December's announcement that U.S. and Cuba are renewing diplomatic relations has generated much controversy in Miami's Cuban exile community, as well as considerable press in Miami and beyond. As someone who's lived in Miami for 30 years and has experienced the peculiar position of being, in various degrees, both inside and outside the Cuban exile community, I am well aware of the profound grief Castro's regime has brought to my half-Cuban husband's extended Cuban American family in South Florida.
Havana Memories
In addition, that historic December news brought back memories of my trip to cover the 7th Havana Biennial in late 2000 for The Miami Herald. My editor at the time really wanted me to attend, but I was told under no circumstances could I go as a Miami Herald journalist because the MH was not allowed in the country. Then it was suggested that perhaps I could go undercover. . . .well, I did love my job but certainly was not willing to risk jail time in Cuba for it!!
So I did go, but legally. I used connections with a southwest Florida university group and traveled with them. My husband came along as a translator, although it turned out many Cuban artists and curators I met spoke English, so I did not need him to translate as much as I thought I would. While we were there, we visited a few of his relatives who had not chosen exile. We brought them a small suitcase of meds--we had learned from one of his Miami Cuban relatives that these meds were badly needed.
Today I am posting my two articles about that trip to cover the 7th Havana Bienal (that's the spelling I used, in reference to the catalog I brought home with me). One thing I did not report was how many Miami people I saw on that trip to Havana! Most of them looked horrified to see me and begged me not to write in the MH that I saw them in Havana!
What I did report was the impressive number of art museum groups, from outside Miami, I encountered. It did seem to me that Miami's art museum community was missing out on provocative, intriguing cultural exchanges that many other art communities were going to great lengths to experience. So many things have changed here in Miami since I went to Havana. It's no longer the kiss of death for artists to exhibit here if they have exhibited or worked in Cuba.
I also reported on how artists, including Tania Bruguera, were censored at that event. Very interesting, and surely not surprising, to see how censorship is still taking place in Cuba since this historic December announcement regarding thaw in Cuba and U.S. relations. Once again, Bruguera is involved in censorship in Cuba.
Current Situation in Cuba: Various Views
On Friday, January 2, 2015, Randal C. Archibold reported in The New York Times that "Human rights monitors said that up to 50 government opponents were arrested around the time that Ms. Bruguera was detained Tuesday before she could carry out an open mike performance in Havana's Revolution Square in which she planned to ask citizens to speak about their visions of the country."
For this blog post, I've emailed several members of Miami's art community scanned copies of my MH articles about my trip to Havana, explaining I thought that now was an appropriate time to post them on my blog. In light of that, I asked them to email me comments about how they think December's news will affect the art scene in Cuba as well as Miami's innumerable artcentric connections to Cuba. I also asked them to offer any reflections they might have on the Havana Biennial as a cultural institution since the 12th Havana Biennial will take place May 22 - June 22, 2015. So here are their comments.
From a longtime member of Miami's diverse art community:
"There could be a comparison with the 25th anniversary of the Berlin wall falling Nov. 2014 and the beginning of diplomatic relations with Cuba. The coming years in all likelihood will be confused, chaotic and, for some, deeply unfair, but 25 years from now the possibilities are endless for Havana. If the Fanjul family (Cuban-American sugar barons), as reported in the Washington Post, are considering business relations under the right circumstances, then why not for Cuban artists?"
From Howard Farber, collector of Cuban art, who calls both Miami and New York home:
"In the past, I attended my first Havana Biennial with very little expectation. However, when I arrived in Havana, I was very impressed with not only the venue (the historic Morro Castle), but with the amount of energy put forth by a country that has minimal financial resources to compete with other venues like Venice, etc.
"A movie theatre is only as good as the films they play, and any Biennial is only as good as the quality of art it exhibits. Cuba has always done a wonderful job of marketing and exhibiting the best of the best of international as well as Cuban contemporary art. To me, it's amazing. . . . It's like 'the little engine that could.'
"Collectors, journalists and museum curators have always attempted to make it a 'must see' visit.
"So now, we are entering 2015 and a new era of U.S. and Cuban relations, which is long past due.
"Some of us older collectors of Cuban contemporary art have waited for years to see this occur. . . . I know that many collectors are always looking for the next 'big thing.'
