AfroCubaWeb

Bibliography

'Queloides': Artists Explore Racism in Cuba  6/14/2011 The Root: by Alejandro de la Fuente, with video - "Despite the social transformations implemented by the Cuban revolutionary government since the early 1960s, racism continues to be a deep wound in Cuban society, one that generates countless social and cultural scars. Racist attitudes, ideas and behaviors have gained strength in Cuban society during the last two decades, during the deep economic crisis known as "the Special Period," which followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. As the Cuban economy became dollarized, and competition for scarce jobs and resources intensified, racial discrimination and racial inequality increased. White Cubans began to use racist arguments to deny blacks access to the most attractive sectors of the economy (such as tourism), those in which it was possible to earn dollars or other hard currencies."

Rafael Lopez Ramos, "La Huella del Latigo" Los Lirios del Jardin  4/19/2011 : "A propósito de la recién inaugurada edición del proyecto Queloides, dialogué vía correo eléctronico con sus curadores Alejandro de la Fuente y Elio Rodríguez Valdés acerca del tema en que se centra la exposición y otros detalles relacionados con esta."

Alejandro de la Fuente y Michael Olijnyk nos hablan sobre "Queloides"  2/26/2011 YouTube: "Tuyomasyo Art presenta: Alejandro de la Fuente y Michael Olijnyk nos hablan sobre "Queloides" Race and Racism in Cuban Contemporary Art. Michael Olijnyk Co-director de Mattress Factory y Alejandro de la Fuente historiador y curador de la muestra."

"Queloides" Catalog  1/6/2011 Matress Factory Shop: "Queloides: Race and Racism in Cuban Contemporary Art," companion volume to the exhibition of the same name at the Mattress Factory Museum in Pittsburgh, PA, documents the complete exhibition in the United States as well as the previous Queloides exhibitions in Cuba. Edited by Cuban scholar and Queloides co-curator, Alejandro de la Fuente, this 172-page full-color bilingual (English and Spanish) catalog contains four essays: “Introduction: The New Afro-Cuban Cultural Movement,” by Alejandro de la Fuente; “Queloides: A History,” by Omar Pascual Castillo; “Race and Racism in Cuban Contemporary Art” by Odette Casamayor; and “Racism: Parody and Postcommunism” by Dennys Matos. The “Queloides: Race and Racism in Cuban Contemporary Art” catalog also includes extensive full-color photographic documentation of works in the exhibitions at the Wifredo Lam Center and the Mattress Factory and biographies of each of the 13 artists."

Racism in Contemporary Cuba Explored in Mattress Factory Exhibition, Cocurated by Pitt’s Alejandro de la Fuente  9/13/2010 Pitt Chronicle 

La "raza" y los silencios de la cubanidad  1/7/2009 Encuentro: Alejandro de la FuenteLa "raza" y los silencios de la cubanidad  1/7/2009 Encuentro: Alejandro de la Fuente

The New Afro-Cuban Cultural Movement and the Debate on Race in Contemporary Cuba  12/4/2008 Journal of Latin American Studies: "This paper analyses recent debates on race and racism in Cuba in the context of changing economic and social conditions in the island. Since the early 1990s, and largely in response to the negative effects that the so-called Special Period had on race relations, a group of artists and intellectuals began denouncing the persistence of racist practices and stereotypes in Cuban society. Although they are not organised around a single program or institution, these musicians, visual artists, writers, academics and activists share common grievances about racism and its social effects. It is in this sense that they constitute a new Afro-Cuban cultural movement. It is too early to fully assess the impact of this movement, but these artists and intellectuals have been largely successful in raising awareness about this problem and bringing it to the attention of authorities and the Cuban public."

Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century ( University of North Carolina Press, 2008).

Cuba’s Racial Democracy: What Now?  10/1/2007 New School: by Alejandro de la Fuente

Editor, "'Su único derecho': los esclavos y la ley," Debate y Perspectivas 4 (Madrid: Fundación Mapfre-Tavera, 2004).

"Slave Law and Claims-Making in Cuba: The Tannenbaum Debate Revisited" Law and History Review, Summer 2004

A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001 (Spanish ed. Madrid 2001)

"Slaves and the Creation of Legal Rights in Cuba : Coartación and Papel," Hispanic American Historical Review 87:4 (November 2007), 659-92.

