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Having said this, I must confess, while we are here, that approaching Roberto after a quarter of a century has meant observing his work almost as a tourist, as one who looks from outside and not only from outside the island, his natural habitat, where he still works and lives. An island that is sometimes spoken of very lightly because it is marked by very specific stereotypes, from a Western perspective and even from the academic perspective of certain lines of Cuban critical thinking that are racist in their deviatoric and disguised obstinacy; fundamentally due to ignorance because they do not know the ancestry of the Afro-Atlantic culture within which Diago moves. They have no idea of its burden.

Therefore, approaching his work today involves trying to rediscover Roberto Diago, an artist who caught my attention in the early 90s in Havana While the national context was pointing towards canonical representational aestheticism, what we commonly refer to as “Academic”, that supposed post-modern “new return to order” under the pretext of “restoring [an] aesthetic paradigm” that seemed to me to be a step backwards; Diago’s work was going against that grain.

Allow me to explain: while Agustín Bejarano, recently returned from a short period of exile in Brazil, was flooding our native Havana with large-scale paintings of “martyred guajiros” (stock peasant characters with the facial features of José Marti, our poet and national hero, a white man, by the way), and Arturo Montoto was delighting Havana officials with his tropical versions of postmodern Murillos or island Sánchez Cotánes – eminently imperial, aesthetically speaking, despite the neo-baroque costume-; both proposals were reactionary and backward,  academic to the point of becoming scholastic, too paradigmatic and tremendously complacent. While the new graduates of the Higher Institute of Art (known as the ISA) swarmed around the ideas developed by the group of artists who participated in the exhibition Las Metáforas del Templo (The Metaphors of the Temple)(2); defined in terms of their artistic traits by the de-folklorisation of anthropological themes as a mark of national identity, which they claimed had been “abused” in the previous decade, along with their representational – academic – affiliation under the halo of neo-historicist painting or their more aseptic installation-based neo-conceptualism; Diago chose to buck this trend. And this voluntarism was endorsed by the understanding that, if it did indeed make sense to return to “a paradigm” of sorts, he already had his own, the one contributed by his legacy, approaching post-modernism not through rupture but from the perspective of “unfinished continuity”, that lingering after-taste within the modern, closer to the work of Lezama Lima than Lyotard; this earned my respect. I saw something there that refused to stop being what it was, “still asilvestrado” (feral), an Andalusian word that I love, even though I discovered it five years later. That primary, artisanal, rustic, persistent side truly captivated me.

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The ironic thing is that these accusations often emanated from curators and academics of the first world, always willing to put Knowledge where the Other was obliged to put flavour.

Iván de la Nuez

Teoría de la Retaguardia

There are Cuban historians, critics and curators who did not see what happened in the early nineties as the whitewashing of our visual culture. There are those who do not perceive that ‘evil lurking in the background’, that belated triumph of the Bolshevik school that academised the provincial art schools with professors recently graduated from the Soviet Fine Arts Academies or from other former socialist countries of Eastern Europe; all branded with the seal of Socialist Realism. What they didn’t manage to do with music, they did with art. I don’t know why they can’t see it. Perhaps because they are not from Havana either, and that “new white guajirismo ” represented them then and still does today.

Sometimes, we just need to clean our lens a little, to remove the whitish dust of the whitewashing that the people of Cuba were subjected to over the past century. For example, no matter how well trained Diago has been in the Academy of San Alejandro, we cannot ask him not to be connected to the anthropocentric tradition of Cuban Art that he explores in the Afro-Atlantic legacies, initiated by the vertiginous and avant-garde work of Wifredo Lam, the mysterious painting of his paternal grandfather, Roberto Diago, and the voluminous sculptural fleshiness of Agustín Cárdenas in the early and middle twentieth century; because those foundations nourished him visually as a child. Therefore his attachment to the modern island tradition is natural; it comes from his cradle. And years later it is natural that he has communicated with the fabulist and mystical work of Manuel Mendive (whom Roberto admires and respects), with the neo-expressionist graphology of Eduardo Choco, and the anthropological research of José Bedia, María Magdalena Campos and Marta María Pérez Bravo into Afro-Atlantic cultures and creeds; with these precedents the artist enters Art through his racial condition as a Black man, city-dweller, urbanite, habanero, descendant of artists and musicians, as an individual transected by the transitory nature of the end of a century, where the diaspora is no longer an escape and takes a home, an outline, a familiarity as a starting point and an arrival point. As if the point itself, that black dot that’s not always perfect, rather than becoming a line, needed to be turned into a dot that travels in space, and this was his obsession. As if his training as a sculptor always pushed him to conceive all his work spatially, but his musical education opens out the perspective of his planimetries to emulate certain staves, certain organisational schemes, ruled by rhythm. Where brocading and burnishing, honouring the investigations of his paternal grandfather within graphics, reminded us of the evil doing of the last neo-expressionist painting of the twentieth century. Where the scratched mark, with feigned clumsiness, demonstrated dexterity, control, accuracy of gesture, indicating rebellion, disagreement, visual violence, grotesque seductive masking. Frontality, once again. A frontality that has remained in his work since then.