Yoel Díaz Vázquez

Previsión: A Critical Fabulation of a Silenced Newspaper

Reclaiming a Voice

Yoel Díaz Vázquez’s (b. Havana, Cuba, 1973; lives and works in Berlin) works examine how power, ideology, and colonial dynamics shape social, cultural, and historical memories while also spotlighting individual and collective responses that challenge these structures. Combining video, photography, drawing, sculpture, installation, and printmaking, he transforms archival materials and his own documentary records into novel narratives. At the core of his work is the effort to give visibility to marginalized voices.

For his most recent project, Díaz Vázquez has developed a contemporary reissue of the newspaper Previsión. It was founded in 1908 by Evaristo Estenoz as the organ of the Afro-Cuban political party Partido Independiente de Color (PIC), which advocated for the rights of Black Cubans and was brutally suppressed in 1912—on the orders of the second president of the Republic of Cuba, José Miguel Gómez—following an uprising. The artist addresses the massacre of the newspaper’s editor and thousands of members of the party, which marked the culmination of the suppression of Afro-Cuban movements and which was repressed from collective memory for decades.

The publication combines his works with archival materials and contributions by Sandra Álvarez Ramírez, Alejandro de la Fuente, Yoel Díaz Vázquez, Arsenio Rodríguez Quintana, Anamely Ramos, and Yesenia Selier.