Ramon Carulla was sitting in class as a law student at the National University in Havana, Cuba, when the instructor, who was French, decided she would provide the class with a cross-cultural encounter they'd likely remember. She had just received a food ration of four chickens, so she demonstrated how to wring the neck and drain the blood into a galvanized pail, the French way.
Carulla did not care much for the chickens, but he wanted the blood. Even though he was an employed translator of English and French, and even though he was well on his way to earning a law degree, he had, at the age of 24, recently discovered a natural ability and a fierce desire to paint. But he was out of red paint, which along with the other primary colors, was hard to find in Cuba. That's why he wanted the chicken's blood. He diluted it with vinegar, which made enough red for two paintings, his bloody paintings, the first he'd ever sold and the beginning of his art career in 1964.
Carulla now lives in his home in Miami with his wife, where he has plenty of red paint and supplies for his studio, and where he paints his keen observations with a sure and poetic brush. He works in series: people in "places," people with "masks," people with "dreams," people as "hostage," people on "sofas," people on "journeys" — all people playing "the Game of Life," yet another series. He works appreciatively because, he says, "I live in a free country and paint as I wish."
And as others wish, if you judge by the fact that Carulla's paintings hang in fine-art establishments in more than 30 cities around the world, including Corbino Galleries in Longboat Key, where he happens to share space with seven other Cuban-American artists, all of whom left Cuba at some point after Fidel Castro assumed power. All but two live in Miami. In age, they range between 30 and 65. They have impressive resumes, stories to tell and artistic visions to convey. And nearby, they have company from Cuba.
Namely, Cuban artists who work in Cuba and have recently been able to show in the Tampa Bay area. Their presence provides an opportunity to view the art of Cubans and the art of Cuban-Americans, as if they were engaged in a kind of roundtable conversation that replaces the usual political virulence between the two countries with an artistic and creative language that is not necessarily apolitical but that informs the political with the deeply personal.
Visions of Escape and ExileLeonel Matheu is Corbino Galleries' youngest Cuban-American artist, who happens to be the nephew of Cuban jazz trumpeter Arturo Sandoval. Matheu has recently become a citizen. "He's really proud of that," says Max Moore, the gallery's manager. Matheu's cartoon-like characters convey two modes of existing in a machine-cyber-technological world. His subjects are either stuck holding up what they can, like a brick in a wall or a bit in a code, or they're engaged in the death-defying lunacy of chasing a dream, an occupation that in Matheu's vision, means being on the run as much as in pursuit.
There's little pining for nature or nostalgia for Eden in these paintings, even though they contain memories of lost homeland, for example, in the texture of Matheu's burlap-like painting surface or in the drip of a farewell tear. In cool, Caribbean color, dice and dominoes shaped like buildings, sneakers and childhood toys figure big in Matheu's paintings. "From Where I Come from to Where I'm Going" is one title that encapsulates Matheu's choice of abandoning the defunct utopia that is Cuba and going to the U.S., where dreams are still alive but where fate still amounts to a roll of a dice.
The specter of the 90-nautical-mile journey separating Cuba from Florida paradoxically unites, like an Odyssean archetype, the Cuban people who live on either side of it. Traditionally, there has been some animosity in Cuba toward those who have left. But in the wake of the most recent large exodus, during the so-called "special period" of extreme material deprivation due to the collapse of the former Soviet Union's support of Cuba and the U.S. trade embargo, a turn from anger to sadness seems to have occurred.
It's a change that registered in the exhibition Contemporary Art from Cuba: Irony and Survival on the Utopian Island, which was shown at the University of South Florida's Contemporary Art Museum last year. In that exhibition, the artist Kcho in the piece "Para Olvidar" (in order to forget) sets a well-crafted kayak of primitive materials (there are few industrial grade materials in Cuba) atop a sea of standing, empty bottles. The imagery evokes what curator Marilyn Zeitlin calls the theme of "escape" and the thousands of balseros who fled the extreme poverty of their home. Osvaldo Yero's assembly of 750 ceramic, aquamarine, teardrop-shaped hands conveys a "Sea of Tears," for Cuba's historical loss at the hands of the slavers and colonizers and for the considerable dimming of the light of the socialist dream. Tears fall for those who've left, and hands reach out to touch them.
