Dichrostachys Cinerea: Resilient Roots in a Shared Cuba

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Every day begins with the mingling rituals of contrasts and coffee. I often find myself caught between two sights each morning: the sun filtering through the worn-out buildings, caressing the walls of the Malecón with its detached rhythm, while the Caribbean Sea awakens in hues of blue, seeming to encompass all the brightness the country has lost.

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From my window, this interaction between the magnificent and the decaying repeats like a visual mantra. In the adjoining building, a vibrant red sign boldly declares, “Homeland or Death! We will overcome!” (“Patria o Muerte, Venceremos”) and greets the break of day as a silent witness. Once shining through the night, its letters now bear the marks of time since the collapse of the electrical system. These letters, touched by dawn, are now merely remnants of what was once fervent belief. The sign stands as a vestige of a bygone rhetoric, a relic of endurance that no one dares to demolish, having become an involuntary monument.

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Fidel Castro, political leader and verbal architect of the nation, built his revolution with words carved as slogans. When he first uttered “Homeland or Death” in March 1960, he was weaving what Roland Barthes would have recognized as a perfect political myth: the transformation of history into nature. Three months later, he would complete the formula with “We will overcome!” turning triumph into historical law, not mere possibility. This binary language, “Homeland or Death,” “Revolution or Enemy,” left little room for nuance, creating a mental landscape as rigid as the territory today devoured by the marabú.

This decomposition of slogans into hollow symbols is not limited to architecture. In the work of Adonis Flores, we see how even the materials of military and ideological power can be reconfigured into critiques of their own violence.

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Adonis Flores, in his works La Moledora (The Grinder) and Centinela (Sentinel), dismantles military symbolism to reveal its intrinsic violence: a boot crushes flesh; a soldier becomes a rotating device. With a dark humor reminiscent of the disturbed surrealist objects of Dalí or Man Ray, Moledora is a piece that carries the essence of the sinister (the boot as a grinding machine) and the absurd (who would feed meat to a boot?). The contradiction points to the autophagic logic of war: the system devours those it should protect. Here, the bronze, material of commemorative statues, immortalizes not a hero, but a mechanism of violence. Centinela, on the other hand, turns the soldier into a panopticon, watching over even in his absence; or a chess piece waiting for the next move. Adonis explores the dehumanization of bodies under systems of control, where self-identity is dissolved.

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Flores’s unsettling transformations remind us that symbols, like buildings, eventually betray their weight. And as these monoliths decay, they leave behind a silence that other voices begin to fill.

The “re‑evolutionary” Cuba is also a field of dissonant cracks, where the marabú or sicklebush has taken root. This invasive plant, Dichrostachys cinerea, has become the best chronicler of the country’s recent history. Arriving as ornamental in the 19th century, today it covers 1.7 million hectares (18 % of the national territory) according to figures from the Ministry of Agriculture. Its expansion may have an obvious link to the failure of the Zafra de los Diez Millones(10‑Million‑Ton Harvest) in 1970. There is a profound irony in how this plant, with concrete‑piercing roots, has colonized the landscape with the same tenacity that slogans conquered the collective imagination. Marabú is no mere weed: it is the living metaphor of how human projects, when they lose touch with reality, are reclaimed by nature.

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The year 1970 could be analyzed as that liminal moment when revolutionary rhetoric clashed with economic reality. The Zafra de los Diez Millones was a flagship project of Cuban socialism that mobilized the whole society: students, workers, soldiers, and professionals were sent to cut sugarcane in the fields. The land was eager to bear fruit, the landscape permeated with slogans of perseverance, and all of Cuba was calculating the sugar cane harvested every day. The goal was to reach 10 million and expose to the world the symbolic triumph of the social and ideological process of the Revolution.

However, nature has its own laws. The harvest barely reached 8.5 million tons. It was an economic failure that awakened everyone to reality, the impossibility of achieving that productive dream, and with it, the segmentation of a landscape. In exchange, the official linguistic discourse was changed and reinterpreted as a “moral accomplishment”: “We have turned the setback into victory.” The material defeat transmuted into a spiritual triumph through the power of language; yet, while official discourses encouraged this “victory,” the countryside began its silent mutation. Without labor or resources to maintain them, the sugarcane fields were conquered. The marabú grew precisely in those interstices between discourse and reality, between utopia and its failed implementation.

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This binary system of meaning—so dependent on performance and repetition—finds a satirical mirror in the work of Levi Orta, who appropriates the very gestures of political iconography to expose their absurdity.

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Levi Orta copies paintings made by politicians, from George W. Bush to Vladimir Putin, in an act of critical mimesis that exposes the instrumentalization of art by power. What does it mean to repeat the gestures of power? Political Creation not only evidences the aesthetic mediocrity of the leaders, but also expropriates their propagandistic gesture. His work is a meme avant la lettre: he appropriates already empty images (such as Winston Churchill's landscapes or Alberto Fujimori's portraits) and replicates them to the point of exhausting their meaning. The project is an ironic critique of the cult of personality, but also an experiment in authorship: who is the artist here, Orta or the politician he plagiarizes? In Artwork Donation, he takes this logic to another level: infiltrating a piece into the archives of the Ministry of the Interior is like hacking the system from the inside, letting the censored machinery digest its own parody.

