How Wifredo Lam Became Cuban
On June 29, 2020, at Sotheby’s auction “The Vanguard Spirit: Modern and Surrealist Masterworks from an Important Estate,” Wifredo Lam’s Omni Obini sold for $9,603,800.[1] Lam, the son of a Chinese immigrant and his Cuban pardo wife, now holds the record for work by a Cuban artist.[2]
Lam is best described as a Cuban artist because that is what he was. He recoiled at any description — such as “Afro-Cuban” — that erased his father’s heritage or ignored his mother’s Taíno roots.[3] It’s not surprising that Lam, a mixed-race person, lived his life in racial ambivalence, always trying to understand who he was and his place in the Hispanic world. Yes, he was Afro-Cuban, he said, but he was also Chinese. Yes, his painting explored African themes that informed the Cuban identity, but he sought to honor his beloved mother’s Taína heritage.
In the 19th century, Chinese immigrants were contracted throughout Latin America primarily to build the railroads. Cuba was the exception; the Chinese were brought to work there in the sugarcane fields as “contracted colonists” after 1847.[4] By the time the 20th century came around, middle-class and educated Chinese also immigrated to Cuba. Yam Lam, the artist’s father, was comfortable enough to move his family from the village of Sagua La Grande to Havana in 1916 in order for Wifredo to study law.
That his parents were then able to send him to study in Spain is evidence of the Lam family’s economic and social standing in Cuba, a sovereign republic only since 1902. Indeed, it’s worth noting that at a time when interracial marriages were illegal in the United States and segregation denied Blacks equal opportunities under the law, the Lam family enjoyed success and acceptance in Cuban society.
“Although I am dedicated to exploring the African roots of Cuba in my art, I am mulatto, Taíno, and Chinese, and as such my art is an expression of these heritages, which is to say, I am Cuban,” Wifredo Lam told visitors from Havana who paid him a visit in Paris in January 1954.[5] This affirmation of identity asserted his agency; he resisted how people wanted to define him — then and now.
That he distinguished between Lam the artist and Lam the Cuban was due, in large part, to the example Jaime Valls Díaz set. Valls Díaz, indeed, was the first artist to explore, formally, Afro-Cuba as appropriate subject matter for fine art in Cuba. Without Valls Díaz, it would have been improbable that Lam could have broken free from the postcolonial expectations of what acceptable Cuban art should be and remain: an homage to Spain with an Eurocentric aesthetic.
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Jaime Valls Díaz was born in Tarragona, Spain, on February 23, 1883. He moved to Barcelona for an education. He studied painting under the master Apeles Mestre and sculpture at the Gassó workshops.[6] When he was 18, his family emigrated to Havana. There, he pursued a career as a painter, sculptor, cartoonist, and book illustrator. The young man garnered national attention — and his first taste of fame — in 1903 when he won first prize in a contest Carteles magazine conducted. Soon thereafter, his illustrations were published in El Fígaro magazine, and the public schools hired him to illustrate textbooks, bringing his work to Cuban children throughout the island.
Valls Díaz, as he became Cuban, absorbed the thrilling cultures of the disparate constituencies that comprised the emerging Cuban identity. He was seized by the vitality of Afro-Cuban imagery, and he validated Cuba’s African heritage in fomenting the nation’s joyful character. He also sought to affirm the dignity of Cuba’s determination to fuse distinct histories and peoples into its singular national character. He also wanted the young Cuban nation to champion modernist art in 20th-century Latin America.
