After independence, architecture was one of the most popular courses of study at the university, because it led to lucrative contracts and positions with the Ministry of Public Works. Generally, modern Cuban architects have used functional, monolithic concrete or marble forms, ill-adapted to the subtropical setting. There are exceptions to this, notably, the Tribunal de Cuentas (Court of Accounts), known as one of the most "felicitous" buildings in all of Latin America. It was designed by Aquiles Capablanca y Graupera and displays the influence of Lé Corbusier. Built between 1952 and 1954, it incorporates various textures of stone; an exterior mural of ceramic tile by Amelia Peláez is an integral part of the building's design.

Since 1959 many new schools and playgrounds have shown considerable ingenuity and lightness. The National School of Art, designed by Ricardo Parro, is actually a complex of buildings that houses facilities for students of art, drama, dance, and music. Rounded, domed structures of brick and concrete are connected by covered walkways and narrow open courtyards.

Cuban sculpture had a late beginning. The major modern movement began when José Gómez-Sicre (b. 1916), Cuba's most renowned sculptor, returned to the country after many years of study in Europe and introduced European forms, largely French neoclassical. His best pupils are the contemporary sculptors Alfredo Lozano, Roberto Estopiñán, and Agustín Cárdenas. Estopiñán makes great use of the intricate patterns of Cuba's tropical vegetation, whereas Cárdenas' work is more simplified, tending toward elongated shapes. Alfredo Lozano has created sculpture for a play-park in Havana. Sculpture too has its exponents of Afro-Cuban themes, the most representative of which is Teodor Ramos Blanco.

The first art academy, the San Alejandro Academy, was established in 1818 as the successor of a school of painting organized by the French painter, Jean Baptiste Vermay. Until the 1920s, however, Cuban painters were largely trained in the academic school and followed Spanish and eighteenth-century French models. After Cuba gained independence, its artists turned away from Spanish and colonial culture, and many sought to absorb the latest European developments. In the 1920s Leopoldo Romanach, who finally broke with the academic tradition, headed the academy. Many students returning from Paris joined him, and the result was a rapid blossoming of a vibrant, rhythmic and colorful art movement.

Cuban contemporary artists (as did their predecessors) draw upon all schools for their technique and method of handling color, but in terms of subject matter they divide into two schools: a criollo group that draws upon the vestiges of colonial life with the natural

landscape and people; and an Afro-Cuban group that uses material drawn from Negro life, particularly magic and religion.

The most noted exponent of the criollo group is Amelia Peláez, who studies with Picasso and Braque. Her work, which has been widely exhibited, is cubist in form and uses elements of Cuba's vegetation and its colonial architecture.

The criollo painters referred chiefly to a Spanish and upper class culture increasingly irrelevant to modern Cuba, refreshed erratically by modern Spanish, French, and Mexican art. Its uncertain inspiration is evident, for example, in the work of Mario Carreno (active in Chile since 1958); it reveals the influence of the various schools with which he had been in contact. He has, however, been primarily a geometric abstractionist. In the 1960s he painted organisms mutated by the atomic bomb, as in his Love, done in 1964.

In contrast, the work of the best-known painter of the AfroCuban school, Wilfredo Lam, shows the steady development of a highly personal idiom. The influence of Picasso and other Europeans, classical and modern, is evident, but in all except the early painters it is subordinated to the artist's own experience and an unmistakable regional inspiration. Popular Afro-Cuban rituals and costumes contributed strongly to the symbolism employed. Lam was born in 1902 of Chinese and Negro parents. He studied in Madrid and Paris, returning to Cuba during World War II. Leading museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, have purchased his work.

Leading painters in the 1960s include pop artist Raúl Martínez, a painter of political portraits, and Antonia Eírez, an expressionist painter whose subjects are tortured-looking people, akin to those of the British painter Francis Bacon. Cuban engravings in wood, metal, and linoleum are of excellent quality and show imaginative and full use of their respective materials.

