“Neither ‘Tropicalisms’ nor ‘Folklorisms’”: Race and National Visual Arts in 1950s Cuba

This paper historizes the influence of the Afrocubanista movement on national visual arts production during the 1950s in Cuba, when many artists declared in writing their desire to distance their art works from previous nationalisms. They refused to express Cubanidad in racial terms, unlike the “exoticisms” and “tropicalisms” of the previous generations of artists. At the same time, Afro-Cuban culture continued to be an essential ingredient of abstract artists’ pictorial language and of what was considered Cuba’s national art. The paper juxtaposes how artists rationalized the concept of abstract art with their approaches to Cuba’s African heritage. In doing so, it offers new interpretations of Cuban abstract artists’ understandings of blackness within Cuba’s national imaginaries. If previous Vanguardias othered Afro-Cubans by representing stereotyped rumberos or poor black workers at the margins of Cuba’s modernity, abstract artists might have interpreted that lo negro was inherent to their own individuality and to the social environment from which they aimed to distill that which was most essential and pure.