Cuba entered a “rectification period” (1986–1990) as a response to the perceived need to set right economic “errors” and “negative tendencies” such as individualism that resulted from market reforms in the early 1980s. Performance artists also sought to raise awareness of societal problems during this period.

  

They wanted to “Revive the Revolu[tion]” (to borrow from the title of performance troupe ArteCalle’s 1988 performance installation, “Reviva la Revolu”), but called on society to do so.

In 1986 Consuelo Castañeda and Humberto Castro (b. 1957) entered a Unión Nacional de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba (UNEAC; National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba) meeting on art and sexuality dressed in giant phalluses and threw milk at those present. 

Juan-Si González, Jorge Crespo, Eliseo Valdéz, and several others performed short, controversial and critical pieces in buses, in front of Coppelia’s outdoor ice cream parlor, and in the centrally located corner of 23 and G streets. Ricardo Vega carefully documented these performances through film and they can now be seen thanks to the recuperation work of Ofill Echeverría and Glexis Novoa. Many criticized their performances for not being “aesthetically or formally well-done.” But their aim was to perform without any institutional mediation allowing the spectators to take over the public spaces offered under an “aesthetic” guise.

When security agents physically repressed them, they formed the group ART-DE, an acronym for Arte Derecho and a Spanish homonym for “burning.”