"Well, the next 'big thing' to me since late 2001 has always been Cuban contemporary art. It will be an exciting time for all that have devoted their time, efforts and money to see the 2015 Havana Biennial surpass our most hidden fantasies of what a market can become.
"There is a new dawn for Cuban contemporary art, and I'm so thrilled to be a witness to it."
From Tami Katz-Freiman, independent contemporary art curator based in Miami, and who also attended the 7th Havana Biennial when I was there:
"It's very interesting what's going on now and how this new relationship will impact the art scene." Referring to a recent New York Times article reporting that "Cuba's art scene awaits a travel boom," she says, "As you can see it's all about the impact on the art scene and basically I agree--it will be booming for a while until 'everybody' will come, and then it will be like any other country . . . for the long run--I am sure it will also impact the content of the works.
"As for censorship--I don't think government policies will be evaporated suddenly--but hopefully this new agreement is a sign for a change and it might take time and Cuba will be more open and more tolerant to the freedom of speech."
From widely exhibited artist William Cordova--who spent two weeks in Cuba in 2012 and visited Havana, Matanzas, and Ceiba Mocha--and who has also spent much time living and working in Miami:
"The Cold War never ended for the U.S. and Cuban governments or for most Cubans in South Florida. There are many ways in which some have benefited politically and financially. This is not exclusive to the arts at all but in reference to state and local politics and government policies."
Cordova thinks that, when I quote Cuban-American artist Tony Labat saying that Cuban artists "don't even know what paying dues is. . . . Busloads of collectors are buying work from artists that are not ready to show," this situation, Cordova says, "echoes strategies applied since then towards the booming Asian art market in the early 2000s or the NY East Village buying boom in the early 1980s. Most of that art never saw the light of day after being purchased but was a byproduct of buying frenzy and opportunism."
A further example of such frenetic opportunism in the art market, Cordova says, is "what occurred in Miami in the early 1990s when many young Cuban artists decided to establish themselves in South Florida. Some experienced severe culture shock. . . capitalism has its pros and cons but many were not prepared for a foreign system that took advantage of their previous success.
"This phenomenon was and is not exclusive to Cuban artists at all. Most immigrants who migrate to any country have to adapt and understand new systems. For some Cuban artists, though, it was more traumatic because in Cuba some artists 'are privileged and able to travel' as artist Jose Toirac stated in your article. The difference in the U.S. is that nothing is free and the government does not value or support visual culture in most capacities.
"Luis Camnitzer's New Art of Cuba (1993) gave us a glimpse of many of those artists who eventually left the safety of the island. It's interesting to see how some of those same artists focused on subversive themes related to government policies in Cuba. Those same artists were unable to evolve thematically once they left Cuba. . . you can see how derivative some of their work has become because they had no time to evolve and were very young when they left their country. I see similar situations with Chinese artists because they're not fully informed about how commerce is applied to the arts in a Western market."
So, without further ado, here are my MH articles:
A NEW PICTURE by Elisa Turner
COPYRIGHT BY ELISA TURNER
Published Sunday, January 28, 2001, in The Miami Herald
HAVANA
Cuban art in enjoying widespread popularity, and, at a recent Havana showcase, the booming scene was on display for curious Americans.
Savvy Americans art lovers can't get enough of Cuba these days.
"Cuban art is hot," says Ricardo Viera, director and curator of Pennsylvania's Lehigh University Art Galleries, who traveled here this fall to visit family and friends. "The amount of Cuban art selling in this country [the United States] is unreal."
Cuban artists "don't even know what paying dues is," adds Tony Labat, a Cuban American artist who teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute and who brought his students to the capital city to work with artists. "Busloads of collectors are buying work from artists that are not ready to show."
International fascination with the art and artists of Cuba, which has been building for a decade, reached a crescendo this fall at the 7th Havana Bienal, a series of exhibitions that drew more than 1,500 foreign visitors, according to director Nelson Herrera Ysla. More than 1,000 of those came from the United States--the highest number of Americans ever to attend the Bienal--including groups from New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.
The past 10 years have also seen German chocolate baron Peter Ludwig create the Ludwig Foundation in Havana to support Cuban artists; group shows at the Bronx Museum, the University of Florida and in Barcelona; and also solo shows in the United States and Europe for celebrated Cuban sculptor Kcho.
