This chapter discusses some of the mechanisms that the ideologues of the Cuban planter class, grouped at the Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País in the early nineteenth century, used to transform art into a white domain. These ideologues characterized the works of popular Afrodescendant artists as crude and unsophisticated, and institutionalized art education through the Academia de San Alejandro (1818). The Academia excluded applicants of African descent (as well as women) and trained future artists in European styles, sensibilities, and techniques. As a result, we know of only one artist with identified works in nineteenth-century Cuba, Vicente Escobar (1762–1834), who was socially identified as pardo. Escobar came from a privileged sector of Havana’s population of African descent. Members of his family occupied prominent positions in the Pardo Battalions of the Militias and were successful craftsmen who accumulated some wealth, including slaves. It was probably thanks to these family connections that Escobar learned his trade as painter. This may also explain how he managed to acquire formal training at the Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, which he attended in 1784.

The Preface introduces some of the key questions and analytical points of the book, its sources, and some of its contributions. It details how the book was inspired by an art exhibition that the authors co-organized with art historian Bárbaro Martínez-Ruiz and the process through which some of the questions posed by the exhibition became a book project. It discusses how it was frequently difficult to assess whether an artist was racialized, at least in some social contexts, as a person of African descent, and the author’s strategies to handle this question.

By the early twentieth century, a handful of students of African descent were attending the Academia de San Alejandro. Some of them managed to continue their studies in Europe, frequently with fellowships from national and local institutions. The so-called sociedades de color – clubs and mutual aid societies organized by people of African descent – played key roles in procuring state support for these artists and their careers. By the late 1930s, a small but consolidated group of artists of African descent, including a few women, exhibited regularly in Havana. Several participated in international exhibitions as well. Yet many, indeed most, of these artists are barely remembered today. The rise of the artistic vanguardia (avant-garde) of the 1920s and 1930s depicted their works, which were executed in the academic language, as obsolete and mediocre. As in the early nineteenth century, what the vanguardia described as true – and certainly as new – art was produced mostly by white artists. This is ironic, for much avant-garde art constructed visions of national identity that were centered on Afro-Cuban cultural expressions, to the point that the movement is known as Afrocubanismo in Cuban arts and letters.