Servando Cabrera Moreno
1923-1981, Havana
Servando Cabrera Moreno was not only a great painter and draftsman who mastered various subjects, genres, visual languages, materials, and techniques. He was also astoundingly prolific, and his fecundity in creating art was equal only to his generosity in giving it away. Being free of many responsibilities—“family duties as well as labor or social” duties—he was able to dedicate much of his time to making art. Such was the opinion, not without a certain caustic quality, expressed by another renowned Cuban artist, Raúl Martínez, who criticized Cabrera Moreno
...for two reasons: the first and most significant, because he churned out banal works which bore the mark of professional skill but were devoid of authentic artistic expression. The second and lesser reason was that, by giving away his superfluous works—so numerous that he did not know what to do with them—he saturated our environment. Not only was there nowhere you could visit for the first time without finding a “Servando,” but a lot of those people, accustomed to his prodigious output, upon visiting me asked immediately for a free “Raúl Martínez” to hang at home. (Yo Publio. Confesiones de Raúl Martínez. Havana, Artecubano/Letras Cubanas, second edition, s.a., p. 340.)
However, the deceptively simple Little Red Woodpecker—Heart of the Plantain is an ink drawing that stands out from the legions of “banal works” to which Martínez alludes. Although he had no high regard for Cabrera Moreno’s oeuvre—which included figurative as well as abstract art, neocubism, and portraits, and which delved into “social,” epic, and erotic subjects—Martínez did acknowledge Cabrera Moreno’s merits as an “extraordinary draftsman.”
This piece fully confirms the skill of one of the most important artists of the 1960s and 1970s. But this ink drawing is more than a testament to mere technical virtuosity; it organically melds signifier and signified. It bears expressive kinship to the work that earned Cabrera Moreno an Honorable Mention for the internationally prestigious Joan Miró Prize in 1969: another ink drawing full of erotic connotations expressed in its title, Flor de carne (Flesh Flower)—a blend of poetry and salaciousness.
Cabrera Moreno chose the titles for his works very carefully—for his paintings at least. Before they were even born, they already had names, in Spanish, which the artist used to write in his notebooks. The title Little Red Woodpecker—Heart of the Plantain suggests multiple meanings of an erotic, sexual nature. In Cuban slang, el plátano—the plantain—means the penis; the heart of the plantain may therefore suggest a visceral penetration. In turn, for Cubans pájaro (bird) is a gay man, a homosexual. And this particular bird, the woodpecker, pierces tree trunks with its bill, a maneuver reminiscent of penetration or oral sex. And so forth…
This multiplicity of meanings is taken a step further by the image. Cabrera Moreno barely sketches the thighs, making the crotch the center of attention, giving it volume and a painterly treatment through the nuanced use of color. The penis is not merely drawn, but emphasized, magnified in a sort of ultra-close-up. It could almost be said that he rubs the viewer’s nose on it.
Little Red Woodpecker… is closely related to the erotic series dedicated by Cabrera Moreno to the city of Seville, Spain, which he considered “a symbol of love” and visited every year. This was a series that he started in the 1970s, and which came to an unexpected end with the artist’s death, which occurred the same year that this ink drawing was made.
This drawing also pays homage to Cabrera Moreno’s previous expressionist period, in which he tortured the human body into uncomfortable positions or magnified it on a grand scale, in an attempt to capture the revolutionary—and above all, virile—violence of the effervescent Cuban revolution. Cabrera Moreno’s expressionism showed the stylistic influence of his Spanish friend, Antonio Saura, and was also distinguished by the mutilation of human anatomy or the magnification of extreme, forced poses—an “intemperance” congruent with the impetus of sexual coupling.
But Little Red... has the exceptional quality of a truly unique work. Moreover, it shuns the obvious overstatement. Here, the penis is not shown erect. (Cabrera Moreno, in fact, did not usually represent it standing at attention, so to speak, but more often in the at-ease position—to use military terms.) Even so, he enhanced its masculinity through its considerable dimensions.
In the male chauvinist, phallocentric Cuban society, the overt representation of a penis should not have triggered moralistic censorship. However, censors did prey on Cabrera Moreno, who had been previously forced to abandon his epic period because it was questioned whether a homosexual—then considered an ideologically weak individual, a deviant—could authentically depict a robust, vigorous patriotic sentiment.
Today, there is in Havana a museum and library devoted to the study and preservation of Cabrera Moreno’s art, but in life he was ostracized for being gay and was not allowed to teach because he was not considered a “good moral example” for impressionable students. Taking this back-story into account, his depiction of the penis seems a paean to homosexuality. Works in this vein, such as El campeón (The Champion), were removed from public exhibitions and buried deep in the storage rooms of cultural institutions.
In any event, Little Red... is full of ambiguity. It is, perhaps, reminiscent of the paranoid imagery so dear to Dalí—a painter and draftsman whom Cabrera Moreno greatly admired. No doubt such ambiguity makes this drawing even more suggestive, provocative, and defiant.
— Israel Castellanos León
