Miami Herald. January
29, 2001
Anti-Castro game a hit on Web
Czechs click away to 'free prisoners'
Screen shot from Czech web sitewww.flashfun.cz
shows cartoon of Castro with prisoners.
By Luisa Yanez. lyanez@herald.com. Published Monday,
January 29, 2001, in the Miami Herald
Millions of times, Eastern European cyberspace heroes are blasting away at
Fidel Castro's make-believe militia to free two prominent Czech citizens
currently jailed in Cuba.
It's no Play Station II staple, but the Internet game is the latest craze in
Prague.
Fueled by the true-life political wrangling going on between Cuba and the
Czech Republic over the arrests, the game has gotten millions of hits in Eastern
Europe.
With instructions in English and Czech, the game transforms each player into
an armed agent. The goal is to rescue Ivan Pilip, a member of Parliament, and
Jan Bubenik, a human rights activist and former student leader, from Castro's
jail.
In real life, the two have been held since Jan. 12, accused of having
contact with anti-Castro dissidents on the island.
The game, created by Jan Kottman, Vít Novácek and Tomás
Nevrtal, is being circulated through the Internet site www.flashfun.cz. To start
the game, click on the box marked "Novinky.'' Attempts to reach the
creators through the Internet and by telephone were unsuccessful.
As the game begins, Pilip and Bubenik are seen in a prison cell while Castro
gives one of his famous marathon speeches.
Suddenly, unsavory-looking members of Cuba's militia guarding the Czechs
begin popping from behind bushes and other hiding places, firing with automatic
weapons.
If a player gets a kill, blood splatters. Ill-fated agents see a yellow
splatter before meeting their maker.
Players killed off are shown lying face down in a pool of blood, their
weapons next to their bullet-riddled bodies. And the Czechs stay in jail.
A player who kills 50 of the guards wins the release of the prisoners -- and
a surprise.
In the game's final frame, the Czechs happily float away from Cuba toward
South Florida atop an inner-tube raft, accompanied by a dark-skinned, wide-eyed
island boy with a T-shirt with the misspelled name Gonzales.
Castro casts a wary eye toward Bush
Published Saturday, January 28, 2001, in the Miami Herald
HAVANA -- (AP) -- President Fidel Castro of Cuba said Saturday that his
government will keep a close eye on the new Bush administration, insisting that
he will not judge it beforehand but noting that millions of Cubans are trained
to handle firearms.
"A new administration of a very irregular form has just been installed
in the United States,'' Castro told more than 200,000 people gathered in San José
de Las Lajas, about 30 miles southeast of the capital.
"We are not in a hurry to judge it beforehand . . . We will not throw
the first stone,'' Castro said during his half-hour speech, televised live on
state television. But, he said, "we will carefully watch every step it
makes and every word it pronounces.''
"Absolutely nothing will take us by surprise,'' Castro added.
Castro noted that "the Cuba of today is not the Cuba of 1959'' -- the
year the revolution triumphed.
Then, he said, Cuban citizens were unarmed and practically illiterate.
Now, "there is not a single illiterate person'' on the island, the
Cuban leader declared. "Millions of men and women have learned how to
handle weapons.''
He said his government would continue the "battle of ideas'' launched
14 months ago against U.S. policies toward Cuba, referring to mass rallies held
regularly on Saturdays in different parts of the island.
Castro made his first public comments about Bush last weekend after the Jan.
20 inauguration, saying he hoped his new adversary in the White House -- the
10th U.S. president to serve since Castro came to power -- is "not as
stupid as he seems.''
The White House declined to comment on most of the earlier remarks.
Bush has expressed support for the four-decade U.S. trade embargo on Cuba.
He has said he envisions no change in U.S. policy toward the communist
island unless free elections are held and political prisoners are freed.
Outside artists face censorship when exhibiting works in Cuba
'I felt like I . . . had no right to question their
society.' - ALBERT CHONG, University of Colorado
By Elisa Turner. elisaturn@aol.com. Published Sunday,
January 28, 2001, in the Miami Herald
HAVANA -- Although Havana's 7th Bienal was dedicated to the theme of
communication, censorship compromised the images and ideas some artists hoped to
communicate.
Albert Chong, a Jamaican-born artist who teaches at the University of
Colorado in Boulder, said he ran afoul of Cuban censors and feels "betrayed.''
The trouble arose when he altered his installation, Winged Evocations,
months after it had been chosen by Bienal curators. In Havana, Chong added
letters from Cuban artists on and off the island whom he'd asked to comment
about their country. Especially objectionable was one from a Cuban American, who
wrote "freedom'' and "libertad'' all over a photocopy of his Cuban
passport.
According to Chong, Bienal officials asked him to remove the letters, saying
he was "being insensitive to the situation in Cuba.'' He refused, citing
his artistic freedom.
