<DIV>This bilingual (English and Spanish) book offers the first comprehensive study of Grupo Antillano, an Afro-Cuban visual arts and cultural movement that thrived between 1978 and 1983 and has been written out of Cuban cultural and art history. Grupo Antillano articulated a vision of Cuban culture that privileged the importance of Africa and of Afro-Caribbean influences in the formation of the Cuban nation. In contrast to the official characterization of Santeria and other African religious and cultural practices as primitive and retrograde during the 1970s, Grupo Antillano valiantly proclaimed the centrality of African practices in national culture. They viewed Africa and the surrounding Caribbean not as a dead cultural heritage, but as a vibrant, ongoing and vital influence that continued to define what it meant to be Cuban. Some Afro-Cuban intellectuals, such as the noted ethnomusicologist Rogelio Martínez Furé, who was a collaborator of the group, even proclaimed that a "new," authentic Cuban art (radical, popular, black) had been born. That is the art that this book seeks to recover and to honor.<br></DIV>