Ricardo Pau-Llosa’s essay discusses six generations of modern and contemporary Cuban artists, most in exile, and their art as it deals with alienation and uprooting. According to Pau-Llosa, the first generation (1920s) includes the founding fathers of Cuban modernism, who traveled to Europe, and were influenced by Cubism, Surrealism, and other Parisian movements, yet became interested in creating work that exuded “Cuban-ness.” As examples, he cites the work of Víctor Manuel García, Amelia Peláez del Casal, Fidelio Ponce de León, and Carlos Enríquez. The second generation emerged during the 1940s and revised the “explicit Cuban lexicon of the first generation.” In this generation, Pau-Llosa includes Cundo Bermúdez, René Portocarrero, Mario Carreño, Carmen Herrera, and Daniel Serra-Badué. Therefore, Pau-Llosa proposes that this generation produced the first truly abstract work in Cuba. The third generation emerged following World War II with two major movements in Havana, Grupo de los Once and Grupo de los Diez Artistas Concretos.  He takes into account many individual artists from this generation. The fourth generation identified by Pau-Llosa includes Cuban artists working in exile following the 1959 revolution and their work is compared to previous Cuban artists working abroad. The fifth and sixth generations include Miami-based artists who emigrated from the island at a young age and whose work is marked by their biculturalism. Several artists from these last two generations are examined.

Ricardo Pau-Llosa was born in Havana in 1954 and immigrated to the United States in 1960. He is a poet and art critic who has written extensively on Latin American art including Cuban art of exile. This introduction appears in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, Outside Cuba: Contemporary Cuban Visual Artists. This traveling exhibition is the first major show of contemporary Cuban artists (with a focus on the art of Cubans living outside of the island since 1959 and specifically Cuban-Americans) since the 1944 Museum of Modern Art exhibition, Modern Cuban Painters, in New York. The exhibition catalogue contains essays by Cuban-American writers, Ilena Fuentes-Perez and Graciella Cruz-Taura, numerous artists’ statements, and brief biographies of the forty-eight exhibition artists. Here Pau-Llosa contends that exiles live in the imagination and he equates modernism with both the imagination and the art of exile. Moreover, he opens his essay by discussing repression on the island that has caused the exile of Cubans for generations and escalated with the 1959 revolution. He believes that the arts were restricted under the “totalitarian” regime and artists had to leave to pursue artistic freedom. His attitude is very much that of a Cuban exile and not entirely indicative of the situation on the island.For the Spanish version of this document see record #801497.