There also have been residencies and exhibits for Cuban artists in U.S. cities organized by Art in General, a nonprofit organization in lower Manhattan. And, in April, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will stage "Shifting Tides: Cuban Photography After the Revolution," a major show that includes black-and-white images of Havana's Malecon by Manuel Pina, and New York publisher Harry N. Abrams will release Art Cuba: The New Generation, an illustrated survey of 67 artists working in Cuba, by Art in General Director Holly Block.
Closer to home, the traveling exhibit "Contemporary Art from Cuba: Irony and Survival on the Utopian Island" comes in May to the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum in Tampa while the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art [now known as the Nova Southeastern University Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale] recently added works from nearly a dozen Cuban artists to its permanent collection.
But has that interest been sparked by the quality of art and the artists or by Cuba's forbidden allure, something given greater emphasis in this country by the island's status as a renegade outlaw, off-limits to U.S. citizens without special permission?
"I think the curiosity factor was strong," says Dan Cameron, curator of New York's New Museum of Contemporary Art, who attended the Bienal with a group from the New Orleans Museum of Art. "Cuba has been very much in the news, with Buena Vista Social Club and Elian Gonzalez. Suddenly people who hadn't given Cuba very much thought took this as an opportunity to find out what was going on."
New Opportunities
Art, like most everything in Cuba, is run by the state, which manages 21 art schools, organized regionally with at least one per province. Budding talent is identified at an early age, and the most gifted children are boarded at these special schools.
The pre-eminent school is Havana's Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA), a tattered Utopian masterwork of sensual domes built in the 1960s by now-exiled architect Ricardo Porro on the greens of the former Havana Country Club. ISA produced most of the so-called 1990s generation of Cuban artists, the first post-revolutionary artists allowed to travel to the United States and Europe for exhibits and residencies and to legally receive coveted American dollars for their work--although the government can still claim a sizable cut of the artists' earnings.
Because the artists bring much-needed hard currency to Cuba, at home they're an elite that enjoys latitude--up to a point--to address themes such as materialism, politics and identity with ingenious metaphors rather than strident attacks that characterized so much work by Cuba's vaunted 1980s generation.
In a conundrum typical of this swiftly changing island, where totalitarianism and tourism make odd dance partners, there is a mantra you hear about the students of ISA: Their art is terrific, and their access to art materials is terrible.
But deprivation has been the mother of creative invention for these artists, who receive an in-depth cultural education and are taught to draw with exquisite skill. In an art world that prizes unconventional materials, scarcity has become a curious boon.
Kcho, by far the most internationally famed of this group, recycles rum bottles, planks from broken- down docks and twisted mangrove stumps to craft large installations that evoke the experience of being uprooted and the tragic travails of the balseros, or rafters.
Jose Toirac, whose spectral portraits of slain revolutionaries sold for $9,500 at auction at Havana's Casa de las Americas, painted them with wine and blood, though he also paints with oils.
Recycling isn't just a matter of convenience, it's an aesthetic statement that allows artists to produce compelling objects that allude to personal and political pasts--the contrast between Western consumerism and Third World want as well as internationally topical issues of migration and identity.
Abel Barroso uses cedar panels from old armoires to craft his wry hybrids of sculpture and woodcut prints. Rene Francisco turns empty paint tubes into robotic figures. Yamilys Brito paints her works on 45 rpm records. And in a startling mix of art and design, the Havana design team known as Cabinete Ordo Armoris has sculpted a baroque pink lamp from tubes used to inseminate cows.
Art and Revolution
The 7th Havana Bienal was an ambitious if disorganized collection of exhibits by more than 170 artists from 42 countries, emphasizing work from Cuba and elsewhere in the Third World. But several museum officials admitted the mixed bag of the Bienal was not the real draw for visitors; it was the chance to see Havana and artists working there.
Across town from the narrow tourist-filled streets of Old Havana, Jose Toirac shares his studio and home with his wife, art historian Meira Marrero. It's a modest walk-up apartment with a Sony TV, gray peeling window shutters and a vintage General Electric refrigerator next to a wooden easel.
Wearing a white T-shirt speckled with black dots in a pattern matching the bullet holes in the uniform Che Guevara was wearing when he was killed, Toirac is showing his most recent paintings--portraits of Fidel Castro within the iconography of Western advertising.
Many began as precisely painted copies of shots from Korda's "One Hundred Images of the Revolution" before morphing into something like miniature, hand-crafted billboards. Here was Castro standing tall as the Marlboro Man, or glowing as a vision in red, hawking Calvin Klein's Obsession cologne.
