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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