A studio portrait of a person with dark hair styled in a high bun, looking directly at the camera with a neutral expression. They are wearing a grey textured turtleneck sweater, bright red lipstick, and small silver fish-shaped earrings, all set against a solid grey background. — Tatiana Mesa Paján at Dave Decker Photography in Ybor City, Florida on Jan. 12, 2026. Credit: Dave Decker / Creative Loafing Tampa Bay

Tatiana Mesa Paján was an established artist in Cuba before immigrating to the United States in 2013 to join her sister.

“When I was in Cuba, I was doing well as an artist,” Mesa Paján told CL. “I wasn’t really so aware of politics. I was in my artistic bubble.”

Mesa Paján came to the U.S. with a support system of galleries and collectors in Europe. But once in Tampa, that system collapsed. Suddenly, galleries that had shown her work in Europe were no longer interested. Collectors who had once traveled to Cuba just to meet her and buy her work stopped answering her emails. She was effectively ostracized by the Cuban contemporary art world outside the island.

“I’m talking about Miami, New York, Barcelona, Madrid,” Mesa Paján told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay.

She had to start over. She became a “sedano” (person who stocks, arranges and sells goods in Cuban Spanish), a cashier, a waitress.

“It was a shock to me, because I was privileged in Cuba,” says Mesa Paján. “If you are an artist in Cuba, you are privileged. You are part of the elite. You have privilege that other people don’t have.”

At first, she thought that maybe folks had just lost interest in her art. But then she witnessed the 2021 protests in Cuba from her cell phone, uniformed officers pulling teenagers from their homes, repression, death.

“Now there are no excuses,” she explained.

“The idea that the entire Cuban art market is monopolized by the dictatorship sounds crazy,” Mesa Paján admits. “It took me a lot of years to come to the conclusion that most of the Cuban art market outside of the island is totally controlled by money coming from this regime. So they cannot really give opportunity to people who are not trustworthy to them.”

In this environment, Mesa Paján says she can no longer remain neutral.

“I’m not Cuban art,” she boldly states. “I’m not contemporary Cuban art, because I don’t want to represent that.”

Instead, Mesa Paján took whatever honest work she could find and focused on raising her son. While working as an art instructor for the Department of Juvenile Justice, she met someone who encouraged her to get an M.F.A. in the U.S. so she could teach at a university. Once Mesa Pajan became a professor in Tampa, invitations to show her work in Havana once again began to flow.

“But what do I have to do in order to get those benefits? I have to go to Havana. I need to have a studio in Havana. I need to travel to Havana and take a picture on the Malecón. I’m not going to do that.”

“That’s what a lot of people are doing,” Mesa Pajan continued. “They tell the Americans it’s a dictatorship and they claim to be denouncing things, but they have their studios in Havana and they take a picture in Havana. That [picture] might be used to make people think it’s not so bad, because this person is vocally open about [Cuba being a dictatorship] and is traveling, and nothing is happening to them. No. Totalitarianism doesn’t work like that. There are people who have their permissions to say that—it’s strategic on the part of the regime. I don’t want to be one of those people. I want my money to be clean.”

A sculpture of a person's bust, titled "Stone Joan of Arc," displayed inside a large clear glass cloche. The light-colored stone figure is entirely covered in delicate, white dandelion seeds, creating a soft, fuzzy texture over the facial features and shoulders. The piece is set on a white circular base within an art gallery setting. — ‘Stone Joan of Arc’ by Tatiana Mesa Paján Credit: Jennifer Ring / Creative Loafing Tampa Bay

More than a decade after leaving Cuba, Mesa Pajan re-emerges with her first solo show in the U.S. at the Dunedin Fine Arts Center. “Mío/Mine,” at the Dunedin Fine Arts Center through Feb. 22, celebrates the common gestures that make us human, from kissing to telling our stories, constructing our own personal realities and seeking that which is familiar to us. It’s a recurring theme in Mesa Pajan’s work. Although it’s new to Tampa Bay area audiences, Mesa Pajan has been collecting human gestures and contemplating their meanings for more than 20 years.

“It’s very important that we focus on humanity right now,” Mesa Pajan concluded. “We are in a shifting moment where the next generations will be narrated by AI. There is no way to skip that, and we know how important narratives are. This is more important than Cuba or than myself…My work is bigger than what happened to me.”