This chapter identifies two recurring themes that, beginning with Teodoro Ramos Blanco and Alberto Peña in the 1920s–1930s, has continued to define the conceptual basis of many Afro-Cuban artists up to the present. One is their efforts to conceptualize and celebrate their African cultural heritage. The other direction focuses on Afrodescendants’ social conditions and engages with political struggles against structural racism. Challenging the established historical arc accepted by the scholarship, the chapter identifies the 1940s as the most radical moment of Afrodescendant rupture in Cuban arts. It involved the revolutionary visual language of Uver Solis, Roberto Diago Querol, and Wifredo Lam, as well as the reformist executions of unknown artists such as Nicasio Aguirre, grounded on ideas of racial inclusion and black honorability. It also questions the assumed divide between pre- and post-1959, noting how revolutionary institutions continued to function under the common sense of the superiority of Western-centric art. It points to how the defining feature of the supposedly “new” revolutionary art, socially engaged figurative expression, was long established in Republican Cuba. The serious explorations of African-based cultures pioneered in the 1940s also continued in the 1960s–1970s with Grupo Antillano.

This chapter places the Cuban experience in a broader, Afro-Latin American context. It highlights some similarities and differences with other Latin American countries, with a special emphasis on Brazil, where scholarship about artists of African descent is considerably more advanced. As we begin the difficult task of reconstructing the lives and contributions of artists of African descent across the region, new cartographies in the art history of Latin America emerge. For example, the historiographic project linked to San Alejandro appears to have been uniquely successful, as it is possible to identify larger numbers of artists of African descent in other countries during the nineteenth century. At the same time, the presence of Afro-Cuban artists in early twentieth-century Europe was not unique, although the Cubans were there in larger numbers. Many of these artists, like their Cuban peers, were excluded from the new “modern art” that emerged under European influences in the interwar period and were relegated to the corners of academic, “pre-modern,” art. The chapter highlights intriguing parallelisms between Cuba and Brazil, which persist even after the triumph of the Revolution in 1959.

The Preface introduces some of the key questions and analytical points of the book, its sources, and some of its contributions. It details how the book was inspired by an art exhibition that the authors co-organized with art historian Bárbaro Martínez-Ruiz and the process through which some of the questions posed by the exhibition became a book project. It discusses how it was frequently difficult to assess whether an artist was racialized, at least in some social contexts, as a person of African descent, and the author’s strategies to handle this question.

By the early twentieth century, a handful of students of African descent were attending the Academia de San Alejandro. Some of them managed to continue their studies in Europe, frequently with fellowships from national and local institutions. The so-called sociedades de color – clubs and mutual aid societies organized by people of African descent – played key roles in procuring state support for these artists and their careers. By the late 1930s, a small but consolidated group of artists of African descent, including a few women, exhibited regularly in Havana. Several participated in international exhibitions as well. Yet many, indeed most, of these artists are barely remembered today. The rise of the artistic vanguardia (avant-garde) of the 1920s and 1930s depicted their works, which were executed in the academic language, as obsolete and mediocre. As in the early nineteenth century, what the vanguardia described as true – and certainly as new – art was produced mostly by white artists. This is ironic, for much avant-garde art constructed visions of national identity that were centered on Afro-Cuban cultural expressions, to the point that the movement is known as Afrocubanismo in Cuban arts and letters.