In a series of reports from an island in flux, David Usborne discovers
why the privileges enjoyed by artists may soon be coming to all
Monday, 7 March 2011
Pink bougainvillaea smothers the wall that separates the home of Roberto
Fabelo from the street close to the beach in Miramar, a pleasant
neighbourhood of Havana where the embassies are. But the gate quickly
swings open and he is waiting to welcome us inside.
In Communist Cuba, where everyone – doctors, labourers, teachers – is
technically meant to earn the same wage of about $20 (£12) a month,
there are a few classes of citizens which have long been allowed to do a
little better: sports stars and artists. That may provide a model for
the Cuba of the future. For sure, it includes Fabelo, whose works tour
the globe and are sold by Christies and Sotheby's.
"It's true, we are given a great deal of autonomy," Fabelo says. His
studio at the back of the house is crammed with half-finished canvasses
and assorted sculptures that have come home from exhibitions. It is hard
not to miss the giant resin cockroaches with human heads on a terrace
outside. The grotesque creatures were until recently attached to the
façade of an art museum in Havana.
The life of the Fabelo family is to be envied – and not just by ordinary
Cubans. The artist has recently been able to take his 19-year-old son –
who is also named Roberto and will soon go to university here to study
art – to the Louvre and the great museums of Barcelona. Considered by
some to be Cuba's greatest living painter and sculptor, Fabelo also has
a second studio he is free to work from – in Panama.
"I am permitted to save money here in Cuba and abroad," says Ernan
Lopez-Nussa, a pianist who has just finished accompanying the singer
Omara Portuondo, 80, one of the last surviving links to the original
Buena Vista Social Club. (She appeared in the Wim Wenders film of the
same name and sang on the 1996 album.) Lopez-Nussa, whose French-born
mother fought for Fidel Castro in the Cuban revolution, also lives in
Miramar, in a penthouse provided by the state. The freedom to travel
might be one of the greatest privileges accorded Cuba's best artists.
Later this month, New York will host the largest festival of Cuban arts
it has ever seen. Si Cuba! will bring hundreds of Cubans to the city
with art exhibitions and performances by the National Ballet of Cuba and
the rumba and dance troupe, Los Munequitos de Matanzas.
Exchanges such as these between two countries that on all other levels
are at angry odds recall the ping-pong diplomacy that helped thaw
American-Sino relations in the 1970s. They might eventually help smooth
the path towards a broader improvement in political relations, even the
end of the five decades of the United States's trade embargo.
The risk for Cuba has always been artists possibly defecting, but this
rarely happens.
Why does Lopez-Nussa, who has French parentage, after all, keep
returning? He gives a quick and eloquent answer: "In Cuba I have time,
time to do what I want to do. In other countries, no one has time." His
is a different kind of freedom. Inside Cuba, meanwhile, the arts scene
is itself helping to mirror a gradual easing by Raul Castro of Cuba's
restrictions on commerce and freedom of expression. As we talk in his
father's studio, the younger Fabelo's studies a text on his iPhone.
"Five years ago if I saw someone with a cell phone I thought they must
be really rich," he says. Today, they are everywhere. "Even the people
digging the roads have one." More importantly, as he prepares to go to
university, is the new atmosphere of relative tolerance in which he and
his other young artist friends are working.
"We are more free now in what we can paint and exhibit," he says, even
if "some limits" remain. Other conversations in Cuba tell a similar
story. For instance, it is no longer impossible to create art –
including in writing and cinematography – that carries criticism of the
state.
His father suggests that as Cuba prepares for a Communist Congress next
month – which will endorse a limited, parallel free-enterprise economy –
the country's artists might help show the way. "In Cuba we have to
change and people have to learn how to survive for themselves – we are
the model for that," he says.
It is an encouraging thought, but others in Cuba will be sceptical.
"Things will change, but they will change very slowly," Lopez-Nussa says.
As for what the millions of ordinary Cubans, who live far from the tidy
streets of Miramar and the privileges of the artist class, can expect,
the pianist glances momentarily at the ground. "It is very hard to say
it, but for now they have no future."
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