Cuban Zeal: Revolutionary art and artists

Just a few minutes' drive from the hill- side mansions of Cubanacan, the leafy north-western corner of Havana where Fidel Castro and Che Guevara liked to play golf in the Sixties, is El Romerillo, the city's largest slum.

The sprawling barrio, a higgledy-piggledy mix of corrugated iron and luridly painted breezeblock shacks, narrow streets, roaming dogs and impromptu baseball games makes for an unlikely cultural hotspot. But for the last five years it's been the focal point for one of Cuba's most celebrated artists, René Francisco.

Francisco, a dynamic 48-year old professor at the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) in Havana started visiting El Romerillo over 10 years ago. When, in 2003, he received a grant from a foundation in Berlin to create a new work, he resolved to spend it in that desperately poor neighbourhood. First he surveyed 44 residents, asking them who was most deserving of his help. The answer came back: Rosa Estevez, a local healer who lived with her son in a broken-down lean-to. Francisco duly put the money towards renovating her home – repairing the roof, providing a toilet and putting up shelves. Along the way, he took beautiful photographs which he later exhibited in Berlin.

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Since then, Francisco has returned to El Romerillo, to dig a new patio for the wheelchair-bound Marcelina Ochoa, for a photographic series, "El Patio de Nin", exhibited at the Venice Biennial in 2007. His current project is the rebuilding of a decrepit shack, built in 1920, belonging to two pot-polishers from Buena Vista.

Francisco's projects are regularly stormed by the police, who would prefer his images of Cuban poverty to stay in the slums. But his work is not simply charity in disguise, nor a cynical attempt to make art out of Havana's poorest. "They always need someone," says Francisco simply. "And I always need someone." Beneath the philanthropy is a web of ideas, relating to private and public space, utopian ideals and the capacity of the artist to change society.

Francisco's exhibition is just one of hundreds of events taking place this spring for the city's 10th biennial. Featuring over 300 artists from 54 countries, the biennial has transformed Havana into a giant art gallery: a polystyrene igloo nestles among the colonial pillars of a courtyard; a herd of metal elephants moves mysteriously around the city by night; a carousel whirligigs in the shadow of the St Francis church and an infestation of giant cockroaches with human faces climbs the walls of the Fine Arts Museum.

The best of these installations is Duvier del Dago's stunning fighter jet, suspended mid-flight in the rifle range of a former military training ground in the respectably residential Vedado neighbourhood. A flexible sculpture made from transparent nylon string, when it is lit up at night, a scale model American F22 appears in electrifying UV blue – a symbol of the ever-hovering imperialist threat.

The city's first biennial was 25 years ago (there is some flexibility on the two-year rule), when the only other art jamborees were in Sao Paolo and Venice. Havana's is a rather different kettle of fish. Almost entirely state-run, its government funding of around €400,000 would barely pay for a private view at Venice. The main site is the Morro de Cabana fortress – a vast white stone complex with fabulous views across the bay. A prison until the 1980s, these days it houses revolutionary memorabilia and the world's longest cigar – an impressive 11 metres – as its exhibits.

Opening night is a relaxed, carnivalesque affair. Fluorescent pink cannon balls are piled irreverently next to rusting cannons and bright orange benches dot the site. Countless teenagers in knock-off Tommy Hilfiger and curious locals, many with smouldering Cohibas clamped in their jaw, dip in and out of the exhibits. A military brass band – tubas gleaming and boots polished – play rousing tunes, before a joyous set from the No 1 Afro-rocker X Alfonso from a stage on the battlements.

This biennial's clunky theme, "Integration and Resistance in the Global Era", has inspired some amusing if schematic meditations on globalisation, Third-World tourism, capitalism and Guantanamo Bay. There is a room filled with a floor-to-ceiling scroll inscribed with Das Kapital, another filled with row upon row of colourful dolls which on closer inspection are bound and gagged like prisoners and two men sitting in a cell churning out the logos used by the top 500 multinationals, from Apple to Yahoo.

Watch: An interview with Wilfredo Prieto

Among the 50 Cubans on show, the huge, pulsating canvasses of Douglas Perez Castro, a former street artist, stand out. His apocalyptic, sci-fi inspired paintings depict Havana as a Pratchett-esque microworld overlaid with deftly handled symbols, from Lego Ladas to Mickey Mouse balloons, which imagine an invasion of Western ideas into Cuba.

Other interesting work comes from a Cuban trio, all taught by Francisco at ISA. First, Wilfredo Prieto, an impish young artist who won last year's Cartier Award at London's Frieze Art Fair, where he installed a long red carpet which led those who followed it up a flagpole. Prieto's currency is ideas: not for him, though, the po-faced pretentiousness of much conceptual art; rather, he tends to playfulness. His best-known works include Apolitico, 30 flagpoles erected outside the Louvre and topped with world flags all rendered in neutral grey and One Million Dollars, a one-dollar bill reflected to infinity inside a mirrored box, which must, stipulates the artist, be insured for a million dollars at any gallery which shows it. For the biennial, Prieto launched a star – with all its political and romantic associations – into the night sky. As dawn broke, the illusion was revealed – the "star" was a giant, transparent helium balloon with a shining white bulb inside, attached to a tower block by a cable.

Alexandre Arrechea also enjoys an international profile thanks to his work with the art collective Los Carpinteros. Now a solo artist, for the biennial he created a scale model of 11 houses, set on a moveable axis which expands or contracts each day with the fluctuations of the Dow Jones Index. His other works, reflecting on the perils of living in a surveillance society where friends or neighbours might at any moment inform on your misdeeds, include The Garden of Mistrust, a tree blooming with 22 CCTV cameras.

Yoan Capote's scale model for a public art work – a giant maze in the shape of the human brain – takes up an entire hall at the fortress. The sculptor's thought-provoking early works include American Appeal, a Manhattan skyline made out of 80,000 fish hooks on plywood (stained with the artist's blood from his pricked thumbs), in a powerful imagining of the seductive/destructive pull of Cuba's nearest neighbour.

Watch: An interview with Rene Francisco

While politics and Cuban identity are omnipresent, you will look in vain for an artistic appropriation of the iconic faces of Che or Castro – strange for a city where every street corner is daubed in them. To flourish as an artist in Cuba is to work in tandem with a government who in turn offer support – from financial assistance to access to the internet (denied to ordinary citizens) and travelling rights (which can be revoked at a moment's notice). Adonis Flores, a former soldier who photographs himself in army fatigues in a field of daisies, wearing clown make-up or poking out his tongue which has been painted in camouflage colours, strikingly captures the tricky relationship between artist and state.

The emerging artist must walk a trtightrope but a growing international presence at the biennial indicates that the world is slowly waking up to Cuban art. The Havana Cultura website uploads profiles of significant figures to a growing global audience and Charles Saatchi is reported to be getting in on the act with a London show.

For now, it's Francisco who best sums up the contradictions of being a Cuban artist. Is his work a form of socialism in action? "I'm an artist who grew up during a socialist revolution," he answers. "But I'd say the shape of my work is, above all, democratic." As any Cuban knows, there's a difference.

To find out more about Havana's artistic talent, see www.havana-cultura.com