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Performing Revolution 149
26. In 1990 Fidel Castro declared that the country was entering a “Special Period
in Time of Peace,” his euphemism for the period of economic collapse in Cuba.
27. This led, directly and inexorably, to a dollar economy that paralleled and
eventually overtook the peso economy—a development that has left many Cubans
(those without ongoing sources of dollars) increasingly priced out of even basic
goods, in an evolving economic train wreck.
28. The Taller was opened in 1983 under the direction of Aldo Menéndez. Many
of the young artists were hired to work there, and the studio produced editions by
the vast majority of the artists then working in Havana, as well as various others
who were invited to produce prints while visiting Cuba.
29. The “productivist” schemes launched by the Ministry of Culture in the second
half of the 1970s were, according to Tonel, fundamental to the events of the
1980s, determining the “work” that was designed for the artists being produced by
the new institutions (especially the Instituto Superior de Arte/ISA). As Armando
Hart put it at the time: “Within socialism, in order that art as such is able to fulWll
its role in the economy, it must think about penetrating all spheres of life; and
respond to the demands that technological development and the spiritual needs of
the great mass of the population impose on it.” Cited in Eligio (Tonel), “70, 80, 90
. . . tal vez 100 impresiones sobre el arte en Cuba,” 289.
30. Although at the outset of the revolutionary period abstraction was tolerated,
a subsequent reappraisal of it saw it as capitalist art, lying “outside the revolutionary
actuality”—as a “pure” form that was nonsocial (not antisocial), unable to represent
the collective because of its basically introspective gaze. See Manuel Díaz
Martínez, “Salón Anual de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado,” Hoy Domingo (Havana)
1, no. 12 (October 18, 1959), 4–5; reprinted in Memoria: Cuban Art of the 20th Century,
ed. José Veigas, Cristina Vives, Adolfo V. Nodal, Valia Garzón, and Dannys
Montes de Oca (Los Angeles: California/International Arts Foundation, 2002), 422.
On this subject the artist Raúl Martínez has said: “I began to feel that abstraction
had nothing to do with our new environment. Besides, there were a lot of new
pizzerias and public places that groups of painters were decorating with designs that
resembled abstract painting . . . I realized that abstraction and all my experiments
with it were part of an attempt to Wnd out who and what I was. I also realized that
the revolution had made me more interested in Wnding out about others.” Quoted
in Coco Fusco and Robert Knafo, “Interviews with Cuban Artists,” in Social Text
(New York: Winter, 1986), 41.
31. In the 1970s Antonia Eiriz and Umberto Peña had “stopped painting” in the
face of harsh ofWcial disapprobation of their work, “dynamiting . . . the bureaucratic
conformism and voluntarism to create, from the abstract, a kind of art that was contingent,
heroic and eternal,” according to Osvaldo Sanchez, “Tras el rastro de los
fundadores: un panorama de la plástica cubana,” in Trajectoire Cubaine (Corbeil-
Essonnes: Centre d’Art Contemporain, 1989), 14. Their retreat from painting and
into apparent popularisms like papier-mâché, however, was a complicated move,
neither simply an act of revolutionary insistence (as Luis Camnitzer has suggested),
despite the repression of their main work as painters, nor a paltry substitute (as Toirac
suggests), evidence of their incapacitation as artists. In fact, by the mid-1970s the
sanctions imposed on Eiriz (around the end of the 1960s) were being lightened, to
the point that she was included in an ofWcial delegation to Moscow. According to
Desiderio Navarro, “she was not in good shape economically at the time, and she
welcomed the thaw. In her neighborhood of Juanelo, and in her CDR, she began to