Salón de Mayo

It was organized by Carlos Franqui with the assistance of such artists as Wifredo Lam, René Portocarrero, Alexander Calder, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso.

The exhibition presented works by more than a hundred artists and represented rival schools of twentieth-century art: early modernists (Picasso, Miro, Magritte); the next generation (Lam, Calder, Jacques Hérold, Stanley Hayter); and postwar (Asger Jorn, Antonio Saura, Jorge Soto).

[3] A Paris newspaper described the event:[4] ...with a speed that is typically Cuban, a giant white canvas was hung in the outdoors, practically in the street, in the humid night air of the tropics ...

The riskiest venture for man today, which would allow him to communicate most directly with pleasure and death, is to participate in and dedicate himself to revolution.The Salón was a unique event under a regime that, in the words of a writer who was later imprisoned, "used every imaginable pretext to keep culture on a short leash".

Some in Cuba's cultural establishment resented the influence of foreigners and visiting intellectuals, and they took measures soon after it against writers identified as dissidents.