“From enjoying fame as a graphic promoter to being considered by his contemporaries the precursor of ‘Afro-Cubanism’ in his painting, this early-forgotten artist incites with his work a rereading of the so-called ‘avant-garde’ in Cuba,” critic Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring wrote in Social magazine in 1927. “But Jaime Valls [Díaz] is the first of our [Cuban] artists who has made the resolution, which some will describe as heroic, to dedicate himself completely to making Cuban work, [and] choosing Afro-Cuban types and customs as motifs and themes.”[7]
Three years after receiving this praise, Valls Díaz had his first exhibition in Havana. The show, titled “Drawings of Afro-Cuban Types and Customs,” was held at the Cuban Press Association building in March 1930.[8] It was a milestone event. The curator, Juan Marinello, hailed Valls Díaz as one of the first modernist artists in Cuba.
Consider how Roig de Leuchsenring described one work, Ritmo del baile afrocubano, or Rhythm of the Afro-Cuban Dance: “In this dancing black female nude, the details of her body matter little. Her hips, her breasts, as such, do not interest the artist; they only have value for him insofar as they also shake as parts of the body, agitated, all convulsed, lubricious, by Afro-Cuban music. Here rhythm is everything. And Valls [Díaz] has been able to express and capture it wonderfully.”[9]
Then the question arose among Cubans on how to describe this art. Was it Afro-Cuban or Afro-Spanish — afrocubano or afroespañol — or was it simply Cuban?
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While Cubans became enthralled by the ease with which Valls Díaz fused modernist art to invent Cuban art, Lam was an ocean away in Europe. He had arrived in Madrid in 1923. He studied under the master Fernando Álvarez de Sotomayor y Zaragoza, whose pupils included Salvador Dalí. The Surrealist movement impressed the young Cuban. He also admired Henri Matisse’s style. Lam’s own work reflected the modernist Spanish tradition — as had Valls Díaz’s initially — but he began to incorporate distinct Cuban sensibilities into his Cubist paintings.
Lam was an affable man, outgoing and charming. He, of course, drew the attention and stares of passersby. Here was a tall, thin Black man in Europe, speaking Spanish perfectly — and with epicanthic folds. His eyes were exotic and mesmerizing.
Who was this creature? “It was easy to smile and engage people,” he once said.[10]
His effortless rapport helped him sympathize with the working people and peasants — country folk — he encountered in his wanderings through Spain. He fell in love with the country, in fact.
Although Spain helped him find his place in the world as a Hispanic man, the country was slipping into crisis. As political crisis engulfed Spain, Lam confronted his own search for self-identity. “He continued to read a great deal: classics of the Spanish language; contemporary poetry, including an anthology of Iberian poetry prefaced by Lorca who attempts to explain the secret of the Góngora language, the Persian poet Omar Khayyâm and the pre-Romantic William Blake; Thomas Mann; Russian novels from the 18th-century up to Nikolai Gogol,” Anne Egger writes. “He also read various works on historical materialism, exploring the revolutionary writings by Russian and German theorists his friends Fernando Muñoz and Faustino Cordón recommended to him. And furthermore, he studied books on art covering the work of Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, Matisse and the German Expressionists, particularly Franz Mark.”[11]
When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, however, Lam cast his self-doubt aside. He stood with the Republicans and decided to fight for a democratic Spain. He enlisted to defend Madrid against Francisco Franco’s forces. He was assigned to assemble antitank bombs. After a few months, however, he was incapacitated after improperly handling toxic chemicals and was sent to Barcelona to convalesce. There he met Manolo Hugué, a Catalan artist. They became friends, and Hugué gave him a letter of introduction to Pablo Picasso.
The following year, Lam moved to Paris where he presented the letter to Picasso, who had fled the Spanish Civil War. The men became easy friends. Picasso introduced him to other artists, including Joan Miró, Fernand Léger, and — Lam’s idol — Henri Matisse. Picasso also introduced him to Pierre Loeb, an important art dealer who would open doors to Parisian society. Picasso encouraged him to develop his own style using the sensibilities and memories of his homeland.
“Where one is born, one is made,” Picasso told him.[12] Lam listened.
