Identidades in English No 4, December 2014 | Page 81

Davis and became the fashion for the young black
and mestizo population.
The idea of defense against the penetration of imperialist ideologies gave way to African cultural
and religious manifestations and traditions being
judged as folkloric expressions that were valuable
as historical documentation of cultural processes,
but backward in their beliefs and practices according to “true progress” of the Revolution.
Some official publications adopted strategies for
ideological education that revealed the dark side
of these traditions, condemning adherence to
them as incompatible with social progress, describing practices as retrograde, anti-social and
contrary to the Revolution.
Since reality was permeated by ‘official’ rhetoric,
artistic creativity derived from the ancestral underpinning of this religiosity and syncretism was
not only difficult to create, but also dangerous,
despite the fact that they actually derived from the
transcultural phenomenon that had guided the development of Cuban identity and nationality.
The fiction or invention of imaginary characters
and events with symbols that had been brought to
America by African religious mythologies to create new and personalized discourses emerged
from Negritude: there are representative figures
in Cuban and Haitian literature. The same thing
can be said of the plastic arts.
Afro-Cubanness served to justify a reorientation
of an artistic discourse distanced from the social
realist demands that threatened to impose themselves as the only thematic framework for all cultural
expression
during
the
‘Grey
Quinquennium’.
The conflict manifests itself pitting a scientific
view of the world, in keeping with Soviet Marxist
ideology, against the rites, gods and legends. The
latter resulted became a problematic ideological
component in facing the imperious need to insert
the Soviet element that the government was trying to impose—but which did not manage to replace long standing cultural traditions of Cubans.

Neither did it enrich the national ajiaco (stew).
The Sovietization of Cuban society and the replication of the Soviet social model created different
referents for a generation of children and adolescents in the seventies and eighties: they were exposed to Soviet products and cultural influence.
These conceptual conflicts disoriented more than
a few artists: they were forced to follow certain
thematic scripts proposed and imposed by the national competitions and salons in order to be seen
as legitimate Cuban artists, while they yearned to
continue in the vein of influences from international artists.
The “Origen” group
In the midst of this mess, the “Origen” group
emerged in 1974: Miguel de Jesús Ocejo,
Mariano Suárez del Villar and Pablo Toscano
formed an artists’ collective.
They were motivated by the same questions and
concerns that would move later plastic artists.
The Afro-Cuban theme was taken to be a form of
authentic inquiry distanced from social and political discourse: its poetics emphasized elements of
popular culture’s landscape, myths and legends,
in order to reveal new views of secular elements
as part of the integrative miscegenation whose
underlying componen G2&VfW"F