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Vaya Papaya!: Cuban Baroque and Visual Culture in Alejo Carpentier, Ricardo Porro, and Ramn Alejandro
monika kaup

CUBA ASSUMES A SPEcIAL PLAcE IN THE GENEALOGY OF THE LATIN AMERIcAN BAROQUE AND ITS TWENTIETH-cENTURY REcUPERATION, ongoing in our twenty-first centurythe neobaroque. As Alejo Carpentier has pointed out (and as architectural critics confirm), the Caribbean lacks a monumental architectural baroque heritage comparable with that of the mainland, such as the hyperornate Churrigueresque ultrabaroque of central Mexico and Peru (fig.1).1 Nevertheless, it was two Cuban intellectuals, Alejo Carpentier and Jos Lezama Lima, who spearheaded a new turn in neobaroque discourse after World War II by popularizing the notion of an insurgent, mestizo New World baroque unique to the Americas. Carpentier and Lezama Lima are the key authors of the notion of a decolonizing American baroque, a baroque that expressed contraconquista (counterconquest), as Lezama punned, countering the familiar identification of the baroque with the repressive ideology of the CounterReformation and its allies, the imperial Catholic Iberian states (80). Lezama and Carpentier argue that the imported Iberian state baroque was transformed into the transculturated, syncretic New World baroque at the hands of the (often anonymous) native artisans who continued to work under the Europeans, grafting their own indigenous traditions onto the iconography of the Catholic baroque style. The New World baroque is a product of the confluence (however unequal) of Iberian, pre- Columbian, and African cultures during the peaceful seventeenth century and into the eighteenth in Spains and Portugals territories in the New World. The examples studied by Lezama and Carpentier are all from the monumental baroque sculpture and architecture of Mexico, the Andes, and Brazils Minas Gerais province: the work of the Brazilian mulatto artist O Aleijadinho (Antnio Francisco Lisboa [17381814]; see fig. 2 in Zamora in this issue) and the indigenous Andean artist Jos Kondori (dates unknown; see fig. 1 in Zamora), central Mexicos Church of San Francisco Xavier Te po tzo tln (fig. 1), and the folk baroque Church of Santa Mara To nan tzin tla (see fig. 3 in Zamora), to mention a few landmarks and names.

MONIKA KAUp is associate professor of English and adjunct associate professor of comparative literature at the University of Washington. She is the coeditor (with Lois Parkinson Zamora) of Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest (Duke UP, forthcoming). She is completing a comparative study entitled Neobaroque in the Americas, which engages the neobaroque in modern and postmodern literature, lm, visual art, and cultural theory in relation to alternative modernities and postcolonial expression.

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somehow intangible and deficient in comparison with the splendid monumental baroque on the mainland? Carpentier repeatedly takes up the question of the Cuban baroque. In his 1964 essay about Havana, The City of Columns, he suggests that the Cuban baroque is a nameless third style resulting from the spontaneous adaptation and mixing of official architectural styles. He writes, The superimposition of styles, the innovation of styles good

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This essay takes its departure from a striking difference, in the decolonizing New World baroque, between the mainland location of its architectural archive and the Cuban location of its knowledge production. Why does it take two Cuban intellectuals to theorize and promote the insurgent American baroque? And what role does the local Cuban baroque play in the theorization of the New World baroque? What exactly is the Cuban baroque, if it is

FIG. 1
Main altarpiece, Church of San Francisco Xavier Tepotzotln, eighteenth century. State of Mexico, Mexico.

