 Hello. My name is Alejandro de la Fuente and I am pleased to be able to connect with you and to be here with you, even if it is through this through these technologies. I was very much hoping to be the museum in person. I was very much hoping to visit in the museum. I was very much hoping to be able to thank Kerry Weber, the director of the Fairfield University Art Museum in person. And to be able to be with you and to be part of this exhibition and to take part personally in the programs surrounding the exhibition. I want to say that given that that's not possible, I'm going to try my best to do this via Zoom with you. Let me also thank my dear colleague and friend Lily Guerra, who is the curator of the exhibition that I'm sure you all have seen. I haven't been able to do so. I know that some of the colleagues who preceded me, including Guerra and my colleague and friend Barbara Martinez, who provided some context of how this exhibition links to Cuban post-revolutionary politics and conflicts over freedom of expression. I watched Lily Guerra's lecture and also in the case of Barbara Martinez, how Mendeves work connects with African art. What I propose to do here is to add yet another context, that of national and transnational struggles and movements for racial equality and justice, and to do so mostly through the work of two of the artists present in the exhibit who are Manuel Mendeves and Juan Roberto Diago. Both of these artists have intervened and contributed to conversations on race and justice in Cuba and globally, more generally. But they do so from very different vantage points in terms of their life stories, their interests, their messages, and also their pictorial languages. Born in 1944, Manuel Mendeves began his artistic career in the 1960s, during the early years of the Cuban Revolution, and an international moment marked by anti-colonial struggles in Africa, civil rights conflicts and struggles in the United States, and of course, apartheid. These are the years of the Black Panther Party of apartheid in South Africa, of the first World Festival of Black Arts in Dakar in Senegal in 1966. Born in 1971, Juan Roberto Diago is in many ways a child of the Cuban Revolution, someone who grew up and received all his education under the egalitarian policies of the Cuban socialist regime. Whereas Mendeves started his artistic career in the midst of the euphoria of the revolution at a moment of enormous optimism, the era came to age during the crisis of Cuban socialism in the 1990s, when the collapse of the Soviet Union pushed the island into a deep economic and social crisis, forcing Cuban authorities to open the island to global capitalism and tourism. This was a moment marked by the ascendance and growth of a vibrant movement for racial justice and inclusion, not only in Cuba, but in Latin America as a whole, a process that also had an impact on Diago's work and his artistic production. There is something, however, that both Mendeves and Diago share, and that is they share a national context characterized by a persistent official silence on race and discrimination. These are issues that were not supposed to have any relevance. They were not supposed to even exist in socialist Cuba. Now this silence was not invented by the Cuban Revolution. This silence has in fact deep roots in Cuban nationalism, which is based, Cuban nationalism is based on the notion that race and racial diversity are fundamentally irrelevant to the Cuban condition since the late 19th century and precisely in order to neutralize fears of racial conflict, nationalist intellectuals created the myth of a racially harmonious Cuba. As for Semartí, Cuba's foremost intellectual patriot, a nation maker, famously put it, a man is more than white, more than black, more than mulatto. According to these foundational fictions, to borrow the felicitous expression of my colleague Doris Sommer, to speak about races and racial differences was not only unnecessary, but probably unpatriotic as well. Mulatto, patriot and intellectual Juan Alberto Gomez, collaborator, a close collaborator of Semartí, summarized this vision when he stated in 1893, we are Cubans, nothing more. The Cuban Revolution was building on this tradition when as early as January of 1959, its leaders began to address publicly issues of race, issues that they could simply not ignore because of our Cuban activists were demanding attention to these issues. When Fidel Castro spoke against racial discrimination in a famous speech in March 1959, he did so by calling on Cubans to build what he called una patria nueva, a new homeland, a new nation, one nation free of racism and discrimination and call for a national debate on race and racism. It causes manifestations and solutions, a rather revolutionary step, I should say at the time. However, as early as 1962, that is a couple, two or three years later, authorities, Cuban authorities, Fidel Castro himself began to talk about racism, to talk about discrimination in past tense and formally proclaimed Cuba to be a discrimination free society. The battle for discrimination had been won already. As the second declaration of Havana issued in February 1962, put it, the revolution had