Monumental Art and Hidden Transcripts of Resistance in Revolutionary Cuba, 1970–1990

Abstract

The transformative ethos underpinning the Cuban Revolution aimed at the creation of the New Socialist Man as conceived by Che Guevara. This was to be achieved through the expansion of culture and education and the instillation of Marxist–Leninist ideology and philosophy of history. As a materialisation of history, monuments were considered as key devices for the reification and public spread of the official ideology. This paper explores how the Cuban Revolution generated a new public monumental aesthetic resulting from the competing demands of political commissioners and artists. It argues that artists sustained a hidden transcript of resistance by promoting abstract art, under the increasing pressure of the regime to develop a monumental public symbolic and material space following Soviet realist models. The paper focuses in the period of higher socio-cultural repression between the mid-1970s and the start of the Special Period in 1990.