This chapter identifies two recurring themes that, beginning with Teodoro Ramos Blanco and Alberto Peña in the 1920s–1930s, has continued to define the conceptual basis of many Afro-Cuban artists up to the present. One is their efforts to conceptualize and celebrate their African cultural heritage. The other direction focuses on Afrodescendants’ social conditions and engages with political struggles against structural racism. Challenging the established historical arc accepted by the scholarship, the chapter identifies the 1940s as the most radical moment of Afrodescendant rupture in Cuban arts. It involved the revolutionary visual language of Uver Solis, Roberto Diago Querol, and Wifredo Lam, as well as the reformist executions of unknown artists such as Nicasio Aguirre, grounded on ideas of racial inclusion and black honorability. It also questions the assumed divide between pre- and post-1959, noting how revolutionary institutions continued to function under the common sense of the superiority of Western-centric art. It points to how the defining feature of the supposedly “new” revolutionary art, socially engaged figurative expression, was long established in Republican Cuba. The serious explorations of African-based cultures pioneered in the 1940s also continued in the 1960s–1970s with Grupo Antillano.

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.

This chapter traces the transformation of Christian Democratic attitudes toward the Chilean military regime. Whereas the two Christian Democratic parties in the FRG defended the military coup in 1973, by 1975 the CDU had turned against the Pinochet because of three interrelated reasons. First, CDU politicians feared that left-wing solidarity activists were using Chile to monopolize the topic of human rights in the FRG. Second, the international movement against the Pinochet regime and the latter’s international isolation forced the CDU to take a more critical stance. Finally, the Pinochet regime repressed Chile’s Christian Democratic Party (PDC), a close collaborator of the CDU and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation since the 1960s. The CSU, however, welcomed the Pinochet regime’s neoliberal restructuring of the Chilean economy and rejected the Keynesian PDC. Despite these differences, there was also convergence. The CDU consistently criticized the asylum program for refugees from Chile, largely accepted Pinochet’s neoliberal experiment, ignored abuses elsewhere in Latin America, and moved towards normalizing relations with the Pinochet regime by the late 1970s.

This section is an incomplete biographical directory of Afrodescendant artists in Cuba, from the colonial period to the present.

This chapter places the Cuban experience in a broader, Afro-Latin American context. It highlights some similarities and differences with other Latin American countries, with a special emphasis on Brazil, where scholarship about artists of African descent is considerably more advanced. As we begin the difficult task of reconstructing the lives and contributions of artists of African descent across the region, new cartographies in the art history of Latin America emerge. For example, the historiographic project linked to San Alejandro appears to have been uniquely successful, as it is possible to identify larger numbers of artists of African descent in other countries during the nineteenth century. At the same time, the presence of Afro-Cuban artists in early twentieth-century Europe was not unique, although the Cubans were there in larger numbers. Many of these artists, like their Cuban peers, were excluded from the new “modern art” that emerged under European influences in the interwar period and were relegated to the corners of academic, “pre-modern,” art. The chapter highlights intriguing parallelisms between Cuba and Brazil, which persist even after the triumph of the Revolution in 1959.

Nearly thirty years after the end of the civil war, campesina women continue to remember their revolutionary past. The Survivors’ Historical Memory Committee of Arcatao, Chalatenango, has worked on four major projects: the exhumation of victims killed in military-led massacres, the construction of a sanctuary to house the remains of loved ones, commemorative events, and a community museum led by survivors themselves. These popular historians facilitate intergenerational continuity across decades of struggle. The committee’s work to mourn, exhume, bury, and remember the dead charts a path toward healing, a tenuous process given the ongoing violence in postwar El Salvador. Additionally, I draw insights from two workshops I facilitated in 2015 to trace how committee women understand their revolutionary past. They have a specifically feminist understanding of their insurgent past and highlight the central role of civilian organizing within the guerrilla territories. Campesina women insisted on remembering how their revolutionary organizing created more equitable gender relations and resisted state violence against women, and they critiqued male leftists who ignored their contributions.

This chapter focuses on the role of women teachers and campesinas in the class struggle. Two mass organizations played a critical role in building a combative labor movement: the National Association of Salvadoran Educators and Union of Rural Workers. Women comprised 80 percent of members in the teachers’ association, while significant numbers of campesinas participated in the rural union. By 1975, teachers and peasants joined forces in a revolutionary coalition to overthrow the political and economic system that exploited the entire working class. Many teachers and rural workers joined guerrilla organizations, such as the Popular Liberation Forces, whose cadre helped build mass organizations. Participation in the class struggle led to changes on two fronts. First, it deepened women’s class consciousness and revealed the state’s brutality in crushing the most minimal reforms. Second, the struggle transformed how women saw themselves and their role in changing society. Women confronted sexist expectations that shamed them for working alongside men and prioritizing political participation over domestic work. Fifteen years prior to the outbreak of the revolutionary war in 1980, a multigenerational movement of women had broken with patriarchal tradition. That rupture was fundamental. It facilitated women’s political participation and their increasing militant action that elevated class struggle to unprecedented levels. This gendered history allows us to appreciate what it took to build and sustain the revolutionary mass struggles of the 1960s and 1970s.