In another case, Israeli artist David Reeb was asked to make "a small
concession'' and remove a portrait of Fidel Castro from a series of paintings.
Reeb refused, reported the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, sending another work
called Censorship in Other Places, which deals with events in South Africa and
Czechoslovakia.
The piece was untouched, though Bienal officials changed the title to
Untitled.
"Art is one of the last spaces where you can speak your mind,'' Chong
said. "I felt like I was an outsider and had no right to question their
society, but I had asked Cubans for their views. The responses from Cubans in
Cuba were very poetic . . . if you are a citizen or artist you have to deal with
these situations poetically.
"I didn't do this, so I guess I was at fault. People understand how to
read between the lines.''
After a restless night, Chong decided to cover up the letters, partly out of
fear that his Cuban assistants would be punished for working with him.
"I didn't have a choice,'' he says. "I can leave but they have to
live with it.''
His solution layered irony upon irony: He and his crew covered the letters
with paper boats -- icons of freedom -- made from pages ripped from Inside the
Company, a book critical of the CIA's involvement in Latin America.
Still, the experience left him with "grief for the lost human
potential. There are a lot of people who are very intelligent who are stagnating
on the island because they have no outlet.''
A performance and installation piece by Cuban artist Tania Bruguera also
generated talk about censorship when it was shut down temporarily on the
Bienal's first day.
Situated in La Cabana, a former prison, Bruguera's intentionally ambiguous
piece required viewers to walk down a dark tunnel over a floor covered with
pungent sugar cane. Near the end, light shone from a video monitor mounted on
the ceiling, flickering with Cuban TV footage of Castro.
Near the screen and hard to see in the dark, four naked men repeated
gestures as if they were washing their mouths or hands.
Visitors were curious about why the work's ominous title, Engineer of Souls
was scratched out on the label and replaced by Untitled. In an e-mail, Bruguera
said the initial title referred to another work she had planned to show in a
smaller space; only after the label was up did she notice the error and it was
corrected. She said she was told the piece was shut down by the military, not
the Bienal, because of the nude men.
Bienal director Nelson Herrera Ysla acknowledged that the Bienal and artists
don't always agree on what to show. While he and his staff talked both Chong and
Reeb into changing what they exhibited, "they were free,'' he wrote in an
e-mail, "to exhibit their artworks or not.''
Herrera said he preferred to talk about "negotiations'' rather than "censorship.''
"I talk about ethics in curating,'' he wrote. "Everyone has their
own principles. We do, as [do] many others in the world.''
U.S. brands Cuba's claims about Czechs 'ludicrous'
From Herald Staff and Wire Services. Published Saturday, January 27, 2001,
in the Miami Herald
The State Department on Friday called "ludicrous'' claims by Cuba that
two pro-democracy activists from the Czech Republic were engaging in subversive
activities when they met with Cuban dissidents early this month.
"Meeting with peaceful political activists and carrying a list of
activists' names is not considered a crime in most countries of the world,''
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said.
Cuba's continued detention of the two Czechs "provides graphic proof of
why it is important to continue to focus international attention on human rights
in Cuba, and we echo the Czech government's call for their release,'' he said.
Cuba arrested Ivan Pilip and Jan Bubenik on Jan. 12 after they met with two
dissidents. Pilip, 37, is a deputy in the Czech parliament's lower house and a
former finance minister. Bubenik, 32, was a student leader in the 1989 overthrow
of the communist government in Prague.
Cuba, whose relationship with the Czech Republic has deteriorated over the
past decade, earlier this week accused the Czechs of working with U.S.-based
Freedom House to destabilize the communist state.
In a document posted on an official state website, the Havana government
urged the Czechs to appeal to Cuba's "generosity'' to release the two men,
who could face 17 years in jail if convicted.
Both Czech President Vaclav Havel and Prime Minister Milos Zeman rejected
the idea of the Czech government apologizing to Cuba. The Czechs have asked for
the official reasons behind the arrests.
Czechs and Cuban officials resumed contact on Friday, with the Cuban Foreign
Ministry handing to the Czech charge d'affaires in Havana a document detailing
the reasons the two men are being held.
Former Cuban ballplayer's son defects, seeks contract
Scouts to watch pitcher Marquetti
There has been an exodus of Cuban players, denounced in Havana as
traitors.
Paul Brinkley-Rogers. pbrinkley-rogers@herald.com.
Published Saturday, January 27, 2001, in the Miami Herald
The baseball-playing son of famed Cuban slugger Agustín Marquetti has
defected, hoping that a major-league team will make use of the pitching skills
he honed with Havana's Industriales.
Miami agent Joe Cubas said he is representing the younger Marquetti, whose
first name also is Agustín, and that the 23-year-old right-hander will
show off his talents to major-league scouts in the Dominican Republic this
weekend.
