COMMENTARY : Cuba’s Art World Comes Undone : Arts: Many in the creative community have left after the state began trying to control the content of their work or capitalize on it too crudely.

There is only one line at Miami’s airport where travelers are thrice interviewed about U.S. Treasury Department regulations before they even check in. It’s the line for the charter flights to Havana, and there I stood, at 6:30 on a Wednesday morning earlier this month, wondering if Miami’s infamous right-wing, anti-Castro terrorists are early risers.

I’m returning to my mother’s homeland after three years. It wasn’t only family ties that had drawn me to the island many times during the last decade. It was also the vibrant and innovative cultural scene that had flourished in the 1980s, attracting observers from all over the world.

To the dismay of many outsiders, Cuba had an arts community that was smart, skilled and loaded with style, thriving under socialism in spite of the blockade. The young Cuban artists raised within the revolution had revised their country’s understanding of popular culture and used satire to question the staid political order.

That was before Cuba’s ties with the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were all but dissolved. Although the country continues to produce excellent artists, its drastic economic decline and political instability have led to a heightening of censorship in the arts in the last few years. Artists at the peak of their careers began to see the state that had nurtured them as now trying either to control the content of their art or capitalize on it too crudely. This prompted many of Cuba’s best and brightest creators to leave for good. Hundreds now live scattered throughout Europe, Mexico and the United States. After three years of watching this exodus, I decided to go back again to see what was left.

Within minutes of arriving, I was overcome by how Cuba was rapidly remodeling its image to attract foreigners. There seem to be no limits on the marketing efforts. Religious artifacts and fetishes that Cubans had once hidden in their homes are now mass-produced and sold in hotel shops. Formerly clandestine rituals are now initiated at the paid request of a tourist. Cabaret shows in many hotels offered visitors the promise of a dance with their favorite showgirl. The image of Che Guevara, once revered like a socialist Jesus Christ, is now endlessly reproduced in T-shirts, buttons and bumper stickers. “It’s for those old Italian communists who still like to come here and dream,” a friend explained when I expressed surprise at such merchandising.

I’m no purist, but I had for years been struck by Cuba’s pride in not having sold out. I came back to find that almost anything had a price. Those with clout in the cultural industry can now even exert pressure internally, according to their market value. For example, Juan Formell, the leader of Cuba’s top salsa band, Los Van Van, had recently announced that his band would now only work for Cuban institutions if they paid in dollars--once an unthinkably defiant gesture.

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In the first two days of my visit, I was invited to gallery openings, restaurants and speak-easies--all in people’s homes and all operating with dollars. The Cubans’ ingenious ability to squeeze beauty and pleasure from the most meager of sources had not been daunted by scarcity; instead, it was being redirected to accommodate their increased access to, and need for, dollars to survive. The main difference is that now, instead of blaming Castro for their troubles, people are complaining about speculators and inflation.

On a Saturday morning, I visit the candongas, the new open-air markets. In the officially sanctioned areas, licensed artisans sell small paintings, caricatures, wall hangings and crafts--in pesos or dollars depending on the customer. Along the fringes of these markets and in less tourist-visited areas of the city, unauthorized bartering of coveted goods such as food, soap and clothing takes place together with sales of cheap home decorations and earrings, mostly made of plastic and paper.

The most upscale version of these candongas is in the Plaza de la Catedral, in the middle of old Havana, now the heart of the city’s cultural tourism. It has become a tropical Montmartre. I am stunned by the sheer volume of faux naif religious sketches, lurid beach scenes and blatant copies of works by dead masters and exiled artists such as Tomas Sanchez, a painter now living in Miami whose works are being sold by Christie’s. I had heard about forgeries being sold out of private homes, with peddlers often seducing buyers with tales of inheritances from eccentric grandmothers. What I now saw was less tinged by such dirty dealings. Many of the street artists are students from the prestigious Higher Art Institute who were catering to the tastes of European tourists, saving their more serious work for international shows that bring them prestige, but no cash.

