IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 4 ENGLISH | Page 85

The Antillean group’s discourse on identity was
relegated and went out of style. Any vestiges of
illumination or polemics regarding a renovation
of Afro-Cubanness were rigorously and valiantly
embraced at the nation’s most critical moments,
when class differences worsened due to the legalization of the dollar and the daily fight for survival. Both of these situated black people, who
had fewer economic possibilities, as second-rate
citizens, at odds with the Revolution’s emancipatory discourse regarding them.
Socially, they became the least fortunate and the
most marginalized, in their large family networks
on the city’s urban periphery with the lowest paying jobs. Others attempted to bring to light this
new reality when Volumen Uno was published
and all support by specialized art critics legitimated the new plastic art movement, “new Cuban
art” - which was not a renovating movement in
and of itself. Yet, its teachings acted as a detonator for later discursive directions regarding the artistic idiom and constituted a point of departure
for the renovation of already worn out pathways
of the plastic arts, and extirpate them from corrupt
official discourse. The rebelliousness of young
creators, especially that of the 1980s utopians, diluted any nostalgia for lost time and the alignment
strategies of those who created institutional
mechanisms.
A discursive renovation of the language of the
plastic arts, and incorporation of other resources
and expressive media from so-called postmodernity, offered a different perspective on the desacralization of tradition’s symbols and emblems,
a reinsertion of complicated revelations, and a
change in the rules of the supposedly harmonious
discourse of Cuban art. The intention was to reveal the existential problems of both blacks and
whites a much more convulsive and complex national context: the Special Period. Magdalena
Campos, Marta María Pérez, Belkis Ayón and
other female artists pulled aside the veil with their
new perspectives and never before seen polemic
from deep within the problems experienced by
blacks. (Figures 8a, 8b, 8c).

Fig. 8a.José Bedia Morales. 1992.
“Yo soy la ruta”. [I Am the Way]
Painting. Oil on canvas

Fig. 8b. Marta María Pérez. 1994.
“Está en sus manos”. [It’s in Your Hands]
Manipulated photograph

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