IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 6 ENGLISH | Page 138

This is how the issues of race and
gender—which is deeply rooted in
Cuban society—reached their most
critical point during the crisis of the 90s,
despite the official pronouncement
regarding respect for the whole of
human dignity and people’s inherent
rights regardless their skin color. Official
rhetoric did not become aware of these
signs at any time; if they don’t invalidate
criteria regarding individual proposals,
they certainly do reflect an interpretive
impartiality that somehow

limits foci and understandings of these
specific poetics. Interpreting and
speculating about the connotations of
any artwork’s topological system
presupposes that at some moment in the
history of Cuban art the black issue has
been conditioned by the events that
favored its importance, but in a
decidedly picturesque and carnivalesque
way that has not joined the problems of
the black issue with other social interests
regarding development, outside the
realm of what is usually associated with
blackness.

Jorge Delgado, La fuerza del mambí, acrylic on cloth (1992).
Various artists render homage to the
Abakuá secret society, the legacy of an
African ritual traditions linked even to
Cuba’s independence wards. It remains
intact and admitted white men as early
as 1836. Ekobio Mukarará means ‘white
brother,’ a term that was coined in the
Havana’s Cayo Hueso neighborhood in
around 1951, in a system of worship that
had long belonged to carabalí blacks
(from Calabar) in Nigeria. The Abakuás
have maintained their traditions,
representations, and language to such a
degree, even today that their descendants

or new members of that first Cuban,
secret society in Cuba, and those in
Africa, can communicate via the same
chants.
The proliferation of criticism that
emerged with “New Cuban art” during
the 1980s does not make a
pronouncement about the black problem.
This topic has been disdained for a long
time; its recuperation has not enjoyed
spaces in which the debate about the
worsening issue of inequality for the
black population could be legitimized. It
saw its own initiative and efforts towards

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