There are two national art galleries in Havana, one dedicated to Cuban art and the other to International art. Since we have visited major art galleries in many cities across North America and Europe, we did not feel the need to revisit similar works in Havana. Accordingly, we dedicated our 5th and final day of our Havana vacation to visiting the
National Museum of Cuban Fine Arts (Museo Nacional de Belle Arts de Cuba). We had originally scheduled this activity for the day before, but when we arrived at the art museum, we found out that there was another huge opening for the
Havana Biennale taking place and the lineups to get in were insurmountable. So we decided to postpone the visit until the last day, which unfortunately was a Sunday when the museum was open for fewer hours, closing at 2pm instead of 5pm. We knew that we had to use our time wisely if we wanted to see everything and we decided that we did not have time for a guided tour or the use of an audio guide. This was too bad because we have come to learn that Cuban art often contains hidden, possibly political meanings and messages that would have been fascinating for us to hear about. I did eavesdrop on someone else’s personal guide and learned to look for the number 26, signifying the 26th of July, 1953 attempted seizure of power by Castro and others. I found the pictoral signs for the cloakrooms amusing since they indicated that they would not store what looked like bags of money or diamonds.
The Museum of Cuban Fine Arts displays works by both native Cubans and foreigners who resided in Cuba, spanning from the Colonial period of the mid to late 1800s when Cuba was still controlled by Spain, through to the late 1990s with many examples of what is considered to be Contemporary Art. Through all that span of time, the one constant that seems to underlie all the works is that they each have a definitive political message or point of view that is either subtly, or more likely overtly conveyed through the art.
From the Colonial period, a fascinating series of oil on cardboard paintings by Spanish “costumbrista” artist
Victor Patricio Landaluze represent caricatures of black peasants and slaves on sugar plantations, ironically depicting them under idealized conditions that didn’t actually exist.
Costumbrism is defined as the literary or pictorial interpretation of local everyday life, mannerisms, and customs, often in a satirical and moralizing manner. In these images, the Afrocuban characters are seen dressed in fancy gowns and evening wear and depicted in courting situations usually reserved for the white population of the time. Even in the few paintings showing servants performing household chores, they are inappropriately portrayed in high fashion not befitting their status. It is interesting that there are no accurate or more realistic depictions of black slaves or servants working on the fields or performing manual labour on display at all in the Museum.
From the 1930s through the start of the 1960s, an avant-garde and constantly changing style that was labelled “
Modern Art” emerged, moving away from historical representations towards expressions of emotion towards social and political concerns. In these decades that followed Cuba’s independence from Spain in 1930s, the inspirational National Hero
Jose Marti was frequently depicted. While they all portray Marti’s thin face, sharp pointy chin and telltale mustache, they differ quite a bit in style and context. The portrait of Marti by
Jorge Arche (1943) is the most realistic of the renderings, while
Albert Pena’s “The Call of the Ideal” (1946) makes Marti seem like an omnipresent messiah overlooking his people.
Carlos Enriquez painted two images of Jose Marti in 1957. The first depicts Marti’s famous landing in Playitas on the shores of Cuba in 1895 to join the Cuban War of Independence from Spain, painted almost like an allegory, while the second is titled “The Death of Marti”. I liked the style of a couple of Enriquez’s earlier works from 1938, which featured “fluid lines, overlapping color forms, transparencies and dynamic figure compositions”. The one ironically called “
Happy Peasants” depicts one of the most emancipated and woe-begone families that I’ve ever seen. The second called “
The Abduction of the Mulattos” include many of Enriquez’s favourite subjects—aggressive bandits, sensual women and restless horses, all portrayed in a stylized manner where the different images blend together and yet are easily picked out.
Another Cuban painter of this period whose works I really liked was
Marcelo Pogolotti, who dabbled in surrealism as well as futurism, a style based on speed, technology, youth and violence that he picked up during his time spent in Italy. The curvy-bodied figures in Pogolotti’s works somehow remind me of Fernand Leger’s images. While at first glance, the paintings feel animated and cartoonish, a closer look reveals more meaningful social commentary with imagery of workers, capitalism, religion and revolution. Pogolotti did most of his work between 1925-1938 before losing his vision after a lengthy battle with progressive blindness. His depiction of rich capitalists in top hats and tails is reminiscent of the character in the board game Monopoly.