CHAPTER 11

RELIGION

As of early 1970 about 85 percent of the people consider themselves to be Roman Catholics. In the urban areas where churches are located, only a small proportion were practicing Catholics. Because of the lack of churches and mixture of Catholicism and African tradition in the rural areas, very few rural persons were practicing Catholics. Most of the people, nevertheless, consider themselves Catholics.

There were, moreover, a number of Protestant churches predominantly in the urban areas serving a religious body estimated at 250,000 persons. Among the smaller religious communities were about 17,000 Jehovah's Witnesses and about 150 Jewish families. The Witnesses and the African cults were the only religious groups other than Catholics located in the rural areas where the government draws its main support.

There was no official religion or national church in the country in early 1970. The government was avowedly atheistic but was more nonreligious than antireligious. Only the Jehovah's Witnesses were the object of government pressure.

The Roman Catholic Church has never been as powerful in Cuban national life as it was in other countries of Latin America, and Church and state have been constitutionally separate since the beginning of the twentieth century. The general attitude toward the clergy has ranged from indifference to active hostility. Nevertheless, since most of the people are of Spanish extraction and have been influenced by Spanish Catholic culture, attitudes, and values-expressed in innumerable details of thought and observance are those of a Catholic country. The strongest supporters of the Church have always come from the wealthy, Spanish-oriented upper class, which believed in the maintenance of the status quo. Leaders of the principal revolutionary movements made the Church one of their major targets.

Both before and during the republican years, competing moral systems were offered by the rationalism of many middle-class intellectuals, Protestant missionaries, and the African traditions brought in by slaves. Anticlerical rationalism, in the form of freemasonry, was aligned with independence sentiments and competed on equal terms with Catholicism through parallel institutions. Protestantism,

which offered a philosophy not only relatively new to Cuba but in many respects culturally and morally alien, continued to compete with Catholicism.

Catholicism, rationalism, and Protestantism were principally associated with the middle and upper classes during the republican years. In the urban lower class, cults resulting from the synthesis of African and Catholic traditions grew in importance. These cults are regarded by their devotees as orthodox Catholicism, but the Church itself regards the cults as a degenerate composite of popular superstitions. Many other less-developed cults had sporadic influence in the urban lower classes. In the relatively unevangelized rural areas where communities are either indifferent to, or cannot finance activities, religious activity of any kind has been minimal.

Between the period of the founding of the country and independence, the Catholic Church was active in education and charitable organizations and had an important voice in political affairs. With independence, the Church was separated from the state, education was secularized (although the Church retained its private schools), charitable organizations became the concern of the government, and the Church was stripped of its political influence. Protestant missionary activity began, but Catholicism was still the national church and diplomatically aligned itself with incumbent administrations. After the 1952 coup by Fulgencio Batista and until late 1958, the attitude of the Church continued to encourage the status quo; only in late 1958 and 1959 did some Church members, along with some Protestant groups, recommend opposition to government policies. A few members of both the Catholic and Protestant clergy became active in the 1959 Revolution.

As the Castro administration leaned increasingly left, the Church saw its centuries-old position threatened. A confrontation ensued that resulted in severe restrictions on religious activities, the expulsion and flight of a large percentage of the clergy, and the confinement of the Church to strictly devotional functions; its schools and many of its buildings were nationalized. The Protestant community, less outspoken in either its support or condemnation of Castro, suffered equally under government restrictions and nationalization laws. A number of its clergy and laity were jailed or exiled. Almost the entire Jewish community went into exile.

For most of the religious communities, the tensions that existed in relations between church and state in the early years of the Revolution had eased by the end of the 1960s. The improved new relations are, for the most part, the results of efforts of a few individuals in the church hierarchies and do not necessarily reflect the attitudes of the clergy or the laity. Only the Jehovah's Witnesses remain the object of government surveillance, and at times, persecution.