ABSTRACT
I decided to write the essay that follows in the spring of 1996 after two apparently disparate but thematically related events. In March of that year I witnessed what were familiarly polarized responses to an art exhibition by a Cuban national in a high-profile American venue. The artist in question was Kcho, a 26-year-old sculptor who had made a splash at the 1994 Havana Biennale, gone on to win the top prize at the 1995 Kwangju Biennale, and landed his first New York show at the prestigious Barbara Gladstone Gallery. Though his opening was picketed by dozens of exiles, the Cuban cultural bureaucrats who had micro-managed his rise to fame touted him as a revolutionary success story, and tony collectors and critics showered him with praise. What struck me as I watched the events and read the reviews was that historical amnesia pervaded the marketing and celebration of both Kcho and his signature rafts, which quite clearly referred to the makeshift boats that thousands of Cubans were buying, borrowing, or stealing to leave the island. That lacuna was extremely painful for me: it symbolized the price that postcolonial artists pay in the wake of the backlash against identity politics in order to be valued in the global art marketplace — deracination and depoliticization. But in this instance it also occluded a human tragedy that had affected many people I know, some of whom are kin. No matter what ignorant idealists or militants may want to believe about why Cubans do what they do, I refuse roundly to condemn Cubans for choosing to remain part of or remove themselves from a social experiment over which they have very little control. I grow increasingly intolerant of those who, without having to face such earth-shattering choices themselves, minimized the relevance of having one's life determined by others, and restricted their support of Cuban artists to the ones who lived in whichever place their agenda deemed appropriate.
