Finding Art in the Despair of Cuban Refugees : Exhibitions: As more rafts find their way into galleries, artists and curators struggle with presentation of a primitive craft used to escape a communist regime.

In the window of a storefront art gallery, the work on exhibit still drips with desperation. Strewn about the tiny plywood deck are plastic water bottles, a Russian-made medicine jar, a worn pair of shoes, a rusted knife blade, sand and seaweed.

The tattered sail is tied to the mast with intravenous tubing apparently scavenged from a hospital. The hull is carved from plastic foam.

“These rafts are like antiquarian African masks,” said Cesar Trasobares, an artist and curator. “They are inventive, creative means of escape. They were not intended to be art. Yet it is happening.”

Three months after the end of a ragtag exodus in which about 40,000 people set sail from Cuba on an array of flimsy homemade vessels, the rafts are being displayed in South Florida art galleries, snapped up by museums for their permanent collections and even used as dramatic centerpieces for social events and fund-raisers. The Cuban rafts have become poignant symbols in an exile community obsessed with the fate of their homeland.

Increasingly viewed as a mix of art and artifact, the rafts have become valuable. Private collectors have rushed in. One man has more than 500 rafts, ranging from single truck-tire inner tubes covered with canvas to elaborate constructions of plastic foam, wood and metal that may have ferried 20 or more people across the Straits of Florida. He hopes to build a raft museum.

But other South Florida residents, not all of them Cuban American, also have preserved rafts as mementos of a tumultuous chapter in local history and the continuing Cuban diaspora touched off by Fidel Castro’s rise to power on the island 36 years ago next month.

“Real people were on these things, fighting for their lives, for freedom,” said collector Finlay B. Matheson, who has four rafts.

Last summer’s chaotic exodus from Cuba and the unresolved fate of about 30,000 rafters being held in U.S. detention camps have stirred deep emotions in Miami. But the rafts themselves have rekindled an impassioned debate on a conundrum as old as civilization: What is art?

“If you take a raft and isolate it, it can be as much a work of art as African sculpture, for example,” said Marcia Morgado, who--with her husband, artist Juan Abreu--last year published a book of glossy photographs of rafts. “And I presume that they will become valuable.

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“But at the same time, there should be no exchange of money for these rafts. They are not ours. They are the patrimony of the Cuban people, a part of our history. Many people have died. These rafts should be a reminder that this should never happen again.”

No one admits to either buying or selling rafts, although one businessman who displayed a Cuban balsa in a fountain outside his Miami Beach store this fall says that a New York record company executive offered him $5,000 for the vessel. The offer was refused and the raft donated to a south Florida museum.

The raft or boat has long been a familiar icon in the works of such established Cuban exile painters as Luis Cruz Azaceta, Carlos Cardenas and Margarita Cano. But in recent years, as the number of Cubans fleeing the economically troubled island has surged, the balsa and the balseros who sailed them have re-emerged in works by scores of younger Cuban artists, both in the United States and Cuba.

For next month’s Art Miami ’95 exposition, one exile artist, Juan-Si, has planned a large installation, centered on a raft, called “The Islanders’ Obsession.”

Several current Miami exhibitions featuring rafts and images of rafts were opened this month to coincide with the 34-nation Summit of the Americas. Among those exhibitions are “Diaspora,” a selection of Azaceta’s work, and “Exodus,” a melange of artworks that includes an authentic raft as well as paintings by Juan Abreu, Jose Bedia and Ana Mendieta.

At the Havana Biennial earlier this year, Cuban artist Kcho (Alexis Leyra) created a huge installation in which he fashioned dozens of little rafts from such everyday objects as shoes, toys and driftwood. Both the Smithsonian Institution in Washington and Mexico City’s Museum of Contemporary Art are exploring exhibitions of rafts.

Some critics and collectors say that the image of the raft is now in such vogue among Cuban artists that its power has become diluted. “The image of the rafter is a symbol of the desperation of the Cuban people,” says prominent Miami art collector Ramon Cernuda. “But in art, is it a fashion or a true expression of anguish?”

Overworked or not, the raft as symbol is rooted in both Cuban myth and reality. Cuba’s patron saint, Our Lady of Charity, is said to have appeared to three fishermen adrift at sea, guiding them to safety.

“The image of the raft is part of our national consciousness and a part of our religious iconography since day one,” said art historian Ileana Fuentes, a Rutgers University professor recently named executive director of Miami’s Cuban Museum of Arts and Culture. “For me, rafts are a symbol of bridges that don’t exist in an island. The island itself is a raft.”

Cubans climbing aboard a makeshift raft and hoping to drift to Florida as a means of escaping the communist island is not a new phenomenon. The first rafter known to have made it arrived in 1964. And, under a communist regime that prohibits ordinary citizens from leaving the country for any reason, fleeing the island by boat has been an option of last resort that thousands have chosen.

