Tattoos on the rebound in Cuba after years underground

Tattoos on the rebound in Cuba after years underground
Posted: Monday, February 8, 2016 12:03 am | Updated: 12:30 am, Mon Feb
8, 2016.
Associated Press |

HAVANA (AP) — Bent in concentration beneath the vaulted ceiling of his
Old Havana studio, Mauro Coca draws a tropical bird in blue ink down the
length of Julivic Marquez's arm.
"That's really good," the 21-year-old art student says, and Coca presses
his electric needle to her forearm. She winces as the needle buzzes
across her skin, inking the first centimeters of what will take nine
hours to become a red, blue and green quetzal, the brilliantly colored
national bird of Guatemala.
During the sinful heydays of the 1950s, tattoos were for the sailors
prowling Havana's waterfront and boozy tourists lurching from sex shows
to gambling dens. The socialist revolution drove tattooing even further
underground, with health inspectors and police raiding studios seen as
health hazards and vestiges of capitalist immorality.
Now skin art is on the rebound in Cuba, with hundreds of tattoo parlors
operating largely unmolested across the country.
The studio where Coca works, La Marca, or The Brand, is the most salient
example of Cuba's new acceptance of tattooing. The studio sits on two
floors of a refurbished colonial building in the middle of Old Havana,
the government-restored heart of the city, giving it the clear if tacit
endorsement of the City Historian's Office, the agency overseeing every
aspect of development in Havana's most important tourist attraction.
La Marca opened a year ago on one of Old Havana's busiest streets and
has done some 600 tattoos for a mix of Cuban and foreign clients. It's
been used as a space for government-sponsored art events and its
managers say they've never had any trouble with the state despite their
lack of a license explicitly permitting tattooing.
Like so many other activities in Cuba, tattooing is neither illegal nor
explicitly permitted and regulated, leaving it operating in the gray
area Cubans refer to as "alegal," meaning simply that something lacks
any legal status, positive or negative. And like so many other goods,
tattooing supplies can't be purchased from state businesses, meaning
ink, needles and other goods must be imported in travelers' luggage.
"Tattooing remains in limbo," said Leo Canosa, La Marca's owner.
In the middle of last year, state inspectors raided at least a half
dozen Havana tattoo parlors, confiscating tattooing machines, needles
and inks without providing a clear explanation. Alarmed, other parlor
owners closed in order to avoid confiscation.
In contrast to the past, when tattoo artists simply closed down in the
face of official pressure, owners of the shuttered parlors called a
meeting with government inspectors and pushed for a legal resolution.
They were allowed to reopen soon after.
"Tattoo artists, in reality, don't have any official status, as artists
or anything," said Che Alejandro Pando, a tattooist who has been working
in Havana for more than 20 years. "We've been fighting for them to
accept us as artists in Cuba, but we haven't found success."
For much of the past half-century, ordinary Cubans associated tattoos
with prisoners, who etched crude images on each other behind bars. That
image began to soften by the early 2000s with the arrival of more
tourists, some of them tattooed, and tattoo artists' improved ability to
get professional supplies as air travel to the island rose.
Now tattoos of Cuban revolutionary figures, the Cuban flag, gods and
goddess of the African-based Cuban religion Santeria, among other
designs, can be found on Cubans of all ages and social status.
"Tattoos are a work of art," said Alain Gomez, a 31-year-old
self-employed worker with what he said was his Chinese Zodiac sign
tattooed in black on one arm. "It's not like before, when people looked
down on someone with a tattoo."
___
Associated Press writer Michael Weissenstein contributed to this report.

Source: Tattoos on the rebound in Cuba after years underground -
Richmond Times-Dispatch: Ap -
http://www.richmond.com/news/latest-news/ap/article_dc93ac58-2c38-589a-9d9b-b45b3d8fd7d1.html