Along with Víctor Manuel, Amelia Peláez, Fidelio Ponce, Antonio Gattorno, and other masters of this period, he was involved in one of the most fertile moments in Cuban culture.

Enríquez strove to develop a genuinely Cuban style that, while fueled by surrealism and modernism, took inspiration from Cuba's landscapes, culture, social problems and way of living.

He again left Cuba, this time for Europe, mainly Spain and France, where he continued his painting career and came in contact with Impressionism and surrealism, currents that would radically influence his work.

As with the other vanguardia artists, re-encountering his native land provided the catalyst for his mature style and his commitment to the expression of Cuban social realities and popular myths.

One of his preoccupations as an artist concerned the expression of an authentic Cuban-Caribbean culture, which he believed was only to be found in the countryside, in its Creole people, myths, and legends.

His primitivism, however differs from that of Antonio Gattorno and Eduardo Abela in that it does not represent the guajiros as simple, calm, and noble, but rather as raw, violent, and restless.

In 1939 Enriquez bought a small bungalow, which he christened El Hurón Azúl (the Blue Ferret), in the Arroyo Naranjo district on the outskirts of Havana.

Here he painted El Rapto de las Mulatas (The kidnapping of the Mulatto Women), one of his most famous works, featured on a 1964 Cuban stamp.

Its heated emotional subject of abduction and potential rape is not only depicted, but forcefully expressed through a personal visual language of pulsating and diaphanous color-forms.

He also provided the illustration artwork for books by Nicolás Guillén and Alejo Carpentier, two famous Cuban writers that were friends of the painter and regularly visited his workshop.