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and bad ... created for Havana a style without style that in the long run, through a process of symbiosis and amalgamation, became a peculiar kind of Baroque that functioned as style and inscribed itself in the history of urban behavior (emphasis mine). In this essay and throughout Carpentiers work, the Cuban baroque coincides with the New World baroque in that both are impure, hybrid forms resulting from the sociohistory of mestizaje that Cuba shares with Latin America: Cuba did not achieve compelling Baroque carvings, images, or buildings. But fortunately, Cuba was mixed blood, as was Mexico or Upper Peru, and as with all hybridism, through a process of symbiosis, it engendered a Baroque spirit. To mark their divergence from the European state baroque, the Cuban baroque and the New World baroque may best be pictured as originating from a dynamic process rather than as a finished (built) product, as a doing or making rather than a being. Put differently, the Cuban and the New World baroques begin where the official European baroque ends, in the long afterlife following initial design and early years of construction when unplanned, local practices of use and adaptation begin to grind down the pure outlines of the planned, official city. In Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattaris terms, the American baroques are what colonized, minor subjects construct, from the bottom up, within the major European cultural and artistic forms that are imposed on them and that they are powerless to reject. At stake in the difference between major and minor baroques is nothing less than the question of liberation in cultural production, in particular the possibility of rebellious consumption against the grain of origins re- creation by recyclingthat is to say, the creative remaking of existing, institutionalized expression for antiinstitutional and subversive purposes.2 Angel Rama points out the overlap between the baroque and the implementation of colonial state and church authority in Latin America: One could say that the American continent became

the experimental field for the formulation of a new Baroque culture. The first methodical application of Baroque ideas was carried out by absolute monarchies in their New World empires, applying rigid principlesabstraction, rationalization, and systematizationand opposing all local expressions... (10). Could colonial subjects appropriate and resignify an institutionalized expression like the Iberian state baroques to combat the same institutions that imposed it as an instrument of empire in Spains and Portugals overseas colonies? While the monumental baroque architecture of central Mexico and the Andes displays the impressive end products of sociohistorical processes of becoming minor, I want to suggest here that Carpentiers depiction of Havanas Cuban baroque offers something like a dramatic, live rendering of the process in action. This popular process of anarchic recycling involves the proliferating columns that figure centrally in Carpentiers City of Columns. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, writes Carpentier, classical columns abandon their original site in interior patios to propel [themselves] into the streets, where they multiply and transform, resulting in the incredible profusion of columns in a city that is an emporium of columns, a jungle of columns, an infinite colonnade ... hybrid ad infinitum. Carpentier, who was the son of an architect and had to abandon his studies toward an architecture degree at the University of Havana at his parents divorce, explicitly contrasts Havanas irregular urban pattern to academic urbanism and urban planning. According to Carpentier, Havanas baroque arises from outside the planned, official conceptual cityit is the product of an irreverent and offbeat replay of classical forms, playfully accumulating, collecting, and multiplying columns and colonnades in ... an excess of Doric and Corinthian, of Ionic and composite capitals. To make his point, Carpentier remains silent about the monumental baroque actually found in the Caribbean, of which

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capitalisms best efforts to reduce use to passive consumption, he argues, everyday practice is stubborn, devious, and creative. It finds ways of appropriating and resignifying official structures and systems that impose order on and dominate practice and that practice has no choice but to inhabit. The history of discipline recounted by Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu is only half the story: Certeau insists that no matter how efficiently official systems control, colonize, and represent the everyday, this in itself tells us nothing about what the everyday is to the user. We must therefore study concrete local and historical ways of unplanned, vernacular usehow real people actually make do and live with and in the ready- made official world. The idea I want to explore here is that Carpentiers mysterious, elusive Cuban baroque is nothing other than Certeaus insurgent everyday practice, which exists in all periods and places. Incidentally, this is also how we should read Carpentiers dubious (from an art historical point of view) concept of the baroque as a transhistorical typea human spirit that recurs throughout historyinspired by the Catalan art critic Eugenio dOrs. When Carpentier calls the baroque a human constant and a creative spirit manifest in all cultures and denies that the baroque is an invention of the 17th century, he is thinking of the ever- present realm of practice (The Baroque 9091). In the Cuban baroque, the creativity of a nti-institutional, popular use and recycling stands out so clearly precisely because of the antimonumental nature of the simple materials it works onnot so much grand objects like cathedrals as everyday objects like tropical fruit, food, dance, and, to mention Carpentiers other examples in The City of Columns, fanlights, glass- door screens, and wrought- iron gates. Since the Cuban baroque is defined as spontaneous, secondhand production (remaking by recycling) rather than product (being), it expands the range of baroque materials: nearly anything (fruit,

