A Different Cuba
A Different Cuba
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: The Manila Times, January 14, 1987
ANYONE who grew up wideawake in the '60s cannot help but feel some romantic attachment to Cuba. If there was one unlikely country that braved the odds, that lived its fabled revolution to the hilt, it was this island paradise of stouthearted men and women, staunchly determined to stand firm and rise in defiance from centuries of abuse and exploitation. The bearded men of the Granma and the Sierra Maestra encampments - among them the renegade lawyer Fidel Castro and the young Argentine physician Ernesto "Che" Guevarra - have persisted in myth beyond their years, adored or despised, ridiculed or emulated, but as legendary figures of our youth in their own right.
Then, too, the Cuba of the last two decades calls to mind the excitement of not a few tense moments in history - the grim spectre of global war, the power and grace of an Olympic mega-hero, even Cuba’s own perilous encounters with Hollywood. But once the toast of the Carribean, playground of the rich and famous, the Cuba of pulsating rhythms and torrid nights had suddenly become all too shrouded in political intrigue and heavy-handed sloganeering.
The exhibition of new Cuban Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila is an eye-opener of sorts (albeit a modest one) at a time when cultural exchange almost always signals the onset of greater rapport between ideologically belligerent nations. It is not the Cuba we have come to expect that comes through in these works, surviving the political theatricality of its early leadership. And it is a Cuba that is surprisingly similar to our own home turf.
The art is happily devoid of revolutionary hysterics in work that is infinitely sober and unpretentious. Swathed in folklore, the compilation looks almost Philippine in origin, born as it is of the same sun-drenched agrarian mysticism and iconography. Understandably infatuated with cosmopolitan influences, Cuban Art trails these same influences from a distance, much as we ourselves do. The time warp may have been deliberate in their case, and by force of geographic and economic circumstance in ours. But the same sense of restraint, the same dogmatic naivete, the same disinterest in size and grandeur, the same rural ethnicity, the same inclination to the festive and the ceremonial all seem to reside in both our worlds.
The very young Jose Bedia (b. 1959) is the high point of the collection. A disarming crudeness becomes the key to an artistic style that is both engrossing and powerfully articulate in its narrative lyricism. It is interesting to note, if not downright significant, that of the four exhibiting artists (Clara Gomez de Molina, Cleva Solis, Hilda Vidal and himself), Bedia is the only male, and the only one with formal artistic training. Winner of the recently-concluded 2nd Biennale de la Havanna, he is furthermore the most detached from Old World artistic conventions.
“Today everything is less dramatic because we are more mature,” wrote Che Guevarra to his friend Fidel in April of 1965. Today, we might add, it is introspection and not flourish and jargon that typifies the work on display. In the light of our own revolutionary fervor, that is some indication of the distance that we ourselves have yet to travel.
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Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “A Different Cuba” (page 1 of 1), The Manila Times, January 14, 1987