eradicated discrimination because of race or sex. The revolution had solved Cuba's historic race problem. These were things of the past, of a past of capitalism and of a past of imperialist control over the island. At the same time, the government, the revolutionary government did implement massive social programs in education, health, recreation and employment that contributed in rather unprecedented ways to diminish and in some cases to eliminate different forms of social and racial inequality in Cuba. Now, this is the context in which Cuban intellectuals and artists interested on issues of race produced their work, at least between the 1960s and the 1980s. On the one hand, they lived and worked on what was, for all practical purposes, a fairly egalitarian society. Indeed, by many important measures, racial inequality had declined significantly in Cuba by the 1980s. On the other hand, they lived in a society in which race had become a taboo. Not surprisingly, in this context, race was not a major topic in Cuban visual arts or in Cuban public and intellectual life in general. Those artists and intellectuals, more generally, who remained concerned with issues of racial difference, tended to gravitate thematically to Cuba areas. A, the African ingredients and influences in Cuban popular culture, and B, the importance of race and racial struggles in global processes of decolonization and anti-imperialism, which received the solidarity and support of the Cuban revolutionary movement. Perhaps the best illustration of this individual arts in this, it's the impressive graphic production of Cuban political posters from the 1960s, especially docile into Ospal, organization of solidarity with the peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America based in Havana. I'm sure many of you are familiar with these images, but a quick Google search of Ospal, OSP, AAL will immediately make them available to you. Neither of these thematic areas, African roots for global racist imperialism, however, provided space to talk about race and discrimination in Cuban contemporary society. When Cuban intellectuals and artists and authorities spoke of racism, they were talking about somewhere else, frequently and mostly about the United States. Now, the importance of Africa and of African cultural forms in the formation of a Cuban national culture had been a topic of Cuban arts since the painters of the vanguard of the late 1920s and the 1930s, a moment in which what scholars call an Afro-Cubanista movement, the movement centered on African influences in Cuban culture took off. It is a moment in which those painters, intellectuals, poets, writers, envisioned a mixed, racially mixed, and mestizo nation. As mulatto poet, Nicolás Guillén put it in 1931, I quote, Cuba's soul is mestizo, and it is from the soul, not the skin, that we derive our definite color. Someday it will be called Cuban color, end of the quote. The most important painters of the vanguard, Eduardo Avela, Carlos Enriquez, Victor Manuel, and later, we, Fredo Lam, all explored Afro-Cuban popular culture as part of their common efforts to represent Cubanness in the language of art. The depictions of some of these artists were sometimes representations of blacks as sensual, rhythmically oriented people, you know, dancing subjects, as in Avela's El Triunfo de la Rumba, the triumph of the Rumba. But as scholar and critic Juan Martinez has noted, the movement helped create a new and positive view of Afro-Cubans and of their previously ignored contributions to Cuban culture. Furthermore, some figures within the movement, such as Afro-Cuban painter Alberto Peña, who is represented in the slide, this is not a very well-known painter, but to me is one of the most interesting painters of the vanguard. People like him used their work, and he used the moment, used the opportunity to offer a critical view of Afro-Cuban, of the economic and social conditions of Afro-Cubans. As you can see in this painting, in this piece called Travajadores' Workers. The most interesting and potentially most revolutionary take on this search for African roots, for the African roots of Cubanidad, came from the work of Uefredo Lam, Cuba's best known artist of all times. In an interview in the 1960s, Lam made clear that recentering Africa was a radical move, I quote. I refused to paint cha-cha-cha. I wanted with all my heart to paint the drama of my country, but by thoroughly expressing the Negro spirit, I could act as a Trojan horse that would spew forth hallucinating figures with the power to surprise, to disturb the dreams of the exploiters. A true picture has the power to send the imagination to work, even if it takes time. This search for the African roots of the Cuban soul, of Cuban national culture, of course intensified after the revolution of 1959. As intellectual sympathetic to the revolutionary project looked for the ingredients of a new revolutionary national culture, they found that African-based cultural practices in music, religion, and community organizations were everywhere among humble Cubans, among the working poor, precisely those whose well-being and future the revolution claimed to incarnate. Popular Cuba was