Our second album of the Cub trip includes many more images of art, artists, the art school, murals and studios. Tropical climate lends itself to bright colours everywhere.

We spent a little while in Cienfuegos Central Plaza, with its restored pre-Revolution buildings, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The theatre is quite spectacular and we learnt that performances take place there regularly. There seems to be a determination by the government to cultivate Cuban culture, whether it is Visual Arts, Theatre, Dance and Music Performance (we attended a Cuban Spanish Ballet evening) and to insist on good education and the best medical health care possible. But all this is happening while most of the Cuban people are living in extreme poverty. We were taken to a little museum which records with old photographs the events of the Bay of Pigs invasion, at Giron on the south coast. After a drive through newly settled towns in the swamp area there we made our way back to Havana for the last few days of our trip.

As you’ll see in the photos we saw an astonishing variety of wild, colourful, Afro-Cuban art in the city. The Instituto Superior des Artes (the Cuban art school) was built in the sixties of brick, to resemble mud huts of the African countries where many Cubans originated. Tuition and accommodation are free for the selected art students and they follow a structured four-year-long programme. Dare I say that the education equips graduates with specific skills in painting, print-making, sculpture and ceramics. The internet is not reliable and we saw very few computers. Instructors were on hand (where were the students?) and seemed most willing to display their work to us, an interested group of art admirers who had seen a show of Cuban art at MOA in Vancouver. Happily some of our number purchased work then and there. I took lots of photos in the school, and later at the studio of Douglas Perez Castro, of Santaria artist Julian Gonzalez Perez and of an alley covered in Afro-Cuban graffiti. Take yourself away from Vancouver’s rain for a few minutes and enjoy Cuban art. https://picasaweb.google.com/112208740085943894765/Cuba2November2014

Several of us enjoyed reading Vancouver’s Alan Twigg’s “Cuba: A Concise History for Travellers”. It was an excellent way to fill in some of the gaps in our knowledge of this little country/large island.

The catalogue for the show curated by Orlando Hernandez, “Without Masks: Contemporary Afro-Cuban Art” is available at the Museum of Anthropology, UBC, Vancouver.