Orlando Suárez, master of Cuban and Continental Muralism, is ignored. The digital encyclopedias do not mention him and very few books refer to him as a teacher or collaborator of the great artists of Mexican muralism.
This Orlando Suárez, unknown and ignored, is from San Antonio de los Baños and his enormous work can be seen on the central wall of the Havana Bus Terminal. We do not have much information about him. He was born in the early twentieth century in Vereda Nueva, then belonging to San Antonio de los Baños, where he developed his childhood and early youth showing talent for painting. The cultural climate of Ariguanabo, where Abela was venerated, impelled that adolescent and later graduated from San Alejandro, an academy where he also worked as a teacher.
Orlando Suárez was part of that generation of René Portocarrero, Amelia Peláez, Carmelo González and Raúl Martínez, among other essential artists of Cuban plastic arts. His sense of justice and social commitment made him a participant in the revolutionary movements, a militant of the Popular Socialist Party and an anti-imperialist fighter. That is why, when traveling to Mexico, his talent and conscience led David Alfaro Sequeiros, Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, "the three greats" of Mexican muralism and with art as a weapon of struggle in that country.
They painted then the gigantic frescoes of the Palace of Fine Arts or the University of Guadalajara, denouncing the unhappy life of the Indian, the peasant, the woman and the worker. The revolutionary program of President Lázaro Cárdenas and his defense of the national wealth and the people, confirmed the cause of these artists and that of Orlando Suárez himself.
After several years, he returns to Cuba with an insurmountable experience that he distributed among his students and classmates. On January 1, 1959, he was surprised by the triumph of a revolution that he embraced with a true founding spirit. He promoted the creation of schools of art instructors and the Higher Institute of Art. It organized itinerant exhibitions in peasant and fishermen communities; He formed artisans and gave value to the native expressions, also bequeathing the huge historic mural that decorates the Havana Bus Terminal, inaugurated by Juan Marinello, and with the presence of Nicolás Guillén, Dora Alonso, Félix Pita Rodríguez, Onelio Jorge Cardoso and other important personalities, in 1976.
Orlando Suárez, that anonymous giant, deserves a place or a tarja, a memory, in his homeland of Ariguanabo, because we are what memory builds.
