Cuban Expatriate Artists Paint Another View of Castro Revolution

In Cuba in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, young, talented people were encouraged by the state to become artists. These privileged students were given years of free instruction and materials at Havana’s top art schools.

From this supportive environment came artists with independent ideas about art, politics and conditions in Cuba. Despite the state’s largess, several of them found Castro’s revolutiongenerally repressive and riddled with hypocrisy. Using the tools of their education, they voiced their challenges to Cuban social and political life in their art. That’s when government support ended, and censorship began.

Many artists, unable to express themselves freely in Cuba, left in the late ‘80s.

The works of four Cuban artists now living in the United States are on view at the Iturralde Gallery in the show, “4 Cubans Today.” Painters Julio Antonio Perez and Tomas Esson, painter and photographer Arturo Cuenca, and sculptor Florencio Gelabert have plenty to say, verbally and artistically, in opposition to Castro’s revolution. However, that does not imply that these recent arrivals are in sync philosophically with the vehemently anti-Castro Cuban community in the United States.

“The most important thing to them is the freedom to paint,” Teresa Iturralde said. She and her sister, Ana, as co-directors of the gallery, selected the artists for the show based on the visual impact of their work rather than on any particular political message.

Gelabert’s wood sculptures, such as “Comprension” (Compression, done in 1992), which he has ensnared with barbed wire, conveys “the feeling of being entrapped and in prison,” Teresa said.

Living in Miami since 1990, Gelabert said, he feels “more comfortable outside Cuba. My thoughts are opposite the government’s. . . .

“But I still feel as Cuban as when I first came to the United States. It’s a very strange feeling.”

Cuenca, who settled in New York in 1991, contemplates the conflict of living in exile in the series of photographs, “This Isn’t Havana” (1991).

He also comments on style-conscious Cubans in the painting “Moda, Kitsch Y Colonizacion” (Fashion, Kitsch and Colonization, done in 1991).

“He likes to make fun of Cubans who are so snobbish,” Ana said. “He has a funny, bizarre side.”

However, there is nothing humorous about “Escudo/Balsa II” (Shield/Raft, done in ‘92), which represents a sinking of true revolutionary ideals in Cuba.

“I felt betrayed by the system and the revolution,” Cuenca said.

“I’m from a revolutionary family. My family put in me the utopian vision of the world. I don’t believe in any power. I believe in the people. I criticize the revolution from the point of view of a revolutionary.”

Esson left Cuba in 1990 after they censored his sexually charged political works in the same vein as the painting he did that year, “33 Microfonos” (33 Microphones). Here, a distorted image of Castro is surrounded by 33 phallic microphones.

“I am thankful for the education I received in Cuba, 12 years studying art,” Esson said. “But the double standard of life makes you a sick person. Play the game or defect are your two choices. I felt like I couldn’t move, like I was in jail.”

Unlike the other three artists, who are in their 30s, 42-year-old Julio Antonio had to spend some time in the Cuban military.

The life of a soldier was particularly unpleasant for him. He began to study art as a form of recuperation from the experience of it.

He settled with his family in Miami in 1986.

His dark, Expressionist paintings show people trapped in circles that go nowhere.

“4 Cubans Today” is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays through March 31 at Iturralde Gallery, 154 N. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles. Call (213) 937-4267.

WITNESS TO CHANGE: Photographer Laurie Brown has lived in Orange County for 30 years, and witnessed the enormous change in the area’s landscape. Since 1975, she has captured with her camera land sites in their transitional state. Her eye is drawn to vast parcels that have been bulldozed and graded into submission.

Brown’s remarkably lyrical, large black-and-white photographs of vacant graded land are on view at Turner/Krull Gallery in the exhibit, “Recent Terrains.”

“When you photograph the area already built, it doesn’t make the impact that it does in its raped version, between the natural and the developed,” said Craig Krull, the gallery director, who grew up in Orange County. “We both witnessed Orange County going from orange groves and oak trees to a sea of condos and beige stucco. She is documenting and commenting on where she lives.”

“I am drawn to these land forms. What is interesting to me is the tension between the social, technological devastation of the land and the elemental, mythical, heroic aspects of it. You can see both of those things” in these sites, Brown said.

Although her barren, sweeping compositions convey the coldness and sterility inherent in land stripped of all its natural elements, they also illuminate a variety of earth textures and patterns that are particularly engaging and sometimes beautiful.

“There is a nice formal aesthetic quality about them,” Krull said. “They are like large, minimal, volumetric, Cubist earth sculptures.”

“Recent Terrains” is open 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Saturdays through Feb. 27 at Turner/Krull Gallery, 9006 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles. Call (310) 271-1536.