#afro-cuba

A perspective from CUBA: CENSUSES, SKIN COLOR AND SOCIAL ANALYSIS

Professor Esteban Morales – photo credit Fred Thomas, III reprinted with permission For nearly six years Professor Esteban Morales and I have enjoyed a very positive relationship. He has been a valuable source to me for most thing CUBA, particularly on the issue of race. This article was penned in late June, just days before the July 11th uprising. His article is a perspective and I encourage…

We are flooded with so much information, most of it we push it aside and keep moving.  Then, there is a little we keep and ponder what it means.

  The exact date escapes me but it seems about ten years ago that I heard the issue of race in Cuba explained in a way I had never heard nor appreciated.  I was listening to an interview with Professor Dwayne Wickham.  He taught at Morgan State…

They Are We (Alternative Teaser)

This is the alternate trailer to the "They Are We" documentary... 

Wifredo Óscar de la Concepción Lam y Castilla aka Wilfredo Lam

Country: Cuba (Of Chinese/Latin/African Descent)

Style: Surrealism

Medium: Oil on canvas/cardboard/paper

Fun Fact: In January and February 1941, Lam illustrated Breton’s poem Fata Morgana which was censored by the Vichy government. On March 25, Lam and Helena Holzer embarked on the “Capitaine Paul Lemerle” headed for Martinique, in the company of some 300 other artists and intellectuals―André Breton and Claude Lévi-Strauss among them. Upon arrival, the passengers were interred at Trois Îles. It was during this forced passage in Martinique and before leaving for Cuba that Lam and Aimé Césaire met for the first time to become life-long friends.

Quote:“It is often assumed that my work took its final form in Haiti, but my stay there, like the trips I made to Venezuela, Colombia or to the Brazilian Mato Grosso only broadened its scope. I could have been a good painter from the School of Paris, but I felt like a snail out of its shell. What really broadened my painting is the presence of African poetry.”

Works

True to my exploration of negritude, these paintings are from the 40s period of his works when he was closest linked to the movement

1. Harpe Astrale (Harpe Cardinal)

2. Le Bruit

3. Le Sombre Malembo, Dieu du carrefour

4. Tête [Canaima],

5. La Jungle

6. Mofumbe (Ce qui Importe)

7. Untitled

8.

View more of his work (post negritude) here