Wifredo Lam and Fernando Ortiz

Afrocubanismo spawned a number of artists, such as the painter Wifredo Lam, composer Amadeo Roldán and the poet Nicolás Guillén, who often drew inspiration from black working-class street culture and sought to establish and promote the value of popular black musical, artistic and literary forms as vital elements of national identity.

Afro-Chinese Cuban artist Wifredo Lam employed Cubist painting techniques inspired by Afro-Carribean religions. His surrealist compositions present his mythic, erotic and syncretic influences in supernatural and abstract forms, and his artwork sought to liberate Afro-Cubans from cultural subjugation during a time in which Cuba was in danger of corrupting its African heritage. The Jungle, which is considered Lam's masterpiece, intends to relate a Santería-inspired spiritual state; here, Lam simultaneously expresses the spirit of Afro-Cuban culture while attending to the way their traditions were debased for the sake of tourism.

Wifredo Lam, The Jungle (1943)

Notwithstanding his intellectual formation within a white and Hispanophile cultural elite, the Cuban ethnographer Fernando Ortiz left an intellectual legacy of astonishing breadth and erudition that asserted Cuba's cultural debts to Africa. Motivated by what he saw as a complete lack of sociological research on blacks in Cuba, Ortiz set out to methodically chronicle and catalog all of Cuba's African-derived forms to undo years of heretofore Negrophobic musicology by scholars who denied any African influences in Cuban music. He pioneered the use of the term Afro-Cuban in his 1906 book, Los negros brujos, and developed the concept of transculturation, considered his most influential contribution, which is distinguishable from assimilation in that it acknowledges ongoing struggle and creative resistance that mutually transforms two or more cultures.