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Performing Revolution 147
8. Gerardo Mosquera, interview with the author, Havana, March 26, 2002.
Flavio Garciandía explains it thus: “I think that Gerardo is the one who really did
it, he was the Wrst to try to give a theoretical, or rhetorical vision of the whole of it
. . . and later he was precisely the one who took on the task of going to the speci-
Wcs of each artist. . . . Also you have to realize that on the institutional level there
was a certain rhetorical discourse, . . . and Gerardo was trying to use some of the
same ofWcial, institutional rhetoric, to give it a twist, to change it, but he had to use
certain elements, let’s say, of rhetoric.” Interview with the author, Monterrey, Mexico,
April 19, 2003.
9. For example, Mosquera writes the following in his short text for the “Volumen
Uno” exhibition: “The exhibitors do not constitute a group nor do they defend
a particular tendency. Their reunion in this room has an informal character. If they
have joined here in a group it is—in addition to personal afWnity—because of a
common desire: to experiment within the currents of present-day plastic arts. All
of them have been sensitive to the latest directions of the search in the evolution
of art. Starting from those they have intended to speak their own words.” Gerardo
Mosquera, Volumen Uno, exhibition brochure (Havana, 1981), unpaginated.
10. For example, Magaly Espinosa writes “This ability to bring art close to the
socio-cultural framework allows one to explain the strength with which the sociological
conscience of the artists had been established, artists who did not form an
organized group, and possessed neither programs nor manifestos but who, attached
as they were to the daily life, to religious contexts, to the paraphrasing of political
icons and kitsch, succeeded in marking out the principal paths imaginable by which
Cuban society left a record of its investitures.” Magaly Espinosa Delgado, La espada y
la cuerda: A veinte años de Volumen Uno (Havana: unpublished typescript, 2002), 4.
11. Both of these terms are somewhat problematic, “generation” because it indicates
a cycle of succession related to entire career spans, while the Cuban situation
has seen the emergence of distinct moments on a much shorter time frame, as little
as Wve years; some have proposed the term “promotion,” instead, to indicate that
artists have tended to come into visibility in groups, as a result of their promotion
by the Cuban cultural apparatus. “Movement,” also, is misleading in the Cuban
case, since it again indicates an inXated degree of cohesion among artists, in this
case by virtue of a mutually agreed manifesto or platform or program—all of which
were speciWcally absent during this period.
12. For an extended discussion of this question of subjecthood and socialism, see
Desiderio Navarro, “Unhappy Happening: En torno a un rechazo en la recepción
cubana del pensamiento francés sobre la literatura y las artes,” in Gaceta de Cuba
(Havana: Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba, 2002), 21–25.
13. Ibid., 23–24.
14. Magaly Muguercia, “The Body and Its Politics in Cuba of the Nineties,” in
Boundary 2 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 175–76.
15. Ernesto Che Guevara, Socialism and Man in Cuba (New York: PathWnder
Press, 1989), 6. Originally written in the form of a letter to Carlos Quijano, editor
of Marcha (Montevideo) and published there on March 12, 1965.
16. Ibid., 5. Guevara does follow this comment with the observation that the
Cuban people nonetheless follow their leaders “without hesitation,” an apparent
contradiction that he reconciles in the orgasmic relation that he saw between the
Cuban people and their Commandante: “In this Fidel is a master. His own special
way of fusing himself with the people can be appreciated only by seeing him in