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CUBA
NEWS
The
Miami Herald
Chamber issues new report on Cuba business
opportunities
By Jane Bussey., jbussey@herald.com.
Posted on Tue, May. 25, 2004.
The Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce updated
its report on business opportunities in
a post-Castro Cuba, issuing a road map for
investments and trade today more than a
decade after its first ''waiting for Fidel
to fall'' study.
There were few surprises in the report,
as Pedro Freyre, co-chairman of the Cuba
Committee, announced its conclusion that
Miami would be the ''logical, focus point''
for renewed trade with a post-embargo Cuba.
One of the main purposes of the study is
to provide the local business community
with an understanding of the implications
of a ''free'' Cuba -- both opportunities
and challenges.
But the meeting, where the audience of
executives, diplomats and chamber representatives
had only one question for a panel of speakers,
also delved into the challenges facing South
Florida and briefly touched on the hot-button
issue of whether Cuba -- and anxious Cuban-Americans
-- faced a transition or succession in the
future.
This is the question over whether the passing
of President Fidel Castro would bring about
an abrupt transition to democracy -- much
like the collapse of the Soviet government
or the Berlin Wall -- or would be followed
by a succession, with some continuity of
Castro-created institutions as his brother
Raul or some other Communist Party-bred
leaders stepped into power.
The Miami report came just a few weeks
after President Bush's Commission for Assistance
to a Free Cuba, established in October,
recommended some policy changes to spur
freedom on the island, such as restricting
who may receive the estimated $1.2 billion
in remittances sent by Cuban-Americans.
In the report, Secretary of State Colin
Powell called any post-Castro succession
that allowed the regime to retain its hold
on power as "completely contrary to
the hemisphere's commitment to freedom.''
But Damian Fernandez, director of the Cuban
Research Institute at Florida International
University, said solely focusing on a transition
without considering the holdover of almost
50 years of ''cradle-to-grave welfare''
was possibly ''wishful thinking'' on the
part of policymakers.
''There is a great dissonance between what
the academic community thinks and what the
policymakers think,'' said Fernandez, a
panelist at the morning meeting at the Hotel
Inter-Continental.
''We have to face the reality that levels
of continuity will stay in place,'' Fernandez
said.
Also speaking besides Fernandez and Freyre,
an attorney for Akerman Senterfitt, were
Dennis K. Hays, a former State Department
official and now managing director of the
global and government affairs practice in
Washington for Tew Cardenas, a Miami law
firm; and Manuel Lasaga, president of StratInfo,
a Miami economics and financial consulting
firm.
Chinese-Cuban roots and thrifting prizes
By Elisa Turner, elisaturn@aol.com.
Posted on Mon, May. 24, 2004
The world has already seen enough photographs
of vintage American cars huddled on crumbling
Havana street corners; there are far fewer
images of the Cuban capital's Chinatown.
Once a bustling enclave of restaurants,
Chinese language newspapers and theaters
showing films from Hong Kong, the Barrio
de Chino in Havana fell into a swift decline
following Fidel Castro's rise to power in
1959, when many business owners of Chinese
descent fled to the United States.
At Diaspora Vibe Gallery in the Design
District, photography and video by New Jersey-based
artist Maria Lau give a too-brief look at
a neighborhood with a compelling history.
Families of Chinese-Cuban ancestry can
trace their roots to contract laborers who
arrived to work on the island's sugar plantations
in the mid-19th century, as well as to veterans
of the California Gold Rush and refugees
of modern Chinese civil wars. Lam Yam, father
of Cuban modernist painter Wifredo Lam,
was a Cantonese-born shopkeeper and scribe
who arrived in Cuba in the 19th Century
by way of San Francisco and Mexico.
At the turn of the 20th century, Havana's
Chinatown was considered the largest, most
vibrant concentration of Chinese culture
and cuisine in Latin America.
In her art, Lau reveals the old neighborhood
to be less than a ghost of its former glory.
In these grainy color photographs of typical
Havana scenes, with rusting motorcycles
and wheezing 1950s cars, the typical sense
of dusty fatigue is palpable. But the added
dimension of cloudy, double-exposed imagery
hints at a less familiar past, with the
fading presence of Chinese characters and
Chinese names embossed on storefronts and
apartment buildings.
Lau is an American-born artist raised in
New Jersey; her Chinese-Cuban parents left
Cuba in 1961. Only in the last few years
has she reconnected with her heritage, returning
to shoot Havana streets, including those
in Chinatown.
The work is both documentary and personal
journey. Documentary photos of Havana sights
are predictable and disappointing, especially
her portrait of a cigar-chomping Santeria
priestess clutching a lacy fan.
Others show the promise of a rich material
worth more development. Among them: Dad
Divination, a passport-type photo of her
father as a young man, with images of slim
wooden strips bearing Chinese characters
superimposed over his face. The wooden strips
are divination sticks Lau used at a family
altar in Havana, and in the photograph they
become both barriers and keys to memory.
PLACEMAKER GALLERY
Also in the Design District is Elusion
Allusion by New York-based artist Shelby
Hughes, at Placemaker Gallery. Hughes excels
in quirky rescues of rag-tag kitsch and
chintzy decorative arts.
Her drawings, sculpture, and makeshift
shelters have the air of a great-aunt's
attic that's been rummaged through and reconfigured
with playful, unsturdy insouciance. Glass
prisms hang from the ceiling, attached to
fraying twine with studied casualness. This
is art for the meandering eye, alighting
here and there on relics of a not-so-distant
past, which pretend to be much older and
grander than they really are.
Hughes exposes, and then enjoys, such loopy
artifice. There's the flowery faux baroque
glitz of a 1970s dollop of wall décor,
which the artist found in a New Jersey thrift
shop and then cast in Latex rubber and spiced
up with glitter to create the strange wall
sculpture, Everything's Peachy.
The most resolved are the drawings on vellum.
They are meticulous and sweetly weird, like
Unmentionable Real Estate, with its stagey
vista of retro styles. Here, Tudor townhouses
nudge up to castle turrets and a modest
mid-century boat. Styles of the past shed
their historical context and become gleefully
absorbed into the recycler's fanciful but
elusive and fragile new order.
Elisa Turner is The Herald's art critic.
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