The time that has elapsed since the founding birth that transformed the aristocratic Country Club of Havana into an area of study and coexistence to train children and young people in different manifestations of artistic creation and interpretation, has demonstrated the transcendental value of that event.
It was in 1962 when he launched a project announced the previous year –during the meeting of the Directorate of the Revolutionary Government with writers and artists at the National Library–, which has been one of the most fruitful in the last 60 years of cultural construction: the opening of the National School of Art (ENA). Of the five educational centers that integrated it (Music, Modern Dance, Performing Arts, Ballet and Plastic Arts), connected as «communicating vessels», in the first and second decades of its existence a considerable number of creators emerged with valuable results; and the bulk of teachers in these disciplines also emerged from an extraordinary crusade embodied in the Cuban Artistic Education of the last five decades.
There were three then triumphant young guerrillas: Fidel, Che and Celia, who agreed on the idea of establishing “a city of art” there. Hence, after the Literacy Campaign, literacy instructors arrived at the Cubanacán District and were sent by the Rebel Army’s Directorate of Culture, who in 1962 formed the first group of students of the ENA complex. The purpose was to open a comprehensive vocational field of education for everyone with skills, based on a new professional movement in the arts, bearer of the humanistic sense of the social transformation undertaken. A conversation between Carlos Rafael Rodríguez and the local student body, later published by the Cuban Book Institute with the title art and revolutiondefined in the second five years of the 1960s fundamental questions about the conjunction of creativity, freedom and responsibility, which animated this new entity.
It was a common habitat of life, studies and intercommunication of dissimilar imaginaries, capable of merging local learning traditions of the different artistic manifestations with universal vectors of renewal, expressive diversity and pedagogical thought specialized in aesthetics, inherent in the modern world. Those of us who came to study at the National School of Art in 1965 found a center with plural study programs and a complementary approach in order to design an informed, advanced, civic, patriotic and supportive artist.
Both the few remaining members of the foundational cloisters, as well as the students of that first stage, can attest to the richness of that managing panorama of knowledge and imagination, oriented towards a necessary harmonized differentiation of individualities.
The Directorate of Artistic Education of the National Council of Culture took care of the polyformity of the teaching methods, as well as that permanent connection of the ENA with the artistic practices of the country and international changes; and he also turned his teaching plans into guides to reshape the pedagogy of the arts throughout Cuba. In fact, the ENA –whose category was the highest in its educational sphere– became a source of learning in tune with modernity, the productive relationship between the aesthetic and the historical, and the possibility of nurturing ourselves from the evolutionary crossroads of the visual, sound, body and performing arts. His contributions would become a platform for the Latin American Encounters of Artistic Teaching held in the 70’s and 80’s; and also paradigms for art schools of other nations; at the same time that they served from 1976 to the Higher Institute of Art of Cuba, which would have members of the cloisters and artist-professors from the five national art schools.
If we take as a revealing example of the time of genesis of that great institution the School of Plastic Arts, we will see that it amalgamated universal principles of the Bauhaus, Torres García, Polish graphics, German and Mexican engraving, as well as North American The Art Students League. Resources of surrealist, expressionist and informalist operations were also assumed, in addition to drinking in Concrete Art and Pop Art. And the personal perspectives of important Cuban and foreign artists, who became unique teachers of Sculpture, Engraving and Painting, also participated in their didactics. . Of them we name Martínez Pedro, Darié, Antonia Eiriz, Servando, Adigio, Beltrán, Jamís, Rigol, Lesbia, Moret, Yanes, Masiques, Fernando Luis, Sergio Martínez and Armando Fernández. This initial faculty was completed by the Polish poster artist Selenik, a German designer trained at the Bahaus, the Italian ceramist Carlo Ferri and the Peruvian engraver-ceramist Francisco Espinoza Dueñas. Without missing the workshops offered by Roberto Matta and Antonio Saura.
Although it should not be forgotten that this art school maintained its activity in the 1970s, with changes in teachers that included Osneldo, Antigua, Antonio Vidal and Abela Alonso; and equal to graduates from that center in the late 1960s and the first five years of the 1970s (1).
There are many names of Cuban art that passed through their learning spaces, among them, some who would later study at the ISA Faculty of Plastic Arts, founded with pedagogical guidance from Soviet academic advisers, who did not understand the evolutionary modernity of Cuban art and influenced the decrease in the teaching level awarded to the Cubanacán School of Plastic Arts. It was so that, when this one was equal in rank with the San Alejandro provincial school, which emerged as an Academy since 1818, the latter would remain as the only Havana school of studies for the teaching in question, which caused the artificial extinction of its equal specialty of the ENA.
Something similar happened with the rest of the specialties that were articulated in the National School of Art, although these have remained until the present.
In Music, we started from a terrain fertilized by classical teaching, and alternatives for learning the art of sounds of the 20th century were assumed at the same time. The School of Dramatic Arts was based on a sum of knowledge from previous centuries, completed by concepts of Stanislavsky, Brecht, Grotowsky and others; although always through the individual experience of directors, actors and technicians of the stage making of our capital. Modern Dance had a mystified teaching of dance and body expression, which integrated pedagogical-dance variants derived from Marta Graham, Isadora Duncan, Maurice Béjart and the Cuban Ramiro Guerra. Both Alonso and Alicia renewed the Creole ballet code with new class exercises and training methods that would give dynamism and identity to the corresponding study center.
Having been a substantial part of a revolutionary process with multiple institutional seeds for the good of the nation’s spirituality; and proposing as a rule to develop talents that opt for dreams of service and a consequent expansion of the languages of art in the country, give the ENA an indisputable seat of vital performance and transcendence within the fertile trunk of our culture.
(1) Some of those new teachers at that time were: Luis Miguel Valdés, Roberto Pandolfi, Nelson Domínguez, Eduardo Roca (Choco), Ernesto García Peña, José Villa, Tomás Sánchez, René Negrín, Enrique Angulo, Juan Quintanilla, Rafael Paneca, Hortensia Peramo and Manuel López Oliva.