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Cubas capital possesses a major landmark, the Cathedral of Havana (174877), a former Jesuit church influenced by Francesco Borromini, one of the famous architects of the Roman baroque (fig. 2).3 In claiming that Cuba is not Baroque like Mexico, Quito, or Lima, Carpentier is technically correct, as he affirms the absence of the hyperornate, late baroque Churrigueresque in the Caribbean (fig. 1). But he turns a blind eye to existing monuments of the Cuban baroquealbeit fewer in number and more restrained and sober than those of the mainlands Churrigueresqueto single out as the Cuban baroque the spontaneous, unplanned eclecticism and deformation of academic forms that produced them. In a 1974 interview, Carpentier offers what is likely his most striking statement on the antimonumental Cuban baroque:
I would say that the Cuban Baroque ... corresponds to an ecology. Our colonial period has not left us many examples of Baroque architecture comparable to those of Mexico, Peru, or Ecuador. And yet, Cuba is Baroque in its grille work, its glasswork, its furniture, the traditional vegetation of its patios. And in things intangible and yet present, quotidian, familiar: the use of language, the omnipresence of music and the sea, the color of things, a certain luxuriant atmosphere, a certain dance rhythm that arises when least expected. I dont know. The Cuban Baroque is difficult to define: it is in the air one breathes. One feels it. (qtd. in Zamora, Inordinate Eye 158)

Here Carpentier most clearly identifies the Cuban baroque with the realm of the everyday, of the multiple activities of everyday practicesuch as storytelling, walking, eating, cooking, reading, playing music, dancing, even breathingwhich are also the subject of Michel de Certeaus The Practice of Everyday Life. According to Certeau, practicethat is, how users make do with the structures they inhabit but do not design or build or controlis the realm of antidiscipline. Despite

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FIG. 2
Cathedral of Havana, 174877.

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usic, everyday objects) can become baroque, m since the baroque is nothing but an everyday practice of creative misuse and disfiguration. Yet how exactly can tropical fruit, such as the papaya, become baroque? With this question, I turn to the contemporary visual artworks of the architect Ricardo Porro and the painter Ramn Alejandro, both Cubans. They have in common the fusion of European art and vernacular Afro- Cuban culture, as well as a focus on the papaya, which appears at the center of theiralbeit very differentneobaroque works. I will discuss Porros School of Plastic Arts, one of Cubas five national art schools constructed between 1961 and 1965 in Cubanacn, a Havana suburb (figs. 36). An architectural experiment of the early years of the Cuban Revolution constructed on the grounds of the most exclusive country club of prerevolutionary Havana, the curvilinear complexes of brick and terra- cotta domed huts and porticoed walkways feature vernacular Afro- Cuban influences and explicit sensual symbolism. Sadly, the national art schools fell

from grace in the year of their completion because of an ideological polemic.4 This was in part because of the overt sensuality of Porros School of Plastic Arts: in its central plaza, it features a fountain in the shape of a papaya, a symbol for the female sex in Cuba. On the inside of the fountain can be found drains in the form of little phalluses (fig. 5). It is amusing to note, John Loomis reports in his history of the art schools, that water was banned for a period from Porros suggestive fountain, on Party orders (123). As the utopian phase of the Cuban Revolution ended and Cuba entered the Soviet orbit, the art schools vernacular, ethnosensual heresies succumbed to the dictates of Soviet- style modernist functionalism. In effect, Porros neobaroque design, sensitive to local, ethnic, and historical dimensions that modernist functionalism sets out to erase, fell FIG. 3 victim to the rationalism of Soviet industrial- Aerial view, School ized modernism. Abandoned and reduced to of Plastic Arts, ruins, the national art schools began to be re- 196064. Havana. claimed by the Cuban regime in the 1990s and Architect: Ricardo Porro. Photograph will soon be restored (Segre 144).

by Paolo Gasparini.

