The regime is trying to recuperate painter Hugo Consuegra, a member of the Eleven and a critic of Fidel Castro.
14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 29 March 2025 — What happened in Cuba that made Hugo Consuegra have to wait six decades between his last solo exhibition and the one recently organized in Havana? He was 35 then, wore a jacket or a guayabera, perhaps smoked—there is no art without smoke—and hadn’t left the country. Now he’s a ghost, a fairly young ghost because he died in 2003, but no more than that. The specter of an exiled painter, who cultivated abstraction and to whom critics barely dedicate a place in any enumeration.
Thirty-five years passed between this man’s birth in 1929 and his last exhibition in Havana; 60 between that show and the one still housed at the National Museum of Fine Arts; and more than 20 between his death and this page. In those hiatuses, time disrupted everything. A revolution was waged and perverted, millions were exiled, art also experienced its small revolts, but they dissolved. An entire country dissolved.
Consuegra appears in Havana like a ghost among ghosts, to bear witness to that great upheaval.
Consuegra appears in Havana like a ghost among ghosts, bearing witness to this profound upheaval. The titles of his 41 pieces—15 of them drawings that are almost stains—become echoes of the story he lived and heard from his exile in New York. It is an act of complete sincerity that the exhibition that attempts to recover him is called (Des)Arraigos (Roots ).
Very disturbing was the intervention of the museum’s director, Jorge Fernández, for whom Consuegra is a phenomenon that predates our era: B.C., before Castro. An animal that belongs to the “complex decade” of the 1950s, “which is being revalued.” He claims that two of his works were left out, and one is dying to know why. Fernández is bothered by titles like Bienvenidos al infierno (Welcome to Hell ), with the solidity of a punch, or by his idea of ”protest paintings” in 1966, when he returned to figuration as a warning gesture against the regime.
In Rey Obsecado [Headstrong King], a small drawing from 1959, a strange figure raises his fists as if on a platform. You don’t have to think long to guess who it is. A Compañero Has Died #1 , from 1962, represents the shadow of a hanged militant. In #2, the deceased is on the ground, and from his chest—or rather, from his entrails—emerges a stain that could be his soul, the soul of a communist terrified by his immortality. And finally… the negation of the negation : the supreme tongue-twister of Marxism completes the theorem.
The artist showed that he wasn’t going to be faithful to any canon. Abstract Expressionism, yes, but in his own way.
Consuegra, of course, is much more complex than his ideology. A member of the “controversial group”—once again, the museum’s political correctness takes over—of Los Once [The Eleven], the artist demonstrated that he wasn’t going to be faithful to any canon. Abstract Expressionism, yes, but in his own way. His autobiography, Elapso tempore [Time Lapse], published by Ediciones Universal in Miami and which Fernández confesses to having read almost secretly, is already quite difficult to obtain.
A native of Havana, trained as an architect and pianist, and recipient of dozens of awards, Consuegra’s works can be found in such unconventional venues as the orthodox Casa de las Américas and the headquarters of the Organization of American States in Washington DC. The Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes had quite a few of his pieces in storage, but hadn’t given them prominence—how dare they?—until now, at the initiative of curator Yahima Rodríguez.
“Too many creators have been turned, at best, into non-people on the Island.”
One of the scholars, Armando Álvarez Bravo, summarized the Revolution’s war against Consuegra in an anthology paragraph: “Too many creators have been converted, at best, into non-persons on the Island; they have been erased from official records and, if exiled, have had to suffer, in addition to their expulsion into outer darkness, the antagonistic weight of the complicit academic, cultural, political, and media machinery sympathetic to Castroism or in its service. A machinery that, in addition to denying true values, has exalted too many mediocre people.”
Go see Hugo Consuegra now that you can. I’m not talking to the happy ghosts who, like me, are no longer there, but to those who can afford to pay 30 pesos—a Judas figure!—to see the umpteenth exhumation of a dead comrade take place in Cuba .
’El ahorcado’ is back in town. / Xavier Carbonell
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