Book review

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.5.2.0215
• Published date: 01 October 2013
• Date: 01 October 2013
• Pages: 215272-217
• Author: Maria Iñigo Clavo

BOOKREVIEWS 215

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history of Africa in educational curriculums alongside the teaching of the history

of imperial Spain; or on the history of black politics in pre-revolutionary Cuba.

As Morales acknowledges, debate has revived in recent years and been aired at

the highest levels. He wants more systematic work by the Party, the institutions

of Popular Power, and by mass organisations, not least in education. And he calls

for a specif‌ic national institution to oversee the effort (p. 207). As an analysis of

the persistence of racism, Morales’s book is a unique English-language resource

for students of Cuba who otherwise frequently rely on tendentious US-sourced

material. As a revolutionary cri de coeur, it also deserves a wider audience

among Cuba’s many admirers and visitors.

Steve Ludlam, University of Sheff‌ield, UK

Andrea O’Reilly Herrera, Cuban Artists across the Diaspora. Setting the Tent

Against the House (University of Texas Press, 2011) pb 272pp.

ISBN 9780292726956

Reviewed by Maria Iñigo Clavo

This book by Andrea O’Reilly Herrera takes a biographical journey through

Cuban exile art via the exhibition project CAFE (Cuban American Foremost

Exhibition). This series of exhibitions was mainly organised by Leandro Soto

in America. Since its inception at the University of Massachusetts in 2001, it

has been hosted by various academic institutions especially in states such as

Arizona, Colorado and Wisconsin, but also in cities such as Rome and Cave

Hill (Barbados), until its last issue in 2011 in Sangre de Cristo Arts Centre

in Colorado. In this case, as in the 2002 edition, the author of the book was

the co-curator of the event. More than just an exhibition, the CAFE unfolds

as a meeting place for artists and intellectuals who share a common history

of migration to what the author calls the f‌ifteenth Cuban province, exile,

which in her text focuses primarily on the United States. And it is clearly into

an Anglo Saxon methodological framework that O’Reilly wants to place the

debate and the conceptualisation of this Latin American reality: Stuart Hall’s

cultural negotiation, the disorienting loss of Edward Said, the in-between of

Homi Bhabha, the multigenerational transmission of Cultural memory of James

Cliffort, the altermodern of Nicolas Bourriaud and Antonio Benitez-Rojo run

through the book as representing Cuban exile.

The book is divided into two main parts, the f‌irst contains a historical contex-

tualisation of ‘Cuban art’ and an excellent conceptual review about migration: it

stops short of rethinking and decentralising the concepts of diaspora, preferring

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