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Spain decorates the director of Cuba's Fine Arts Museum, accused by artists of censorship
Spain's ambassador in Havana presented Jorge Antonio Fernández Torres on Saturday with the Cross of Officer of the Order of Isabella the Catholic, granted by King Felipe VI, at a ceremony attended by Cuba's culture minister, according to Cubanet and OnCuba.
King Felipe VI granted the Cross of Officer of the Order of Isabella the Catholic to Jorge Antonio Fernández Torres, director of Cuba's National Museum of Fine Arts. It was presented on Saturday by Spain's ambassador in Havana, Francisco Javier Hergueta Garnica, at a ceremony in the museum's Cuban Art Building attended by Culture Minister Alpidio Alonso Grau, according to Cubanet and OnCuba.
According to the state-run Cuban News Agency, cited by Cubanet, the ambassador praised the honoree's professional career, his knowledge of painting and his work as a cultural manager, and highlighted the cooperation between Spain and the museum.
Fernández Torres, born in Havana in 1965, is an art historian, critic, curator and professor at the University of the Arts since 1999; he previously directed the Wifredo Lam Contemporary Art Center and has headed the National Museum of Fine Arts since 2016, OnCuba noted. He had already received France's Order of Arts and Letters and Italy's Star of Italy at the rank of officer.
The official has drawn repeated public complaints from artists critical of Cuba's cultural system. In 2016, artist Tania Bruguera accused him of trying to justify censorship during a lecture held at the museum itself, in an article titled 'How censorship is normalized' published by Diario de Cuba; by that account, the director equated the restrictions imposed on Cuban artists with institutional practices in other countries and responded with personal attacks when she challenged his arguments, Cubanet reported.
In May 2021, several artists, among them Bruguera, Sandra Ceballos, Tomás Sánchez and Marco Castillo, asked the museum to cover their works on display and remove them from its digital platforms, in protest at the situation of Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, leader of the San Isidro Movement, who was being held incommunicado at the Calixto García hospital after the authorities interrupted his hunger strike. The museum's management rejected the request in a statement invoking its responsibility to the public, without addressing the case, according to Cubanet.
Cubanet also recalled that Alpidio Alonso was filmed assaulting a journalist during a peaceful protest outside the Ministry of Culture in January 2021.
Sources: Cubanet · OnCuba News
Data updated: 2026-11-09T16:15:00.000Z