An artist who appropriates and analyzes stock images of the Cuban revolution, Toirac has been linked to Goya by Marilyn A. Zeitlin, the Miami-educated curator of "Contemporary Art from Cuba," who finds the artist's ironic works analogous to the Spanish master's subtly derisive court portraits.
"Every artist has to find a way to mix the revolution and art," Toirac says. Still, he admits, "It's not possible to show all these together. It's not the right political time."
Though he has visited the United States, Toirac remains in Havana now that he can sell his art for dollars. "Artists are privileged and able to travel. It's not expensive to live here," he says. "My rent is paid for. Everyone can't go and be successful like Bedia (Miami-based artist Jose Bedia, Toirac's former teacher).
Artists really want to stay and take part in the Cuban art phenomenon. "When I go to the United States, I knock on gallery doors and they don't want to open the door," adds Toirac, "but here they knock on my door."
Independent Display
In Havana's Vedado district, a hilly, formerly middle-class neighborhood with sidewalks upturned by the untrammeled roots of ficus trees, stands a Mediterranean-style home that houses Espacio Aglutinador, a gallery created in 1994 when artists Ezequiel Suarez and Sandra Ceballos divided their one-room apartment in half.
Ceballos and Suarez have since parted ways. Now she runs the gallery with partner and fellow artist Rene Esteban Quintana. Old pink and floral tiles cover the floor; a Hewlet Packard computer and printer rest on a desk next to shelves packed with art books.
Known for mounting unusual exhibitions, Ceballos said she launched the gallery because she was frustrated with the official mechanisms for showing art.
"I wanted to be more independent," she says.
The current show features small objects and mementos such as invitations saved by Havana critics and art supporters. The opposite of trendiness, the show is engaging and intimate.
But it remains a challenge, Ceballos says, to raise an independent voice now that the art market is more available.
"It depends on what kind of artist you want to be," she says with a shrug. "If you want to be an artist influenced by foreign galleries and curators looking for a type of Cuban art," she continues, "you'll produce a certain kind of work."
"The galleries are looking for names, not artists," she adds, a lament that could be heard almost anywhere.
Are artists free to criticize the government?
"Some artists can, some cannot," she says. "If the money comes, they can do what works. [But] it's got to be metaphorical, like Kcho."
Also in Vedado is a sagging, 19th Century villa scarred by a gingerbread front porch that had rotted. Its open door led to "This is Your House Vicenta," a memorable show of work by seven artists timed to attract Bienal visitors.
In this ghostly house--where elegant faded wallpaper stirred speculation about plusher days--lives Vicente, the 80-year-old former maid of the home's late owner. Though Vicente has done nothing to repair the house in more than 50 years, she allowed artists to make installations in several first-floor rooms.
These rooms proved especially compelling because they were woven into the home's ruined charm, though Angel Delgado's piece would have been riveting anywhere. His was a trestle table laid with metal plates filled with soap crafted to resemble prison food, a formally austere homage to Delgado's six nonths in prison, punishment for having defecated in a performance on a photo of Fidel Castro. A small photo of Che hung over the table, though a government official later insisted it be removed, apparently disturbed by what appeared to be an illusion to Delgado's past insurgence.
Mapping Nostalgia
Vibora, a neighborhood of modest residential architecture, lies a bumpy, 25-minute, exhaust-filled trip southwest of Old Havana. There, in a white-columned home, artist Ibrahim Miranda lives and works. Early on a November day he finds himself playing host to two Los Angeles dealers, a handful of collectors from California and New York, and Laurel J. Reuter, director of the North Dakota Museum of Art. Miranda is one of the first Cuban artists to make prints at Tampa's Graphicstudio.
Hanging in his dining room above a mahogany sideboard is his 2000 Graphicstudio woodcut in shades of pink and black. A surreal image calculated to appeal to exile nostalgia, the woodcut is based on a strangely proportioned 18th Century map of Cuba and Florida. Dark waters separate the two land masses and floating in the water are giant eyeballs, from which roll oily black tears that swamp Cuba's coastline.
The title, "Lagrimas negras" ("Black Tears"), he explained, is also the title of a nostalgic and passionate Cuban song from the 1930s. It's an "emotional view," he adds, of the relationship between Cuba and Florida.
