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María C. Gaztambide

Originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico, María C.Gaztambide, PhD is Associate Director of the International Center for the Arts of the Americas at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Her work straddles administration, research, and publications, as well as long-term exhibition and archival initiatives focusing on Latin American and Caribbean art. Her book-length project on Venezuela’s El Techo de la Ballena is forthcoming from the University of Florida Press.

Double Vision: Cuban Art in the Special Period

Cuba’s Special Period was one of multiple truths, writes María Gaztambide: deep shortages coexisted with unbridled creativity, tight borders with increased internalization of the Cuban art world, institutional voids with personal opportunities, socialist doctrine with the free market reality of “every man for himself,” institutionalized censorship with artistic ambiguity.