Native Painters in Havana
Frank Correa Writer and Journalist Havana, Cuba
Art and Identity
M
ore than two decades ago, a group of visual artists from Havana were frustrated because the art commissaries did not accept their aesthetic proposals for the official and commercial circuit. These artists have had to fight against a thousand and one adversities to keep their art alive. They are the autochthonous painters of a surreptitious culture and their relevance is still far from being understood by the scholars nowadays. The most representative is Antonio Calzada, alias Tonito or Rasta, a true art hero, who lives in a very miserable wooden house with zinc roof at the end of the darkest corridor in the neighborhood Romerillo, together with his elderly parents and his alcoholic brother. In his minuscule room, some of his paintings are hanging like in a gallery, next to Bob Marley posters. The other paintings have been sold through intermediaries, God knows at what prices, and he has received a portion of the purchase price " that is never sufficient to afford living here ". Those art works must be decorating rooms or galleries today, who knows where. On a small table, next to a rough bed, his brushes and squeezed oil tubes crowded together. At an angle, the wooden easel, always with a novelty. Being a child, Tonito won the first prize in a painting competition. The president of the jury was Roberto Fabelo, who exalted the expressionist values and the style audacity of " that neighborhood boy." However, the Romerillo’ s House of Culture did not give him any credit and he wasn’ t sent to San Alejandro Academy. Since then, the young artist isolated himself in the marginal neighborhood sub-world. He made his own paintbrushes with horse hair. He invented paints by melting lead, mixing gasoline with ashes. He used all the bed sheets at home as canvases. The frames were flagpoles collected through the streets at the end of political parades. He became a Rastafarian, but since he reached majority, his fate was already sealed: painting until the end. He finished the series Mitochondrial Eve, which included ten pieces: Mother, Help, Two Evas, Genealogical tree, Tripar, Clearly, Darts and Arrows, Men with Hands in Their Pockets and Doubt, all of them covered by dust in the bottom of the wardrobe. Another native painter of the same group is José Díaz Santacruz. He lives in Jaimanitas and paints since he was a child. He has stamped his personal seal all over around the town by spreading his art to countless places. Almost everywhere, marlins fan out while jumping and marine paintings can be seen with the signature J. D. Santa Cruz. Marlins and albacores also reveal his personal seal in many facilities across the town. He was even more frustrated when, a few years ago, the authorities removed their giant marlin at the town entrance, a very popular symbol, to place a small wreck fish with dreamy eyes made by the painter José Fuster. But that other Joseph is a deep sense painter and his greatest frustration is having postponed— while painting fishes to get food— his fundamental works: God Sweeping the Street and The World Partition.
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