Cuban Slugger                                                                                                

By Gary A. Anuez

Reynerio Tamayo was always a chronicler, as any good Cuban, 

“a jodedor” (A joker), a type of artist who narrates, that makes stories and at the same time legitimizes the story and almost always through laughter. He put things in place, but on that place where the art makes it simple. His great and long career always noted the Cuban man, in this case, with all its contradictions, its culture, its joys and woes without taking sides in ideologies or trends only in its almost religious zeal of a constant artistic practice that goes beyond the trends, gestures, positions or tourist needs, and attitudes that move Cuban arts within or outside of the island today.

In his disadvantage he has an advantage, in his pain and his limitations is the springboard to that height which can only be reached in this constant reinvention that the Cuban people practice in their desire to transcend an era, a time, a moment.

Cuba is baseball (among other things of course) and baseball has always been to Cuba the sublime. The practice of making a game, the moment of ecstasy and the sublime, a reminder to the needs of the day-to-day, what is lacking as the antithesis of what is left over, and a lot of talent in the history of this sport. In this time interval, which defines to generations of Cubans, and this artist exposes it as an educational and historical document on those past glories, but not forgotten of our national sport.

There are ingredients in Tamayo’s work, intertextual dialog from the appointment to the reiteration as a symbolic element to define a counterpoint that places us in this geographical space. In a rare animal of an island that survives due to the repercussions of the times, to the history, and geopolitics. Our history is static, immobile (aplatanada), but always hopeful and looking for ways for the resurgence, but collective at least individual that is where is the beginning of all restorative and creative work, the emancipation of all the darkness that precedes and exceeds life, the history itself.

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The value of the art of Tamayo is that constant movement and interaction of the values of his culture, that continues to prevail in the political shocks and cyclones, molding his work in one direction. The importance of men in their constant becoming, in their struggles and battles for the spaces and moments that history and society forces them to face in this life.

In this example the sport is in celebration, and through art, the two spaces become authentic overcoming the social impact as the living memory that defines and absorbs several generations of Cubans who were great exponents of this sport, so rooted in the Cuban cultural tradition.

There is no better concern that defines an artist, and Reynerio, has always had the grace of melting languages and traditions into his artistic work, and not only from an aesthetic perspective, but from the cultural anthropological ingredients that have defined his artistic production for more than twenty five years.