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In his slim booklet entitled Vaya papaya! (Go Papaya!), which celebrates Ramn Alejandros paintings, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, a fellow Cuban, explains how the papaya becomes baroque: In Cuba ... the papaya is called fruta bomba . ... To counter assertions by ignorant foreign critics, the term bomba does not refer to a bomb; rather, it carries major sexual connotations. Bomba is the Cubanization of one of the terms for the female sex in Yoruba, embomba.5 This baroque mechanism of allegorical indirection and circumlocution is identical with the process of metonymic displacement along the chain of signifiers: the term for the tropical fruitpapayais substituted by fruta bomba, which in turn yields to the Afro- Cubanism embomba and finally to the latters sexual referent. Indeed, in his 1972 essay The Baroque and the Neobaroque, Severo Sarduy, a Cuban writer, names Porros papaya fountain as an example for his poststructuralist theory of the baroque as antirealist artificialization. According to Sarduy,

[I]n the architecture of Ricardo Porro ... the functional elements of the architectonic structure are sometimes replaced by others that serve as signifiers only when inserted into that context as mechanical supports: a drainpipe is converted ... into a flute, a femur, or phallus; a fountain assumes the form of a papaya, a Cuban fruit. This last substitution is particularly interesting, because ... by expelling the normal signifier of the function and putting another, completely alien one in its place, what occurs is the eroticization of the totality of the work ... by means of linguistic cunning.

Associating the baroque and the neobaroque with the apotheosis of artifice and the irony and mockery of nature, Sarduy highlights the creative disfigurement at the core of minor baroque expression. Sarduys notion of the baroque is akin to parody, to the deformation of a previous work, to the re- creative work of everyday practice as theorized by Certeau, and to the elusive operations of Carpentiers antimonumental Cuban baroque. More generally, the light Sarduy sheds on baroque

FIG. 4
View of entrance, School of Plastic Arts. Photograph by Paolo Gasparini.

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virtue of the fact that we neither had them nor can have them. Herein lies our originality. Porro thinks of his architecture as neobaroque and as black architecture, as expressing a Cuban baroque that is distinct from the European and infused with Afro- Cuban symbolism. For his preoccupation with Borromini, one of Porros nicknames in Cuban architecture circles was Porromini. Undeniably, Porro reminisces, Porromini fits me quite well, because his influence on my architecture was very strong. ... There is a powerful baroque aspect to everything I do.6 He is familiar with the writings of Lezama and FIG. 5 Sarduy on this subject:
In the moment that I conceived the School of Plastic Arts I was interested very much in

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antifunctionalism and derealization also exposes the contingency of language as such: the playful proliferation of signifiers uncovers the arbitrary relation between signifier and signified, thereby dismantling languages referential- realist function. The Cuban baroque thus showcases the insurgent creativity of everyday practice, which does not produce originals but remakes existing materials. This secondhand mode of production as rearticulation also describes the condition of cultural production in colonial and postcolonial locations such as Latin America. According to the Mexican critic Gonzalo Celorio, In light of our Spanish, colonial, and therefore eccentric past, our American originality is to adopt ideas that are, in principle, alien to us but that we have made our own by

Fountain La Papaya, School of Plastic Arts. Photograph by Paolo Gasparini.