Born to a Chinese father and part African, part mulatto mother,
Wifredo Lam is one of the most renowned artists from Cuba, with an entire gallery named after him in Cathedral Square and a large room dedicated to his works in the National Museum of Cuban Fine Arts. While Lam started out in the late 1920s painting classical portraiture like the one on display of
Eulalia Solino (1927), in his later years he combined influences from Surrealism (via encounters with artists such as Joan Miro) , Cubism (George Braque and Picasso) and Afro-Cuban culture and religion that he experienced after returning to Havana. Most of Lam’s works on display were from this later period and formed a stark juxtaposition to his earlier works. While many of the European artists turned to abstraction to convey the horrors of the World Wars, Lam might have been working through his own personal traumas after losing his first wife and son to tuberculosis.
For me, the most fascinating part of the Cuban art collection is the set of
post-revolutionary works created in the intervening years following the 1959 Cuban revolution. This momentous event is obviously still an important and prevalent topic that continues to show up in works spanning from the time immediately following the revolution all the way through to Contemporary works of the current day. The first thing we encountered when walking into this section was the giant work that spelled out the word “Fidel” using a bunch of smaller cardboard cards. As you approached and got a closer look, you would see that each card had the faint image of a man’s face, drawn with graphite and red wine. This piece by
Jose Toirac is called “Efemérides, 2000” or “Diaries, 2000”. Unfortunately there was no additional information about it, so we were left wondering who those faces were and what their relationships were to Fidel. Had this been in a museum in some other country, I would have assumed that these were political prisoners that perhaps had been “disappeared”. But since this was in the Cuban National Art Gallery, more likely these were loyal soldiers and supporters of Castro. I was tricked by another work by Toirac which from afar I thought was a beautiful black and white photograph of Fidel Castro hiking through the mountains wearing his signature hat. Reading the title card, I learned that this is actually a self-portrait of the artist himself that parodies a photo taken of Castro in the Sierra Maestra mountains.
Leandro Soto’s mixed media installation sends mixed messages. It features the image of a smiling, congenial-looking Castro with a young boy in his arms and is surrounded by Christmas lights and ornaments. But there is also a plastic gun pasted across the image and scrawled writing whose rough translation seems to dedicate this gift “To grandmother from her grandchildren who love her very much”. It’s not clear to me whether this is a tribute to or an indictment of the Castro regime? There is no such ambiguity in
Rafael Zarza’s 1973 painting titled “
El gran fascista” (The Grand Dictator) depicts dethroned Cuban president Fugencio Batista as a bull dressed in his military uniform, gesturing to the crowd of bulls gathered below him.
Several powerful works reference the
Cuban Revolution and the subsequent CIA-sponsored
Bay of Pigs Invasion by a group of Cuban exiles, intending to overthrow Fidel Castro’s Communist government. Armed with the bit of information I gathered while overhearing someone explain the significance of certain symbols in the post revolutionary works, I spotted the number “26” painted into
Raul Martinez’s work “26 de Julio” (1964), named after the 26th of July Movement that was the revolutionary organization and later, the name of the political party led by Castro. There were also elements of collage with images of Castro and anti-American slogans pasted onto the painting. Martinez also created a piece titled and featuring the word
Girón, which is the beach where the counter-revolutionary military group landed to launch the Bay of Pigs Invasion. This is accompanied by the words that translate to “Our children died .. we took their place”. The large letters spelling out Girón and “Murieron” (They died) are written in a bright blood-red colour.
Servando Morena’s painting called “
Bombardeo del 15 de abril, 1961” refers to the date April 15, 1961, when CIA sponsored Cuban exiles flew American B-26 bomber planes to attack Cuba in the Bay of Pigs invasion. The depiction of panicked strewn bodies clutching babies brings to mind Peter Paul Ruben’s famous painting Massacre of the Innocents as well as Picasso’s Guernica.