Loss and YearningA number of the Cuban-American artists at Corbino Galleries turn away from the notion of escape, to the exile's invisible home in representations of religious yearning and spiritual knowledge. Paul Sierra, for example, says, "I don't see any justice in nature, no morals or right and wrong. These things are humanly imposed." His work "Epiphany," which hangs at the Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, with its big 5-and-a-half-foot-by-8-foot canvas and harsh palette of reds, greens, yellows and touches of blue and black, communicates a dramatic moment of nature's indifferent brutality. The trees, water and sky seem on fire, consuming the living and the dead. The epiphany is signified by white water falling, like light, from above.
"My brother meditates," says Sierra. "He has these moments of detachment," or epiphany, the revelation of a sense of timeless well being. "I haven't achieved that." On the wall at Corbino Galleries, Sierra's "Halcyon," conveys a similar idea. Though the word properly refers to the mythical bird of peace, the artist uses it to evoke the swimmer (a recurring figure for Sierra), which is simultaneously well formed and strangely embryonic, muscled but androgynous and surrounded in a softer but still dissonant psychedelic palette of incandescent tropical flora. The swimmer rides the river to the brink of a renewal that's spiritual or creative in essence and achieved by flowing with the water rather than against it.
Sierra left Cuba in 1961 at age 16 with his mother and brother to join his father in Miami. They soon moved to Chicago, where Cuban-Americans number about 11,000 and where he has remained since leaving Miami. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. As to how his experience of separation from homeland affects his work, he admits, "the loss of country, friends, identity, ambiance, the crumbling of society, it must be a kick, but I don't know how it shows itself." He says, "Art is a way to stay away from the psychiatrists and the bars." Maybe it transforms the pain. In the meantime Chicago is home for Sierra. He has no plans to return to Cuba, but he adds "a slow painful death" would be fine for Castro, to let nature be cruel to him, spiritually speaking.
Like Sierra, Baruj Salinas and Mario Bencomo make scant reference to Cuba in their art even though they were plenty old enough to have vivid memories when they left the island: Salinas in 1959 at age 21 and Bencomo in 1968 at age 14. Trained as an architect, Salinas splits his time between Miami and Barcelona. Bencomo lives in Miami and is part of the largest concentration of Cubans outside Cuba in the world.
Both artists pursue a transcendental effect. Incongruous to his training, Salinas paints as the anti-architect. His latest work is subtle in hue, shade and figure, but fast. It's as if you are looking at the subject, a palm or flower, caught in the horrific beauty of a typhoon, as if the mysterious logic of weather applied the paint. The canvas is whole and complex, and the more you look, the more you wonder at it, like poetry or God: something you might feel but never know.
Bencomo, on the other hand, goes for ambiguity and mystery but with the underlying precision of a draftsman, indeed, the sketch surely underlies the surface. His subjects are organic. As if filled with life juices, they seem to move in luminous color like light through a clerestory window, absent the familiar pictorial figures of the great religions. Thus mysticism, wonder and beauty overtake the traditions of concrete meaning and dogma. Like Sierra, these guys don't seem to kneel and pray. They pray as they create.
Julio Antonio shies neither from religion, in the indigenous sense, nor politics. Like several Corbino gallery artists, Antonio studied at Cuba's world-class art schools in Havana, the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts and the Superior Institute of Art — in total, about a 12-year course of study. He was part of Cuba's 1980s generation of artists that included Jose Bedea, Carlos Alfonzo, Agustin Cardenas, Ana Mendieta, Ana Albertina Delgado and many others who blew the doors down on the Soviet-style ideological cliches and control that had been Cuban policy in the 1970s.
Irony and SubterfugeMany in this generation left the country for Mexico, Spain and Miami, but they left behind a still-fresh wind of free expression that today's Cuban artists enjoy, though they still, to quote the late Carlos Alfonzo, "play the game" in which irony, humor and subterfuge are the rule. Nevertheless, since the '80s, Cubans have held the attention of the international art world. The art critic and historian Lucy Lippard writes: "It was never believed that a socialist republic could appear with a new exuberant art, that builds bridges between kitsch, folklore, popular religions, and postmodernism, an art that takes on the mestizaje and the syncretism which are also beginning to be major themes in North America … a truly democratic impulse that excludes neither the history of art nor the formal advances of the West, nor the populist vitality of the developing nations."
As with baseball, music, boxing and ballet, Cuba excels in the visual arts, due in part to its free educational system and, in part, to the way this isolated, small strip of a country has managed to diminish racism and social hierarchy somewhat and absorb and integrate its European, African and, to some extent, its indigenous Indian customs and traditions, though that culture was wiped out long ago. This has resulted in Cuba's amazingly rich, resourceful and cosmopolitan cultural imagination.