The size and inventiveness of the rafts and the sheer suicidal courage of the people who get on them long has been a source of wonder and admiration on this side of the Florida Straits. Over the years, Cubans have made the crossing--which, at its shortest point, is 90 miles--astride plastic pool toys, in the overturned roof of a truck and standing up on a sailboard.

Most of the rafters are young men. But thousands of women and children have come too. And in Miami, oft-told tales of heroic endurance and terror at sea have become legend.

The majority of the rafts were fashioned from inner tubes, often topped with canvas or burlap and smeared with grease in hopes of repelling sharks. The materials to build them were scavenged, stolen, assembled in secret and hauled to the beach at night.

As this summer’s exodus gained intensity, however, the rafts became larger and more sophisticated. By mid-August, when it became clear that Castro had withdrawn border guards from the beaches and was allowing the balseros to leave, the Cubans’ long-repressed entrepreneurial spirit took over and professional raft-builders opened shop. In beachfront towns such as Cojimar, sturdy vessels made from 55-gallon oil drums welded together were selling for $300.

Between the first of the year and mid-August, more than 7,000 balseros landed in Florida and immediately were granted refugee status. But on Aug. 19, the Clinton Administration said it had had enough. A naval blockade was established off the Cuban coast, and more than 30,000 rafters were picked up and taken to the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay on Cuba’s southeastern coast.

As the Navy and the U.S. Coast Guard pulled Cubans from the rafts, many of the vessels were burned or sunk. Many of those that washed up on Florida’s shores were hauled to landfills. But the appearance of crude rafts on beaches populated by sunbathing tourists stirred the public’s imagination.

Few Cuban rafts were named, and fewer still have showed any decorative touches. Nonetheless, “this community is so shaken by rafting,” says Fuentes, “and if you think of art as anything that a person creates, they are art.”

Clearly the one that Steve Rhodes found abandoned in September was created more than just as transportation. It had a name, the Tio B (Uncle B) painted on the side, a hammered sheet of tin over the bow, and an unusual triangular design.

Rhodes salvaged the raft from an uninhabited island south of Miami and installed it in a fountain outside his Miami Beach import store and restaurant. There it became a popular attraction, garnering publicity and eventually a monetary value. The New Yorker who offered $5,000 for the Tio B reportedly wanted to use it in a music promotion.

“To me,” said Rhodes, who sells Asian and Indonesian artifacts, “that raft was conceptual art at least. It had a very distinctive shape.

“And it certainly got people talking. People would sit here drinking cappuccino and wondering who had made it and what it must have been like at sea.”

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The nexus of rafts and art was first explored by Coral Gables gallery owner Fredric B. Snitzer in 1991 when he mounted an exhibition called “They Would Rather Die.” In addition to displaying several paintings and a 30-minute documentary film dealing with the rafter theme, Snitzer also borrowed eight rafts--chiefly made of inner tubes and canvas--and hung them on the walls.

Reaction was mixed. Along with praise for calling attention to the rafters’ plight, Snitzer also was criticized for making objets d’art of the detritus of human suffering.

Now, three years later, Snitzer said he remains convinced that the rafts are works of art. “It’s complicated,” he said. “Art functions in provocative ways. The rafts push what we think of as art and that’s healthy.

“But they are also coffins. They should never be sold. These rafts have to be separated from the commercial because of their sad and serious human implications. But they can be looked at as art and as tragic political artifacts. And one enhances the other.”

The rafts that Snitzer hung on the walls, as well as seven others recently displayed at a downtown Miami exhibition mounted by a coalition of Cuban exile groups, came from the collection of Humberto Sanchez, a Cuban-born service supervisor for a Miami car dealer.

What became Sanchez’s calling began seven years ago when he came upon a single life jacket while fishing in the ocean. Moved to begin preserving what he saw as the relics of a dramatic era in Cuban history, he contacted the Coast Guard, which agreed to give him rafts that otherwise might be destroyed. In two rented warehouses and in borrowed space in an airplane hangar, Sanchez has more than 500 rafts, as well as 5,000 personal items recovered with the vessels.

Sanchez also raised $30,000 to build a monument to Cuban rafters lost at sea. Called “Liberty Column,” the marble monument was unveiled in a downtown Miami park earlier this month.

“I have no desire to make any money from such a sad story,” said Sanchez, 40. “And if I found out that anyone was making money out of the suffering of the Cuban people, I would be the first to protest.”

In a section of her book, “Raft,” Morgado presents several rafts photographed against a stark white background. Removed from the water, the rafts look like sculpture.

Morgado says, however, that although “some of the rafts are artistic, they were not constructed as art. Perhaps 50 years down they road they might become art objects.”