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frontation. Any other topic with some other orientation was not considered to be important, or was simply privileged by established curators or critics. This exhibit provoked a great many questions and concerns about racial prejudice in Cuba; the art world began to make good use of the subject. The first version of Queloides included artists such as Douglas Pérez, René Peña, Elio Rodríguez, Gertrudis Rivalta, Roberto Diago, Manuel Arenas, José Ángel Vincench, Álvaro Almaguer, Omar Pascual Castillo and Alexis Esquivel. In the first place, the collection wanted to show those artists who had dealt with the subject of race before, with works in which there was a spontaneous defense of the socio-cultural and religious life of blacks and mestizos. These works displayed contemporary and innovative artistic styles. Some of the works were insistent in their somewhat critical and analytical representations of another realm of the everyday existence of blacks, his social and political history, and even his concrete reality as part of a subaltern culture among the most disadvantaged people of Cuba’s contemporary society. They focused on blacks as marginalized subjects with economic disadvantages, traumas, and their own denunciations, which was Rene Peña De las urgencias del retrato [Of the image's urgency] Manipulated photo in clear counterpoint with the 42 tive with which the original and even fundamental producers of those Afro-Cuban cultural expressions were reduced in importance. The show was realized by black and white artists, which ended up finally refuting “very old excuses” like those that defended the idea that any claim blacks made concerned only a group of “resentful blacks,” which meant that it was their strategy only, and no one else’s. Queloides demonstrated the sincere interest there was in this topic on the part of a group of artists who, regardless their color, felt the need to dialog about it. It’s important to note that any initiative of this sort was not well received or understood by those who were dominant in local art at that time. There was an attempt to ignore all efforts: there was suspicion and jealousy even among the well intentioned whose advice for artists to leave aside those issues so they could better develop their individual careers. A month later, Ariel Ribeaux, a young writer who graduated with a degree in Art History from the University of Havana, and was a specialist at the Provincial Center for Plastic Arts and Design in Old Havana, organized a second exhibit: Ni músicos, Ni deportistas [Not Musicians, Not Athletes], which are the professional stereotypes that Santiago Rodríguez Olazábal José Ángel Toirac 1997 Permanecer en la tierra La coronación de Ochún [Remain on the Earth] [The coronation of Oshun] Installation Oil on cloth and yellow ribbons folkloric perspecwere generated by the changes in social mobility that the island’s political transformation brought