MONICA MARIA GARABITO
Belkis Ayón. Siempre vuelvo [I Always Return], 1994
The background is black, so black that the torso of a white figure seems to rise from a void. The white silhouette is wrapped in luminous, shadowy grey flames. The figure’s face is pierced by several sticks. Its gaze is hollow, distant. Where we might expect the mouth, a large mark covers it, as if silencing it. Censoring it. The rest of the torso is woven into an ecology of snakes, fish, and plants. The hands are crossed over the body.
Beneath this figure, three bodies emerge from the darkness. They are marked by the same elements: plants and fish. One conceals a dagger. All three seem to reach upward, as if longing to touch, or be acknowledged by, the great, enlightened figure rising above them.
This is my attempt to describe Siempre Vuelvo, a celebrated 1994 collagraph by the Afro-Cuban artist Belkis Ayón. Printed through the collagraph technique, the work is rendered in a monochrome palette of black, white, and grey while exploring the secret universe of the Abakuá brotherhood.
Coming back to Belkis Ayón’s work in 2026 feels different. I’m now the age she was when she left. In 1999, at only thirty-two, she took her own life. She left no farewell. Only a profound silence. It echoed through a Cuba already grappling with the economic and ideological collapse of the Special Period. It still reverberates today, because of the timelessness of her work.
I was born in 1994, in Cienfuegos, Cuba, the same year Siempre Vuelvo was made. A coincidence that makes me both curious and strangely connected to the work.
I left Cuba before I was old enough to remember it. Yet I keep returning, again and again. Both inside and outside at once. Today I write from the diaspora, from a distance that is both comfortable and painful. I watch the island from afar. I watch what hope looks like now, worn thin by decades of hardship. I watch what speaking up still costs there.
I often wonder why Belkis chose black, white, and grey. To me, that palette has come to mirror something I recognize too well: the rigid binary that still frames every political vision of Cuba’s future. Should the island once again fall under the influence of the United States, as it did before the Revolution, risking a new kind of neocolonial dependence? Or should it remain on its current path as an authoritarian socialist state, one that has censored, exiled, and disdained so many of its own thinkers and artists? Between these two poles, countless other possibilities disappear. Even her grey isn’t really a third option: it’s what happens when black and white collide, the residue of two forces pressing against each other. Cuba is trapped in this grey too, caught between two forces it did not fully choose and cannot fully leave. I find myself yearning for a way out, toward something more than black, white, or grey.
The Abakuá society was founded in 1836 in Regla, Havana. It was formed by enslaved men of Carabalí origin who had been brought from the region of Old Calabar in West Africa. There, their ancestors belonged to a secret brotherhood known as Ngbe, “the leopard.” In Cuba, that brotherhood became Abakuá, an exclusively male society.
At its center is a myth.
A woman, Princess Sikán, goes to fetch water from a sacred river. There, a magical fish speaks to her, revealing the secret voice of God. Startled, she drops her jar. The fish dies.
She swears to keep the secret. But she breaks that oath and shares it with her husband, who belongs to a rival clan. War follows. To restore peace, the tribes sacrifice her. Only then does the sacred voice return, carried through a drum made from her skin.
Sikán is the woman punished for hearing something sacred, and for speaking it. She is remembered and erased at the same time: central to the myth yet excluded from the brotherhood it created.
Belkis Ayón once said: “She is like me, and she lives through me in my restlessness, as I instinctively search for an escape.”
Perhaps this is why her work keeps returning to me. Sikán’s covered mouth. The myth of a woman punished for speaking. It is not only history. It is not only myth. It survives in the way Cubans on the island can still be punished for speaking freely, in the quiet calculus of what can be said, and what cannot.
Belkis Ayón Manso was a visionary: an Afro-Cuban artist, printmaker, curator, and educator. Born in Havana in 1967, she committed herself to the visual arts from an early age. She studied at San Alejandro before continuing at the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA). By the late 1980s, she had already gained international recognition, earning awards for her extraordinary mastery of printmaking.
The mystery of her expressive silence remains a paradox. Her silhouettes, often genderless and rendered in black and white, evoke anonymity and universality. Their fragmented faces suggest fractured identities. Their absent mouths become symbols of repression. Yet their wide, unwavering eyes suggest something else entirely: an unsettling awareness.
Some days, following the news out of Cuba, I feel like that figure myself. Mouth covered, unable to add a clear word to the noise. The information that reaches me is so tangled: propaganda from one side, exile anger from the other, algorithms flattening all of it into fragments, until I stop trying to understand. It leaves me with a wide gaze and speechless, because everything begins to feel hopeless. I recognize that stillness in her figures now. Not peace. Just the exhaustion of trying to discern what’s true from a distance that distorts everything it touches.
In Ayón’s work, the traditional relationship between artwork and viewer is reversed. We are no longer simply looking. We are the ones being looked at.
Perhaps that is where silence finally breaks.
Not when we speak the loudest, but when we can no longer pretend we have not seen. Ayón’s figures do not ask us to admire them. They ask us to answer for what their gaze has revealed. They ask whether we will continue watching in silence, or whether, like Sikán, we will risk speaking anyway.