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the problem of tradition. Cuba is not Catholic. Cuba is a country where the African religion has more force than the Catholic. So I tried to make an arquitectura negra , a city seized by a negritud that had never before had a presence in architecture. While it had been given a presence in the paintings of [Wifredo] Lam, to draw from Cubas African culture in architecture was a radical step. So this calm and sensual Cuban Baroque from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries arrived in the twentieth century with an explosion, an apotheosis. ... It exists in Lezama and in Sarduy. In Cuba this new Baroque is fully expressed. It is also that which I wished to express in my School of Plastic Arts. (qtd. in Loomis 5768)7

In addition to the papaya fountain, sensual symbolism appears in the domed roofs, which recall African huts as well as the female breast (fig. 6). A description of the entryway of the complex gives a sense of the disorienting baroque space of Porros School of Plastic Arts (figs. 3 and 4):
In the School of Plastic Arts, Porro organizes three powerful trumpet- shaped arches to form an entry; by tradition, by experience, by architectural conventionthe three porticoes of Christian churcheswe expect that the central arch would be that which dominates the development of the composition. But it is here that, having just advanced twelve meters, the central

FIG. 6
Roofscape, School of Plastic Arts. Photograph by Paolo Gasparini.

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Many of Alejandros human- f ruit or human- plant hybrids are found as illustrations in Orlando Gonzlez Estevas entertaining study Cuerpos en bandeja: Frutas y erotismo en Cuba (Bodies on a Platter: Fruit and Eroti cism in Cuba). Discussing the erotic symbolism around tropical fruit in Cuban literature and culture since the eighteenth century, Gonzlez Esteva notes that it is no wonder
that Cubans end up developing the complexes and properties of fruit, just as fruit have come to develop the properties and complexes of human beings. ... In the midst of a luxurious vegetation and alleged artifacts of torture, fruit of various and at times mysterious kinds, dogs, goats, birds feathers, reclining and interlacing trunks that improvise rare architectures (like skeletons of some Cuban Tower of Babel), masks, shells, turbulent skies, and nude women and men armed with machetes, Cuban nature opens its legs and shows the papaya, equally open, gigantic, appetizing....8

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opening vanishes and we can only continue in the lateral galleries: in addition the view through the central arch is blocked by a line of buttresses and gargoyles that turn, impeding any sense of axiality. ... I would say that this is an atheist composition that denies to us the path to the altar. The spectator is disarmed by the entrance, dazed, and his system of orientation collapses in a sensorial abyss.  (Hugo Consuegra, qtd. in Loomis 167)

While in Paris in the early 1950s, Porro befriended the Cuban painter Wifredo Lam, whom he credits for having had a great influence on him (Loomis 10; see also Porro, Cuidadano 13). Lam famously translated his mixed heritage (he was the son of a Chinese father and an Afro- C uban mother) into the tropical modernism embodied by his celebrated 1943 painting La Jungla (The Jungle). Indeed, Lam inaugurates the remaking of European avant- garde style in painting through vernacular Afro- Cuban content and symbolism; also in Lams work papayas (with their sensual associations) first appear in Cuban painting as visual punssee the bulbous fruta bomba as parts of female anatomy in La Jungla (Fletcher; Sims; Cabrera Infante). My third example of the Cuban baroque, Ramn Alejandro, is a painter who, like Sarduy, left Havana permanently for Paris in the 1960s. His allegorical canvases stage tropical fruit and vegetationfrequently the papaya at the center of surreal still lifes and fantastic anthropomorphic assemblages he calls machines (figs. 8 and 9; Alejandro 10). Critics have pointed out that these are reminiscent of Giovanni Piranesi and the mannerist painter Giuseppe Arcimboldos anthropomorphic visual puns composed of fruit and vegetables (Ponte 9; Rojas). Alejandros work also continues Lams tropical surrealism, as well as the Cuban tradition of creative recycling that Carpentier calls the Cuban baroque. As Cabrera Infante notes, the striking sexuality of Alejandros work results from the fact that he opens the papaya that Lam always kept closed.