Lam remained in Paris until the Nazis invaded in May 1940. When France fell, he, along with giants of French intellectualism, made their way to Marseilles. He attempted to work there, producing, with Breton, the Fata Morgana suite illustrations, a remarkable testament to the development of his confidence as an artist. André Breton declared him a Surrealist — as he had also designated Mexico’s Frida Kahlo.
Marseilles, however, was no refuge. War was war and Marseilles was under assault. He, Breton, and other French intellectuals, including Claude Lévi-Strauss, fled to Martinique, a French possession in the Caribbean. Upon arriving, however, the men were imprisoned. Lam managed to convince the authorities to let him return to Cuba.
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A friend, a relative of Virgilio Piñera, the Cuban poet and playwright, recalls that Piñera visited Lam in Paris on several occasions. He was known for his caustic wit, capricious attitude, and snobbishness. He had the attitude of a man who is convinced of his own superiority and entitlement. That he was able to travel to Europe and hobnob with the Continent’s intellectuals increased his stature back on the island.
He visited with Lam, his friend. The men discussed the idea of cubanidad, or the essence of being Cuban. The men agreed that cubanidad had to break free from its European colonial heritage and the legacy of American domination following the Spanish-American War.
“What is Cuban must be a rejection of what is purely Criollo,” Lam said, Piñera wrote in his notes.[13] “Criollo” was a term for individuals born in Spanish America of parents who had emigrated from Spain. Cubanidad, in other words, had to embrace the African, Chinese, and indigenous roots of the people who were becoming the essence of the national Cuban identity.
Piñera was a prolific writer, and some of his notes and comments on his conversations with Lam have only recently come to light. Both men opposed Batista, whom they believed used the police to protect American interests to the detriment of the natural evolution of Cuban culture, political independence, and economic prosperity.
When Fidel Castro overthrew Batista, they diverged on what Castro’s Revolution would bring. “He will be even worse than Batista. With his Galician character, he will be a Franco,” Lam argued.[14] Piñera disagreed. Lam refused to move back to Havana; he returned to Paris.[15] Lam didn’t understand why Piñera didn’t see the ominous turn in the Revolution’s emerging intolerance.
In 1961, for instance, Fidel Castro held a meeting at the National Library. The conference, Palabras a los intelectuales, or “Words to the Intellectuals,” did not go well. When it was made clear to Cuba’s intellectual community that their expectations of engaging freely in ideas and discussions were secondary to the interests of the Revolution, there was dismay. Fidel made it clear that the requirements of Cuba’s Communist Party were paramount. The meeting ended abruptly: Castro placed his gun on the table, saying, “Dentro de la Revolution, todo; contra la Revolución, nada.” “Within the Revolution, everything; against the Revolution, nothing.”
The room fell silent. Then Piñera, of slight build, stood up. Tengo miedo, tengo mucho miedo, he said. “I am afraid, I am very afraid.”
When Lam heard what Castro had said, he was not surprised. He understood Castro’s inspiration: Benito Mussolini. The Italian dictator had similarly scolded his restless countrymen: “Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”
From the moment Piñera told Castro that he was afraid, everything Piñera did or said was political within the context of the Revolution. After that meeting — and confrontation — many other intellectuals, writers, and artists left. The following year Piñera’s autobiographical play, Aire Frío, or Cold Air, opened in Havana. It told the story of a family torn by change, resisting the ennui and dissatisfaction of their lives in a stagnant society. The play is evocative of Chekhov’s plays, where characters languish in the malaise of lives of desperation. It also recalls the strained family dynamics in a play like Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. The play was his family’s story. Some relatives rejected Castro and went into exile, joining the swelling ranks of the Cuban diaspora. Some relatives, on the other hand, stayed in Cuba. That was a familiar pattern. Even Fidel Castro’s sister, Juanita, and daughter, Alina, broke with him and went into exile.