black, working class Cuba was black, humble Cuba was black. To them, Africa was not a root, but a reference in their daily lives. In the early 1960s, the Cuban government created a host of institutions to support and disseminate the new national culture of the revolution. This culture grounded in the popular sectors and their practices. Among these institutions was the Atronational de Cuba Cuban National Theater, whose department of folklore was conceived as a tool for Cubans to become the owners of their own culture. The department staged its first public performance in February 1960 and it was a thoroughly Afro-Cuban performance. Out of the department of folklore came two institutions that would play a crucial role in the formation of a new revolutionary culture, the National Institute of Ethnology and Folklore, charged with the creation of a Museum of Cuban Ethnology, and Conjunto Folklore Nacional National Folklore Ensemble, which in the words of its founder would collect dancing and musical expressions of national character and integrate them into the new socialist culture. Now this doesn't mean that the revolution's cultural institutions were going to promote Santaria or other Afro-Cuban religions. These institutions sought to research Cuban popular traditions, catalog them, monitor them, monitor their evolution on their socialism, and ultimately store them in the newly created Museum of Ethnology. They were charged with keeping the historic memory of these cultural expressions precisely because revolutionary authorities believed that those expressions would eventually disappear and would die out in socialist Cuba. The main goal of the new educational system was in fact quite at odds with those popular practices because the new educational system sought to create a technically sophisticated western modern man who had to be clients of cultural influences deemed to be traditional, even reactionary. At the very top of the list of those traditional perhaps reactionary practices were African-based religious and communitarian practices which were invariably characterized as primitive or savage. As an official publication of the Communist Party, El Militante Comunista, put it in 1969, the Orishas were monstrous and extremely repulsive deities. Orishas are the gods of Yoruba-based religions, the gods of Santaria, a crude mixture of mythological elements of primitive African peoples. By the late 1960s, cultural and educational authorities openly stated that religions in general and African religions in particular had no place in revolutionary Cuba. They were remnants of a past of ignorance and capitalism that would not be tolerated, that would be simply destroyed. Paradoxically, just as authorities were discouraging Santaria and other African-based religious practices, a group of fairly young visual artists, most of them of African descent, but not all of them, were starting to develop an important corpus that through the incorporation of ritual and iconographic elements taken from the Yoruba-based Santaria, from the Congo-inspired Palomonte, or from the rituals associated with the male esoteric society known in Cuba as Avaquá, sought to construct a Cuban popular culture that was very much linked to Africa. Many of these artists had personal and family connections with Santaria and with other African-based religions. They had grown up in religious families and ritual communities that experienced these religions as key and vibrant elements in the daily lives of ordinary Cubans. They subscribed to the view articulated by Afro-Cuban activist Walterio Carmonel that African religions were at the very center of national culture, and not only that, but that they played a progressive role in the politics and culture of the nation and continued to impact the material and spiritual lives of ordinary Cubans. I quote Walterio Carmonel, the people worship their generous gods. Religion and music are of capital importance in the spiritual life of Black people, and at the center of that spiritual life were of course Afro-Cuban religions. The book, by the way, where Walterio Carmonel articulated this use, critica como surgió la cultura nacional, the title in English would be Critique, the origins of Cuban national culture, published in 1961. That book ended up being banned, so many Cubans actually never even knew about this book. Perhaps the best known exponent of this group of artists was painter Manuel Mendiva. Let me go back to the power point here. By the 1970, Mendiva's work was already openly and unmistakably celebratory of the Orishas and of Santería. His most important pieces from this period, such as Ogún 1966, Pabaluallé, and Oya 1967, were dedicated to them. Ogún is the Orisha of Hunters, of Medals, and a warrior, identified in Cuban Santería with Saint Peter. Pabaluallé is the Orisha of Good Health, and is frequently identified by practitioners with the Catholic saints and Lazarus. Oya is identified with the Virgin of Candelaria. She lives in unguarded cemeteries, she's the Orisha of Death. In other words, through these works, Mendiva was reproducing his work forms of religious knowledge that were hardly compatible with the technical Western education that