Cubas, who has made an art of engineering such defections and who once
represented New York Yankees pitching ace Orlando "El Duque'' Hernández,
said he was not involved in the defection that took place about one month ago
when Marquetti was in Venezuela on a private visit.
"He did that with the help of someone else,'' Cubas said. "But in
Venezuela we were able to obtain status and a visa so that he could go to the
Dominican Republic.''
Cubas said the baseball commissioner's office has ruled that Marquetti is
eligible as a free agent.
Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, who authored last year's The Pride of Havana: A
History of Cuban Baseball and who has watched the younger Marquetti pitch for
the Industriales team in Havana, said the young six-foot six-inch pitcher "looks
good.''
But Gonzalez, who teaches Hispanic literature at Yale University, said a
Cuban fan grumbled to him when the right-hander was knocked out of a game in the
seventh inning that he was only pitching for the Industriales because his father
played for that team.
Marquetti's father retired in 1987 after 22 seasons and 207 home runs in his
career. A perennial batting champ, he had a .288 batting average and was known
for his left-handed, split-grip batting style and his warm-hearted leadership
qualities.
Two of the younger Marquetti's teammates on the Industriales, right-hander
Mayque Quintero and shortstop Evel Bastida, both 22, also recently defected and
are in Costa Rica.
Their agent, Joe Kehoskie, said they will probably try out for the major
leagues in February "somewhere in Florida.'' Quintero, who also pitched for
Cuba's national junior team, is seeking a signing bonus of about $14.5 million.
Recent months have seen an exodus of Cuban players, who have mostly been
denounced by Havana as traitors to Cuban sports.
Third baseman Andy Morales, who came ashore near Key West in July 2000 and
who hit a home run for the Cuban national team against the Baltimore Orioles in
1999, is being courted by several major-league teams.
Cuban national junior team catcher William Plaza, 17, and pitcher Yolexandry
Reina, 18, defected after a game in Canada last August and fled to Mexico with
the help of Kehoskie.
Mario Miguel Chaoui, a player with the college team Equipo Caribe, left last
May and is in South Florida.
Gonzalez said he expects talented players will continue to try to leave.
"People seek freedom, and players want to test themselves against the
best and have a chance at earning a living,'' he said.
"A lot of Cubans want to leave Cuba because of repression. But baseball
players are special cases. The time clock of an athlete ticks very fast, and
unless you make it out of Cuba by the time you are 25 it may be very difficult
to get into the majors, although some players like El Duque are different, of
course.''
Gonzalez said Marquetti's father, who won Cuba's home run championship in
1972 and gave "stellar performances in international competition,'' is "probably
happy for his son.''
In Miami, protests of Cuban art drop
By Daniel Chang. dchang@herald.com. Published Sunday,
January 28, 2001, in the Miami Herald
The farther Americans live from Cuba, the more likely they are to see work
from the island's contemporary artists.
Or so it seems.
In Long Beach, Calif., for example, a recent exhibition by a new generation
of Cuban artists offered an insightful peek into present-day Cuba. And though
the works painted an unflattering portrait of Cuba's four decades under Fidel
Castro, the political context of bringing Cuban art to Miami proved
controversial, says the person handling the collection.
"We tried,'' says Marilyn A. Zeitlin, curator of Contemporary Art From
Cuba: Irony and Survival on the Utopian Island. "We approached all the
usual suspects in Miami: art museums, science museums, but there were no
takers.''
But while the history of Cuban art in Miami is marked by vociferous
protests, there has also been growing and steady support.
Indeed, Miami's tolerance for Cuban artists seems to have come a long way
since 1988, when Miami art collector Ramón Cernuda weathered public
controversy for presiding over an auction that included work by artists living
in Cuba. Federal agents seized Cernuda's collection the following year, charging
him with violating the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba.
The artwork was later returned.
"In Miami, whatever exhibition, concert or lecture that is given by
someone who still lives in Cuba is bound to be controversial,'' says Juan
Martinez, an art history professor at Florida International University who will
deliver a talk at the opening of a Cuban-American artists' exhibit at the Lowe
Art Museum on Thursday.
Yet works by Cuban artists have been shown in Miami without incident.
Contemporary Cuban artists such as photographer Humberto Mayol -- whose works
were shown at Miami-Dade Community College in 1999 as part of a publicly funded
show -- opened and closed without protests. And artist Alfredo Sosabravo, who
still lives on the island, recently hosted a book signing in Coral Gables to
promote his most recent catalog.
Sosabravo, a painter and multimedia artist, was even invited to the recent
inauguration of the Barrio Museum at Little Havana, in the heart of the Cuban
exile community. The Barrio Museum's inaugural exhibit includes works by Ever
Fonseca, a painter who lives in Cuba.
