Portrait of activist Tai wearing a sugarcane cross in her hair. Sugar was the reason why hundreds of thousands of Africans were torn from their villages and taken to sugar plantations in Cuba. The Catholic Church attempted to evangelize black people so that they would forget their pagan gods and somehow justify this process of slavery.
Portrait of the rap singer La Reina wearing the crown and necklace of the Orisha Yemayá. Yeyamayá is the Orisha who has crowned La Reina as a saint in the Ocha-Ifá religion. Portrait of a slave who was a santera.
Portrait of rapper Yisi Calibre. Map of Africa.
Portrait of rap singer La Fina over an image of the tomb in Havana’s Colón Cemetery of the Sánchez Ferrara family, belonging to Cuba’s “sacracrocia” (a sugarcane plantation industry), the economic elite that grew rich from slave labor.
Portrait of Inaury, deputy director of the Casa de África Museum and an expert in African culture. Image of original shackles used by slaves and a deed of sale between a slave and her daughter.
Portrait of model and actress Jessica Borroto with cowries. These shells have great value and significance in Yoruba culture. They are used as currency and decorative elements, and are also used for divination and in religious ceremonies. Jessica has refused to straighten her hair to walk on runways or act in films or TV series in Cuba.
Portrait of the singer and model Ivena. Ivena is of Caucasian, Black, and Chinese descent. Advertisement for the sale of slaves. Living room of the Mena family mansion, one of the families enriched by the slave trade and sugarcane plantations in Havana.
Portrait of the singer and model Ivena. Ivena is of Caucasian, Black, and Chinese descent. Advertisement for the sale of slaves. Living room of the Mena family mansion, one of the families enriched by the slave trade and sugarcane plantations in Havana.
Rap singer Yisi Calibre’s hand holding a microphone. A man’s hand holding a machete for cutting sugarcane at one of the sugarcane plantations in the city of Güines, Mayabeque province.
During the time of slavery in Cuba, women’s heads became a map made of braids and shapes that only they understood. The braids showed the paths they had marked as escape routes. They also stored seeds that would later be used to grow crops in the palenques.
Pelo Malo is a journey of discovery and recognition of Afro pride in which Cuban hip hop singers with feminist and anti-racist messages, together with civil activists, reclaim their African heritage. Afro hair, together with Afro aesthetics in clothing, has become a tool for Afro-descendants in Cuba to reclaim their identity in recent years.
The expression “pelo malo,” which is a negative expression towards black people’s hair, has a meaning that goes beyond its literal meaning. This expression embodies an appalling racism that persists to this day in Cuba. It perpetuates racist stereotypes that associate beauty and social acceptance with Eurocentric characteristics, making the decolonization of beauty a necessary path to follow. This harmful narrative devalues Afro-descendant identity and culture. Beauty standards have been one of the most effective mechanisms in constructing the racist discourses employed by colonial powers.
In Pelo Malo, I have used archival images, original objects, and elements related to racism and slavery to generate a visual discourse between the past and the present. A journey into the island’s slave-owning past to understand the origins of the racism that permeates Cuban society at all levels. A journey into the past to understand the present of the new generations of Afro-descendants.
