Between Melancholy and Critique: The Sugar Industry in Contemporary Cuban Art

• In Event: Cuba: nuevas miradas sobre arte, cultura e historia

Abstract

How does art respond do, engage with, and comment on changes in the national organization of the economy? In what ways do images from the food industry function in such artistic interventions? My presentation will explore these questions by looking at contemporary representations of the sugar industry in Cuban art. As hinted by the popular saying “sin azúcar no hay país,” the social, political, and environmental demands of the industry have dictated every aspect of the Cuban reality, including relations of class and property, racial composition of the society, and even ways of measuring and making sense of time. Since Fidel Castro announced the decision to downsize the industry in 2002, almost half of the mills have been closed and a quarter of the workforce has been dismissed. When an industry that for centuries had shaped and colored every aspect of life becomes defunct, profound alterations are due in the social fabric, alterations which art in turn uses creatively to reconsider the past, the present, and the future of the nation. Recent works by Marcel Molina Martínez and Alejandro Saínz Alfonso engage with the economic and political disillusionment in closure’s aftermath. We see under-water macheteros, abandoned sugar mills, and Death—personified as a skeleton—wandering the fields. The spectral remains of the industry provide a dystopian setting that oscillates between critique and melancholy.

Author

• Ali Kulez, University of Chicago