Difference Between Mexican And Cuban Muralists

Why did Mexican and Cuban muralists and graphic artists create pieces and posters that revered the racial mixture, or mestizaje, of indigenous, African, and European roots? To answer this question, one has to dig deep into the writings of activists and historians and grasp the anti-imperialist and pro-nationalist undercurrents of such work. Firstly, José Luis Cuevas used his 1957 manifesto The Cactus Curtain to part with major Mexican muralists like Diego Rivera, who he believed conflated racial mixture with nationalism. Secondly, David Craven, a U.S. expert on Latino art, exposed Cuban painter Rene Portocarrero and writer Gerardo Mosquera’s propagandic tendencies as Portocarrero made film posters under the Castro regime and Mosquera spoke
During the centuries that preceded the 20th, a light-skinned élite controlled the country’s political and economic affairs and tried to hide works that showed indigenous, mestizo, or Afro-Mexican people. After the Mexican Revolution, muralists produced paintings that sought to reverse that élite repression of Mexico’s racial mixture and feature its black and brown roots as its foremost symbols of national identity. Yet, Cuevas desired “broad highways leading out [from Mexico’s art scene] to the rest of the world, rather than narrow trails connecting one adobe village with another.” There, Cuevas stated that Mexican artists should not fear deviation from the mestizaje norm, and incorporate whichever foreign abstract qualities they felt helped to embellish their work. Yet, anyone who has seen Rivera’s ubiquitous murals knows that nonconformists like Cuevas struggled to counter such mestizaje
imperialism. Nevertheless, those two men denied that Afro and indigenous-Cubanness constitute distinct cultural identities in the process of artistic national unity. For instance, Portocarrero, a revolutionary opponent of Batista, designed his Soy Cuba poster to feature a person with red locks of hair within which he entangled pseudo-Mayan and African symbols to “denote a pictorial negation of the established [mainstream U.S.] order.” Moreover, the poster lacks myriad Hollywood-style commercial acknowledgements of the cast and crew and features this uniquely Latino individual in an Abstract Expressionist style instead of Art Deco hotels in Varadero. In other words, it embraces Latin American mestizaje and defies U.S. commercialism. Additionally, Mosquera failed to explicitly chastise the Castro regime for not valuing Afro-Cuban culture as a particular foundation of Cuban heritage when he claimed that Cuba should “incorporate naturally the most diverse elements” of its society “instead of feeling like second-rate…‘Blacks’ who do not belong in the West.” While it is true that Cubans of African descent should never have experienced racism, that does not mean that santería or jazz, which many Cubans with Asian, indigenous, European, and African roots praise as