344 Chapter 13
is a result of the group’s commitment to the community and the rela-
tionships the group has built over more than a decade of working
together.
The examples of the Queloides artists and OMNI-ZonaFranca point
to a changing situation for Cuban artists starting in the late 1990s (not
only for black artists, but for all) of a new possibility to approach
issues of race, to adopt black cultural styles, and to engage publicly in
discussing these issues. These younger artists have been inspired by
groups such as ArteCalle and later groups such as ENEMA, DIP (El
Departamento de Intervenciones Públicas) and Galería DUPP, and
have also benefited from the efforts of artists who engaged with Afro-
Cuban and African diasporic issues and themes before them. They
have been able to take advantage of this diverse set of predecessors to
invent their own forms of critical and ethical art and create new spaces
in the form of an expanded role for art in Revolutionary society.
Conclusion
Over the past several decades, Cuban artists and cultural producers
have challenged the government’s hegemony in several key arenas,
including free speech, artistic freedom, the right to religious expres-
sion, and the opening up of cultural and other institutions to civic
debates. Out of this interaction between social actors and hegemonic
structures, new spaces for civil society have been forged, manifested
in large measure within the terrain of cultural production.
The continuous assertions of Afro-Cuban religious and cultural
identity, along with the incursions of art into the public sphere that
began in the 1980s, constitute two intertwined forces that have made
intermittent progress toward creating a form of civil society in Cuba.
In aggregate, these activities might be seen as acts of resistance, as
struggles to create new social, aesthetic and political space through
maintaining cultural practices and making and performing art against
the backdrop of a government apparatus that continually seeks to
exert its control over such expressions.