Cuban Art & Living

“Fernando, there seems to be an overall, underlying sadness in the people.  How about you?  Would you say you are generally happy?   The waiter has been receptive to my probing in the past and he didn’t disappoint. 

His reply was a question of his own.  “Are you happy?”

Not ready for it, I had to think about it. “I have moments of happiness.”

“We have moments of happiness too.  My children and I do not live in fear.”

“You mean fear of the system?”

“No, I mean we can walk in the darkest streets alone.  My children are safe in school.  There are no guns.  And there is opportunity here.  We must find that opportunity however we can.  We must take it.”

I recently met a Miami doctor in the restaurant of Havana’s old José Martí airport.  Since we were the only two people in the room, we lunched together, and he shared his medical experience in Cuba.

“I’m not Cuban.  I’m American and I am 75 years old.  I’ve been coming to Cuba twice a month for seven years to do  arthroscopic knee surgery. We don’t do knee replacements here because the Cuban doctors can’t do the follow-up.  They are excellent at working in developing countries because their abilities are like that of 40 years ago… thorough, knowledgeable and caring .  But they don’t have the technology and don’t know what to do with the medicine that surrounds it.

“Anyway,  I just go in, do my work, and I do not discuss politics, U.S. medicine or anything.  I just do my job.

“I use to do this in the hospital in Havana, but the foreign student doctors would gravitate to me to learn. It was I who should have been listening to the Cubans.  So now, I work at a hospital in Pinar del Rio, where there are not all those foreign student doctors around.  I think I wore out my welcome in Havana.

I’ve just rediscovered an essay in an old journal from 1999 that describes my first impressions of Havana.  Before we get very far blogging about the here-and-now adventures of discovery of Cuba, perhaps this post might be of interest.  

February 18, 1999 - Two days is far too little time to see a city, let alone a country.  Not much time to explore or meet many people, derive truths or understand politcal idealogies, only time for first impressions…

…which doesn’t lessen the value of first impressions.  A strong original imprint is part of a live continuum of knowledge.  Tomorrow it can be proved false, exaggerated or understated, but still, a first impression is important, because a first impression is always just and only that… a first, inarguable, notion concieved at a particular point in time.

I might see things differently down the road, but right now, visiting Havana is like witnessing an unfolding drama.  Since 1959, this island nation has embraced socialism then Communism, and now drifts somewhere between both, and Capitalism.  The doors to tourism have been opened as the country maneuvers to provide for basic needs in the wake of the Soviet bloc pullout, the loss of its largest market - sugar, and a tightening of the U.S. economic embargo. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome World.

People ask all the time, “I thought we couldn’t go to Cuba. How do you get to go, and I don’t?” They are referencing the decades long U.S. economic embargo with Cuba that disallows normal trade and travel with the country.

My first experience with the forbidden island was from the deck of a trimaran at the break of dawn, watching Havana reveal itself as its tall buildings developed slowly out of the sea. That was thrilling. That was 1999, during one of the last, then-legal yacht races from Key West to Havana. And, that’s when I discovered the art of Cuba. I knew I would be back.

I was back the next September with Dawn Schnuck, who would be my partner for the next few years in procuring, exhibiting and selling Cuban art in the U.S.

We arrived in Havana on a specially chartered flight from Miami with foreign service agents that work in the American Interests Section in Havana, and tearful Cuban-Americans carrying medical supplies and clothing to relatives in Cuba. Crisply folded into our passports was written permission to do business in Cuba, from the government of both Cuba and the U.S. Going back to our own revolutionary days, our First Amendment rights include the right to access informational material, including art, found anywhere in the world. But getting a license to go after Cuba’s art is another story; the qualifying rules are stringent and the permitting process is lengthy.

Read the rest of this entry »