Piñera, in contrast, was convinced of Cuba’s auspicious future. Then, reality shattered his delusions: he was not within the Revolution. The Revolution wanted to rid Cuba of bourgeois “degenerates.” They rounded up the prostitutes and pimps. Then they came for the pájaros, a Cuban slur meaning “faggots.” The Cuban Revolution was not interested in those who spent their time conjugating irregular verbs.
After his arrest, as a gay man in Communist Cuba, Piñera’s career was effectively over. He kept writing at a frantic pace, however, and slipped into obscurity nonetheless. He was reduced to working in a factory, and he depended on remittances from his relatives abroad. He suffered a fatal heart attack on October 18, 1979. Decades later, the harsh mistreatment he received was acknowledged in efforts to rehabilitate his image; he was honored on the centennial of his birth in 2012.
Lam, on the other hand, believed that Castro, who had overthrown Batista, a mixed-race man like himself, would reinstate a white-minority government in a country where Blacks, mulattos, and other minorities were in ascendance. “Virgilio thought that being a pure gallego like the Castros would protect him,” Lam said. “But this Revolution hated everyone equally.”[16] He hailed his friend as a tragic hero whose wings melted before the intense heat of Castro’s sun.
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Before settling in Paris permanently in 1952, Lam spent the 1940s in Cuba. This is the decade when he immersed himself in the culture from which he felt alienated after so many years in Spain and France. He threw himself into Cuba, following the advice Picasso and Breton had given him in the 1930s: Find inspiration in your homeland.
Lam became enamored of Cuba’s African legacy, especially Santería. This religion evolved in Cuba between the 16th and 19th centuries. It combines elements of the Yoruba religion of West Africa and Roman Catholicism. His godmother, Matonica Wilson, was a Santería priestess. She was renowned as a healer who could commune with the orishas, spirits in Santería who offer humans guidance. Lam also explored Cuba’s Chinese legacy that — to his surprise — dated back hundreds of years. He knew in his heart he also had to honor his father’s Chinese ancestry.
The modernist aesthetics he learned in Europe found fertile inspiration in the African and Chinese character of Lam’s vision of Cubanidad. “Let them think they are sugarcane, but they are bamboo — and if they were sugarcane, then it is the sugarcane that the Chinese cut under the punishing Cuban sun,” Piñera wrote in his notes that Lam told him in 1954 of La Jungla, or The Jungle, a Cubist masterpiece Lam created in 1943. [17] In another entry, Piñera noted Lam’s ideas about how people saw him: “If they’re going to call me something, ‘Afro-Chinese’ makes more sense, but why not just call me ‘Wifredo’? Or call me ‘Cuban.’”[18]
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Whenever I am in Havana, I visit the Monument to the Chinese Soldier in the Vedado district. I find it one of the more compelling public markers, austere and sublime. It was dedicated on October 10, 1931, to honor the Chinese who fought for Cuban independence from Spain. Commanders José Bú and Captain José Tolón are remembered to this day as valiant and capable military leaders who fought valiantly. The monument, a simple black granite column, bears Gonzalo de Quesada’s famous tribute to Cubans of Chinese ancestry: “There was no Chinese Cuban deserter. There was no traitorous Cuban Chinese.”[19] De Quesada, along with José Martí, was one of the architects of Cuban independence.
Lam visited the monument frequently in the 1940s, out of respect for his heritage and in awe that Cuba had the sensitivity to honor Chinese immigrants who had been so few in number.[20] He was determined to honor the contributions the Chinese made to Cuban society.
El murmullo, or The Murmur, painted in 1943, is a singular example of the design of the Chinese monument appearing in his work. It was an homage to his father’s Chinese essence. A figure stands behind a female in the foreground. Her breasts are lactating: Lam, in essence, is the murmur that was born into Cuba’s consciousness.
It is remarkable that critics ignore the Chinese monument’s influence in this masterpiece; there’s more than Cubism there for anyone willing to see. It is clear that Lam seized on Valls Díaz’s approach to cubanidad. He, after all, was explicit in his thinking when he told Piñera, “Forget Afro-Spanish or Afro-Cuban: it is now Cuban.”[21]
Lam, in essence, declared it was enough simply to be Cuban, no hyphenation required.
