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The 26th in the art codes ›Granma

One of those mornings when I went early to talk with Mariano Rodríguez, and see him paint in his apartment in the building where the Habana Gallery is located, before he left for his daily functions at the Casa de las Américas, the commemoration of July 26. I told him that I was only six years old in 1953, but that I remembered the tension and uneasiness in my house and in the neighborhood, because the criminal Batista soldier walked the streets of Manzanillo like hunting dogs, interested in preventing her from being able to spread the riot that occurred in the not so distant barracks in Bayamo. Meanwhile, the central painter – known for polychrome roosters, fruits with sensual women and sketched crowds – told me that when the Moncada assault occurred he was in Santiago de Cuba, invited by José Antonio Portuondo to plan an exhibition of collective patriotic spirit and to the Once you contemplate –from the guest seat of the tribune– the rides of the authentic carnival in that «hot land».

It was then that this Master of Color revealed to me that many of the sketches drawn during that popular festival (of banners and lampposts, companions and choreographic spaces) served him to conceive elements of the mural between figurative and abstract that he made -between the years 52 and 53 – on the ground floor of the Dental Retreat Building, where the Vedado School of Economics currently resides, in front of the Coppelia ice cream parlor. Almost unintentionally, but as a consequence of the imaginative perception of a traditional artist, some visual references captured in the Carnival of Santa Ana on July 25, just hours before the heroism and genocide that occurred in that eastern area, constituted the formal basis to complete a work that is today part of the urban thesaurus of national art.

But that would not only be the indirect way in which the libertarian combat anniversary would be projected onto sincere quality artistic creations. Also in the stage that opens with the triumph of the triumphant insurrection of 59, in the pages of the newspaper Revolución a character from the political graphic stamp – “Julito 26” – created by Santiago Armada “Chago”, who was manager of the musical Quinteto Rebelde in the middle of the insurgent camp of the Sierra Maestra. Chago, who later became the designer of the Granma newspaper, assured me that he had thus devised a synthetic visual archetype, with non-idealized human qualities, of the Cuban who became a fighter for justice and dignity from that epic dawn of the year of the birth centenary of Jose Marti. Chago, himself from Santiago, specified that Julito 26 was a linear sum of physiognomic and psychological characteristics that he had observed among the common people of the town and the members of the rebel troops where he appeared.

The repercussion that the Moncada deed had on the feelings of artists of various generations, who in the 60s and 70s identified with the project of revolutionary transformation of Cuban society and culture, also extended until the appearance of the Arts Contest. Plásticas 26 de Julio, convened each year by the Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, without imposing any formal scheme; and in which several artists from the country (who later would modify their codes of expression) obtained prizes and mentions. At the same time, a valuable group of posters with a pluralistic advertising aesthetic was produced, which from the dor, the Icaic and the Casa de las Américas, had very professional visions and signs designed to highlight the emotional iconicity that that date has maintained. And there was no shortage of illustrations of force or lyricism, in the flat press and magazines such as Unión, Bohemia and Cuba internacional, which conveyed the editorial duty of bringing to light the call and the clamor implicit in such an event.

Twenty years after the aforementioned epic, a group of artists consolidated in their names and others who were still young were invited, by Mariano Rodríguez and Haydée Santamaría, to work on two articulated actions to commemorate another 26. It was about making free drawings ours inspired by statements and passages from Fidel’s legal defense known as La historia me absolverá (for a unique edition made by the Casa de las Américas, with a design by Umberto Peña); At the same time, they participate in the in situ elaboration of huge panels, large installation caricatures, light sculptures, in addition to a unifying environmental design, destined to fill all the spaces of the House with plastic evocations sustained in the sustained local and global reach. of the moncadista clarion. Coordinated by Lesbia Vent Dumois, the choral authorship of that stylistically diverse environment was integrated, apart from Mariano and Lesbia, by Luis Martínez Pedro, Fayad Jamís, Adigio Benítez, Ernesto González Puig, René de la Nuez, Blanquito, Félix Beltrán, Alfredo Rostgaard, Sergio Martínez, René Azcuy, Mario Gallardo, Alberto J. Carol and Manuel López Oliva.

Everything born to the heat of a cultural endeavor fueled by gratitude and a social brotherhood oriented to the betterment of the nation – where neither denaturing market nor fierce individualism governed the conduct of the creator and the value of the artistic – implied legitimate humanistic images of a sovereign identity. Later came a certain breakdown in the field of visual arts, for which museologies and curatorial conventions or speculative criticisms arose that confined the active fusion between artists and vital context to the parameters of what they present as the “fossilized” cultural decade of the 70’s. Objective and honest analysis will always have to recognize the contributions and significance of what was created by linking the July 26 symbol with solid native speeches of the imagination.

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