Still, museums and cultural groups remain wary of courting controversy by
exhibiting works by Cuban artists even though the U.S. embargo against Cuba
permits cultural exchanges.
"It's true that no one wants to take that risk,'' says Josefina Hernández,
owner of Kendall-based Publications Exchange, which imports cultural products
from Cuba and which sponsored Sosabravo's trip. "[But] I think the time is
right.''
Published Sunday, January 28, 2001, in the Miami Herald
"There is no market for art in Cuba"
"There is no market for art [in Cuba],'' says photographer Manuel
Piña.
By Elisa Turner. elisaturn@aol.com. Elisa Turner/Herald
Staff
HAVANA -- Savvy American art lovers can't get enough of Cuba these days.
"Cuban art is hot,'' says Ricardo Viera, director and curator of
Pennsylvania's Lehigh University Art Galleries, who traveled here this fall to
visit family and artist friends. "The amount of Cuban art selling in this
country [the United States] is unreal.''
Cuban artists "don't even know what paying dues is,'' adds Tony Labat,
a Cuban-American artist who teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute and who
brought his students to this capital city to work with artists. "Busloads
of collectors are buying work from artists that are not ready to show.''
International fascination with the art and artists of Cuba, which has been
building for a decade, reached a crescendo this fall at the 7th Havana Bienal, a
series of exhibitions that drew more than 1,500 foreign visitors, according to
director Nelson Herrera Ysla. More than 1,000 of those came from the United
States -- the highest number of Americans ever to attend the Bienal -- including
groups from New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles Museum of
Contemporary Art and The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.
The past 10 years have also seen German chocolate baron Peter Ludwig create
the Ludwig Foundation in Havana to support Cuban artists; group shows at the
Bronx Museum, the University of Florida and in Barcelona; and solo shows in the
United States and Europe for celebrated Cuban sculptor Kcho. There have also
been residencies and exhibits for Cuban artists in U.S. cities organized by Art
in General, a nonprofit organization in lower Manhattan. And in April, the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art will stage Shifting Tides: Cuban Photography After
the Revolution, a major show that includes black-and-white images of Havana's
Malecon by Manuel Piña, and New York publisher Harry N. Abrams will
release Art Cuba: The New Generation, an illustrated survey of 67 artists
working in Cuba, by Art in General Director Holly Block.
Closer to home, the traveling exhibit Contemporary Art from Cuba: Irony and
Survival on the Utopian Island comes in May to the University of South Florida
Contemporary Art Museum in Tampa, while the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art
recently added works from nearly a dozen Cuban artists to its permanent
collection.
But has that interest been sparked by the quality of the art and the artists
or by Cuba's forbidden allure, something given greater emphasis in this country
by the island's status as a renegade outlaw, off-limits to U.S. citizens without
special permission?
"I think the curiosity factor was strong,'' says Dan Cameron, curator
of New York's New Museum of Contemporary Art, who attended the Bienal with a
group from the New Orleans Museum of Art. "Cuba has been very much in the
news, with Buena Vista Social Club and Elián González. Suddenly
people who hadn't given Cuba very much thought took this as an opportunity to
find out what was going on.''
NEW OPPORTUNITIES
Art, like most everything in Cuba, is run by the state, which manages 21 art
schools, organized regionally with at least one per province. Budding talent is
identified at an early age, and the most gifted children are boarded at these
special schools.
The preeminent school is Havana's Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA), a
tattered Utopian masterwork of sensual domes built in the 1960s by now-exiled
architect Ricardo Porro on the greens of the former Havana Country Club. ISA
produced most of the so-called 1990s generation of Cuban artists, the first
post-revolutionary artists allowed to travel to the United States and Europe for
exhibits and residencies and to legally receive coveted American dollars for
their work -- although the government can still claim a sizable cut of the
artists' earnings.
Because the artists bring much-needed hard currency to Cuba, at home they're
an elite that enjoys latitude -- up to a point -- to address themes such as
materialism, politics and identity with ingenious metaphors rather than the
strident attacks that characterized so much work by Cuba's vaunted 1980s
generation.
In a conundrum typical of this swiftly changing island, where
totalitarianism and tourism make odd dance partners, there is a mantra you hear
about students of ISA: Their art is terrific, and their access to art materials
is terrible.
But deprivation has been the mother of creative invention for these artists,
who receive an in-depth cultural education and are taught to draw with exquisite
skill. In an art world that prizes unconventional materials, scarcity has become
a curious boon.
Kcho, by far the most internationally famed of this group, recycles rum
bottles, planks from broken-down docks and twisted mangrove stumps to craft
large installations that evoke the experience of being uprooted and the tragic
travels of the balseros, or rafters.
José Toirac, whose spectral portraits of slain revolutionaries sold
for $9,500 at auction at Havana's Casa de las Americas, painted them with wine
and blood, though he also paints with oils.
