Sculpted from marble and designed by artist José Miguel Díaz, Living Room, deliberately titled in English rather than Spanish, evokes the Cuban collective custom of spending most nights sitting in public spaces rather than ensconced in one’s home. Much as we find in Havana, where half the population seems to reside on the malecón [sea wall] on any given night, but especially as temperatures rise, Santiago’s waterfront is also known as the “people’s couch”, an idea inscribed in the piece. Yet Díaz’s marble couch also speaks to Americans, whose invention of radio and television ostensibly marked the “living room” as a central, family-defined space in the 1950s, before the Cuban Revolution seemed to permanently divide the homes on one side of the Florida straits from the other. (July 2016)
