Artists gain a measure of freedom in Cuba

By James Varney
Newhouse News Service

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She rounded a corner not far from the sea wall, darted across the street, and entered the fortresslike U.S. Special Interest Section, Washington's diplomatic toehold in communist Cuba.

She moved swiftly to the restroom, where an unknown woman crouching in the next stall delivered the words Shalett longed to hear.

"Psst! You want to see art?"

Shalett, the director of capital campaigns and endowment for the New Orleans Contemporary Art Center, did indeed want to see what cutting-edge Cuban artists are up to — only more urgently after two days in the Cuban capital shuttling from one bland government-sponsored show to another.

In truth, Shalett's encounter wasn't as clandestine as a cloak-and-dagger novel would have it. She was in Havana as part of a sanctioned cultural exchange.

"I was pretty frustrated," she said, laughing as she recalled the moment. "I was with a lot of friends who were artists and all we'd seen so far was junk. We kept saying to ourselves, 'How do we get to see the real art?' "

Thanks to the unexpected query in the restroom from what turned out to be a tourist guide, Shalett wound up on an unofficial odyssey led by Damian Aquiles, who paints with rust. Aquiles took her to the makeshift studios of more than a dozen artists around the capital, some of whom kept their works under trundle beds. Shalett was wowed by much of what she saw, works by classically trained painters and sculptors laboring in a society where milk is a luxury and freedom of expression even rarer.

The irony is that even in a political climate so inhospitable to creativity, artists with overseas-market appeal seem to be thriving. Filling the void left by an earlier generation of artists who fled, they have emerged as a source of desperately needed currency. As a result, they are cut breaks by Fidel Castro's regime, which allows them a degree of celebrity — and incomes — considerably greater than the average worker.

"The strategy now is to not close any doors," the free-lance Havana critic Gerardo Mosquera notes in "Art Cuba: The New Generation." Mosquera characterizes the work as post-Utopian. There is still an interest in unmasking the cynicism of communist life, and typically the discourse is veiled, so as to avoid censorship, but the new generation is also attentive to the formal aspects of art.

Much of the work focuses on the absurdity and harshness of Castro's 46-year-old dictatorship.
 
In one piece, sculptor Angel Delgado, using soap and a worn pair of shoes, showed the oval path he wore while pacing in his 4-by-6-foot cell. Delgado was in prison for defecating on a copy of the Cuban Communist Party's official newspaper during a Havana exhibit.

Between Shalett's trip and the expiration of cultural exchanges on Dec. 31 as part of new travel restrictions to Cuba signed by President Bush, New Orleans gallery owner Jonathan Ferrara made three trips to Havana. His second show, "Havana Inside Out," opens March 4.

"I have no interest in supporting Castro, and my intention was never to get into the politics of Cuba," Ferrara said. "It was contemporary art, and only art, that drew me to Cuba, but these people are true rebels and you have to admire them." Delgado stayed at Ferrara's house when he was in New Orleans for a 2002 show.

The importation and sale of artwork in the United States falls under "informational materials," and thus is not subject to the terms of the Trading With the Enemy Act, the formal name for what is commonly called "the embargo."

However, remittances to Cuban artists can be made only through a third-country bank, according to the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company