The
first works with influence of the African art appear
belatedly in Cuba, if we only count in them to the
drawing, the engraving, the painting and the sculpture,
that is to say, the traditional techniques. Because
next to the first Africans, in their hands and in
their hearts, entered the occupation and the talent
to build musical instruments, ritual images and cult
objects that were expressed with other woods in America,
seeds, sonorities and colors and they formed the new
voices, the new handmade forms of drawing, to carve,
to model, to knit, to adorn and to honor to the gods
with liturgical cloths, songs and secret signatures,
indispensable in their daily life. It begins this
way the miscegenation and the sincretismo, the shared
fire sheltering against the challenges, the precarious
survival, the resistance to a master that prohibits
and punishes the cult to the old gods. In their patio,
undercover, the necklaces are threaded, the irokos
is adorned, they get ready the remedies. There are
drawings and signs that are hidden, legends and patakines
that are counted in very low voice that many years
will be written later in the school notebooks. There
is wemileres of as much as the man requires for the
life and the death, for the big fences of America
where he knew how to live the black one alone with
the nature and with his gods, without the white man:
parties and hardships, persistence and faith, being
organized, melting, transculturándose in the great
ajiaco, in the miscegenation that approaches us and
it identifies.
In Cuba, the development of the
plastic arts is conditioned by the period of colonization
that embraces, like we know, the XVI centuries to
the XIX one. Of the Metropolis the ornaments are cared
for gift of the wealthy families that here mixed with
works of the new American, carried out colonized cultures
imitating European models. In the first newspapers
of the Island of Cuba announcements of arts and occupations
come exercised by Spaniards, Creoles, brown and brown
free, this will happen during the XVI centuries to
the XIX one. These date historical they allow to define
that our first Creole painter was Don Nicolás of the
Stairway, in the XVIII century. We would be fixing
this way a preliminary fact because it interests us
this road , in this mixture of nations and cultures,
born s the Cuban art: first vision and it works of
dazzled foreigners or enslaved; then function and
occupation of Creoles, of Cuban.
We don't seek to tire with the proposal
of a history of the art in Cuba, but appreciating
how their manifestations arise, they evolve and they
reach the contemporary development, integrating in
their cosmovisión to the dominant cultures and the
resistance cultures or marginal of those dominated,
and among them these African cultures; to recognize
their elements, their system of conceptual and formal
expression through the plastic work. Already at the
end of the XIX century references of manners appear
in Víctor P. Landaluze paintings, about the life of
the black ones in Havana, besides it turns the endowments
working in the geniuses, the Party of the Day of Kings
and other scenes of the life of the slaves in the
engravings carried out in Cuba by Federico Mialhe,
Eduardo Laplante and other engravers, in albums and
in illustrations for packs, boxes and vitolas of tobaccos
and cigarettes.
