Visual Project Management | Grant Work: Democracy + Communism: 2. Cuba: Communism Relived: Cuba_Paskova_034

Art during the Communist years in Eastern Europe was highly sanitized - and artists who chose not to show a utopian view of the country, censored and punished. Artists in state-run Cuba as well have felt pressure to sanitize political issues and any difficulties the Cuban people may face, or omit them altogether. While the more open era of Raúl Castro has made it easier to toe the line in these areas of self-expression, artists who cross it altogether risk losing the support of government-controlled galleries that display their works.Here, Artist Arístides Hernández discusses his painting, which depicts possible bidirectional paranoia resulting from the future melding of Cuban and American culture - the former represented by the Lilliputians, and the latter, by Gulliver, both from the novel Gulliver's Travels - in his artist studio in Havana, Cuba.

Art during the Communist years in Eastern Europe was highly sanitized - and artists who chose not to show a utopian view of the country, censored and punished. Artists in state-run Cuba as well have felt pressure to sanitize political issues and any difficulties the Cuban people may face, or omit them altogether. While the more open era of Raúl Castro has made it easier to toe the line in these areas of self-expression, artists who cross it altogether risk losing the support of government-controlled galleries that display their works. 

Here, Artist Arístides Hernández discusses his painting, which depicts possible bidirectional paranoia resulting from the future melding of Cuban and American culture - the former represented by the Lilliputians, and the latter, by Gulliver, both from the novel Gulliver's Travels - in his artist studio in Havana, Cuba.