Art and culture serve humanity to transcend our ordinary circumstances and to approach, at least in a tangential form, the infinite. In the midst of creation, in the act of creating, man ascends and unfolds himself in floods, in energy, in light and heat; he provisions himself in this way for nature, the source of life, and the guarantee of the continuation of existence. The relation between art and nature has always been a contradictory and living one. On one hand, the beauty of nature and our surroundings have always inspired artists of different times. It is possible to listen the force of the wind in the best of Beethoven's symphonies and Whitman's poems, and you can also hear the inclination of plants towards the light and the furor of stampeding animals in the contemplation of certain cathedrals, the paintings of Bosco, or the sculptures of Rodin. But also the greatest cataclysms, the devastating catastrophes and tempests have served to inspire great creators, infusing an epic or tragic sense in the lives of men, making them feel small or gigantic, fragile or invincible, according to Shakespeare, Milton, or Lezama.

If it is proper to say that nature has been a source of inspiration for artists and humanity in general, in recent times it has also become a source of preoccupation. The degradation of the environment, the contamination of the water and air, the advance of desertification, the damage to the ozone layer, the extinction of numerous species, the uncontrolled destruction of the forests have become undesirable, but sadly, all too frequent phenomena. And together with the denunciation of such ills that compromise man's very future on earth, there has been the use of artistic creation as a weapon of struggle. When the National Library first got news about Toxic Landscape,an exhibition by North American artists organized by the Puffin Foundation, we quickly felt a keen interest in and sympathy towards a cause that day by day has become one of the principle causes of struggle for millions of people from every culture. It is now a source of inspiration for the many artists who are conscious of the danger and want to contribute to the critical consciousness of those who combat it. With the necessary arrangements made, we gladly offered our exhibition space, The Kingdom of the World gallery, to present this show to the Cuban people.

This first collaboration between the artists and peoples of Cuba and the United States is tied together not only through culture and history, but also by the shared preoccupation about the degradation of the environment and its consequences. This is an exhibition for thinking, for capturing the viewer, for moving him/her to action before the danger that hovers over everyone, and that in large measure, is caused by man himself. No one can see this exhibition and remain indifferent: such is the force of art for communicating ideas and emotions, if it is authentic. To return to the beautiful times when nature was only a source of man's peace and inspiration and not an object of restlessness and preoccupation before its deterioration, depends also on whether we receive the message of these artists who are committed to life, and if we are capable of motivating ourselves to evade what we, with plain reason, denounce. If we are capable of doing this, even if we aren't poets of the caliber of Whitman or Lezama, we will have contributed to writing a page of our time: that of a species that refused to forget the beauty of the forests, the dawns, and the oceans, so that we aren't abandoned by the beauty and the reason of the Universe. Thank you to the artists brought together by the Puffin Foundation for reminding us.