the Cuban state was promoting at the time. And he did so not by embracing European or Western techniques and materials, but rather by using humble materials, burnwoods, hair, feathers, glass, metals, very similar in fact to those used by practitioners of Afro-Cuban religions in their rituals and their offerings. Mendiva was not alone in these explorations. He was part of a group of artists who in the mid to late 1960s were beginning to establish a presence in Cuban art. Like him, many of them had personal and family connections with Santería and other African-based religions, a connection that frequently shaped their work and their worldview. Among these artists were sculptural engraver Rafael Kennedy Morales, who I use here as an example of somebody who was very much of the same generation of Mendiva. Mendiva was born in 1944. Kennedy was born in 1942. I also mentioned Kennedy because both of them, Mendiva and him, would eventually work together later on. These were very young artists in the 1960s. Notice that some of the pieces that I showed you of Mendiva from 1966 and 1967, he was well 22 or 23 years old and more or less the same applies to Kennedy. These artists faced an increasingly hostile environment in the early to mid 1970s when they barely had an opportunity to exhibit their work. As Cuban cultural policy became increasingly dogmatic, increasingly exclusionary, increasingly close to Soviet paradigms and to Soviet understandings of cultural politics, visual representations of Afro-Cuban traditions lost favor. Mendiva is an excellent example of what happened during these years. He participated in 10 group shows in Cuba from 1967 to 1970, but had none, not a single exhibition from 1971 to 1979. He didn't have a single solo exhibit in Cuba between 1964 and 1980. During those years, to the extent that he was able to exhibit at all, he was a part of international exhibitions. In Cuba, his work was barely seen. During those years, he began to paint Cuban heroes like Jose Martí or Che Guevara, one senses almost a desperate move to achieve legitimacy, to find some space in what was an increasingly dogmatic official culture. Mendiva would not exhibit in Cuba again until 1979 when he joined the now largely forgotten Grupo Antigano or Antillian group in 1978. This group was created in 1978 by sculptor and graver Rafael Kennedy. This is the moment in which, as I announced before, they come together and work together. Kennedy created the group to create a space for artists interested in Afro-Cuban culture to exhibit and to work together, to support each other. According to the founding statement or manifesto of the group, their purpose was precisely to search for, I quote, the path that links us to our origins and whose future development should bring us a new young strong culture that we will only be able to call Cuban. The basis of our path in synthesis is a quest for cubanness, end of the quote, but in that quest, Kennedy and his collaborators made something very clear, and that is that they were not interested in trends in contemporary Western or European art and that they saw themselves as the voices of an Afro-Caribbean nation. Now, this search for cubanness happened in a much more propitious moment because by the late 1970s, Cuba was pursuing an aggressive foreign policy in Africa and the Caribbean. As you probably know, Cuban troops were fighting at the time in Angola and Ethiopia. Between 1974 and 1980, 11 leaders of African countries visited Cuba. The island established diplomatic relations with 12 African states and Cuban president Phil Castro traveled a total of 13 countries in Africa between 1976 and 1978. The political and cultural moment was summarized by Phil Castro himself in 1975 when he declared that Cuba was a Latin African nation. So to artists such as Mendebe, the members of Grupo Antiguano, this was a great opportunity. They organized as many as 30 exhibits between 1979 and 1983, including one with the participation of Alfredo Lamb in 1981 shortly before his death in 1982. Lamb became in fact something of a protector and a promoter of the young members of Grupo Antiguano. With the support from the Ministry of Culture, they participated in regional and international art festivals. Yet by the early 1980s, they also began to lose official favor and I suspect that the death of Lamb in 1982 did not help. The founder of the group, Rafael Kennedy, has acknowledged that many officials were prejudiced against their work, particularly against their open admiration for African-based religions. To make matters worse, they began to use their exhibits to organize conferences, workshops, and symposia in which issues of race and their identity and culture were debated. In other words, Grupo Antiguano became a space for the creation of a true Afro-Cuban cultural movement in the island. In 1983, having lost official favor and support and after again the death of Alfredo Lamb, the group ceased to exist. Writing about the art of Manuel Benive during these years, Cuban critic Gerardo Mosquera has said, has written, I quote, the Black person tends to be integrated with few contradictions into a new entity, the Cuban nation, end of the quote. This is