By Nina King
Sunday, April 13 1997; Page W18
The
Washington Post
In the gloomy atmosphere of U.S.-Cuba relations, visibility is severely limited. On both sides we see only the crudest caricatures: the Imperialist Monster to the North, the Communist Serpent in the Southern Eden. So it has been for four decades, although it is acknowledged on both sides that the serpent has long since lost its venom and the monster's roar has an increasingly tinny sound.
Although many of Cuba's best artists have chosen exile -- in Miami, Mexico or Europe -- there are plenty left to fill the island's museums and galleries. Next month hundreds of artists will gather in Havana for the Seventh Cuban Biennial. Cuban art is also finding its way to the United States. Last year there were group shows of Cuban artists in galleries in New York, Dallas, Newark, Oxford, Miss., and Sewickley, Pa. And the boy wonder of contemporary Cuban art, a 26-year-old known as Kcho (Alexis Leyva Machado), had a one-man show at a fashionable SoHo gallery.
As he has done in performances all over the world, he planned to paint the bodies of a dozen dancers, creating living canvases who would then dance to West
African drums and a string quartet playing Mozart.
It would not have been the first time that a Cuban artist who still lives in Cuba has performed at the Kennedy Center; officials are quick to mention the appearances there of the Cuban ballet company of Alicia Alonso. But classical ballet is one thing, and the writhing of Mendive's scantily clad painted dancers is quite another. Although the programs at the Kennedy Center are self-supporting or privately funded, the building and grounds are maintained with federal funds as a memorial to JFK, the president who, in 1962, went to the brink of nuclear war over Cuba. Clearly this confluence of sensuality, religion, art and Cubans on U.S. government property would not have endeared itself to Jesse Helms, the Senate's self-appointed guardian of aesthetic morality and its hardest-liner on Castro's Cuba.
As it happened, Helms's sensibilities were spared. One week before Mendive and his troupe were due to arrive, the Kennedy Center canceled their performances. I was told by both the Kennedy Center and the State Department that the Cubans had not submitted their visa applications on time. But Mendive said in a phone interview a few days later that he had been informed by both Cuban and American officials in Havana that the decision was prompted by the approach of the U.S. presidential election. ("The mood of the time made it unpropitious.") Mendive accepted this setback philosophically, dubbing it "el trauma de la visa."
At 52, Mendive is probably the best-known of the Cuban painters still living in Cuba. Although he has exhibited all over the world, it is hard to imagine him
living anyplace else. When I saw him last year at his home in the little town of Santa Maria del Rosario on the outskirts of Havana, he seemed a man in his element. His home is a 16th-century farmhouse set in a yard where lemons, oranges, coconuts, avocados and the brilliant flowers of the tropics flourish. He shares this space with chickens, ducks and several dogs -- a schnauzer from Barcelona and another from New York -- as well as cages of Parisian canaries.
Dressed all in white, his hair in graying dreadlocks, and limping slightly from an old injury, Mendive was serene yet charismatic, as befits a man who is not only a lifelong believer in the Afro-Cuban religion known as Santeria but also an initiated priest -- a santero -- himself. In his devotion to this faith and in his artistic transmutations of it, Mendive represents an important strain in Cuban art and life.
Santeria is a New World version of the religion of the Yoruba people of West Africa. It was brought by slaves to Cuba and preserved by them during succeeding generations, while the official Cuban creed shifted from Roman Catholicism to Marxist-Leninism. Santeria's devotees pay homage to a pantheon of deities known as "orishas," who are both manifestations of a Supreme Being and intermediaries between the human and the divine. Each orisha has his or her distinctive attributes as well as one or more alter egos among the Roman Catholic saints. Spelman College professor Arturo Lindsay, editor of a book on Santeria in art, says that this "syncretism" -- which identifies the Christian Saint Barbara with the Yoruba god Shango, for example, and Our Lady of Regla, the patron saint of Havana's harbor, with Yemaya, orisha of the waters -- made possible the disguised worship of the old gods in new forms during the centuries of African slavery in Spanish colonial Cuba. Santeria today also has many adherents of white European lineage.
Mendive, who grew up in a poor barrio of Havana in a family of Santeria practitioners, says he identifies strongly with the Afro-Cuban traditions and with "the dreams of the very ordinary people . . . who believe in and dream about their connection to the African gods."
Yet Mendive is by no means a primitive or naif painter, stresses Gerardo Mosquera, a leading Cuban art critic. He is a sophisticated, well-educated, classically trained artist who alludes knowledgeably to Shakespeare, Faulkner and Rimbaud. He describes himself as a "spiritual descendant" of Cuba's most famous modernist painter, Wifredo Lam, a member of the European surrealist movement who sought to integrate elements of Afro-Cuban culture with European aesthetic trends.
Since the late '80s, Mendive has devoted much of his energy to his multimedia performances, which involve religion and art, philosophy and ethnography, painting and dance. What they do not include is political statements; in interviews, Mendive will not discuss politics. But in the overheated world of U.S.-Cuban relations, not speaking can itself be a statement, and Mendive has been denounced for his refusal to denounce the Castro regime. In Miami in 1988, an anti-Castro activist purchased a Mendive painting at an auction for $500 and then publicly burned it.
