Like many Cubans educated before, outside, or even within the Revolution, Ana had to make a self-conscious choice to go beyond a neocolonial rejection of "popular" culture and nostalgic, simplistic attachment to folklore. Artist, lay archeologist, and shaman, she excavated links that would reinscribe her self-expression into the world from which she had been cast out. Her intesity of vision and artistic integrity forced her to delve beneath surface layers of the religious and nationalist symbol and stricture that are so much a part of Latin cultural history. As a result, she surprised many of those whose paternalism generated more limited expectations, and stunned other, including family members who to this day refuse to release her complete oeuvre for public viewing.

Ana's unique and haunting poetics speak to the experience of many in the Americas whose histories have been shaped by forced migration, enslavement, expropriation, and loss, and whose expressions have borne out the salutary power of myth, the persistence of belief, and the resilience of the spirit. She sensed that postrevolutionary generations of Cubans, whether at home or in exile, would have to undergo a long and painful process of rethinking ourselves and dismantling imposed histories in order to rediscover our America, its voice, and its art.

Although Ana's return to Cuba has become a paradigm followed by dozens of Cuban Americans, there can as yet be no official recognition, either in Cuba or in the United States, of the significance of these other efforts. On the contrary, while Ana's work is celebrated by many as a symbolic union of exile with homeland, her followers are dimissed as interference by official chroniclers of both sides of the great divide. Those chroniclers who favor Cuba deny the importance of any exile's work in relation to Cuban art, while those who favor Miami stress Ana's alleged disillusionment with the Revolution near the end of her life.

Despite the growing interest among Cuban American artists in making contact with those on the island, no exile since Ana Mendieta has been able to exhibit in Cuba or participate in a cultural event such as the Haana Biennial. Attention has instead been directed elsewhere, away from Cuban-to-Cuban dialogue, at a kind of exchange that does not disrupt age-old schisms. Hence, over the last five years, the flow of cultural exchange has been directed largely at launching work by Cuban nationals into the mainstream art world of the United States. This has been accomppanied by consistent efforts to draw well-known American artists and intellectuals with leftist sympathies to the island; it should not be forgotten it was at Ana's stubborn insistene, over a decade ago, that many of those same people took interest in the burgeoning art scene on that tiny island. This was quite a feat, considering the insularity and ethnocentrism of the New York art world at that time.

Ana Mendieta's life and art have also rendered symbols in the now more self-consciously multicultural America, but of an entirely different order. The trial of her husband, Carl Andre, who was accused and then acquitted having killed her, divided the New York art world along ethnic, gender, and economic lines that are still existent today. Scores of (mostly white) feminists artists have claimed affinities to Ana, and have invoked her name as a metaphor for female victimization, transforming her into a contemporary New York version of Frida Kahlo. Most recently, when the Women's Action Coalition staged a protest at the opening of the SoHo branch of the Guggenheim Museum, the activists threw photocopied images if Ana's work atop sculptures by Carl Andre, and paraded signs with the rhetorical question. "Where is Ana Medieta?" There are more than a few of Ana's colleagues who, remembering her struggles to gain recognition in that same milieu, find the current appropriation of her image painful and even exploitative.

Despite all these attempts to make convenient use of her image, Ana's spirit survives. Her work continues to intrigue and inspire many, and her life and her death continue to haunt us all. I am sometimes moved to believe that the power of that spirit should be proof to us all that Ana could not have wanted to die. Then I think of all the Cuban artists from the island who in the past three years have chosen Mexico as a neutral terrain on which to continue their work, and remember that Ana Mendieta spent a crucial period of her artistic development in Mexico in the mid-1970s. "Plugging into Mexico," she once said, "was like going back to the source, being able to get some magic just by being there." It was during that period that she would engage in a communion with the earth, a process that would eventually take her to the caves of Jaruco, to the sacred ceiba tree in Miami, and onward. It seems hardly coincidental that Cuban from all sides, however inadvertently, continue to retrace her path.