be lost, tied up, hung, and dominated by the image of culture, in an attack on closed identities. This creates a psychologically unqualifiable path and transmutation, and later enshrines a reign of violence and subjection through a profuse intertextual game with the Hombres machos marineros [Manly Sailormen] book series. Rocío García’s ability to highlight a relationship of feminine denunciation is unique in its perspective and enjoys warning us about the fragility of the male sexual condition, as can be seen in certain typologies concerning the embarrassment and camouflaging of male psychosexual identity and its deconstructive metaphors regarding “phalocentric” hegemony. Rocío is interested in the world of perversion, relaxed norms, and the particularly dramatic violence of homoerotic tensions that recall certain scenes in U.S. African-American film. The use of tricks or ruses in her work’s critical approach is frequent; this is to avoid using the term “homosexual,” under the pretext that her work transcends sexuality in favor of a cultural rhetoric. 40 This switch silences Cuban art’s homoerotic voice, and neutralizes its reach, legitimacy and liberating effects. Fear of calling things by their name reduces any reading of Cuban plastic arts to a conceptual and ideological platform that doesn’t rise to the level of all aesthetic thinking and its authentic wealth. With her back turned to the situation, Rocío creates work about human relations and transgender love. This view is sharp in its representation and use of expressive methods employed in the plastic arts, with brief stories that manage to breathe life into the axioms of sexual behaviors, using the most licentious forms of homosexual love as her argument. Sexual freedom, unbridled Eros, full enjoyment of love and the body are some of the repeating truths in her work. Gustavo César Echevarría’s pictorial series Mámenle en raya [Suck it on the Line] comes on the scene in precisely 1998 (he is also known as Cutty). He has become famous not so much for the very real provocations in his paintings, as it should be, but because of criticism’s inability to understand his pictorial transvestism, which is not academic, but also not naïve. Neither is it neatly retinal or exactly bad, either. It’s charm is precisely in its extremely personal montage of dissimilar crossings pursuing two, internally connected thematic lines. One of them is the intimacy of women in domestic bathrooms, exercising their ablutions and desires, which prudish gazes see as scatological, despite their naturalness. The other is that of gay flirtation, the forceful repression of desire, with its culturally based conditioning factors in public restrooms and other socially lateral spaces that can be called heterotopias of imaginary context, like certain other postmodern social institutions. Cutty allows himself the additional perversity of organizing an entire sinuous tradition from the history of western painting, in the form of a generic pastiche.