Cuba’s history is one of toil and hardship in the midst of volatility, isolation and political passion. Art and music have been part of this dramatic history

Cuba has been touched by so many diverse people and cultures. The original native people who were enslaved by the Spanish and ended up being decimated by their disease. The African slaves who were imported by the British to do their dirty work. The Americans who were so shit scared of anything communist, they failed to recognise the richness of their Caribbean neighbour and excluded her from anything American, apart from a pathetic, disastrous attempt to run up her shores on behalf of a toppled regime that probably didn’t even bother to say thank you.

When Cuba was forgotten by her motherly suitor, Russia, in the 1990s, her culture, art and music were all she had to show a world that was immediately fascinated with a country in which time seemed to have stood still. Chris von Christierson, on visiting Cuba for the first time in 2007, felt this fascination with the enigma country that existed behind Fidel Castro’s veil.

Ry Cooder felt the same curiosity and unearthed a genre of music that had died when the communists closed down gambling houses and nightspots that might have hidden dissidents of the regime and sympathisers with Batista and his American puppeteers. The Buena Vista Social Club was one of these clubs and its forgotten musicians, Ibrahim Ferrer, Campay Segundo, Rubén González, Cachaito López and Guajiro Mirabal came out of obscurity to a Grammy award and the musical acclaim they never sought but deserved richly.

The same is true of her art, particularly that which reflects the African influence in her makeup, and the racial divide that has become a consequence. It is not only the African slaves who create a commonality between the continent and Cuba, there are political and military camaraderie with a moderate dash of spiritual and religious influence. Chris von Christierson says of his first visit to Cuba, “Not only were we lifted straight back to our colonial childhoods of the ‘50s but we identified strong similarities with our own troubled country of birth, South Africa. We also soon recognised a complex and imperfect liberation culture rooted in Africa, with the unique rhythms, colours and sounds that Africa has to offer – all so familiar to those who know and love it.”

Orlando Hernández, a former curator of the Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana and his wife Lucha were the catalysts for Chris to assemble a collection of lost Afro Cuban art and showcase it to the world. Orlando’s talents extended him into a prominent writer, art critic, poet, anthropologist and researcher of Afro Cuban religious practice, all of which gave him a profound understanding of the issues being portrayed by the artists. He concentrated on 24 artists, ranging fromestablished Cuban masters with national museum collections, to self-taught street artists.

“What makes this collection unique, is that not only does it portray the obvious African connection common to all Afro American art, it goes much further and exposes and ‘unmasks’ the racial inequalities and discrimination that still exist in modern Cuban society and indeed in most societies of our world.” The Negro-Afro descendants of Cuba have lived much like the black majority lived under apartheid, put thus by Orlando Hernandez in his conceptual description of the collection, “For this has detached or isolated our inheritance from the conditions of subordination, inequality and discrimination under which the Negro-Afro descendants of Cuba have had to develop their traditions, thereby affecting their development and preventing their full dissemination and understanding by the whole of our population”. In short, despite a socialist doctrine of equality for all, things are very unequal for the Afro Cuban people.

Their art reflects this discrimination whether it’s the naïve “Boda Campesina” (Country Wedding) by Oswaldo Castillo Vázquez, a self-taught country artist, or the poignant string of pearls contrasting on the ankle above a well-worn pair of feet by one of Cuba’s celebrated photographers, Rene Pena. As South Africans we know how much of the struggle was reflected in the art of the people and how art was at the absolute centre of that struggle. So too is the art of the Afro Cubans at the heart of their largely silent struggle, not against the Castro regime but against the discriminatory social structures that govern Cuban society.

Without Masks, Contemporary Afro Cuban Art Exhibition, will show at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, in conjunction with the Directorate of Arts, Culture and Heritage of the City of Johannesburg. It opens on Africa Day, Sunday 23 May and runs the entire duration of the World Cup.

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