340 Chapter 13
officially sanctioned spaces for exhibiting art, the hallmark of collec-
tives of the mid-1980s was the activation of the space of the street and
the public sphere to disseminate their ideas and engage directly with
the public. ArteCalle, Grupo Provisional, Art-De, Grupo Independi-
ente La Campana, Grupo Puré, and other collectives emerged, elect-
ing to work in public spaces, often with performances and other
activities structured around interaction with the public.
Integral to these new artistic expressions, an Afro-Cuban artistic
production intersected and overlapped the artistic movement that
expressed itself in Volumen Uno. The work of collectives such as
Grupo Antillano and others can be seen as one of several concurrent
but distinct currents in 1970s and 1980s Cuban art. A number of the
groups formed in this period were interested in the potential of art as
an expression of an emerging identitarian discourse, including Grupo
Raíces, founded by Miguel Angel Ruiz Silva in the early 1980s, Grupo
Orígen,^2 and Grupo Antillano^3 (Ramos Cruz, 2000). With respect to
the Afro-Cuban movement, the racialized nature of the project pre-
sented the regime with a problem as this would contradict the myth of
a Revolution that had eradicated racism and call attention to the fact
that much of the institutional and social apparatus of racism inherited
from Cuba’s pre-Revolutionary history remained intact.
Together, the external influences of race-based movements such as
Black Power, and the experiences of Afro-Cubans sent to serve in the
civil war in Angola from 1975 on, had a significant impact on artists
seeking to develop a distinctly Afro-Cuban cultural identity. A large
percentage of the troops sent to Africa were black, among them the
artists Eduardo Roca Salasar, known as Choco, and Nelson Domín-
guez (Bettelheim, 2005). The years of military service spent by thou-
sands of black Cubans in Angola, and also Ethiopia, reaffirmed and
- Active from 1974-1980. Group members were Miguel de Jesús Ocejo López,
Mariano Suarez del Villar and Pablo Daniel Toscano Mora. - Active from 1975-1984. The core group members included Rafael Queneditt,
Ramón Haití Eduardo, Arnaldo Larrinága, Rogelio Rodríguez Cobas, Leonel Morales,
and Manuel Coucerio. Other participants in the group were Manuel Mendive, Ever Fon-
seca Cerviño, Rogelio Martinez Furé and Guillermina Ramos Cruz.