Luis Cruz Azaceta (born April 5, 1942) is a Cuban American painter. Since the late 1970s the paintings and drawings of Luis Cruz Azaceta have been taking the moral and ethical pulse of this country. In usually large-format works, executed with highly expressive colors, Cruz Azaceta has dealt with themes of urban violence, the type of personal isolation that comes with living in a large and overcrowded city, the hellish conditions created by mismanaged government, the abuses and oppression of dictatorships and, in a number of highly affecting works done back in the late 1980s, the ravages of AIDS.