There is a gleam around Alejandros slicedopen papayas that elicits desire and lures the spectator (figs. 8 and 10). As in Freuds fetishism, it results from the displacement of signification from the everyday object depicted (the papaya and other tropical fruit like bananas, avocados, guanbanas [soursops], and mangoes) to the sexual organ that is indirectly referenced through the fetish as symbolic substitute (fig. 7). Yet, as is to be expected in the baroque, famous for ironic reversals and visual games like trompe loeils, Alejandros neobaroque assemblages refuse simple voyeuristic gratification. Instead, each image stages an interminable oscillation between opposite poles, fashioning an enigma related to (although not strictly identical with) the mise en abyme, a popular baroque framing structure (picture within the picture, play within the play) that incorporates its own picture into the body of its representation (Braider 8). In Voluptas (Pleasure) for example (fig. 8), the fleshy strands of eroticized

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papaya pretending to be human flesh metamorphose into carved ornaments such as one would find on furniture. What appears to be natural and real in the lower part of the canvas is unmasked as artificial in the upper part, as if to say, Gotcha! This amounts toin Rafael Rojass apt observationplacing the words come hither and no entry on the frontispiece of the same temple.9 As the spectators eye scans the image, it is caught in an infinite play of illusion and disillusionment (engao / desengao), which holds the contradiction in endless tension without resolution. This principle is also at work in La controversia (The Controversy; fig. 9) and Boda mstica del Rey Balthasar (King Balthasars Mystical Wedding; fig. 10). Objects of torment and pain are found next to, or mutate into, objects of pleasure; pleasure and pain are ambivalent features of the same represented scene. Paranoid spaces of fear and incarceration morph into erotic spaces of sexual and culinary pleasure, and vice versa. In La controversia, the anthropo-

morphic machines double row of nails threatens even as the guanbana just behind them attracts: the vagina dentata. In Boda mstica del Rey Balthasar, the knife with which King Balthasar has sliced open the papaya is suspended next to his genitals, auguring violence and pleasure in equal amounts for his eponymous mystical wedding. Alejandro stages fetishisms illusionist make- believe to reflect on its process: operating along the lines of Sarduys theory of baroque antirealism, Alejandros paintings play neobaroque games of deception and disillusionment around the similarities Cuban culture constructs between human forms and tropical fruit. Everything that seems palpable and ready to be savored evaporates as yet another simulation, only to be reincarnated with its original spell intactand so on to infinity. In his tropical still lifes, Alejandro renders organic nature surreal and artificial to make explicit its overdetermination through the ethnolinguistic web of vernacular Cuban

FIG. 7
Ramn Alejandro, La champola: La douceur du corossol (La Champola: The Sweetness of Soursop [the title refers to a soursop juice drink]), 1989. Oil on canvas, 50 65 cm. By permission of the painter.

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FIG. 8
Ramn Alejandro, Voluptas (Pleasure), 1992. Oil on canvas, 195 130 cm. By permission of the painter.

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erotic symbolism. More than Porro in his papaya fountain, Alejandro thus exposes the sheer conventionality of Cuban sensual symbolism by depicting neobaroque allegorical assemblages (fig. 9). Carpentier posed the question of the Cuban baroque through the paradigm of the anti- institutional minor baroque that remakes official, institutional culture. His claim that Havana was not baroque like Latin American capitals on the mainland shifted attention away from monumental architecture to the baroque in simple, ordinary objects. Porro follows Carpentiers directive by staging the insurgent creativity of Cuban everyday practice: he incorporates vernacular Afro- Cubanisms (the sexual connotations of the papaya). However, his work is still in the monumental medium of architecture, where baroque features appear as ornaments (papaya fountain) and as structural devices of disorientation (the triple- arched entrance) that set built space in

motion. Finally, Alejandro completes the trajectory outlined by Carpentier: his work is an extended investigation (and celebration) of the antimonumental, antiofficial baroque emerging from Cuban popular culture. His ultrabaroque papayas and tropical fruit are the minor counterpart of the heavy ornamentation of the major Churrigueresque. But Alejandros papayas are hyperbaroque in an additional, self- reflective way that the Churrigueresque is not: the painters actual subject is a semiotic analysis of the extravagant signifying mechanism by which Cuban culture metaphorizes human bodies as tropical fruit and vice versa.