This essay is in memory of Rubby White, 1927–2020, una buena cubana.
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[1] Diego Rivera holds the record for the work by a Latin American artist. His “Los rivales” sold for $9.76 million in 2018.
[2] A mulatto is a person with European and African heritage; a mestizo is a person of European and indigenous heritage; and a pardo is a person who has European, African, and indigenous heritage.
[3] The Taíno people were the original inhabitants of the Caribbean islands; most succumbed to European diseases after the Spanish arrived in 1492.
[4] Other immigrants, such as Jamaican Blacks, were also contracted to work side by side with the Chinese.
[5] “Aunque me dedico a explorar las raíces africanas de Cuba en mi arte, soy mulatto, taíno y chino, y por lo tanto mi arte es una expresión de estas herencias, es decir, soy cubano.”
[6] Apeles Mestre was renowned for his illustrations in the satirical Catalan weekly, L’Esquella de la Torratxa. Alfons Viñals immortalized the Gassó workshop in his painting, The workshop of Josep Lluís Ràfols Gassó, 1888.
[7] “Pero es Jaime Valls el primero de nuestros artistas que ha tomado la resolución, que algunos calificarán como heroíca, de consagrarse por completo a hacer obra cubana, escogiendo como motivos y temas, tipos y costumbres afrocubanos.” Social, Año 12, №12, Dic. 1927, pp. 18–19, 68, 94.
[8] The show was called Dibujos de tipos y costumbres afrocubanos and ran March 5–15, 1030 at the offices of the Asociación de la Prensa de Cuba (Prado 66, altos).
[9] “En esta negra desnuda bailando, los detalles de su cuerpo importan poco. Sus caderas, sus pechos, como tales, no le interesan al artista; sólo tienen valor para él en cuanto cimbrean también como partes del cuerpo, agitado, todo convulso, lúbrico, por la música afrocubana. Aquí el ritmo lo es todo. Y Valls lo ha sabido expresar y plasmar maravillosamente.” Social, Año 12, №12, Dic. 1927, pp. 18–19, 68, 94. Roig de Leuchsenring’s affirmation and endorsement of Afro-Cuban culture as properly “Cuban” resulted in his being named the City Historian in 1938.
[10] “Era fácil sonreír y platicar con la gente.”
[11] See: https://www.wifredolam.net/en/chronology/1923-1938.html.
[12] “Donde uno nace, uno se hace.”
[13] “Lo cubano debe ser un rechazo a lo que es solamente criollo.”
[14] “Será aún peor que Bastista. Con su carácter gallego, será un Franco.”
[15] Although Lam visited Cuba throughout the decades, he settled permanently in France, dividing his time between Paris and New York.
[16] Many Cubans were the children or grandchildren of Galician — gallego — immigrants from northwestern Spain. In consequence, it was the custom to call the Cuban-born children of Spanish immigrants Galician — gallegos — even if they came from the Canary Islands or other regions of Spain. Virgilio Piñera’s parents were from Asturias.
[17] “Que piensen que son caña, pero son bambú — y si fueran caña, entonces son las cañas que los chinos cortaron bajo el sol de Cuba que castiga.”
[18] “Si me van a llamar algo, ‘afrochino’ tiene mas sentido, pero ¿por qué no, ‘Wifredo’ solamente? O que me llamen ‘cubano’.”
[19] “No hubo un chino cubano desertor. No hubo un chino cubano traidor.”
[20] The first Chinese arrived aboard the Manila Galleons from Manila to Acapulco in 1565. From there, they traveled to Mexico City and then Veracruz. Then they sailed to Havana and points beyond.
[21] “Oliváte de afroespañol o afrocubano. Ahora es cubano.”
