QUESTION YICHEN CHEN

Elso’ s Essay on America (1986) pointed to the mistakes of Cuba’s past revolution as well as the Soviets; he refused to carelessly proceed with the social reconfiguration that was proposed under the process of rectification that Moreno’s essay speaks to. However, art works produced at the time were subsumed under a very particular narrative that is defined by that time. According to Moreno, Elso had to “name one thing through the inability to name another.”

How is this a valuable capacity for art in terms of this difficult period? And does this ability that is built on failure have some relation to freeing art from the constrains of its political moment in time?