Cuban artists bring perspective of their homeland via Cleveland Institute of Art’s ‘The Cuba Project’

For many Americans, Cuba alternately is ground zero for the eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation of John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev over nuclear missiles; a poverty-stricken island cruelly oppressed by Fidel Castro; the place the United States imprisons terror suspects; or the home of the best cigars American money can’t buy—as Chuck Yarborough writes in The Plain Dealer.
But as Uncle Duke once intoned in a Garry Trudeau “Doonesbury” cartoon: “Even in Utopia, there is myopia.” What Americans see isn’t necessarily real.
For sure, the isolated country 90 miles off Florida is not a “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” example of urban sprawl. It’s primarily agrarian, and anything “new” is an aberration. As in most such societies, though, Cubans have learned to “make do.”
David Hart, a 52-year-old assistant professor of art history at the Cleveland Institute of Art, said that the decades-old U.S. embargo has fostered a layer of…