Recycling isn't just a matter of convenience, it's an aesthetic statement
that allows artists to produce compelling objects that allude to personal and
political pasts -- the contrast between Western consumerism and Third World want
as well as internationally topical issues of migration and identity.
Abel Barroso uses cedar panels from old armoires to craft his wry hybrids of
sculpture and woodcut prints. René Francisco turns empty paint tubes into
robotic figures. Yamilys Brito paints her works on 45 rpm records. And in a
startling mix of art and design, the Havana design team known as Cabinete Ordo
Amoris has sculpted a baroque pink lamp from tubes used to inseminate cows.
ART AND REVOLUTION
The 7th Havana Bienal was an ambitious if disorganized collection of
exhibits by more than 170 artists from 42 countries, emphasizing work from Cuba
and elsewhere in the Third World. But several museum officials admitted the
mixed bag of the Bienal was not the real draw for visitors; it was the chance to
see Havana and the artists working there.
Across town from the narrow tourist-filled streets of Old Havana, José
Toirac shares his studio and home with his wife, art historian Meira Marrero.
It's a modest walk-up apartment with a Sony TV, gray peeling window shutters and
a vintage General Electric refrigerator next to a wooden easel.
Wearing a white T-shirt speckled with black dots in a pattern matching the
bullet holes in the uniform Che Guevara was wearing when he was killed, Toirac
is showing his most recent paintings -- portraits of Fidel Castro cast within
the iconography of Western advertising.
Many began as precisely painted copies of shots from Korda's One Hundred
Images of the Revolution before morphing into something like miniature,
hand-crafted billboards. Here was Castro standing tall as the Marlboro Man, or
glowing as a vision in red hawking Calvin Klein's Obsession fragrance.
An artist who appropriates and analyzes stock images of the Cuban
revolution, Toirac has been linked to Goya by Marilyn A. Zeitlin, the
Miami-educated curator of Contemporary Art from Cuba, who finds the artist's
ironic works analogous to the Spanish master's subtly derisive court portraits.
"Every artist has to find a way to mix the revolution and art,'' Toirac
says.
Still, he admits, "It's not possible to show all these together. It's
not the right political time.''
Though he has visited the United States, Toirac remains in Havana now that
he can sell his art for dollars.
"Artists are privileged and able to travel. It's not expensive to live
here,'' he says. "My rent is paid for. Everyone can't go and be successful
like Bedia (Miami-based artist José Bedia, Toirac's former teacher).
Artists really want to stay and take part in the Cuban art phenomenon.
"When I go to the United States, I knock on gallery doors and they
don't want to open the door, but here they knock on my door.''
INDEPENDENT DISPLAY
In Havana's Vedado district, a hilly, formerly middle-class neighborhood
with sidewalks upturned by the untrammeled roots of ficus trees, there stands a
Mediterranean-style home that houses Espacio Aglutinador, a gallery created in
1994 when artists Ezequiel Suárez and Sandra Ceballos divided their
one-room apartment in half.
Ceballos and Suarez have since parted ways; now she runs the gallery with
partner and fellow artist Rene Esteban Quintana. Old pink and red floral tiles
cover the floor; a Hewlett Packard computer and printer rest on a desk next to
shelves packed with art books.
Known for mounting unusual exhibitions, Ceballos said she launched the
gallery because she was frustrated with the official mechanisms for showing art.
"I wanted to be more independent,'' she says.
The current show features small objects and mementos such as invitations
saved by Havana critics and art supporters. The opposite of trendiness, the show
is engaging and intimate.
But it remains a challenge, Ceballos says, to raise an independent voice now
that the art market is more available.
"It depends on what kind of artist you want to be,'' she says with a
shrug.
"If you want to be an artist influenced by foreign galleries and
curators looking for a type of Cuban art,'' she continues, "you'll produce
a certain kind of work.
"The galleries are looking for names, not artists,'' she adds, a lament
that could be heard almost anywhere.
Are artists free to criticize the government?
"Some artists can, some cannot,'' she says. "If the money comes,
they can do what works. [But] it's got be be metaphorical, like Kcho.''
Also in Vedado is a sagging 19th-Century villa scarred by a gingerbread
front porch that had rotted. Its open door led to This is Your House Vicenta, a
memorable show of work by seven artists timed to attract Bienal visitors.
In this ghostly house -- where elegant faded wallpaper stirred speculation
about plusher days -- lives Vicente, the 80-year-old former maid of the home's
late owner. Though Vicente has done nothing to repair the house in more than 50
years, she allowed artists to make installations in several first-floor rooms.
