DRCLAS: Inclusive and White: State Cultural Policy in Cuba, 1940-1958

Cuba Studies Program

Speaker: Cary Aileen Garcia Yero, History Department, Harvard University

Between 1940 and 1958, the Cuban state worked to support and developed Cuba’s artistic culture. This presentation explores how cultural administrators actively participated in discourses that defined what was valued as “culture” and what constituted Cuban “art”. It analyses the racialized ideas that underpinned state cultural policy and the effects these had on Cuban black artists and on perceptions of black heritage within Cuban culture.

Cary Aileen García Yero is a PhD Candidate in the History Department at Harvard University. She studies the ways in which meanings of Cubanidad were negotiated and contested through artistic practices during 1938 - 1963 in Cuba. She is the Cuba Studies Program Fellow at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studeis and the Managing Editor of the journal Cuban Studies Journal, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press

Moderators: Jorge I. Dominguez, Antonio Madero Professor for the Study of Mexico, Harvard University

Alejandro de la Fuente, Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics, Professor of African and African American Studies and of History, Harvard University

See also: Cambridge Office, Arts and Humanities, Cuba, Cuba Studies Program