Voice of the Caribbean

Voice of the Caribbean

Coconut water, reggae and one week in Cuba. Until now, this has been my relationship with the Caribbean—which is to say, I haven't had much of one. That's what spurred me to visit the three-museum bonanza of an exhibit, "Caribbean: Crossroads of the World," a visual feast of more than 500 artworks exploring the region's history and culture.

But seeing as I've not even taken a tourist-y vacation to Jamaica (a situation I'm keen to correct), I wanted to visit the museums with people who are connected to the region and could absorb the art work with richer impressions and observations than I could. To that end, I visited each of the participating institutions—El Museo del Barrio, the Queens Museum of Art and Studio Museum in Harlem—with artists of Caribbean descent. Today and in the following two weeks, this column will recount those visits, one at a time.

To start things off, I turned to author Oscar Hijuelos, for whom nostalgia about "the Cuba that was" ("la Cuba que fue") has been inescapable. Born in New York to Cuban parents in 1951, he grew up on West 118th Street and was surrounded by a vision of Cuba conjured by relatives who had left. He went on to write novels inspired by the mixture of memory, culture and imagination, notably "The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love," which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1990.

With that in mind, Mr. Hijuelos and I headed to El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem. A fast talker and big thinker, he took a millisecond to address an issue that simmers in all three exhibits: "Latin American art is often ethnographical and representational in an effort to preserve the ideas for the future," he said. "There is a mission—to remember the history of the struggle."