This talk will look at how young Cuban artists critically addressed the political landscape of the mid-1980s, a period of “rectification of errors and negative tendencies,” when fundamental changes came into effect on the island in reaction to a distancing from the Soviet Union in light of perestroika and glasnost. Appropriating national symbols, détourning official slogans, engaging in absurdist performances, and, finally, symbolically renouncing art making en masse in order to dedicate themselves to baseball, these artists, facing off with cultural institutions and prevalent myths, managed to index in their work the contradictions of the historical moment in which the Cuban Revolution sought to return to its roots before a geopolitical landscape that neoliberalism and Reagan’s policy toward the region were quickly reconfiguring.
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