By exhausting the images of power, Orta reveals how repetition dilutes belief—how even the most triumphant phrase can turn into parody. This slow erosion of meaning is echoed in the Cuban landscape itself.

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The invasive Marabú species began to occupy the entire field space; disseminating and erasing the footprints of the thousands of people who went to till the land and the landscape of the dream. 10 Volumes: Fragments of a Shared Landscape emerges from this conceptual scenery. Like any exhibition on Cuba, this one is inevitably an exercise of cultural and political archaeology. The assembled artists— all born after the failure of the harvest—do not document the marabú, but operate with its same logic: they produce in the interstices of the official discourse, finding nutrients where there seem to be none; they transform the debris of history into creative raw material.

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If marabú is the botanical trace of failed ambitions, Pablo V. Bordón’s broken bulbs are their conceptual fossils—remnants of futures that never arrived.

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Pablo V. Bordón portrays broken light bulbs with a large‑format camera, in a metaphor that addresses the end of great ideas. In Tipologías de una Idea (Typologies of an Idea), burned light bulbs are photographed as if they were fossils of an extinct civilization. This work is an ironic play on failure: each light bulb is an exhausted idea, a future that has not arrived. The series is the artist's most political statement, inviting us to observe the death of EUREKA, the total blackout, from a pessimistic point of view. He not only documents a collapse but also suggests asking ourselves what kind of thought can be born from this darkness.

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Like burnt‑out ideas, the marabú multiplies in silence. It invades not with force, but with indifference, covering over what was once loudly declared.

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Reinaldo Cid captures this strange disjunction between what is said and what is lived. His works function like erased documents—truths revealed through what has been withheld.

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Cid adds his own layers to this geography of ideas. In HE B K F HE DEAD, Cid dismantles language like someone unearthing a ritual. By systematically erasing letters from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, he not only renders a sacred text useless, but also turns it into a broken mirror where each reader projects his or her own fears and hopes about death. The book, now an incomplete alphabet, operates as a metaphor of Cuban memory: full of official omissions that citizens must complete with imagination. On P.D., the artist uses photography as a means of objective documentation, by registering military earthworks. However, the real subject of these pictures is the impossibility of witnessing reality without mediation. By folding the photographic paper like sealed envelopes, Cid replicates the gesture of censorship: the information has to be cracked to reveal its true content; the visible parts of a story are always fragments of a whole.

Just as Cid's works ask viewers to decode absences, the marabú quietly encodes the loss of collective illusions in the soil itself.

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Fiction, in the Cuban landscape, has never been confined to language alone—it spreads to how the island is filmed, remembered, and imagined. This tension is at the heart of Duniesky Martín’s work El difícil acto de confundir el horizonte (The Difficult Act of Confusing the Horizon).

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Martín deconstructs Cuban landscapes filmed by Hollywood in fake locations. He exposes how the representation of the island has been an exercise of appropriation and fiction where countries such as Puerto Rico or Mexico served as substitute sets for an inaccessible Cuba. By isolating these fragments, Duniesky reveals the cultural colonialism that persists even in representation. His technique—the use of lenses that segment the landscapes—replicates the gesture of cinema: cutting out reality to construct an alien narrative. This series of drawings not only questions the artificial Hollywood look, but also the nostalgia of an idealized Cuba that never existed, neither inside nor outside the island.

While Martín dismantles cinematic representations, Linet Sánchez turns her gaze inward—toward architecture as memory’s fragile stage set.

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Sánchez’s work, Serie 00:00:00 #2, encapsulates the fragility of memory through empty architectural scenarios, where the non‑visible—the past, the repressed—outweighs the exhibited. Her empty models, photographed with a deliberately artificial aesthetic, evoke Marc Augé’s non‑lieux: rooms without identity, existing as containers of absent meanings. The reference to the scenic is crucial: these spaces are backstages, structures usually hidden behind a theatrical illusion. By showing them naked, Linet reveals that memory works the same way: it is a fragile assemblage, supported by invisible scaffolding. The staircase, the hallway, the bathroom—places of transit or intimacy—become metaphors for a psyche that can never be fully inhabited, only traversed.

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Both artists make visible the scaffolding behind Cuba’s visible surface—revealing that fiction and memory often grow in the same soil.

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The creators share the Cuban space, the education under the revolutionary ideology, and the need to feed on daily contrasts. However, each one has found its own fraction of horizon. Their works neither explain nor conclude because they understand Cuban contemporary experience resists any attempt at generalized representation; instead, they propose constellations of meaning that the viewer must traverse, as if walking through a labyrinth of changing meanings.

In such a fragmented terrain, identity becomes less a place than a trajectory. Clara Massó maps this experience through personal constellations of absence and connection.