Antonio knows this richness and celebrates it in his utilitarian and decorative ceramic plates, bowls, and pots via the dance of color and the musical placement of African and indigenous religious symbols. In his paintings "The Bunker," "The Scissors" and "The Repressor" these symbols, like truth tellers or paranoids, unequivocally depict the totalitarian nature of the Castro machine, the violence of its control and the nausea of its affect. Goya would be proud.
However, conditions in Cuba have changed since Antonio's exile in 1985, especially for artists.
With the collapse of Soviet support and the siege-like effect of the U.S. trade embargo, Cuba has been forced to build an international tourist industry (legit and illicit), legalize U.S. currency, and tolerate the social stratifications that result from having a tourist-dollar economy and a worthless peso economy brought together by a new black market. Everything's upside down. Doctors, lawyers and engineers, who are paid in pesos, could do better as tour guides, taxi drivers, table servers or better yet, artists.
Cuban art has become an international export product put up for auction at Sotheby's and Christies, bought by international collectors and museums, shown at international festivals, galleries and exhibitions. Artists enjoy government support, opportunities for travel and overseas fellowships, celebrity and money. They are an elite group. The elevation of artists in Cuba makes Ramon Carulla wonder why Cuban-American artists are so neglected, to say nothing of U.S. artists, broadly speaking.
The ironies of this situation register large in Cuban art, intended and not. For example, the young Cuban photographer of growing reputation Liset Castillo visited USF's Graphicstudio two years ago for a three-week collaboration in which photogravures of three of her photographs were made. Each photograph consists of a single domestic item resting on a wooden table: a handful of rice, a head of garlic and a spoon.
The black-and-white prints represent the essence of simplicity, large (approximately 47-by-36 inches), and stunningly clear and textural. On one hand, the prints eloquently comment on the economic plight of Cubans, where scarcity confers maximum dignity to the most basic domestic needs. On the other hand, the prints signify opportunities available to Cuban artists. Here Castillo has been able to participate in the bounty of a technological and cultural exchange within the borders of her own country's enemy. Speaking over the telephone from Amsterdam, where she's in the second year of a two-year international arts program, she mentioned how much she would like to return to the U.S., to be part of its institutions, to show her work and to wag the tail of the critical establishment dog.
Dynamic ConflictCastillo is ambitious, and she's conflicted, knowing that so much of the appeal of Cuban art has to do with its roots in Cuba. She wants to nurture that connection and feels the need for the domestic life and a sense of home. "I have to think of my relationship with Cuba, my valuable education," for which, she says, she is grateful. "I want to go back," she says. But at the same time, she's enamored with the international scene, the nomadic life of living in three or four homes a year, the contacts, the new ideas, the materials and equipment, the sense of healthy competition that makes you "really strong," she says, then adds, with respect to the present generation, "I think if you talked to them you would find they feel the same way I do."
In Cuban artist Abel Barroso's witty installation "Dreams Do Not Fall Out of Thin Air," five pairs of tables are adorned with woodblock design and sculpture. The tables' support structure shows fundamental elements of Cuban culture: maps of its geography, images of landscape and fauna, and indigenous religious designs and symbols.
Cuba's government is evoked obliquely by the installation's primitive components, which symbolize the austerity of a country that has few modern materials and requires that artists be resourceful improvisers. On top of one of the tables rest icons of the new tourist economy: an alluring bikinied woman, luxury hotels, a swimming pool and a piggy bank. Above the tables, desired commodities also hover. No longer counting sheep, the dreamer is sleepless with images of cell phones, a bag of U.S. currency, a computer, an automatic rifle, an SUV, a simple condom.
Multiple meanings present themselves in this exhibit, but one of them hits on the Cuban artists' complex dilemma. Whereas previously, art was pressured to conform to the needs of the socialist state, now it must conform to the socialist state's need for a marketplace.
Where does that leave Cuban artists? Presently, they may have the best of all possible worlds; they're rewarded for doing what they love. But if the market should change, must they compromise artistic freedom to meet the new fashionable requirements? Most U.S. artists know this dilemma too well. Their bank balance reminds them every time they check it.
Asked why he's an artist, Sierra said, "I don't know. Someone must have hit me over the head with a piano when I was a child. I think it's genetic."
Carulla says, "It's a way of life. I have to do it. If I had to work during the day, I'd paint at night." One of Carulla's paintings shows a boatload of tragicomic figures with character-revealing facial expressions, color, hats and clothing. Some have dreams. Others wear masks. One wants to bail, and others want to sleep. All of them look in different directions.
Freelance writer Preston Whaley can be reached at pawjr@earthlink.net.
This article appears in Aug 28 – Sep 3, 2002.