Mosquera writing about the work of Manuel Benive. Now I am not sure that this process was as smooth as Mosquera claims or that the contradictions were in fact few, as the experience of Grupo Antiguano shows. In fact, I think Mosquera misses the point altogether. The areas of Grupo Antiguano did not seek to integrate Black people into the Cuban nation. A notion that somehow implies that the Cuban nation is external to them. The areas of Grupo Antiguano sought to show that Black people and their cultures were the Cuban nation. But people like Mosquera did not get it and many White Cubans could only think about Afro-Cuban culture in terms of a smooth process of integration into the nation as racist subjects. Through the 1980s, distinctions remained somewhat subdued, however, as the Cuban government was able to implement capacious and efficient social programs and services to all, regardless of race, income, gender, and other markers of status. Distinctions, however, exploded into open conflict in Cuba during the 1990s, during the so-called special period, as the Cuban socialist welfare state collapsed with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The structural crisis of the 1990s not only eroded some of the revolutions, most successful social programs, but also resulted in growing social polarization, widening income gap, and increased competition for employment and for scarce resources. Social problems that authorities had deemed solved, such as prostitution, reappeared. Prominent among these unsolved problems was race, which in the 1990s reclaimed a central place in Cuban social relations. As Cubans of all colors and of all social classes were forced to compete with limited resources and for access to rather scarce American dollars, racial differences in income immediately grew. Dollars could be obtained through a job in the growing tourist industry or from relatives in the United States. Most blacks, however, did not and do not have relatives in the Cuban American community, which according to U.S. census figures is overwhelmingly, I don't mean 90 percent white. But they were also systematically barred by white managers from attractive jobs in the emerging tourist sector. On the grounds that blacks lacked, they required cultural and aesthetic attributes, such as pleasant appearance, buena presencia, which was required to work in the tourist sector. Blackness continues to be equated with the most degrading physical and ethical attributes, ugliness, laziness, incompetence, vanity, ignorance. And it's also identified with the most despicable behaviors from robbery and peddling to prostitution and rape. In the 1990s, in fact, these associations, these images, these metaphors, these racist metaphors circulated widely and they served a very concrete purpose, which was basically to minimize competition for access to jobs and to keep Afro Cubans away from those jobs. In those conditions, a growing group of young Afro-Cuban intellectuals and writers and artists, musicians, writers, painters, performers, academics, activists began to do something that was previously unthinkable in Cuban socialist society. They began to denounce the persistence of racially discriminatory ideas and practices in the island. They began to argue that Cuba was, in fact, socialist Cuba was, in fact, a racist country. These intellectuals and activists have articulated the frustrations, the concerns, and the aspirations of the black youth, the sector of the population that came to age in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. Unlike their elders who were protagonists and first-hand witnesses of the profound social transformations that Cuban society experienced during the 1960s and 70s, people like Mendebe and Kennedy, these black youths grew up in a relatively egalitarian society, only to see that society crumble in front of their eyes in the 1990s. Among those denouncing the resurgence of racism in Cuban society was a group of young visual artists, one of whom was Juan Roberto Diago, who completed his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts of San Alejandro in 1990, just as Cuba was approaching collapse. It took the young Diago a few years to develop what literary scholar and critic and Avelin Sariano calls a specifically black aesthetic. But we can find examples of that aesthetic as early as the mid-1990s and certainly by 1987 when Diago's art became belligerent and denunciatory. This belligerence, which aesthetically owed much to Jean-Michel Basquiat's work, was articulated through the use of text and graffiti in his paintings, something that he would do constantly. The use of collage, the use of fragments, and the incorporation of objects, fragments, bones, mutilated dolls that coalesce to convey the fractures, the gaps, the absences, the mutilations that characterize the history and daily lives of black individuals. Some of the works from this period are fairly direct in their aggressiveness. The massive un negro, the black, incorporates a theme that Diago would develop with exquisite insight in his later work. The processes by which black histories and cultures are silenced, sidelined, and ignored by official narratives and historiographies. The