Massó traces in Retrato de familia (Family Portrait) the geographical coordinates of her loved ones around the world, turning the family diaspora into a cosmic cartography. Each point in the video is not just a location, but also a node in an affection network that defies national borders. Her work dialogues with the emotional maps of artists such as Christian Boltanski, but with a key difference: it is not about tracing absences, but about redefining presence. Home is no longer a fixed place, but a constellation in movement. The choice of GPS coordinates as a visual language is significant: in the digital age, even the most intimate ties are mediated by geolocation systems. Massó questions the revolutionary concept of homeland from a micro perspective: how does one redefine belonging when family is scattered across the globe?

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In Massó’s work, belonging is no longer geographic—it is gravitational. A shifting orbit around loved ones, rather than the fixed point of a homeland.

Just as the marabú does not ask permission to grow, these artists develop their own ideas without seeking others’ approval.

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The body, too, becomes landscape—marked by history, weighed by expectations. In Khadis De la Rosa’s performances, this burden is made physical.

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De la Rosa turns military discipline into performance. In Estación (Station), the 67 military belts covering her are a second skin, a breastplate that speaks of the internalization of violence. The act of bearing the weight is a ritual of transition, as if the body had to undergo this test in order to be reborn. Resguardo(Keepsake), on the other hand, is intimate archaeology: the objects found in the pockets of uniforms are small relics of uniformed, disciplined lives that still kept shards of their essence: a flower, some strands of hair, a bullet casing… they are like the fragments in this exhibition: pieces of a shared but not homogeneous landscape. Shared as a wound is shared.

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While De la Rosa explores weight as endurance, Marianela Orozco treats the body as a temporal vessel—subject to both the gravity of time and the invisible strings of power.

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In the video‑performance Las Horas (The Hours), Marianela Orozco drops salt between her fingers, exploring the passive resistance of the body under systems of control. Las Horas is a meditation on time as an escaping substance. Salt, with its multiple symbolism—currency, preservative, tear—becomes a material clock. Every grain that falls is a second lost, an insufficient wage, an unresolved mourning. Like Lot’s wife, in the biblical story who ends up turned into a pillar of salt for looking back, the work shows us how nostalgia can also be a death trap in Cuba. Manipulation is also addressed in Sueño dirigido (Directed Dream), where invisible puppeteers control her sleeping body. It evokes the condition of the citizen in authoritarian states: even in her intimacy—sleep—the individual does not escape external direction. The slowness of the video underlines the everydayness of this oppression.

Their gestures, silent and persistent, echo the slow growth of marabú—each performance a root system beneath the surface of the official script.

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Osmel Herrera captures this paradox of Cuban cities—at once cages and beacons, lighthouses and prisons. His work becomes an urban fossil record of what fades and what survives.

Herrera, on the other hand, builds cities with illuminated cages: structures that are lighthouses, prisons, and, at the same time, houses. These light cages in Nombrar la ciudad (Naming the City) recall Havana's duality: a city that traps but also illuminates. The use of birdcages as architectural modules meets the idea of the contained desire for freedom. Pueblo Blanco (White Town), with its smoke drawings, takes this idea to the extreme: the blurred stains are the memories of a city that never was, or no longer is. Smoke, with its ephemeral state, symbolizes how urban memory vanishes under the weight of history.

In his hands, memory is both fragile and illuminating—a flicker against the darkness, like the possible blue we still search for.

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10 Volumes: Fragments of a Shared Landscape reflects the complex choreography of cultural life in Cuba, a constant dance of antonyms between what is said and what is suggested, between presence and absence. The exhibition thus proposes an alternative cartography of the island, where the “shared landscape” of the title is conflictive, not a unity but a collection of fragments. The works dialogue with each other like marabú sprouts in an abandoned field: each one grows in a seemingly random direction, but together they compose a new ecosystem. When they work with recovered materials or intervene in spaces with installations, they are charting an unnamed collective experience that can only be mapped through their material traces.

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The marabú, in fact, is just an excuse, a starting point to talk about all those strategies of daily resilience that Cubans have developed to continue existing in the midst of fractures. The importance lies not within the plant itself, but what we can do with it: transform it into fuel in the midst of power outages, into raw material when resources are scarce, into a metaphor when words are lacking. In the same way, these works take the debris of official history—its failures, its unfulfilled promises, and its abandoned spaces—and turn them into devices for intimate and collective reflection at the same time. Although the landscape is broken, we are still here, looking at the sea and the city at the same time, searching for a blue that is neither that of propaganda nor that of nostalgia.

A blue that is simply possible.

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Sarah-Lis Muniz-Bueno Aljovín (Matanzas, Cuba, 1993.)

Independent curator and professor at the Higher Institute of Art (ISA), graduated in Art History from the University of Havana (2017). Specialist in contemporary Cuban art galleries, she has worked at N-21artstudio Gallery, Servando Emerging Art Gallery (representing at fairs like Artbo and Zona Maco), and Havana Gallery. She founded ENLACE (2021), a collaborative curatorial network. Additionally, she has coordinated educational exchange programs such as CIEE and API,and Son Dos Alas  promoting intercultural dialogue and the development of emerging artists.

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