Myths of Racial Democracy: Cuba, 1900-1912  6/1/1999 Latin American Research Review: "This article reviews the recent literature on the so-called myths of racial democracy in Latin America and challenges current critical interpretations of the social effects of these ideologies. Typically, critics stress the elitist nature of these ideologies, their demobilizing effects among racially subordinate groups, and the role they play in legitimizing the subordination of such groups. Using the establishment of the Cuban republic as a test case, this article contends that the critical approach tends to minimize or ignore altogether the opportunities that these ideologies have created for those below, the capacity of subordinate groups to use the nation-state's cultural project to their own advantage, and the fact that these social myths also restrain the political options of their own creators."

Links/Enlaces

Slave Law and Claims-Making in Cuba: The Tannenbaum Debate Revisited, Law and History Review, Summer 2004

Page at University of Pittsburgh
www.history.pitt.edu/faculty/de_la_fuente.php

Articles/Articulos

“Queloides” in New York: An Interview with the Curators  4/19/2011 Cuban Art Newsx: "Queloides is a long-term collective project in Cuban art. It’s not a project that belongs to me or to Elio, or to any of the artists who are exhibitng now. This is a project that was born in the late 1990s. The first exhibition was curated by Alexis Esquivel and Omar Pascual Castillo. It was a modest exhibit, in 1997, at Casa de Africa in Havana. It got very little press coverage, and very little recognition. Then there was a second, bigger exhibit organized by the late Ariel Ribeaux Diago in 1999. Ariel Ribeaux began to expand the project—gave it additional theoretical coherence. And then of course Ariel Ribeaux died a few years later and the project got suspended. Nothing else happened. When I learned about these exhibits, the first thing that caught my eye was how little information was available about the exhibits themselves, and about what I saw as a very important movement in Cuban art, and in Cuban culture more generally. But the exhibits have been ignored—and continue to be, actually—in the annals of Cuban art. If you look at the best books of Cuban art, you’ll see that in most cases the exhibits are not even mentioned."

The Audacity of a Cuban Curator  10/21/2010 Havana Times: "[Havana Times:] You’ve been banned from Cuba due to the exhibition. What happened? [Alejandro:] We presented this project to Cuba’s cultural authorities in 2008. I wanted to show it first in Havana because I didn’t want to do it only for foreign consumption. I understood that this was a polemic project, but I also thought that the situation had changed in the island. Racism is something that has been recognized even by Fidel Castro, who had acknowledged publicly that racism has not been solved. The cultural authorities were never quite enthusiastic about the project, but they said we could do it. The authorities had no chance to select the artists. I think several of the bureaucrats started having nightmares that this might endanger their positions and their privileges or that state security may call them. Maybe they did call them." [Alejandro has since been able to return to Cuba.]

Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century.  4/1/2009 College of Williams and Mary: "Although previous generations of historians have documented various aspects of the city’s early development, their main emphasis has often been on Havana’s imperial role as a military outpost and major stopover of the Spanish fleet system. De la Fuente’s book revises—or, rather, complements—that limited imperial view by highlighting Havana’s maritime, commercial role as a port city, by placing it in the context of Atlantic studies, and by providing a richly textured local view of the emerging city."

The New Afro-Cuban Cultural Movement and the Debate on Race in Contemporary Cuba  12/4/2008 Journal of Latin American Studies: "This paper analyses recent debates on race and racism in Cuba in the context of changing economic and social conditions in the island. Since the early 1990s, and largely in response to the negative effects that the so-called Special Period had on race relations, a group of artists and intellectuals began denouncing the persistence of racist practices and stereotypes in Cuban society. Although they are not organised around a single program or institution, these musicians, visual artists, writers, academics and activists share common grievances about racism and its social effects. It is in this sense that they constitute a new Afro-Cuban cultural movement. It is too early to fully assess the impact of this movement, but these artists and intellectuals have been largely successful in raising awareness about this problem and bringing it to the attention of authorities and the Cuban public."

Alejandro de la Fuente, A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth Century Cuba  9/1/2003 Labour: "The book's central argument is that the myth of racial equality was not simply an elite--generated idea that served to demobilize or co-opt Afro-Cubans. The author convincingly demonstrates that Afro-Cubans appropriated the same myth to fight against racism, class oppression, and neo-colonialism. The elite interpretation of racial equality saw any race-based demands, organizations, and sentiments as racist and anti-Cuban. In contrast, a subaltern popular nationalism of mostly Afro-Cuban origin saw the conscious struggle against racism as an integral aspect of the fight for social justice and national independence. Thus race relations in Cuba were characterized by ambiguity more than rigid social dichotomies, by contestation and accommodation more than violent confrontation, and by competing notions of national identity that shaped Cuban political transitions and culture."

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