COLUMN ONE : Cuba Art’s Quiet Exile in Mexico : Scores of Cuba’s best artists have moved into ‘low-intensity exile’ in Mexico. Disillusioned with Castro’s socialism and repelled by Miami’s right wing, they have found a home for their expression.

Cuban painter Jose Bedia was born in Havana five days after a young Fidel Castro marched into the capital to take power. Bedia was raised by Castro’s revolution and educated in the arts by his socialist government.

Like many artists in Cuba, Bedia enjoyed privileges that most Cubans did not have: access to travel, dollars and foreigners. His work was controversial, but he came of age during a period of official tolerance and gained early recognition.

Yet Bedia also shared many of the problems of average Cubans. First, he had no space in which to work. Then, as the island’s economic crisis deepened, he had no art supplies. Finally, fed up with a situation in which even food was difficult to find, he abandoned the island to join a growing community of Cubans living in Mexico.

“This is an undeclared immigration,” the 34-year-old Bedia said in his downtown apartment. “I couldn’t be doing the work in Cuba that I am doing here.”

“I know of at least 30 artists who were already here when I arrived,” added painter Consuelo Castaneda, who settled in Mexico City in 1991.

In the last three years, scores and perhaps hundreds of Cuba’s best visual artists, performing artists and intellectuals have moved to Mexico and into what one painter has called “low-intensity exile.” The Cubans, who fit easily into Mexico’s international arts scene, represent a significant loss of talent and potential revenue for the island. The artists are making names for themselves not only in Mexico City but in New York and Europe too.

These Cubans, many of them in their 20s and 30s, were born after Castro’s rebel army ousted Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959. They are disillusioned with Castro’s aging socialist revolution but are also repelled by the right-wing Cubans of Miami who have tried to topple the government.

They wanted to leave Cuba’s economic crisis and maybe even its political system, but not to formally break with the island, as they would have to do if they sought political asylum in the United States. Mexico, which does not grant asylum to Cubans, has quietly been offering them another choice.

“We are the only Latin Americans who are considered unpatriotic if we live outside of our country, but we have a right to develop ourselves wherever,” Bedia said. “I don’t consider myself a Communist. But to go to Miami would be to join with a kind of thinking that I also don’t share. We are trying to open a third option in Mexico.”

These new immigrants are viewed with suspicion by both official Cuba and the exile community in Miami. In Cuba, citizens who leave for Miami are branded guzanos , or worms, while supporters of the revolution are called companeros , or companions. For the Mexico residents, the hybrid word guzaneros has been invented to suggest the ambiguity of their status; it’s not clear whether they are guzanos or companeros.

Fervent anti-Castro groups who dominate Miami politics do not believe there is such a thing as a middle ground in the battle over Cuba; in their eyes, to be neutral is to be pro-Communist. They view these children of the revolution living in Mexico as agents of the Castro government sending money back home.

Nina Menocal, owner of the Mexico City gallery Ninart, has helped several Cuban artists secure visas to live in Mexico, and her gallery represents them. She too is seen as a villain by both sides for her attempts to remain politically neutral and to earn money for the artists rather than for the Cuban government.

On a recent morning in her gallery in the Zona Rosa, Mexico City’s downtown shopping and restaurant district, Menocal was in a frenzy as she prepared to take eight of her Cuban artists to Miami for the Art Miami 1993 exhibit that opens Thursday. She had received anonymous telephone threats from Miami accusing her of representing the Cuban government and warning her against setting up a booth with the artists, who still carry Cuban passports.

“They said that if I continue to promote Cuban culture, I will be in for a bad surprise, that they will tear down my booth and to be prepared,” Menocal said.

Born to Cuba’s aristocracy, Menocal left the island with her family as a 12-year-old when Castro came to power. She has lived in Mexico for decades and is married to a Mexican industrialist.

“You don’t have to live in the United States to be Cuban and fighting for cultural democracy or patrimony,” she said. “It is a complete lie that I represent the Cuban government. I have a 100% Mexican-owned company, and I represent artists with whom I deal directly.”

The Cuban government, she added, “perceives me as the enemy because they can’t control me. They can’t control the artists. Therefore, they don’t get money through the artists.”

In Cuba, artists are expected to sell their work through the government. When they sell abroad, they are to give their dollars to the government and receive Cuban pesos in return; it is illegal for Cubans to have dollars at home.

The Cuban Embassy in Mexico did not respond to a written request for an interview. Some of the artists say they believe that their government was slow to realize that the migration was under way. Once officials caught on, they apparently accepted it as a lesser evil. The government cannot support the artists’ work and does not want to see them become dissidents. As long as they don’t speak out against the Cuban government abroad, they generally are extended exit visas.

“There is also an image problem,” said Quisqueya Henriquez, a 26-year-old painter living in Mexico. “They’re worried that if they don’t allow artists to travel, they will be accused of human rights abuses. The problem is that the intellectual world has so much voice. A bloc of artists is a potential scandal.”

As with other immigrant groups in the past--Nicaraguan Sandinistas, Salvadoran guerrillas--Mexican policy toward the Cubans is informal and undeclared. It is also unpredictable; Cubans say it is getting harder to obtain permission to stay in Mexico.

Menocal says she has to lobby for each and every visa for her artists. At the same time, the Cubans also must remain on good terms with their government to secure up-to-date exit visas that allow them to remain legally outside the country. As a result, their residence in Mexico is tenuous, and they never know if they will be forced to leave. A few artists recently have made the leap to Miami.

The visual artists at the core of this new migration to Mexico belong to what is called “the Generation of the ‘80s” after the decade in which many of them studied at Havana’s prestigious Instituto Superior de Arte and began to show their work. They were rebellious long before they left the island, turning against the art of their teachers who painted Utopian pictures of machete-wielding peasants and happy workers.

