Felipe VI awards a Spanish distinction to the director of the Cuban museum

Jorge Antonio Fernández Torres, director of the National Museum of Fine Arts of Cuba, received the rank of Officer of the Order of Isabel the Catholic, a distinction granted by Felipe VI. The ceremony took place in Havana and was in charge of Francisco Javier Hergueta Garnica, ambassador of Spain in Cuba. The ceremony took place in the Transitory Room, inside the Cuban Art Building of the museum, with the presence of the Minister of Culture, Alpidio Alonso Grau.

During the ceremony, Hergueta Garnica valued Fernández Torres' experience in painting and his work as a cultural manager, which he described as also recognized outside Cuba. The director thanked the recognition and support of the Embassy of Spain to the institution he heads.

Fernández Torres was born in Havana in 1965 and works as an art historian, critic, curator and professor of Theoretical Studies at the University of the Arts of Cuba. He has taught at that institution since 1999 and has directed both the Wifredo Lam Center for Contemporary Art and the National Museum of Fine Arts, which he has led since 2016. His curatorial work includes projects carried out inside and outside the island, as well as responsibilities in several editions of the Havana Biennial.

In the tenth edition of the Biennale he was a member of the curatorial team, and later assumed the direction and main curatorship of the two events held in 2009 and 2015. He also coordinated and led the curatorship of the theoretical program of the fifteenth edition. Among his projects is "The Perversion of the Classic: Anarchy of Stories", presented at the 2013 Venice Biennale.

As the director of the institution, he has promoted exhibitions that relate his collections to contemporary creators and approaches. In addition, he has given lectures and workshops at universities, museums and art centers in Europe, Latin America and the United States, and has published in specialized magazines, books and catalogs.

The concession has been accompanied by questions about Fernández Torres' performance in the face of claims related to cultural censorship. In a text published in 2016, the artist Tania Bruguera stated that, during a conversation at the museum, the director equated censorship in Cuba with practices in other countries and that, when he objected to that comparison, he received a personal attack from him. In May 2021, a group of artists asked the museum to stop publicly disseminating their works while Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara remained detained and incommunicado in the Calixto García hospital, according to the letter signed by the participants. The museum rejected the request through a statement that did not mention the activist or the demands for freedom included in the claim. The Order of Isabel the Catholic was created in 1815 to recognize extraordinary civil merits related to Spain or to the strengthening of its international ties.