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.

The introduction begins with the story of Domitila, a young campesina who escaped to the mountains at night to train for the coming insurrection. Guarding her secret, she endured beatings from her father, who accused her of promiscuity. After her father discovered the revolver hidden underneath her pillow, he affords her a form of respect that he had previously reserved for men. Through Domitila’s personal story, I explain the conditions that drove rural workers to organize, the dramatic rise of state repression against unarmed movements, the left’s radicalization, the subsequent formation of the insurgency, the outbreak of the civil war (1980–1992), women’s organizing in the guerrilla territories and in multiple countries abroad, and the postwar battles to remember an insurgent past. I also contextualize El Salvador within a regional and global Cold War history. After the major actors and temporal scope are identified, I explain how dominant narratives, many rooted in Cold War paradigms, have contributed to the erasure of revolutionary women within feminist histories. I offer an alternative framework and methodology – rooted in dialectical approaches, oral history, and movement archives – that takes seriously the political contributions of revolutionary women.

Mapping the statements of Afro-Cuban artists on the Afrodescendant social condition and their cultural heritage during the revolutionary period, this chapter delves into the Afro-centric art of Manuel Mendive, Rafael Queneditt, Rogelio Rodríguez Cobas, and others who, during the 1960s–1980s, pointed their emphasis to the Yoruba and Bantú worlds that shaped Antillean societies despite the regime’s religious intolerance. Along with Adelaida Herrera Valdés, Julia Valdés Borrero, and others, they formed the Group Antillano, the first visual art collective grounded on notions of Afrodescendant consciousness that Cuba had ever experienced. The chapter moves chronologically, noting how what could constitute the groundbreaking “New Cuban Art” of the post-1959 period is not Volumen I, but the art of the Queloides collective. While their works were not the first to be concerned with issues of structural racism, they were an unprecedented endeavor that moved beyond previous reformist visions and instead aimed to dismantle the fundamental tenets of Cuban national narratives. The chapter concludes with the internationalization of Afro-Cuban art and how migration and diaspora shape the work of contemporary Afro-Cuban artists.