There were multiple stylized depictions of war hero
Che Guevera wearing his iconic beret while gazing pensively into the distance. These included paintings by
Fayad Jamis (1969) titled “Che” and
Alberto Carol (1970) titled “The Ambush”. Perhaps it is significant that Guevera is depicted mostly in red (blood?) in this latter painting. I found
Gilberto Frometa’s 1973 painting translated as “
From the Rio Bravo to Patagonia” to be interesting since the faces merged into the background of mountains reminded me (intentionally?) of the faces carved into Mount Rushmore. Unfortunately I only recognize Che for sure but the moustachioed figure might be Jose Marti and the guy with the glasses could be Raoul Castro?). Raul Martinez channeled Andy Warhol’s replicated silkscreen images when he created oil on canvas paintings featuring multiple versions of Cuban icons including Che Guevera (1966) and Jose Marti (1966)
A special section of the art museum was dedicated to political cartoons and caricatures created by both Cuban cartoonists, and surprisingly, some American ones from the late 1800s. While I did not recognize the satirized faces of the Cuban cartoons, the American ones were clearly propaganda campaigns against Spain during the Spanish-American conflict of 1898. Spain is depicted as a monstrous brute massacring honourable US soldiers while Uncle Sam is depicted as a giant sailor sinking and defeating the Spanish navy. Given Cuba’s antipathy towards the United States, I found it interesting that the Cuban National Fine Art Museum would feature works by Americans promoting America. I guess as much as Cuba does not like the USA, it does not like Spain (who occupied them for centuries) even more. One of the more recent Cuban political cartoons created by
Aristides Guerrero is provocatively titled “
Wal-Marx”, an obvious play on the company “Walmart” combined with a reference to Marxist communism. Is the implication that Cuba is straying from its Communist ethos and straying towards Capitalism?
I particularly liked the museum’s collection of contemporary art because there was a larger focus on sculpture and installations which I am partial to. The gauge in
Lazaro Saaverdra’s “Detector of Ideology” (1989) spanned from “No Problem” to “Problematic”, “Unconscious and Conscious CounterRevolutionary” and “Diversionism” (defined as actions that sabotage one’s own government or military forces).
Carlos Estevez created a series of carved and painted wooden figures representing iconic people such as Che Gueverra, Jose Marti, Charlie Chaplin, Abraham Lincoln, Napoleon, Hitler, Moses, or representative tropes such as a Templar knight, basketball player, Indian chief, and many more lying on a pile on the ground. From this pile, you can pick and choose a set to place on a mounted “stage”. He called his work “
The True Universal Story” (1995). I guess based on the combination selected, a different story could be told. It was not clear whether the public was meant to interact with these dolls or not (probably not, so we didn’t try!). I always like works that are part painting, part sculpture, such as the piece called “
Productiveness” (1992) by
Rene Rodriguez and Eduardo Gonzalez. It depicts a farmer holding what looks like the handle of a shovel, which spans behind the canvas of the painting and becomes a paint brush at the other end. Not sure what it means, but it was cool. Another sculptural piece that I didn’t fully grasp the context of consisted of canvas sacks labelled “Refined Sugar” on one side, with the face of either a black or Latino man on the other. More than once during our visit to the art museum, I wished that we had time for a guided tour or audio guide to explain some of the works to us, since they all seemed rich with hidden meanings and messages!
For our last dinner in Havana, we wanted to make sure that we experienced authentic Cuban fare by going to a paladar (privately run family restaurant) as opposed to a government-run joint. We chose
Habana 61, which had a good review on TripAdvisor and was also recommended to us by friends who previously visited Havana. This turned out to be a very good choice as we had an excellent meal for a very reasonable price in a cool-looking, relatively modern restaurant compared to the ones we went to on the previous nights. We started off with our standard daiquiri and mojito drinks and an order of croquettes. For appetizers, we shared a plate of fish ceviche, strongly flavoured with lots of cilantro, lime juice and a tomato/pesto salsa as well as the bonito tuna loin brined in a pickled sauce. Both dishes came with generous portions of fish and were delicious. For our mains, we shared big chunks of lobster with spicy tomato sauce and a red snapper filet in a green vegetable puree. Again we were delighted by the large portions of seafood in what turned out to be an all-seafood meal. For dessert, we shared a chocolate mousse, which was just OK. I’m still not impressed by Cuban desserts but highly recommend the appetizers and main courses.
Habana 61 is located in a fun and funky area surrounded by the paladar
Ivan Chef Gusto, the
Revolution Museum, and Plaza 13 de Marco, all of which we visited on previous days. Although we had been very close to this area, we had not actually walked along the few streets leading to the restaurant. It turns out there are interesting shops and many restaurants with outdoor seating areas that reminded us of cafes and restaurants in Europe. We found a sculpture of the titular character from the novel
Cecilia Valdes/Hill of the Angel, a tragic love story published in Havana 1839 by Cirilo Villaverde. Following our meal, we enjoyed the busy nightlife in this area as well as the cool night breeze as we strolled back to our hotel.
We thoroughly enjoyed our five days in Havana, Cuba, soaking up the arts, music, food and culture and felt that for the most part, this was enough time to do all the things that we wanted to do.
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