Ending the Century with Memories…: Paper Money, Videos, and an X-Acto Knife for Cuban Art

Abstract

The last decade of the twentieth century was a time of transition and readjustment for visual artists in Cuba. A considerable number of artists emigrated from the country, among them central figures from the generation responsible for an artistic renewal in the 1980s. That movement, called “New Cuban Art,” was later reinterpreted in the first half of the 1990s by a group of very young artists, who explored art’s communicative and cultural possibilities to better fit the country’s changing social and economic circumstances in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dismantling of the Soviet Union. The shock of that time period, baptized from the beginning as the Special Period, had profound consequences on national consciousness, culture, and ideology. The damages range from more overt racism to increasing class differences and inequality among diverse groups of the Cuban population. Each in their own way, the artists whose works I examine in this essay have confronted some of these issues and have tried to respond to the complex questions posed by the Special Period at the end of the twentieth century.

I maintain lucidity. An unpleasant lucidity, an emptiness

—Sergio Carmona, in Memorias del Subdesarrollo (1968)