Back at the Bienal, Abel Barroso's clever "Third World Internet Café," occupying a dank space that was once a prison in the Castillo del Morro, gently skewered the presence of so many digitally advanced Westerners flocking to a poor country like Cuba. His collection of "Mango" brand computers, fax machines and printers were hand-crafted from wood--like precious low-tech islands themselves.
Barroso's unusual adaptation of techniques for printing woodcuts prompted Graphicstudio to invite him to Tampa to make new work and speak to local art students.
However much they neglect artists who left Cuba before this burgeoning U.S. interest, cultural exchanges like Graphicstudio's and other signs of support continue to flow north and south--opening doors, many believe, to a more open atmosphere in Cuba.
"If you make Cuban artists international, it will be the best for them," Cuban art critic Alejandro Rios says, alluding to the protection fame can provide.
"Who's going to touch Kcho now?"
Elisa Turner is the Herald's art critic.
OUTSIDE ARTISTS FACE CENSORSHIP WHEN EXHIBITING WORKS IN CUBA
by Elisa Turner
COPYRIGHT BY ELISA TURNER
Published Sunday, January 28, 2001, in The Miami Herald
HAVANA
Although Havana's 7th Bienal was dedicated to the theme of communication, censorship compromised the images and ideas some artists hope to communicate.
Albert Chong, a Jamaican-born artist who teaches at the University of Colorado in Boulder, said he ran afoul of Cuban censors and feels "betrayed."
The trouble arose when he altered his installation, "Winged Evocations," months after it had been chosen by Bienal curators. In Havana, Chong added letters from Cuban artists on and off the island whom he'd asked to comment about their country. Especially objectionable was one from a Cuban American, who wrote "freedom" and "libertad" all over a photocopy of his Cuban passport.
According to Chong, Bienal officials asked him to remove the letters, saying he was "being insensitive to the situation in Cuba." He refused, citing his artistic freedom.
In another case, Israeli artist David Reeb was asked to make "a small concession" and remove a portrait of Fidel Castro from a series of paintings. Reeb refused, reported the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, sending another work called "Censorship in Other Places," which deals with events in South Africa and Czechoslovakia.
The piece was untouched, though Bienal officials changed the title to "Untitled."
"Art is one of the last spaces where you can speak your mind," Chong said. "I felt like I was an outsider and had no right to question their society, but I had asked Cubans for their views. The responses from Cubans in Cuba were very poetic. . . if you are a citizen or artist you have to deal with these situations poetically.
"I didn't do this, so I guess I was at fault. People understand how to read between the lines."
After a restless night, Chong decided to cover up the letters, partly out of fear that his Cuban assistants would be punished for working with him.
"I didn't have a choice," he says. "I can leave but they have to live with it."
His solution layered irony upon irony: He and his crew covered the letters with paper boats--icons of freedom--made from pages ripped from Inside the Company, a book critical of the CIA's involvement in Latin America.
Still, the experience left him with "grief for the lost human potential. There are a lot of people who are very intelligent who are stagnating on the island because they have no outlet."
A performance and installation piece by Cuban artist Tania Bruguera also generated talk about censorship when it was shut down temporarily on the Bienal's first day.
Situated in La Cabana, a former prison, Bruguera's intentionally ambiguous piece required viewers to walk down a dark tunnel over a floor covered with pungent sugar cane. Near the end, light shone from a video monitor mounted on the ceiling, flickering Cuban TV footage of Castro.
Near the screen and hard to see in the dark, four naked men repeated gestures as if they were washing their mouths or hands.
Visitors were curious about why the work's ominous title, "Engineer of Souls," was scratched out on the label and replaced by "Untitled." In an e-mail, Bruguera said the initial title referred to another work she had planned to show in a smaller space; only after the label was up did she notice the error and it was corrected. She said she was told the piece was shut down by the military, not the Bienal, because of the nude men.
Bienal director Nelson Herrera Ysla acknowledged that the Bienal and artists don't always agree on what to show. While he and his staff talked both Chong and Reeb into changing what they exhibited, "they were free," he wrote in an e-mail, "to exhibit their artworks or not."
Herrera said he preferred to talk about "negotiations" rather than "censorship."
"I talk about ethics in curating," he wrote. "Everyone has their own principles. We do, as [do] many others in the world."
