The poetic birth of Cuba, and of the character of its culture, might be found in a phrase placed in the mouth of an aborigine of the island and included in a book by the Cuban writers Cintio Vitier and Fina Garcia Marruz, who traced and assembled such outbursts of inadvertent poetry. As is well known, the Spaniards arrived in America by way of the Antilles, which have always formed a sort of aquatic frontier of the continent. In addition to a thirst for gold, the peculiar geography of the area awakened another obsession in Christopher Columbus and his followers that was to last for years: to know if the landscape they were seeing was an island or terra firma. Cuba's elongated shape and its relatively considerable size tended to disorient them. An obscure historian of the nineteenth century, the priest of the Cuban village of Los Palacios, tells us that when Columbus asked the natives of Cuba if the place was island or continent, they answered him that it was "an infinite land of which no one had ever seen the end, although it was an island". Cuba was thus born for the West as quandary, aporia, bluff. In addition, it was to impose the mystery of its aboriginal name over the almost kitschy name Juana, given by the Europeans. The paradox of an infinite island remains as an image of the hyperbolical destiny of Cuba, always out of proportion in comparison to its material bases. Perhaps it is als worthwhile to stress that peculiar and fluid juncture between an insularity that always looks within ("the cursed circumstance of water everywhere", as another writer said) and an opening toward the universal characteristic of Cuban art and culture.

Contemporary Art From Cuba (English-Spanish edition)

Arts & Photography

Mosquera, Gérardo

Fernandez, Tonel Antonio Eligio

Zeitlin, Marilyn A.

History & Criticism

Delano Greenidge Editions

As opined by the book’s title, this is a publication focused toward the shared spaces and communal sensibilities of a city, rather than an attempt to survey the entire contemporary output of this anomalous nation. In essence, the study is a concentrated one of modern Havana, taking note of those artistic, cultural, socioeconomic and anthropological influences on its art scene without intent to become pedagogic in the process. Including major contemporary figures such as Juan Carlos Alom, Celia y Junior and Eduardo Ponjuan, The Spaces Between discusses the modern current of unfocused politicisation within the work, where issues of money, identity and bureaucracy are garnered from each viewers reading and imagination of suggestion, a reflection of the current emphasis on the spectator as contributor to making meaning. Published in collaboration with the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver, the book maintains the ambient approach of the partnering exhibition in an attempt to depict the context of Havana artists in the modern era. In part it discusses the lo-tech necessities of modern artists working in the city today, which has formed if not a coherent style, then a municipal approach to the process. As such, much of the work uses recycled materials or simple video and text-based elements to convey its meaning in a manner more diverse and ambiguous than prior generations of Cuban artists.

The Spaces Between: Contemporary Art from Havana

Wallace, Keith

Andersson, Cecilia

Black Dog Press

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