For Nereida García Ferraz, the past has played a dominant role in her art, as she was deeply moved by a desire to reconnect and develop a relationship with Cuba. By the time her parents decided to leave the island in the early years of the Revolution, the doors to the United States had already been shut. Until 1970, they lived in a limbo: no longer wanted in Cuba but unable to leave. Those who declared their intent to leave the island were banished to an internal exile of sorts in which they were excluded from active participation in the society. This banishment included the children of the household as well. During this period of her life, García Ferraz trained herself to remember the images she was about to lose. Images became mnemonic devices for her to remember her family life in Cuba. [31]
In the early 1970s, after finally arriving in the United States and during a particularly brutally cold Chicago winter, García Ferraz's father abandoned the family. Her mother and three siblings were left to fend for themselves. For years, García Ferraz carried with her the emotional consequences of her parents' divorce and the family's disintegration. Art became a way for her to remember. She completed her BFA in photography at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. While she concentrated in photography, she also began to sketch, and eventually to paint with oils on canvas. On colorful images of female bodies, boats, island plant life, and animals, she would write phrases, using text as a way to reconnect to her native language and to embed on the image a more complex story. This work is characterized by longing and nostalgia of a world left behind, but it was also defiant, in that it was a testimony of the refusal to forget.
But her paintings had more to say. They began to reflect her desire to return to the island of her childhood. Each canvas was a journey of return. Travel to the island had been prohibited by both governments. Cubans could leave the homeland, but not return. Family separations grew long. That began to change in 1978 under the Carter administration, when the United States and Cuba negotiated a series of agreements including the release of political prisoners, increased immigration, and the possibility of exiles to return to Cuba for short visits. García Ferraz became part of the Antonio Maceo Brigade, and in 1979, joined a group of almost 200 young Cuban exiles who traveled to the island. These were emotional journeys to the past but also a confrontation with the new Cuba. Influenced by radical politics and perhaps also a need to belong, García Ferraz's return to Cuba, as for many other young exiles, myself included, were filled with nostalgia and longing. On her first trips, García Ferraz used her camera to capture black-and-white images of an island haunted by ruins, exoduses, and memories. She photographed other returning young exiles, as well as her grandmother and aunt, who had never left.
But García Ferraz wanted more than just temporary visits. For her, Cuba had been the only place where her family had been together. In the next several decades, she found ways to stay for longer periods of time. In 2013, as Cuba started granting exiles permission to begin a process of repatriation as part of a new migration reform, García Ferraz secured hers, eventually obtaining a space of her own in Havana. Her work during this time is revealing. At first, her canvases became smaller, perhaps because that made it easier to transport them between Havana and Miami. But perhaps they also became smaller because they were more intimate and explored more explicit memories of her childhood. This period coincided with her mother's death, heightening her need to reconnect with Cuba.
In one of the first series she created in Havana, titled Havana/Miami, García Ferraz took pages from old books and glued these to a larger white canvas. On these she drew and painted. The first pieces in the series became vivid fragments of memories of herself and her mother.
Also in the series are images that attempt to recover and express the disintegration of her family and the burden she felt in holding it all together.
In the final piece in the series, García Ferraz paints herself standing on a stack of books, looking at a solitary star similar to the one found on the Cuban flag. Yet in the piece, that solitary star is a gaping hole, an empty promise of hope.