These works proved especially compelling because they were woven into the
home's ruined charm, though Angel Delgado's piece would have been riveting
anywhere. His was a trestle table laid with metal plates filled with soap
crafted to resemble prison food, a formally austere homage to Delgado's six
months in prison, punishment for having defecated in a performance on a photo of
Fidel Castro.
A small photo of Che hung over the table, though a government official later
insisted it be removed, apparently disturbed by what appeared to be an allusion
to Delgado's past insurgence.
MAPPING NOSTALGIA
Vibora, a neighborhood of modest residential architecture, lies a bumpy,
25-minute, exhaust-filled trip southwest of Old Havana. There, in a
white-columned home, artist Ibrahim Miranda lives and works.
Early on a November day he finds himself playing host to two Los Angeles
dealers, a handful of collectors from California and New York, and Laurel J.
Reuter, director of the North Dakota Museum of Art.
Miranda is one of the first Cuban artists to make prints at Tampa's
Graphicstudio; hanging in his dining room above a mahogany sideboard is his 2000
Graphicstudio woodcut in shades of pink and black.
A surreal image calculated to appeal to exile nostalgia, the woodcut is
based on a strangely proportioned 18th Century map of Cuba and Florida. Dark
waters separate the two land masses, and floating in the water are giant
eyeballs, from which roll oily black tears that swamp Cuba's coastline.
The title, Lagrimas negras (Black Tears), he explained, is also the title of
a nostalgic and passionate Cuban song from the 1930s. It's an "emotional
view,'' he adds, of the relationship between Cuba and Florida.
Back at the Bienal, Abel Barroso's clever Third World Internet Cafe,
occupying a dank space that was once a prison in the Castillo del Morro, gently
skewered the presence of so many digitally advanced Westerners flocking to a
poor country like Cuba. His collection of "Mango'' brand computers, fax
machines and printers were hand-crafted from wood -- like precious low-tech
islands themselves. Barroso's unusual adaptation of techniques for printing
woodcuts prompted Graphicstudio to invite him to Tampa to make new work and
speak to local art students.
However much they neglect artists who left Cuba before this burgeoning U.S.
interest, cultural exchanges like Graphicstudio's and other signs of support
continue to flow north and south -- opening doors, many believe, to a more open
atmosphere in Cuba.
"If you make Cuban artists international, it will be best for them,''
Cuban art critic Alejandro Rios says, alluding to the protection fame can
provide.
"Who's going to touch Kcho now?''
Elisa Turner is The Herald's art critic.
Alleged spy's double life shocked girlfriend
She calls Cuban's mission virtuous
By Gail Epstein Nieves. gepstein@herald.com. Published
Sunday, January 28, 2001, in the Miami Herald
Until a troop of FBI agents stormed through Maggie Becker's door -- forcing
her boyfriend to the floor at gunpoint and rummaging through their belongings --
Becker had no idea she was living with a man the United States had labeled a
Cuban spy.
"That's absurd,'' said Becker, 50, a Key West masseuse who met Antonio
Guerrero seven years ago.
The person portrayed by prosecutors as sneaky and manipulative in a federal
courtroom in downtown Miami is not the "Zen Buddhist kind of guy'' whom
Becker loved and lived with, she said in the first insider account of life with
one of the five accused spies on trial.
Becker shared with The Herald more than 175 poems Guerrero has written from
prison since his Sept. 12, 1998, arrest. She said the works reflect who he
really is: "A total person of peace, a total person of love.''
Guerrero, 42, is charged with conspiracy to commit espionage for allegedly
snooping around Key West's Boca Chica Naval Air Station in a bid to feed U.S.
military secrets to Cuba. Prosecutors acknowledge Guerrero never got ahold of
classified information, but say it was not for a lack of trying.
Becker met Guerrero when he taught salsa dancing to her girlfriends. He was
dark and thin with an even-tempered disposition. She was an artsy Pennsylvania
native who moved to Key West 15 years ago.
Together the couple danced and took singing lessons, visited Cuba, and
played with Becker's cat Tashi -- Guerrero called her Tashita, little Tashi. She
says she never had an inkling about his double life.
Becker doesn't want to discuss the espionage case against Guerrero in detail
but, not surprisingly, she believes in his innocence. Her answers echo the theme
put forth in court by Guerrero's defense attorney, Jack Blumenfeld.
"My understanding of what he was doing, and it kind of goes along with
who he is, was something very virtuous, a mission trying to prevent terrorism,''
she said, referring to a string of hotel bombings in Cuba blamed on extremist
exiles. "I know he was here totally for idealistic reasons, not
political.''
Guerrero and his codefendants -- Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino,
René González and Fernando González -- acknowledge working
on orders from the Cuban government.
But they deny obtaining secret information or intending to harm U.S.
interests. Instead, they say they were trying to protect Cuba from a U.S.
invasion or terrorist exiles. Becker said she never heard Guerrero mention any
of the other men.