Although Mendive now runs the risk of being manipulated as an "official" artist, it was not always thus. Mosquera says that during the "dark period" of the '70s, when Soviet influence on Cuban culture was at its repressive peak, Mendive was "marginalized" -- denied the perks available to a chosen few. One thing the Cuban artists were spared, however, was the imposition of an official style, such as the heavy-handed "socialist realism" that passed for modern art in the Soviet Union.
Margarita Ruiz Brandi, president of the plastic arts division of Cuba's Ministry of Culture, says it is a point of pride that the Cuban state has never dictated an official style, that its visual artists have been free to express themselves in any manner that suited them. Many would dispute this. Cuba's past persecution of homosexuals -- including many artists -- the censorship of individual works
in official art exhibitions, and the fear that encourages self-censorship have often achieved the same ends as more overt methods of control. Nonetheless, one of the hallmarks of current Cuban art is its diversity.
American gallery owner Milly Moorhead praises the "freshness and mystery" of the Cuban art she discovered in a study tour last year. Moorhead's Southside Gallery in Oxford, Miss., put on an all-Cuban show last May and plans another in September. "Just when I think I've seen all the good art in Cuba," she says, "something new shows up and I'm dumbfounded." Among the works she admires are the haunting, symmetrical landscapes of Lester Campa; the brilliantly colored scenes of rural life of self-taught artists Luis Rodriguez and Pelly; and the almost cartoonlike work of Alicia Leal, whose domestic and rural scenes are highlighted by touches of whimsy, magic realism or Santeria -- a mythical beast in the dining room, fish swimming through the living room, the feet of an orisha on a painted floor.
Traveling around Cuba last spring, I saw impressive work not just in the sophisticated big cities of Havana and Santiago but also in a provincial capital, Guantanamo City, and in rural Pinar del Rio. Guantanamo has two large municipal galleries exhibiting paintings that range in theme from a crude but endearing little oil of a santero with two orishas to a giant "postmodern" shirt.
Although Cuban artists have been supported since Castro's revolution by a network of local art schools, state museums and government-sponsored employment programs, given Cuba's present economic straits, ingenuity and cooperation seem more effective than state programs.
In the tiny village of Bayate near Santiago, I visited Luis Rodriguez and the eight other artists -- including a doctor, a physics teacher, a baker and a sign painter -- who have formed el grupo de Bayate, whose members get together to share such tasks as making their own paintbrushes. A more unusual collaboration is that
of Havana artists Bernardo Prieto and Eduardo Garaicoa, who describe their working method as "painting with four hands." Their joint canvases appropriate Renaissance subjects and techniques, to which they add Santeria images and allusions.
When I met them in Havana, they were exulting in an invitation to take part in an October show in New Jersey. Like Mendive, they were ultimately foiled by the trauma de la visa. Their paintings and their painter friend Elio Rodriguez made it to Newark's Sumei Multidisciplinary Arts Center, but Prieto and Garaicoa were denied U.S. visas on the grounds that they might seek to remain in America. Lester Campa was also unable to follow his landscape paintings to New York.
Art critic Mosquera traces some of the present vigor and diversity in Cuban art to the tradition of "openness and flexibility" that predates the revolution and that arose from the island's role as a place of transit for many centuries, a port on the way to somewhere else.
For the Yoruba people of West Africa, however, Cuba was the final destination. Mosquera marvels at the slaves who, possessing so little, contributed so much. "If you think of all these people uprooted from their countries and cultures and families and coming here speaking different languages. The very ship they traveled in was like the Tower of Babel . . . Coming to a new world, a new continent -- it was like a time machine . . . But they were able to keep their religions and the world views surrounding those religions . . . A strong achievement: keeping all this richness for America."
The Afro-Cuban culture that began with the forced journeys of slaves to the New World is still haunted by sea voyages. The single most popular motif among Cuban artists today may be the balsa, the makeshift boat or raft that so many Cubans have departed on. The young and now renowned Kcho, in particular, has made
a reputation from his artistic variations on this theme. In 1995 he won the $50,000 grand prize at the South Korean Kwangju Biennial for a piece featuring a rowboat on a sea of beer bottles. His recent works include two towers made of bentwood boats clamped together, and a boat fashioned of old Cuban textbooks and Marxist tracts.
Although it is not difficult to read a political message into a work such as this last (something about the seaworthiness of the Cuban ship of state, perhaps?), Kcho, like many Cuban artists, seeks in interviews to emphasize the universal themes of his work: immigration and exile, separation and loss. But politics is persistent. Last spring Kcho incurred the wrath of some Cuban-American activists for allegedly breaking U.S. law by producing art for profit -- his own and that of the dollar-hungry Castro regime -- while in the United States under a cultural visa.
It is one of the many ironies of the current U.S.-Cuban situation that the United States has become the stern gatekeeper, deeply suspicious of the motives of Cuban artists who seek to expand their audience and their market by exhibiting here. At the same time, out of economic need, the Cuban government has in recent years tacitly encouraged its artists to spread their wings abroad -- if for no other reason than it means fewer mouths to feed at home. An artist such as Kcho, whose "subject" is illegal immigration, has no need to take to the seas himself. As far as Cuban officialdom is concerned, he is free to fly.