NOTES
1. The Churrigueresque is an eighteenth- c entury late baroque style named after the Spanish Churriguera family of artists; the eldest of the five brothers in the family, all architects and decorators, was Jos Benito de

FIG. 9
Ramn Alejandro, La controversia (The Controversy), 1998. Oil on canvas, 65 81 cm. By permission of thepainter.

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FIG. 10
Ramn Alejandro, Boda mstica del Rey Balthasar (King Balthasars Mystical Wedding), 1991. Black chalk on Canson colored paper, 150 75 cm. By permission of thepainter.

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hurriguera (16651725). Though the Churrigueresque C is often considered synonymous with Spanish Baroque, Pamela Gosner writes, there are differences, and it might more properly be regarded as an offshoot of it. Although the interruption of straight lines is characteristic of both, as are twisted columns, broken pediments and entablatures, and heavy decoration, in the Churrigueresque the decoration is so heavy and the breaking up of the lines so pronounced that the architectural forms themselves disappear. This extreme, while common in Mexican and Peruvian colonial architecture, is not seen in the Antilles. Another characteristic feature of the Churrigueresque (which appears in the church at Tepotzotln, in fig.1) is estpites, pilasters shaped like inverted obelisks and often broken into segments (26). 2. For an exploration of the notion of a minor baroque, see Kaup. 3. Gosner explains that the most obvious manifestation of the Baroque [in Cuba] was visible in details such as doorframes, arch and gable profiles, and other decorations. Not until the end of the 18th century do fully realized Baroque buildings appear in the Antilles (239). This gradual arrival of the baroque in Cuba, and its first entrance through miniature forms such as ornamental detail, is likely behind Carpentiers antimonumental approach to the Cuban baroque. Ives Bottineau concurs: Cuban decoration was relatively sober... . Baroque here has been termed Borrominesque rather than Churrigueresque, not so much on account of the plans but because faades, such as that of Havana cathedral ... are reminiscent of the architecture of S. Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (9192). 4. Throughout this essay, I am indebted to John Loomiss excellent documentation of the complex history of the Cuban art schools. See also Homenaje. 5. All unattributed translations are mine. En Cuba ... la papaya se llama fruta bomba. Este nombre aparentemente explosivo le sirvi a un escritor francs, ignorante, para declarar que en Cuba fidelista hasta las frutas podan defender a la isla de una agresin extranjera. Lo cierto es que esta bomba en la fruta no estalla pero es de una connotacin sexual mayor que la primitiva papaya. Bomba es la cubanizacin de uno de los nombres del sexo feminino en yoruba, embomba (I have taken the liberty of translating loosely for reasons of space). 6. Innegablemente, Porromini me viene muy bien, porque su influencia en mi arquitectura fue muy grande. ... Hay un lado barroco muy fuerte en todo lo que hago (Porro, Cuidadano 14). 7. It is worthwhile to read in full Porros brief 1982 essay Cuba y yo, from which these translations are taken. 8. Que los cubanos acaben por desarollar complejos y propiedades de fruta, tal y como las frutas hand venido desarollando propiedades y complejos humanos, no debe producir extraeza... . En medio de una vegetacin lujuriosa, y entre presuntos artefactos de tortura, frutas de diversa y a veces misteriosa ndole, perros, chivos, plumas

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de ave, troncos que al recostarse y trabarse improvisan inusitadas arquitecturas (como esqueletos de unas cubanas torres de Babel), mscaras, caracoles, cielos tormentosos y mujeres y hombres desnudos armados con machetes, la naturaleza cubana abre las piernas y muestra la papaya, igualmente abierta, gigante, golosa ... (85, 38). 9. El ven y el no entrars como inscripciones en el frontispicio del mismo templo.

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