Most of Guerrero's poems address love or noble values like brotherhood,
peace, compassion and humility. The bleak solitude of prison life is a frequent
topic, too.
In a forward to the collection, Guerrero writes that the poems were
translated into English "by the person who is most indicated therein, who
is the most knowing of the essence of these inspirations, my inseparable and
beloved Maggie.''
But the works also reflect Guerrero's nationalistic pride in Cuba, the land
he moved to as a toddler after being born at Jackson Memorial Hospital.
In El Beso de La Patria, or The Kiss of the Homeland, dated June 27, 1999,
Guerrero wrote:
There are special things in life/that make us feel great emotion/some
beginning, some farewell/a new friend, a sweet song./Sometimes to select the
preferred one, the one you desire with more hope/is difficult because, in
certain measure/all of them touch deeply, the heart.
But if I were selected/to decide in this situation/I would ponder on what I
have loved more/that which deserves more love/and I would say without
vacillation:/the kiss of the homeland is the best.
Becker said she is more than confident of Guerrero's love for her despite
poems like that and despite evidence introduced at trial that he couldn't make a
romantic move without first consulting his intelligence bosses in Havana.
Should he break up with Becker or move in with her? Get married? Have
children?
Guerrero posed all those questions to the Directorate of Intelligence,
according to encrypted computer files seized by the FBI during searches of his
and Hernández's homes.
"What we are asking is that the status of our relationship with Maggie
be evaluated and that we be given the opportunity to decide whether to move into
Maggie's house in the next few months,'' Guerrero wrote in a 1996 report to
Havana shown to jurors.
The files showed that Guerrero's bosses were concerned that living together
would compromise the security of his clandestine intelligence work.
Becker does think "it was odd'' that her boyfriend sought permission
for such matters.
She first learned of the computerized reports when Guerrero sent them to her
from jail. He wanted to make sure she became aware of their contents from him
first.
He calls her from jail every day. She also came to the trial once. They
smiled and mouthed messages across the aisle under the watchful eye of half a
dozen U.S. marshals.
But Becker dismisses the notion that Guerrero wasn't making independent
choices about their relationship. The way she sees it now, he worked for "a
bureaucratic operation'' that like "the FBI or anything else'' had
logistical concerns he had to address.
"I can see in retrospect . . . there was some weight on us to make
decisions about living or not living together based on the needs of the
mission,'' she said.
That mission, according to testimony and documents, had Guerrero reporting
extensively to Cuba on the numbers and types of military airplanes using Boca
Chica. His laborer job there allowed him some freedom to move about the base.
Under his code name of Lorient, Guerrero also reported on the renovation of
a building that he believed was going to house "top secret'' activity.
Blumenfeld, Guerrero's lawyer, said Guerrero merely reported what any
visitor to the base could see.
Becker said Guerrero has faith that he'll be exonerated "if the truth
comes out.'' The trial is expected to run into March.
"If you come from a small country that's trying to survive and has done
some very positive things with some hindrance from the world's largest power,
and if you're having violence inflicted upon your family and friends, what are
you going to do to prevent it?'' she asked.
Albita is proving with the Son, she's also rising
By Lydia Martin. lmartin@herald.com. Published Saturday,
January 27, 2001, in the Miami Herald
It's the stuff that TV movies are made of.
There's a defection, an overnight success story, photo shoots for all the
glossies. Madonna, Stallone and Versace cheering from the front rows. A
performance for the president.
Then the crash. The big record deal that goes up in smoke. The band that
walks out when the going gets tough. The inner struggle to keep making music
even when all seems lost.
Now comes the slow climb back.
It's been almost a year since Albita, the Cuban songstress who made a splash
in Miami after defecting in 1993, released the belabored Son, her fourth
stateside CD and the one that nearly cost her career.
As devastating as the fall has been, Albita, who performs tonight at West
Palm Beach's Kravis Center, never gave less on stage than her trademark
over-the-top, conga-pounding performance as she has struggled to rise again.
"For me it will always be about making music,'' she said recently from
manager Miriam Wong's house near South Miami.
Though the critics have heaped praise on Son, Sony Discos, which snatched
her up almost immediately after she left Cuba, refused to record the CD,
claiming it didn't have enough of a marketable concept. It also claimed she
wasn't pulling in the sales they expected -- so it dropped her.
Sony declined requests to comment for this story.
The CD, a powerful blend of old organic Cuban with a few modern twists, was
shelved for two years, until Albita could scrape together the $125,000 she
needed to pay Sony to walk away with her record (she had to resort to
remortgaging her West Dade home). And until she could find a new label -- the
small, London-based Silva Screen Records -- willing to take a chance.
Now Son, which has done only moderately well in the United States, is about
to be released in Latin America and Spain, where it should find its biggest
audiences. And Albita has struck a relationship with SGAE, Spain's publishing
rights organization.