black person of un negro is a generic black person, the dehumanized, the silenced being created by enslavement and racism, being who is not able to tell his or her own story, who may not even have his or her own story. With un negro, Diago began to articulate the need to write new histories based on the epistemology's understandings, experiences, and knowledge of people of African descent. Perhaps no other piece exemplifies Diago's artistic and intellectual evolution during this transitional initial period than the angry Basquiat influenced Grito, the Scream. The piece represents the anguish of a generation of Afro-Cuban intellectuals and artists who, having grown up in the mostly egalitarian milieu of socialist Cuba, witnessed how traditional discourses of equality, justice, and brotherhood were replaced in public by racist epithets of surprising vulgarity and intensity. These young artists were literally yelling, they were literally crying for help, trying desperately to find words, to find images, to describe realities that were new to many of them. They were trying to develop a new vocabulary to talk about something that supposedly did not exist in Cuba. The piece was also a denunciation, a challenge to the official silence on race, a confrontation with those who, despite significant evidence to the contrary, insisted that Cuba was and remained a racially harmonious nation of equals. Before they could rethink race and nation, the artists and intellectuals of Diago's generation had to penetrate the thick walls of Cuban nationalism and challenge its sacred silences. Let me take a moment to mention to you, to share with you very briefly an important step in this journey, which was the art exhibit, Que Loides primera parte, Que Loides, first part, organized by artist Alexis Esquivel and by curator Pascual Castillo at Casa de Africa in Havana in 1997. Que Loides are wound-induced race cars. Now, Que Loides can appear on anybody's skin, but many people believe that the black skin is particularly susceptible to a Que Loides. Thus the title evokes the persistence of racial stereotypes on the one hand and the traumatic processes of dealing with racism and discrimination on the other hand. These are scars after all. Like Diago, the participating artists, many of whom did not self-identify as blacks raised difficult questions concerning race, justice and identity in their works. And I wanted to show you just quickly some examples of the work produced by some of the artists who were part of the same group and the same generation of Diago and who participated in Que Loides primera parte and in other exhibits there were two other Que Loides later on. Like Diago by the late 1990s, these artists were developing a unique and uniquely critical body of work concerning race relations in Cuba. You have examples here from photographer René Peña, from engraver and sculpture and painter Elio Rodriguez, who is also known as El Macho, an identity that he developed somewhat mockingly in the 1990s, and by Alexis Esquivel, who was one of the organizers of Que Loides primera parte. Although Cuban authorities remained reluctant to acknowledge the prevalence of racism and discrimination in the country, these artists continued to develop their work. By the early 2000s, Diago had become an internationally known financially successful artist who was represented in the U.S. by Sarnuda Art, the most important Cuban gallery in the country. Diago won the important Amélie Maratí a prize in France in 1999 and was invited to do a solo exhibit at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana in 2002. Mind you, he was only 31 years old at the time. It was an important achievement for a still very young artist and a vindication for a confrontational body of work built on challenging sacred national lives and official narratives of equality and justice. By this time, Diago could proudly proclaim his blackness and summarize his experience as a black Cuban with a single eloquent term, jodido, which in English, please pardon my language, would be something like screwed or fucked or something like that. And the term sounds in Spanish almost as strong as it does in English. I mean, this is a piece that is supposed to create a confrontation with the others. Excuse me. His pieces became direct. He became confrontational and they became didactic to the point of being insolent. Canvases such as Cuba Sea and Espana, the well-being Amisdeosis, pain, give me my gods back, well the history of enslavement and cultural destruction that continues to inform the existence and life chances of black Cubans. The difficult thing is not being a man, but being black. Proclaims one of the pieces, difícil no ser hombre, es ser negro. The use of graffiti, the use of burlap, and this burlap, by the way, came from Ghana, made the pieces visually effective and easily accessible. A concern that was important to Diago at that point in his career. Slavery was not the past. Africa was not a root. Diago was talking in present tense. Through a body of work that had become a relentless denunciation against racism in Cuba. I quote, this is Diago's words, I have always liked my work to be understood as