In the midst of this desperate drive for hard currency, I wondered what culture, if any, was left for national consumption. The Havana Film Festival, which I had ostensibly come to Cuba to attend, had for 15 years been a utopian mix of international solidarity and business, the best of Cuban entertainment and nationwide screenings for the public. Miraculously, the seasoned organizers Alfredo Guevara and Jose Horta managed to save the event by trimming its former excesses. Gone were the wild parties and the dozens of Latin American guests flown in at the film institute’s expense. Gone also was the old system of fixed prices for sales of Cuban films and television programs in the festival market--the point now is to sell, whatever the price. Even Cubans had to pay 50 cents U.S. for their tickets to festival screenings--not much by U.S. standards, but its black market exchange rate equivalent of 40 Cuban pesos equals one third of a teacher’s monthly salary.

Not even these prices could stop the hordes of locals who tried to force their way into screenings of the long-awaited “Strawberries and Chocolate,” the first Cuban film to feature an openly gay protagonist. Once inside, audiences talked back and applauded continuously. They reacted to every nuance in the unfolding of a friendship between the distrustful but naive young militant and the savvy yet marginal gay man who wants to be integrated into Cuban society his own way.

Running away with the festival’s top award, the film covers familiar territory for most Cubans--the society’s macho attitudes toward homosexuality, the culture-hating ignorance of the hard-liners and the desperation of many who love their country but feel suffocated by the limitations imposed on them. Directors Tomas (Titon) Gutierrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabio offer the cathartic pleasure of airing dirty laundry after decades of official silence. Through the simple gesture of inverting good-guy/bad-guy paradigms and presenting the militant as morally weak and the gay protagonist as the keeper of Cuba’s cultural heritage, this allegorical tale levels sharp though indirect criticism at the regime. This veiled approach appears to be the tactic of those few serious artists left in Cuba.

“I want to do my work, not get thrown in jail,” commented one young woman artist who is now publishing a semi-clandestine cultural newspaper called Memoria de la Postguerra (Memory of the Post-War). Entirely self-financed, the publication includes news about artists, critical comments about the state-controlled press and notices about the confiscation of artistic materials belonging to Cubans returning from abroad. Perhaps most daring of all is the newspaper’s embrace of Cuban artists living abroad, including many political exiles. I ask her about this new interest in immigration, which had not previously mattered much to artists living inside the homeland. Up to now, contact between Cubans inside and outside had always been initiated by those living abroad who sought dialogue with people at home.

“It’s because we’re so aware of how split we are,” she says. “Most of the people I studied with and used to work with are gone, something my generation never imagined could happen. But I know that we’re still thinking about each other all the time.”

Her sentiments were echoed by another young artist, Jose Toirac, who is organizing a series of exhibitions and conferences about visual arts on and off the island. “I’m calling it ‘Valen Todos’ (‘Everyone Matters’), which is a reference to a political campaign slogan here, but this event will take the idea even further and make it really mean something.” Having succeeded in obtaining some funding for his efforts from Europe, he had a great deal of trouble securing support from the Cuban cultural organizations and has had to postpone his conference until the spring.

Interestingly, these same organizations are busy promoting partnerships with the foreigners and Cuban Americans handpicked by bureaucrats who are expert in controlling their culture’s public image. The Wifredo Lam Center just opened its new building in the Plaza de la Catedral on Dec. 8 with much fanfare and many international guests. Its upcoming Havana Biennial will be financed by the German collector Peter Ludwig, who will walk away with all the Cuban work in the show. No works by Cuban artists living abroad are to be shown. Everyone is told new variations on a very old story; that despite all claims to the contrary, the true Cuban art is just about to be unveiled. Nonetheless, as the fame of the revolution’s disinherited artist children grows abroad and their bonds with those within stay strong, the government’s version of things may begin to unravel right before the eyes of their most esteemed guests.