In the first half of the ‘80s, Bedia, Castaneda, Ruben Torres Llorca and others of their generation broke with the past in form more than substance. They began using non-traditional materials and adopting Western conceptual art forms that they had gathered from magazines such as Artforum and Art in America.

“There has been debate in Cuba about the relationship between culture and national identity since the 1920s,” said Coco Fusco, a Cuban-American who writes frequently about the arts. “The Generation of the ‘80s took a more internationalist stance that was part of a debate that preceded the revolution and continued afterwards.”

This artwork made its formal debut in Havana in 1981 in a show called Volumen I that was widely criticized but not censored. In fact, for the next seven years the work of these artists flowered under official tolerance and international exposure. The first Havana Biennial brought international critics to the island in 1984, and they returned in greater numbers in 1986.

Throughout the decade, Cuban artists were encouraged to travel, and one of their favorite destinations was Mexico, whose art community was friendly to them.

A second, slightly younger group of artists such as Glexis Novoa and Tomas Esson went a step further and began to include social commentary in their art--what they considered to be constructive revolutionary criticism. They raised questions about issues such as official propaganda and the gap between facilities for foreign tourists and entertainment for Cubans. They even began using Cuban national symbols--the flag, pictures of the revolutionary hero Che Guevara--in ambiguous, mocking ways.

But in 1988, official tolerance reached its limits. The Soviet Union was knee-deep in perestroika (reform) and Castro was resisting. He made a speech criticizing artists for earning too much money abroad, and some hard-liners in his government interpreted this as a green light to clamp down on what they perceived as liberals who had gone too far. Esson’s one-man show, “A Tarro Partido,” was closed for its political content.

The Berlin Wall came down, the Communist Bloc broke up and then so did the Soviet Union. Cuba’s main trading partners were splintered and broke. Cuba’s economy plummeted.

“In Cuba, when the economy suffers, everything is affected,” author Fusco said. “When the economy is weak, there is always an attempt from within to clamp down, to control dissent.”

Why, Cuban artists and intellectuals began to ask, were the paradigms of socialism abandoning socialism? Why was perestroika unacceptable for Cuba? They began to talk about the fact that, while there were no social classes in Cuba, there were castes or political and military elites who lived better than most Cubans.

Henriquez the painter said Cuba’s socialist government “formed us to demand much more from society. They gave us education, food, medicine. But that’s the least we can expect. They can’t blackmail us for that. Socialism was supposed to be much more.”

Liberals in the Culture Ministry let the rebellious artists put together a series of exhibits called Castillo de la Fuerza beginning in 1989, but conservatives blocked several of them from opening, including a project comparing official portraits of Castro with those of Batista.

The 1990s began with electricity and gas shortages and, eventually, people scrounging for food. Art became a luxury to a government trying to feed its people. Art supplies were all but gone. So artists began looking for a way out. The cheapest ticket off the island is to Merida, on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. Friends in Mexico would put up the money for tickets to a friendly, Spanish-speaking country.

And then there was the political issue.

“Mexico doesn’t imply political dissidence,” Castaneda said. “Journalists always ask us for conclusions, but we still don’t have them.”

“One of the reasons I left Cuba,” artist Torres said, “is because of the tendency toward extremes. I have no interest in falling into another situation that is the same. Here, I am invisible--one more. I am not interested in having anyone force me to take a political position.”

The more artists left, the more wanted to leave. Their community was shrinking and with it the debate, constructive criticism and exchange of ideas that fed their art. Even some of the “older artists” in their 40s who preceded the Generation of the ‘80s began to spend more of their time in Mexico.

Eduardo Roca, known as “Choco,” said at the end of a three-month stay here: “I have no interest in leaving Cuba. It is my country; I am Cuban. But that doesn’t mean I couldn’t spend three or four years out of the country.”

He has become more aggressive in selling his works to galleries in Mexico, which means less for the Cuban government.

“I am beginning to think I have a right to the money,” he said. “It is my work.” And with the economic crisis, he added, “you have to think about eating and buying materials.”

Cuban artists are rebuilding their old communities in Mexico and forming new ones. One of their gathering spots is Mama Rumba, a restaurant and nightclub in the Roma neighborhood owned partly by Felix Diaz, a Cuban who moved to Mexico in 1991. Diaz, 39, worked for 12 years organizing exhibits for the Cuban National Fine Arts Museum and later in government art restoration.

Now, his restaurant is a place for Cuban art exhibits, Cuban music and book presentations. He serves Cuban food, Cuban drinks and Cuban coffee and reluctantly admits that he is a successful Cuban businessman--as if that were a bad thing.

“This isn’t just a commercial task. It’s part of the help you give your friends, your people,” Diaz said. “We feed each other. This is an interesting place because of the community that meets here.”

Like many of the other immigrants, he never felt that Miami was an option for him. Cubans in Mexico seem more afraid of extremists in the Miami exile community than hostile to it. They have visited Miami and have come to view Miami Cubans as far more heterogeneous than they had been taught to believe back home--particularly since some of their colleagues began moving there in recent months. But Miami does not offer them the broad artistic community that Mexico does.

“Miami is a society of businessmen, not artists,” Diaz said. “They are merchants, and we don’t have a common language. Here there are artists, writers, dancers. I came here to try my luck, to see what happened. The revolution got old, but I am young, and there are other things in life--like having a space like this, a gallery and restaurant that are mine.”

Mexico has been good to many of the Cubans. They have materials to work with and, thanks to people like Diaz and Menocal, a market in which to sell their art in Mexico and the United States.

“I made four paintings in 11 months in Cuba before I came here,” 28-year-old Novoa said. “In the three months since I arrived here, I have made 20 paintings. Maybe more.”