quickly as possible and also by as wide a public as possible, end of the quote. And this was perhaps a problem. The public did understand and so did critics and curators. Visibility is a trap, as Foucault once famously stated in Discipline and Publish and Punish. Unaccustomed to such an open debate about race and racism, Diago's success, the sheer effectiveness of his work and his message made some Cubans uncomfortable. This discomfort was captured best in an interview after his exhibit at the National Museum of Fine Arts in 2002. The question he was asked was powerfully simple. I quote, are you a racist? End of the quote. Whether Diago crossed the line by forcing a national debate on racism and discrimination or by working with an officially maligned gallery such as Agnuda Art in Miami, or whether he felt the need to develop fresh approaches to all concerns. The fact is that his artistic production began to experience a turn around 2003. It was a formal shift towards greater abstraction as illustrated in one of the pieces at the exhibit, study number three. Towards an emphasis on volume and installations and a thematic focus that, while still related to issues of race, became less direct, became less confrontational, less explicit, more existential, and more intimate. Global issues such as urban crowding, marginality, and poverty never absent from his work gained visibility, while his comments on a for diasporic subjects and cultures became frequently less obvious, if not less potent. He increasingly turned towards wood and metal for volume pieces and installations and also used photography, which he had never done before, to comment on the existence of humble people who lived in precarious conditions. Examples of this turn of these pieces are the pieces on pedestal of Historia, a piece of my history, and his installation Ascending City, both of which, by the way, are used with recycled materials, pieces of metal, pieces of wood that he collects from the poorest neighborhoods around Havana. Some critics have interpreted Diago's turn to what they describe as abstraction, as a thematic turn away from race and denunciations of racism. Some people claim that Diago has mellowed over the years and that his messages are not as strong as they used to be. I respectfully disagree. To start fragments, which are the center of abstract work, had always been part of Diago's pictorial language, for they conveyed the central element of his discourse, the hopeless fragmentation of the Afro-descendant experience and the Afro-descendant history. The fact that enslaved Africans lost their genealogies, lost their clans, their communities of origin. We're talking about broken histories, incomplete histories, impossible histories. Histories that are put together, that are reconstructed piece by piece in a rather imperfect canvas. Fragments. What has happened with Diago's most recent work is not necessarily a thematic turn, but a change in expressive techniques. In these works, the fragments have taken over. They are no longer a visual resource, as they were before. To become the message, the fragments are now at the very center of his work. And therefore, the work acquires looks like abstraction. This is particularly obvious in the series, La piel que habla, the skin that talks from 2014, which includes a collection of black canvases interrupted by white scars, keyloids, white keyloids that define the existence of Afro-diasporic subjects. It is through these scars, it is through these keyloids that a fragmented blackness is constituted and rather precariously stitched together. Diago seems to be implying because it is through the scars of racism that a piece of skin is rendered black. The black skin is made black by the white gaze. Now, Diago's visual language and formal solutions have certainly evolved through time, but core concerns guide and sustain all of his work. One of those themes is the importance of African cultures and African influences in Cuban society, a concern that he has shared with Mendele and with many other artists and intellectuals in Cuba. Both artists see Africa as a source of religious and emotional strength, as an anchor to the Cuban nation. But whereas Mendele feels that stores through ritual elements and ritual knowledge, Diago's Africa is the Africa of the slave trade. He's the Africa of ships and chains of bones and bloody rivers. Diago's Cuba is a nation built on violence, slavery, rape, and the unbearable stench of the slave ships. It is a Cuba where colonial legacies remain alive, feeding racial differences, feeding discrimination, feeding exclusion in present times. Now, this is an ongoing conversation. It is an ongoing conversation not only in Cuba, it's an ongoing conversation elsewhere as well as you know all too well. But artists such as Mendele and such as Diago have done something absolutely remarkable, which is to foster a difficult conversation in a country that simply, that was simply reluctant to even examine the persistence and the persistent effects of racism. The black skin of Cuba, the black skin, the black skin of Diago is very much still talking. Many thanks again. I would have rather done this in person with you. Thank you.