EUROPEAN COMMODITY
Belonging to SGAE repositions Albita as the world act her new label is
trying to pitch her as. As much as she insists on staying rooted in Miami ("After
traveling through the world I can tell you there is no better country than the
United States,'' she says ), her affiliation with SGAE, which represents some of
the biggest Spanish-speaking acts, makes her a European commodity instead of a
U.S. Latin market commodity.
"I've heard so much that Sony had a hard time selling me to the U.S.
Latin market because I didn't have the right look, or that Spanish radio in the
United States doesn't play me because my music is too complex. But it makes you
wonder about the U.S. Latin Market,'' Albita says. "If Barbra Streisand
sang in Spanish and was trying to make it in that market today, she'd have no
career. She's cross-eyed, her nose is crooked and she sings complicated songs
that not everybody can interpret.''
Albita, 38, and her new label believe there is a different Spanish-speaking
world worth tapping into.
HUGE MARKETS
"In Latin America and Europe, places like Spain, Argentina, Venezuela,
even Brazil, there are huge markets of people who are willing to listen to
something besides the top few salsa hits,'' the singer says.
Adds Yusuf Ghandi, president of Silva Screen America: "She's done
pretty well considering that we have had to spend a lot of time reestablishing
her. Sony tried to sell her as a pop act, but she's not pop.
BACK TO HER ROOTS
"She is going back to her roots, trying to remake it as a world artist.
She will be successful because she is a great performer. But it takes time.''
Javier Nouvaes, pop music director for SGAE, also believes it's just a
matter of time before Albita reaches the top.
"She is more than just a singer, she is also a great author,'' he says.
"All you had to do was see who was in the audience when we had a show
recently to introduce her in Spain. Some of the top composers and performers
were there.
HOT MUSIC
Cuban music is very hot in Europe. And nobody makes better Cuban music than
Albita.''
But Silva Screen isn't just going after the Spanish-speaking market. The
label sent Albita on a wide European tour last year, including dates in the
Netherlands, Germany, Belgium and Switzerland. It also is working to reacquaint
her with the English-speaking market in the United States.
"She has a big following among English speakers,'' Ghandi said. "But
it's more of a National Public Radio audience. We're working to get her on that,
and on TV stations like PBS.
"It's how the Buena Vista Social Club found an audience in the United
States. Nobody played that record on mainstream radio, either.''
Albita is just focused on moving on.
"I'm excited that Son is about to be released in Latin America and
Europe, and that we're preparing for a new tour. But the truth is, I just want
to make the next record,'' she says. "This one has been the focus for so
long because of all the problems. I have a lot of new music that I'm dying to
record.''
Mayor resolute in effort to prosecute Fidel Castro
SWEETWATER. By Mariano Avila . Herald Writer. Published
Thursday, January 25, 2001, in the Miami Herald
A resolution passed recently by the Sweetwater City Commission urging the
indictment and prosecution of Fidel Castro and other Cuban authorities for the
murders of four Brothers to the Rescue pilots carries no legal weight, Mayor
Jose "Pepe'' Diaz acknowledges.
Rather, it is "an expression of opinion to bring the matter to the
people's attention,'' the mayor says.
The resolution was directed to State Attorney Katherine Fernández-Rundle,
former President Clinton, former U.S. Sen. Connie Mack and others.
Diaz said he intends to take the matter to the Florida League of Cities to
ask for the support of all the Miami-Dade County representatives.
"Some people might think it's a waste of time,'' Diaz said. "But
you never know if someone will take it up.''
Diaz said he believes the resolution is representative of the sentiment of
the people of Sweetwater.
"My personal sentiment on this -- I wish that it had never happened and
that those people were still alive,'' Diaz said.
Ed Griffith, media relations representative for Fernández-Rundle,
said the state attorney believes legal action should be taken. In an Aug. 29
letter to U.S. Attorney Guy Lewis, Fernández-Rundle urged Lewis to pursue
Castro's indictment based on information obtained by the FBI.
There were plans for a visit from Castro to the United Nations in New York,
which would have put him under American jurisdiction.
"This would provide a most opportune moment to issue criminal
charges,'' Fernández-Rundle wrote then.
The Brothers to the Rescue pilots were killed on Feb. 24, 1996, when Cuban
fighters shot down their planes over international waters.
The pilots lived in Miami-Dade County.
The incident occurred outside the jurisdiction of Sweetwater and of the
Miami-Dade County state attorney.
In her letter to Lewis, Fernández-Rundle said: "We as law
enforcement will hold everyone involved accountable in the death of these
pilots. All involved should be held accountable for any illegal and immoral acts
committed or condoned that resulted in the deaths of these men.''
Copyright 2001 Miami Herald | 