Yet if there is a star to be celebrated in this show, it is not Castro but Wifredo Lam, born in 1902 of Chinese and Afro-Cuban parents. He traveled to Europe to study art in 1923, joined Andre Breton's Surrealist circle, fought in the Spanish Civil War and painted in a Surrealist style that caught Picasso's eye with its use of African imagery, which resembled forms that Picasso borrowed earlier in the century.
The exhibition's centerpiece is Cuba Colectiva, a gigantic 1967 mural on six panels that was initially conceived by Lam and created by 100 Cuban and European artists for the Salon de Mai, an annual exhibition. Although artists were making "collective works" in the US and Europe at the time, often in protest of the Vietnam War, this mural was a tribute to a romantic view of Cuban Socialism that inspired many Europeans artists at the time.
The huge mural traveled the following year from Cuba to France, where curators said it was taken off display after a few hours to avoid damage in the May 1968 student uprising. Back in Havana, it was eventually placed in storage. When the museum was emptied in 1999 for renovation, the mural and its frame were found to have been invaded by termites. Without money to restore it, the Cubans found a Parisian dealer to underwrite the job, and the mural is being shown for the first time outside Cuba since its conservation.
Like the mural, much Cuban art since 1959 has been in the service of the Castro regime, either in Socialist-Realist styles through the 1970s (when Russians taught in art academies there) or in a Pop Art style adapted to official portraiture of figures like Castro and Che Guevara.
"It's a Pop form of vocabulary - the flashy colors, the bright letters," said Aquin of the Montreal museum. "They were taking the Pop aesthetic and functionalizing it."
Less functional ideologically are works made by contemporary artists who are beginning to find markets abroad after years during which their only client was the state. In the 1980s and 1990s, as Soviet aid dried up, art materials were particularly scarce, and mixed-media artists like Alexis Leyva (Kcho) and the duo, Los Carpinteros (all represented in the Montreal show) constructed work from whatever they could scavenge. It was a new Cuban hybridization: a mix of found objects and Arte Povera. "I bought a sculpture, and I asked the artist if he could put it in bubble wrap for me," said Howard Farber, an American collector. "He didn't know what I was talking about."
While most Cuban artists struggle, some are thriving, like Carlos Garaicoa, who takes photographs of empty sites where buildings once stood in Havana and then constructs the former structures in delicate thread atop the pictures. Garaicoa, 40, has had solo exhibitions in the US that included his large installations of sculptural urban ensembles - he calls them "utopian cities" - but he has not been granted a visa to enter the country. One of his clusters is the final installation in the Montreal museum's show.
Garaicoa's dealer, Lea Freid of Lombard-Freid Projects, suggested that this softly illuminated city in miniature could be an image of a place awaiting Cubans one day after the death of Castro, or after the end of the US embargo.
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