Commitment and Correspondence: The San Juan Print Biennial and Solidarity with Cuba

In 1986, the Cuban delegation made a splash at the San Juan Print Biennial, arguably the Americas’ most important event for works on paper. It was the first time artists from revolutionary Cuba, who won several prizes, participated since it was founded in 1970. Their absence, and that of the Cuban government’s cultural diplomacy apparatus, was felt nonetheless by Puerto Rican leftist artists working in the neocolonial territory. This was especially true in the case of printmaker-activist Lorenzo Homar, who co-founded the biennial but quickly became disillusioned by its links to the art market and the U.S. (New York’s MoMA was an early supporter). This essay examines Cuba’s absence-presence at the biennial; and the conflicted cultural politics of solidarity in the Caribbean basin. Reading the letters and criticism that shuttled between Homar, Casa de las Américas director Mariano Rodríguez, Cuban exile critic Samuel Cherson, and Los Angeles-based art historian Shifra Goldman, it traces the strategic and contingent rhetorics and affects of friendship and fraternity that negotiated aesthetic-political commitment, often to the point impasse. These discursive networks help us understand Cold War solidarity beyond alignment and non-alignment and the rise of biennial culture as a transnational space of negotiation.