The first solo exhibition of the young Cuban artist Sandra Ramos (Havana 1969) is the one that took place from December to last January at the Nina Menocal Gallery in Mexico City. Sandra Ramos is currently in Havana. She returned to her country to participate in the previous selection of the Cuban artists that will be invited to the Fifth Havana Biennial that is inaugurating next May. As discussed, the general theme of the great international exhibition will be that of migrations: emigrants, exiles, trans humans, expatriates, transported, uprooted; legal, illegal, tolerated, discriminated, despised, accepted, favored.
 
There is no continent where this phenomenon does not occur today, mainly due to economic, military and political reasons. Among the countries with a large flow of people into exile is Cuba, so the contents of the V Biennial will touch on very active and painful sores that will cause meditations and examinations of enormous importance, both in the ruling sector and in the population in general, including intellectuals and artists, who in the face of the great crisis affecting the island, have decided on definitive or temporary exiles.
 
The series exhibited by Sandra Ramos at the Nina Menocal Gallery have a recurring theme: that of the current migration of Cubans. The series, worked on in Cuba in 1993 are: A way to kill loneliness (19 intaglio collage), The last of the trips (6 intaglio prints in small format) and Bearing my cross (two oils on canvas: Cuba and the night, and Emigrants).
 
The images have been composed from personal experiences, although those experiences go beyond autobiography to express quite generalized emotions and states of mind. In all of them the same head of a girl appears and it could be assumed that she is Sandra Ramos herself, self-portrait. Well, no. She preferred to use as a portrait a face very similar to hers that she found in a nineteenth-century engraving. Another factor present in the works is Cuba as a loved land, where many painful circumstances occur: an engraving titled Maribel names, represents and evokes a friend who emigrated to Ecuador, Wendy went to Spain; Her boyfriend Alejandro first went to Italy and is now in Venezuela.
 
In The dammed Circumstance of Water all around Sandra turns her own body into the island's geography, which is spiked with palm trees in the shape of darts, in the shape of feathers, in the shape of insects about to take flight. In And Now, What can I Hold you with?, Sandra's body lies in a  green prison field, while she watches in a blue sky that comes out of her mouth a bird with the face of Alejandro (the friend who is gone) that flies alongside and airplane; on the opposite side another bird, with the Cuban flag for wings and Sandra's own face. Above them lies a cloud which absorbs them, collapsing into rain and tears. At the top and in the center, you see a character with mythical strength, it is the portrait of her current partner, the talented artist Ibrahim Miranda.
 
In A way to kill the solitudes, Sandra Ramos creates a self-portrait on an engraving plate as the virgules (Mayan speech scrolls) of her soliloquy take form around her. The doubt about the effectiveness of her own aesthetic practice is expressed in My daily vocation of suicide. There her body lies on the engraving plate press and as it passes through the cylinder the pressure removes its anatomy and turns it into the Cuban flag. Many virgules- words come off her fingers, in the piece …and when everyone is gone, loneliness arrives, at the moment she is waving her hand to say goodbye to the friends who fill a plane in which they are leaving, perhaps not to return.
 
Several prints make up the sequence of Castro's indoctrination. In We will be like Che
Sandra is shown as a pioneer girl, surrounded by a bright red glow. In The Prophet's Dream the pioneer Sandra embraces José Martí who dreams of the green island where the flag of his liberation waves. In Bearing my cross, in front of the red and black glows, the young Sandra, naked and crucified, tries to lift with one hand the green island that has begun to disintegrate at one end.
 
Two characters are repeated in several of the prints, one is the fat Bobo, used by the painter and cartoonist Eduardo Abela to criticize the corrupt government of Gerardo Machado: the other is a jinetera (slang giving to prostitutes in Cuba). In ... then communicating becomes more difficult every day, El Bobo emerge into the background of the composition and observes how Sandra Ramos is giving a great speech (Moral?) To the jinetera, while other recognizable characters from Cuban culture stroll indifferently through the park.
 
The work that Sandra Ramos exhibited at the Nina Menocal Gallery, shows that in Cuba continue to emerge artists with a strong vocation to crumble through images with creativity and audacity, their difficult and specific reality. This mature young woman of 24 years of age did her training (between 1980 and 1988) at the Elementary School of Arts "20 de Octubre", continued it at the Provincial School of Arts "San Alejandro" and concluded it with a specialty in engraving, at the Higher Institute of Arts. In addition, she was in an art critic workshop led by Gerardo Mosquera at the Wilfredo Lam Center. Other workshops he attended were: unconventional graphic printing, steamroller art, taught by students from the Massachusetts College of Art in Havana; that of NonConventional Techniques and Supports that was led by Carlos Capelán, a Uruguayan based in Sweden; as well as that of graphic experimentation encouraged by Liliana Porter, Carolina Campos and Ana Tiscornia. This indicates that in the midst of great and serious deficiencies, young people with an artistic vocation have a solid and diverse field for their training, and it is frequent that in them the critical spirit flourishes and they grow wings to fly.