How Graffiti is Making Classic Cuba Contemporary
There are neighborhoods in Latin America where graffiti is a symbol of the city’s identity, such as San Telmo and Palermo in Buenos Aires or Colonia Doctores in Mexico City. Many other cities in the world have large open spaces where this street art is completely legal, such as Queens, Paris, Burghausen, and others. In Cuba, there is no specific law for this artistic expression, but writing on the walls of public spaces or buildings is not permitted. According to National and Local Monuments Law No. 2, to intervene in any Cuban public place, you must request authorization from Physical Planning and the Monuments Office.
With the continuous expansion of the city and an accelerated demographic growth, Havana reflects a complexity of social, economic, and cultural relations, where notable identity differences are perceived between neighborhoods. In this respect, underground culture has an outstanding presence in the aesthetic of graffiti, poster art, and musical movements such as hip hop, reggaeton and trap, to name a few. These youth movements assume the festive and transgressive as one more element of social manifestation and protest. Its interventions in public spaces and daily life enrich urbanity and reveal the cultural level of the city and society from which they are manifested.
The polemic of the public space
Graffiti began to appear in Cuba in the 1970s and 1980s as an effect of the New York Wave. The scarcity of resources and conflicts with the official political vision by some of its exponents caused the works to be promptly covered with grout and replaced by icons or phrases corresponding to revolutionary propaganda. Censorship was far more widespread than graffiti.
Even so, this expressive tool was conceived as a cultural response led by a sector of the population, which understood it as a way of reaffirming their identity, escaping, criticizing, or proposing. Their mostly problematic and deserting tone, in the eyes of the public and government, catalogued them as an improper anomaly to eradicate. The negative view of graffiti was thus promoted. It was considered an attack on citizen hygiene and government policy, as well as a lack of civility.
In addition, there was a protectionist policy with real estate architectural and urban heritage that had its boom in Cuba in the 1970s with the ratification of two laws, the first of their kind, by the National Assembly regarding the conservation of heritage, and supported by the Office of the Historian of the City of Havana.
In this way and due to the illegal nature of this type of street art, the main public spaces in Havana were mainly filled with political propaganda sponsored by the Cuban State throughout the past 60 years. Graffiti promoted by the UJC1 and other political organizations show an official and consensual expression of iconic images of the Revolution: Che Guevara, the Cuban flag, Fidel Castro, and others.
Despite the demoralization of graffiti as a social practice, there has been an awakening of visual street art in Cuba over the last ten years. A concentration of recent graffiti trends in the urban center of Havana represents one of the most important challenges facing public administration. A fairly successful type of management has been adopted by other governments that have taken advantage of the city's aesthetic renovation as a tourist attraction and have joined independent graffiti artists to work to beautify the public spaces. Consider the cases of Lisbon and Morocco.
Graffiti, visual pollution or art at the service of people
In the midst of the Special Period during the 1990s, the buses of Havana began to fill with signatures, exaggerated declarations of love and hate, and all imaginable adolescent symbols of rebellion. Cuba had unofficially imported the concept of New York “tagging” and subway art, trends that continue to this day and are now accompanied by “sticking” as identity logos of individuals or groups that need to mark and reaffirm territory publicly.
You can see various trends among Cuban graffiti artists and muralists by where they choose to show their work. The chosen sites range from neutral: those that avoid the nuisance of the neighborhood; to those that are symbolic due to their traditional or emblematic locations. The urban layout influences the influx of graffiti, from the most hidden, to labyrinthine, and somehow to mystified areas that are the most used. Many of the artists who practice graffiti from anonymity as an underground, rebellious, and socially provocative art, choose (or have been forced to choose) deteriorating urban landscapes and abandoned properties to express themselves artistically. In this way, their art transforms otherwise uninteresting and deteriorating buildings into a point of attention, denouncing the wear of these structures and giving them new life.
Another trend is led by artists who are recognized by the government; those of national and international renown who work with authorization and therefore have access to spaces downtown and larger formats, never competing in quantity with underground graffiti and official murals, but sometimes sharing spaces with them. What was originally perceived as an aggressive art that sought to generate controversy, stir consciences, and talk about the themes that were apparently hidden from everyday life, is recognized as a purely aesthetic art in some spheres of contemporary Cuban society.
The natural, unauthorized rebirth of advertising in Cuba, in which private actors take advantage of underground and digital formats to spread their ideologies, has been one of those spheres where graffiti fits perfectly. Quote or template graffiti based on phrases and ideas is used both for commercial and non-commercial purposes. Graffiti, and underground aesthetic in general, has supported the reputation of various brands and new private businesses on the island.
Restaurant “Jibaro” in Old Havana with graffiti on its facade.
Galleries, art spaces, shops, and restaurants are beginning to show interest in these works and want their facades to have cool paintings that resemble authentic graffiti in order to attract young audiences whose identity surrounds these emerging urban cultures. Graffiti gives a modern and progressive image to businesses and is usually much cheaper than hiring any other decoration service. The owners of businesses and private galleries in Cuba have become, in short, the patrons of commercial urban art.
Street art is the bearer of urban humanization. Havana is now more alive because of it. The multiplicity and complexity of the city rises thanks to this modern form of muralism. There will always be those who judge graffiti as a symptom of degradation and those who defend it as a social regenerator. Regardless of who is the critical observer, good graffiti is part of modern cultural heritage, invading the daily life of the passer-by and impacting their life by causing them to question it.