Ramos emerged during Cuba’s Special Period of the 1990s, instigated by the fall of the Soviet Union, and made an impressive debut at the Fifth Havana Biennial in 1994 with an installation titled Migrations II, which included ten suitcases submerged in sand. “Covered by almost naïve figures that transmitted the complexity of the yearnings and the losses experienced by the traveler,” recalls curator Abelardo Mena Chicuri, “these suitcases then began to sink—literally and metaphorically—shifting the narrative to the sea bottom” (Cuba Avant-Garde: Contemporary Cuban Art from the Farber Collection, exh. cat., Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, Gainesville, 2007, p. 156). “The open suitcase was a medium to make public the private and social reality of Cuban people,” Ramos later explained. “From this first experience I created other installations, boxes that looked like coffins, treasure trunks containing dreams about trips, homesickness and death.” (“Blog: Artist Sandra Ramos on ‘Migraciones II,’” Pérez Art Museum Miami, https://pammiami.org).

La pesadilla continues this series of surreal and often disconsolate trunks, displaying a macabre scene of death and drowning alongside symbols of flight and resurrection. A wide-eyed, anthropomorphic bed sinks helplessly below the surface, greeted by fish with human faces and limbs; two uncanny conch-children lie at the bottom of the case. A Cuban flag, made of feathers and spangled with a starfish, hangs in the background, its mixed-media limbs akimbo. Five lambs—white, black, and blood-stained—bear witness to this unending “nightmare,” their presence a metaphor for innocence, sacrifice, and salvation.

Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park