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148 Rachel Weiss
action. At the great public mass meetings one can observe something like the dialogue
of two tuning forks whose vibrations interact, producing new sounds. Fidel and
the mass begin to vibrate together in a dialogue of growing intensity until they reach
the climax in an abrupt conclusion crowned by our cry of struggle and victory” (6).
17. Muguercia, “Body and Its Politics in Cuba,” 177.
18. For a fuller discussion, see Iván de la Nuez, “Al encuentro de los pasos perdidos,”
in Cuba Siglo XX: Modernidad y Sincretismo (Las Palmas de Gran Canario:
Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, 1996), 62.
19. Mario Benedetti, “Present Status of Cuban Culture,” in Cuba in Revolution,
ed. Rolando E. Bonachea and Nelson P. Valdés (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, Doubleday,
1972), 526.
20. The participants were José Bedia, Juan Francisco Elso, José Manuel Fors, Flavio
Garciandía, Israel León, Rogelio López Marín (Gory), Gustavo Pérez Monzón,
Ricardo Rodríguez Brey, Tomás Sánchez, Leandro Soto, and Rubén Torres Llorca.
“Volumen Uno” was neither the Wrst exhibition of these artists (the exhibition “Six
New Painters,” including many of them, had been planned for 1978, and in 1979
many of the same artists organized “Fresh Paint,” which was Wrst presented in a
private home and subsequently in an ofWcial gallery in Cienfuegos) nor the only
grouping during the early 1980s. Other group projects emerged in subsequent years,
including Grupo Hexágono (1982–85, a group whose work focused mainly on landscape;
members included Consuelo Castañeda, Humberto Castro, Ángel Sebastián
Elizondo, Tonel, Abigail García, and María Elena Morera).
21. Various authors have pointed out much earlier tendencies or indications,
during the Wrst years of the revolutionary period, toward a prescriptive and censorious
behavior on the part of the Cuban government vis-à-vis cultural expression: see,
for example, Desiderio Navarro, In medias res publicas (Havana: Unión de Escritores
y Artistas de Cuba, 2001), 40–45, and Gerardo Mosquera, “The New Cuban Art,”
in Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition, ed. Ales Erjavec (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 216. The 1970s period of institutionalization/Sovietization
is seen here as the proximate, but not the sole, antecedent
condition to which these artists were responding.
22. Antonio Eligio (Tonel), “70, 80, 90 . . . tal vez 100 impresiones sobre el arte
en Cuba,” in Cuba Siglo XX, 292.
23. Flavio Garciandía, interview with the author, Monterrey, Mexico, April 19,
2003.
24. This is explicit, for example, in comments by members of the artist collective
DUPP: “one thing we learned . . . was that the sense of dialogue, of conversation
among the artists, has been totally, completely lost.” Interview with the author,
Havana, March 19, 2002.
25. Abel Oliva describes this extended, conversational working methodology
within Cuban theater: “then there was much more sense of community. In the
eighties, in the theater, there were more experimental groups: the theater was much
stronger, and the groups lasted, a group could spend up to four or Wve years experimenting
in order to bring out a work, living together, working. Now, for example,
the theatrical formula is that it’s impossible to form a group that works that way . . .
the actors leave. That is, you can’t create a work within that method of working,
which is all research, and in which the product is not, let’s say, the objective. Now
the objective is the work itself, and as quickly as possible.” Interview with the author,
Havana, December 25, 2002.