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46 / Neel’s Social Realist Artmoribund when Neel arrived in Havana, Cuban literature and anthropologywere thriving. The decade from 1923 to 1933 was also to be a dynamic periodof political, educational, and cultural reform, during which the dictatorship ofGerardo Machado (1925–1933) was brought down. According to Martinez:“The most enduring contribution of the Cuban reform movement . . . was creatinga strong sense of nationalism or cubanidad.” 3 In books published between1906 and 1913, the anthropologist Fernando Ortiz had deƒned “LoCubano,” that which is Cuban, as the mix of Indian, Spanish, and African culturesfound in ajiaco, a Cuban stew. Spanish Harlem was a different sort ofstew, but after 1938 Neel would set herself the task of deƒning its culture, asOrtiz had done for Cuba.Cuban modernism was similarly characterized as a mixture of Europeanmodernism on the one hand and the native Indian and African traditions,Criollismo and Afrocubanismo, on the other. Moreover, the emerging avantgardeallied itself with social and political reform. The poet and communistleader Juan Martinello called artists to the cause: “Only art [can] achieve ourtotal liberation.” 4 As in the United States, socially conscious art frequently appearedin cartoon form in left-wing magazines such as Social (1916–1936) andCarteles (1919–1960), edited by the caricaturist Conrado Massaguer, as wellas by Carpentier, Martinello, and the essayist Jose Z. Tallet. Both magazinesdecried the lack of state support for the arts, and their efforts helped to pave theway for the establishment of public art education and mural projects in 1937.Throughout the decade, artists used their skills “as weapons to criticize theZayas and Machado regimes.” Among the most widely published of these effortswere Enríquez’s illustrations for El Terror de Cuba, published in 1933 inboth Spain and France by the Comité de Jovenes Revolucionarios Cubanos. 5Carteles and Social were the counterparts to the Masses and the Liberatorin the United States, and their use of art as a weapon anticipated Neel’s subsequentafƒliation with American social realism, speciƒcally her Masses &Mainstream illustrations from the 1940s.The one radical journal devoted exclusively to the arts was Revista deAvance, which between 1927 and 1930 called for and deƒned the vanguardmovement. Its ƒrst editorial, by Jorge Manach in the March 15, 1927, issue,was entitled “Vanguardismo: La ƒsonomia de las Epocas.” In May 1927, Revistade Avance sponsored the ƒrst exhibition of Cuban avant-garde art, the“Exposicion de Arte Nuevo,” which marked the beginning of a new direction,as the journal proudly proclaimed in its April 15 issue, brandishing such termsas “militant,” “new,” and “avant-garde.” As Martinez points out, the nineartists’ works were at most “mild versions of European modernist styles,” butthey were radical by Cuban standards at the time. In his autobiography Of