"Real revolutionaries adorn themselves on the inside, not on the outside."
Ernesto "Che" Guevara
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At first glance, Cuban artist Wifredo Lam’s 1943 painting The Jungle looks jungle-y enough. It’s lush. It’s colorful. It’s filled with faces of strange animals peering out from dense foliage. But looks can be deceiving...
The green plants aren’t trees. They’re sugarcane and tobacco, both crops imported by colonizers. The animals seem to be horses, which aren't native to Cuba either. There’s even a pair of scissors floating about. Those definitely don’t belong here.
Before creating The Jungle, Lam spent 20 years working with leading Cubist and Surrealist painters in Europe. Had he forgotten what a jungle actually looked like?
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Wifredo Lam, "The Jungle", 1942-43, gouache on paper mounted on canvas, 94.25 x 90.5 inches, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © ADAGP, 2016.
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Not at all. He just wasn’t aiming for photographic accuracy. The world Lam created in The Jungle is one from his imagination, rich with references to Santeria, a religion that blends Afro-Cuban practices with elements of Catholicism.
Take the horses, for instance: they have hands, feet and curvy backsides. Apart from their tails and long faces, they barely resemble earthly animals at all. Where do they come from? In Santeria, deities called orishas can possess the body of a living person, and the possessed are often compared to horses.
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Detail of horse faces from Wifredo Lam’s "The Jungle". © ADAGP, 2016.
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With a Santeria priestess for a godmother, Lam was deeply affected by the religion. His horses are a reference to the gods, whose presence transcends the centuries of foreign rule—represented by the sugarcane and tobacco.
The floating scissors serve a purpose, too. "The scissors mean that a break with colonial culture was needed," Lam said, "that we had enough of cultural domination."
Clearly, it was time to cut ties.
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Detail of scissors from Wifredo Lam’s "The Jungle". © ADAGP, 2016.
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 Real revolutionaries adorn themselves on the inside, not on the outside.
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Ernesto "Che" Guevara 
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Wifredo Lam, "Zambezia, Zambezia", 1950, oil on canvas, 49.38 x 43.38 in., Guggenheim Museum, New York. © ADAGP, 2016.
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Sculptor Alexander Calder was from which country?
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