More to Havana than old cars and cigars: the street art edition
The Cuban street art is bewitching and a more recent development on the streets of Havana. In January 2017, I visited Yulier Rodriguez’s, a 26-year-old street artist, co-op studio space on the Prado, the street that divides Habana Vieja from Centro Habana. From my research, the goal of these specific street artists I discuss below is to show that there is more to Cuba than just the old cars, cigars, and salsa music.
About three years ago, Yulier Rodriguez, who signs his work as Yulier P., began adorning the streets of Havana with rarely happy and sometimes alien-like figures and chooses buildings and walls that are falling apart yet in highly visible places, like bus stops. There isn’t too much of a political flair to his work, so the police have not detained him, but sometimes, his work has been painted over by the local authority.
Fabián Lobet Hernández, a 19-year-old young artist, works out of Yulier’s studio and goes by the moniker 2+2=5 like the RadioHead song, but that is not what it means to Fabián. In an interview with the Center for Media & Social Impact, Fabián says that his pseudonym means freedom to him.
People say that two plus two equals four, but I don’t see it like that. I believe that it can equal whatever you want it to be. You can be whatever you want to be…And I want people to know that, so I put it everywhere with my art. I paint here, I paint there, I paint everywhere. I want people to know that I am free.
You can see Fabián’s tag all over Havana, and his work includes modern Cuban societal & political themes.
Yairan, better known as 5stars, also works out of Yulier’s studio on the Prado. A native of Havana, he began painting the streets in 2010, predominantly in Centro Havana. He chooses areas where youth gather and has also expanded to the Regla neighborhood, where hip hop shows take place. As of recently, he is currently located in Frankfurt, Germany, continuing his work but travels back to Havana often. He started a social media hashtag #CubaSiempre to showcase Cuban street art to a wider audience.
A more famous graffiti artist, known for his political outcries and arrest, is Danilo Maldonado Machado. Commonly known as El Sexto, he opened a studio space in Little Havana’s Futurama. Machado spent ten months in Cuba’s Valle Grande Prison after a photo he posted of two live pigs he nicknamed “Fidel” and “Raúl”.
Established in 2011, Futurama is another co-op art space with 12 artist studios and 5 offices located in Little Havana. A little more formal than Yulier P.’s co-op on the Prado and not filled with only street artists, Futurama hosts monthly events, such as art openings, music productions, and business & networking events.
One more creative space that has been long established since the 1990s is Hamel Alley (Callejón de Hamel), founded by artist Salvador Gonzáles Escalona. The 1990s, known as The Special Period, were extremely difficult economic times in Cuba when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 because the island lost about 70% of its exports and imports and about $8 billion a year in aid and subsidies (Staten, C., The History of Cuba, p. 6, 2003). Even though it was hard to find painting materials — such as brushes and paint — during this time, Salvador made it his prerogative to cover all the walls of Hamel Alley in murals. Located on its own street in Centro Habana, just a few blocks from the university, its walls are covered in a fusion of Afro-Cubano art manifested through poetry, colors, images, and sculptures. This alley can almost be identified as its own Cuban culture. The residents nearby Hamel Alley, in barrio Cayo Hueso in Centro Habana, have their own comparsas (carnival street bands), even practice an Afro-Caribbean religion called Santería that started when African slaves merged their beliefs with Roman Catholicism, and love to dance the rumba!
I didn’t make it to the Fábrica de Arte Cubano, which is like Havana’s answer to New York City’s PS1, but that is supposed to be a big tourist spot with great displays of art, too.
To learn more about the work of some of these artists, please follow them on social media:
5stars
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/5starsarte-971993686267881/
- Instagram: @5starsarte
Yulier P.
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/yulier.rodriguez.52
- Instagram: @yuliergraffiticuba
Fabian (2+2=5)
- Instagram: @lopezh.fabianpintandopared
If you are curious about communist propaganda — celebrating the Revolution, Fidel Castro, and anti-democracy and anti-capitalism — it is still widespread in the art on the streets of Havana and in the voices of the people. When you ask the Cuban people about Fidel Castro, they respond, “We do not talk about the President.” There is no freedom of expression, and the media is controlled by the state. If Cubans speak out against the government, they run the risk of imprisonment. The Communist Party of Cuba is the only legal political party in Cuba (Staten, C., The History of Cuba, p. 8, 2003).
See photos of communist propaganda below:
