Flowing from Mariel
Freedom became the intoxicating
muse for a generation of artists
By Fabiola Santiago. fsantiago@herald.com.
Posted on Sun, Apr. 17, 2005 in The
Miami Herald.
Gilberto Ruiz doesn't want to talk about
the voyage that brought him to U.S. shores
25 years ago, but gently coax him and the
images emerge with the force of his brusque
strokes on canvas.
The overcrowded shrimper Mrs. Smugglers,
the storming high seas, the smaller vessels
surrounding them taking on water, people
disappearing into the waves. The complete
darkness of night, and then, a dock and
freedom, unimaginable freedom.
''Mariel was the best thing and the most
terrible thing that ever happened to me,''
says the 54-year-old painter whose first
job in exile was as a fried-chicken cook
at McCrory's in downtown Miami.
Likewise, in the poetry of Reinaldo García
Ramos, journeys and escapes prevail, and
the image of water is at the heart of his
digital literary magazine, Decir del agua,
a poetic phrase that combines the concept
of water and speech.
One year -- 1980 -- and a tumultuous, historic
journey from a Cuban port -- Mariel -- mark
their generation as creators. Twenty-five
years later, the stamp of artists, writers,
musicians, thespians and dancers who arrived
via the boatlift is sprinkled over South
Florida and the nation.
''We arrived with a desperate need to express
ourselves,'' says García Ramos, a
retired United Nations translator who in
Cuba had to declare himself ''an undesirable''
with authorities to leave the island and
now writes from a Miami Beach apartment.
"For us, it was a liberation in the
most ample sense of the word. We had not
been allowed to exist in Cuba as artists.
We had been marginalized, not allowed to
publish, to exhibit our art. Freedom allowed
us to become and Mariel was the laborious
birth.''
That's why three years into their exile,
Mariel artists staged their first art exhibit
at Tamiami Park, where thousands of the
Mariel refugees were processed and why a
group of Mariel writers that same year --
1983 -- began publishing the literary magazine,
Mariel.
''Most people get here and yearn to buy
a house and a car,'' García Ramos
says. "We wanted to publish a literary
magazine. Some of us put our rent money
into the magazine.''
The magazine closed in 1986, but it was
long enough to establish the Mariel generation
as an intellectual force.
The roster of Mariel artists is impressive:
Primitivists Eduardo Michaelsen in San Francisco
and Alberto Godoy in Houston; the late painter
Roberto Valero in Washington D.C.; writer
Roberto Madrigal in Cincinnati, who founded
another literary magazine and editorial
publishing house Término.
In Miami, the list includes artists Andrés
Varelio, Victor Gómez, Luis Vega;
drummer Ignacio Berroa, who played with
the late Dizzy Gillespie; writers Carlos
Victoria, Andrés Reynaldo and Luis
de la Paz; radio personality Adrián
Mesa; Miami Hispanic Ballet founder Juan
Pablo Peña.
What makes their generation different from
previous waves who left Cuba is that these
artists spent two decades in a hermetically
closed society. Rock 'n' roll was banned;
religious worship was discouraged; gays
were sent to labor camps.
MENTAL 'ASPHYXIA'
''From 1960 to 1980 we suffered from intellectual
asphyxia,'' says García Ramos, who
translated books from French to Spanish
for the official Book Institute but was
not allowed to publish his own works. He
was deemed ''ideologically deviant'' for
participating in the independent literary
publishing group El Puente from 1960 until
1965, when it was dismantled by the government.
"We left Cuba because we needed to
breath.''
In exile, the work of Mariel artists is
among the most irreverent, often taking
on a quizzical discourse on the world. Ruiz's
mixed media The Sky is Falling, inspired
by the Mexican earthquake and Mount St.
Helens eruptions of the early '80s, is typical.
As is his acrylic on canvas Peaceful Path,
in which a naked man is poised at the edge
of a raft as if he were about to jump into
a deep-blue ocean, into a fate unknown,
all of his humanity exposed.
''One of the fascinating things about the
Mariel group is that they break away from
the baggage of exhausted nostalgia in Cuban
art outside of Cuba because they don't have
any nostalgia,'' says Alejandro Anreus,
an art historian at William Patterson University
in New Jersey who has curated exhibits by
Mariel artists. "You won't see stained
glass windows bathed in light, that sweet
nostalgic view of the patio in the house
of painters like Cundo Bermúdez and
José Mijares.''
The Mariel artists don't sell as much as
those who toil with more nostalgic themes,
but many like Ruiz, represented by the Barbara
Gillman Gallery in Miami and preparing for
a retrospective exhibit in the fall, have
declined to do more commercial work and
earn a living at another job. Ruiz, for
instance, is a security guard at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York.
IMPACT OF AIDS
For many, the journey in exile has been
bittersweet: Some of the most noted artists
were lost to the AIDS epidemic.
One was an exceptional painter, Carlos
Alfonzo, the other a provocative writer,
Reinaldo Arenas, whose autobiography, Before
Night Falls, was turned into an acclaimed
film. And so were lost the painters Ernesto
Briel, Valero, Humberto Dionisio and Luis
Boza.
''Surely it has to do with the idea that
for the first time, we were in possession
of our lives and we surrendered to its force,
and that includes sexuality,'' says García
Ramos, who knew them all and has on his
walls abstract paintings by Briel, for whom
a commemorative retrospective is being organized
at Miami Dade College in June.
"Unfortunately we arrived in 1980,
and at that moment, there was no knowledge
of the epidemic and it wasn't until '83
and '84 that we began to hear about it in
New York, and by then, many had already
been affected.''
Despite the setbacks, the desire of Mariel
artists to break all bounds -- and their
success in doing so -- has given the exodus
newfound cachet.
Being labeled a Marielito, once a stigma
because of the criminals and mentally ill
patients Fidel Castro placed among the refugees
on the boats, is now a source of pride.
In fact, many who arrived at the same time,
but did not come via boat, call themselves
part of "The Mariel Generation.''
One of those artists, sculptor Laura Luna
arrived in Miami on April 21, 1980, the
same day as the first boat of what became
the Mariel boatlift. But she arrived in
Miami on a flight because her father, a
freed political prisoner, had obtained a
visa.
''The only difference between me and the
other Mariel artists is the mode of transportation
to come here,'' she says. "But I am
a Marielita.''
Luna, 46, is included in practically every
Mariel exhibit and her life in Cuba echoes
that of her fellow artists.
A voracious reader of Victor Hugo and Albert
Camus when her contemporaries in exile read
American and English authors, Luna, 46,
studied at San Alejandro Academy, where
some of the best Cuban painters were schooled.
But she was not allowed to continue to study
in the Escuela Superior de Arte because
her father was in prison for counterrevolutionary
activities, her mother was a Jehovah Witness,
and Luna did not belong to communist youth
groups.
''Everything was prohibited -- books, music,
a certain kind of clothing -- but we [the
young artists at San Alejandro] did everything
we could to rebel,'' Luna says. "Whenever
we would get a hold of a prohibited book,
we would take shifts reading -- someone
would read it in the morning, another in
the afternoon and another at night. In one
week, you had some 20 people read the same
book.''
Such a thirst for culture was the perfect
thread in a Miami-in-the-making tapestry.
The musical tastes of the Mariel generation,
for example, are more eclectic than the
Cuban-Latin mainstream.
Mesa, the radio personality, was 18 when
he rushed into the Peruvian Embassy in Havana
with his older sister and 10,000 other Cubans,
the event that catapulted Mariel.
Now on his three shows on Clásica
92.3 FM, he plays a mélange of music.
There's contemporary Cuban music, the likes
of the '90s-made Habana Abierta fusion ensemble,
grass-roots exile singers like Marisela
Verena and the late ''king of filin''' Luis
García -- in addition to singers
from Spain, Italy and France, popular in
Cuba when rock was banned.
He was among the first to break the long-held
taboo of not playing singers like Elena
Burke, who remained in Cuba.
''It's the music I grew up with,'' Mesa
says. "They weren't played here at
all and I even had some problems at first
with people calling me communist for playing
them. But we were there all those years
and we know who is who and who did what.''
But he's also not unfeeling to exile sensibilities.
''I won't play Xiomara Portuondo, for example,
because she continues to boldly declare
herself a communist at every chance, and
the same for Pablito [troubadour Pablo Milanés]
and Los Van Van,'' Mesa says of singers
closely identified with Castro's government.
As for Mesa, he's dabbling in music himself,
hosting an amateur show at Little Havana's
Casa Medina Tuesday night and debuting recently
as a singer and actor in the show Magia
at Dade County Auditorium.
''Oye,'' he says in his trademark jovial
voice, "and proud to be a Marielito.
Not just now, always.''
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